Alphabet’s Q1 earnings were a disappointment for Wall Street, courtesy primarily of ad revenue shortcomings. The hardware team met with some difficulties, as well, owing in part to a stagnating global smartphone market that has impacted virtually all players. CEO Sundar Pichai cited “year over year headwinds” when referring to the company’s smartphone line, following […]

We’re deep in IPO news, and last week was no different. When this happens, Equity’s Kate Clark and Alex Wilhelm fire up their mics and wax financial about the news we can’t possibly fit into the regular episode of the popular TechCrunch podcast. Last week the duo discussed Uber’s href=”https://tcrn.ch/2vpaHCg”> IPO pricing and Slack’s S-1. […]

Twitter is unveiling a number of new content deals and renewals tonight at its NewFronts event for digital advertisers. It’s only been two years since Twitter first joined the NewFronts. At the time, coverage suggested that executives saw the company’s video strategy as crucial part of turning things around, but since then, the spotlight has moved […]

Amazon announced today it’s begun to ask customers to participate in a preview program that will help the company to build a Spanish-language Alexa experience for U.S. users. The program, which is currently invite-only, will allow Amazon incorporate a better understanding of things like word choice and local humor into the U.S. Spanish-language experience, as […]

At the Open Infrastructure Summit, which was previously known as the OpenStack Summit, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth used his keynote to talk about the state of open-source foundations — and what often feels like the increasing competition between them. “I know for a fact that nobody asked to replace dueling vendors with dueling foundations,” he […]

With news that the We Company (formerly known as WeWork) has officially filed to go public confidentially with the SEC today, there’s a big question on everyone’s mind: is this the next massive startup win or a house of cards waiting to be toppled by the glare of the public markets? No company I follow has […]

Mobile marketing company ManyChat has raised $18 million in Series A funding. The startup, co-founded by CEO Mikael Yang, is currently focused on Facebook Messenger. It offers tools for creating a bot on Messenger while also supporting live human chatting (ManyChat says its approach is a “smart blend of automation and personal outreach”), and additional […]

No one ever said consumer robots were easy. But Anki’s actually made a pretty strong go of it, all things considered. After wowing the world at Apple’s 2013 WWDC keynote with its Drive cars, the company went all in on robotics, first with Cozmo, then Vector. After earlier reports of an understandably emotion Monday morning […]

Menlo Ventures was founded in 1976 but it took 35 years for the venture capital firm to hit the jackpot. Since the dot-com boom, Menlo Ventures has teetered between good and great. A prolific Silicon Valley investor, it’s never quite reached the heights of Accel or Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), or established the level of name […]

After warning investors that it would be taking a $1.7 billion (€1.5 billion) charge this quarter due to a fine from the European Commission over anticompetitive advertising practices, today Google parent Alphabet reported its quarterly earnings for Q1. Overall it’s a tough quarter for the company that speaks to struggles with its growth. Alphabet reported revenues […]