Nine lessons on how Niantic reached a $4B valuation

We’ve captured much of Niantic’s ongoing story in the first three parts of our EC-1, from its beginnings as an “entrepreneurial lab” within Google, to its spin-out as an independent company and the launch of Pokémon GO, to its ongoing focus on becoming a platform for others to build augmented reality products upon. The Niantic […]

Madrona Venture Group launches $100M acceleration fund

Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group has long been one of the most prominent early-stage funds in the backyard of Amazon and Microsoft. Now, however, the firm is starting to look beyond the Pacific Northwest with the launch of its $100 million Acceleration Fund, which will expand its geographic reach and give it a vehicle to invest […]

Is Crypto the Missing Ingredient for Universal Basic Income?

Over the past few decades, a growing suite of technologies and advances in artificial intelligence (AI) has given rise to a significant trend toward automation in almost every industry imaginable. Depending on who you ask, though, that trend is either going to lead to a future filled with leisure and comfort, or one where 40% […]

Building a Predictive Analytics Model From Scratch

There’s a lot of talk right now about the potential value AI can bring to businesses, and the logistics business – because of its complexity and how much e-commerce depends on it – is no exception. Imagine your e-commerce business needs to ship an order from San Francisco to Seattle and you’ve promised 2-day delivery. It’s […]

The Daily Crunch: Apple stock jumps after earnings

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Apple’s stock jumps 5 percent after beating expectations Apple released earnings for its fiscal second quarter yesterday, reporting revenue of $58 […]

Walmart’s Vudu shows off original content and shoppable ads, hints at interactive shows

Walmart-owned streaming service Vudu announced today that it will be launching new interactive shows later this year, created through the company’s joint venture with interactive content startup Eko. This confirms a Bloomberg report that Walmart plans to debut several interactive new shows produced with Eko, along with shoppable ads. We’d hoped that the company would take […]

Facebook updates PyTorch with a focus on production use

During last year’s F8 developer conference, Facebook announced the 1.0 launch of PyTorch, the company’s open source deep learning platform. At this year’s F8, the company launched version 1.1. The small increase in version numbers belies the importance of this release, which focuses on making the tool more appropriate for production usage, including improvements to […]