A turbulent 2018 for China’s gaming market hasn’t held back newcomers. Bytedance, the world’s most valuable startup behind a collection of rising new media apps including TikTok and Jinri Toutiao, is making a further push into video games after it took control of a mobile game developer through a roundabout deal. According to a business registration

Kevin Tsujihara is leaving his role as chairman and CEO of Warner Bros. Entertainment. He joined Warner Bros. back in 1994 and took charge of the film and TV studio in 2013. As part of broader leadership changes at WarnerMedia — which is now under the ownership of AT&T — his role was recently expanded

Ridehailing firm Lyft will make its Nasdaq debut as early as next week at a valuation of up to $23 billion, The Wall Street Journal reports. The business will reportedly price its shares at between $62 and $68 apiece, raising roughly $2 billion in the process. With a $600 million financing, Lyft was valued at

If you live in a big city, you’ve probably had your fair share of battles with apartment intercom systems. Those electronic gatekeepers with their tiny screens, sticky buttons, and seemingly endless lists of names to tap through in search of a friend who can buzz you in. Doorport wants to make those existing systems a

We’ve decided to step back from the breaking news for a minute to conduct a review of seed and early-stage funding trends over the last decade for U.S.-based companies. I’m fairly certain we can all agree that the environment for startups has changed dramatically in the past 10 years, specifically in two major ways: The

PC gaming has grown to be a pretty wide niche of people with some far-flung similarities and differences, one thing they all share are souped-up rigs that rely on beefy GPUs. This is fine for those with dedicated machines but PC gaming isn’t too friendly to those trying to pull double-duty on their everyday machine.

After a conspicuous stretch of silence ending with a mysterious teaser tweet on Thursday, No Man’s Sky creator Sean Murray revealed that another major free update is on the way. The new content, which is the first since last year’s Visions update, will hit the massive space exploration game this summer. The bundle of new

In a rare turn, director James Gunn is once again heading up up the third installment of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy series. Gunn, who directed the previous two films, was fired over the summer when offensive tweets dating from between 2008 and 2011 resurfaced after being promoted by right-wing personalities like Jack Posobiec and

Customers can already place an order for the Tesla Model Y, a mid-sized crossover SUV that won’t go into production until 2020. Tesla requires a $2,500 deposit to complete the order for the all-electric vehicle, according to information posted on its website. A disclaimer on the order form states that “production is expected to begin

French startup Stanley Robotics showed off its self-driving parking robot at Lyon-Saint-Exupéry airport today. While I couldn’t be there in person, the service is going live by the end of March 2019. And here’s what it looks like. [embedded content] The startup has been working on a robot called Stan. These giant robots can literally

Google is a tech powerhouse in many categories, including advertising. Today, as part of its efforts to improve how that ad business works, it provided an annual update that details the progress it’s made to shut down some of the more nefarious aspects of it. Using both manual reviews and machine learning, in 2018, Google

James Williams may not be a household name yet in most tech circles, but he will be. For this second in what will be a regular series of conversations exploring the ethics of the technology industry, I was delighted to be able to turn to one of our current generation’s most important young philosophers of

Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana and Bixby–almost all virtual assistants have something in common. Their default voices are women’s, though the role that plays in reinforcing gender stereotypes has been long documented, even inspiring the dystopian romance “Her.” Virtue, the creative agency owned by publisher Vice, wants to challenge the trend with a genderless voice

Voice recognition is a standard part of the smartphone package these days, and a corresponding part is the delay while you wait for Siri, Alexa, or Google to return your query, either correctly interpreted or horribly mangled. Google’s latest speech recognition works entirely offline, eliminating that delay altogether — though of course mangling is still

Amazon will stop forbidding third-party merchants who list on its e-commerce platform in the United States from selling the same products on other sites for lower prices, reports Axios. The company’s decision to end its price parity provision comes three months after Sen. Richard Blumenthal urged the Department of Justice to open an antitrust investigation

Editor’s Note: Our writer Galen Moore (who previously wrote an analysis of STOs) attended the MIT Bitcoin Expo this weekend. These are his field notes on his interviews with a bunch of the leading thinkers in the Bitcoin community, along with links to the full audio if you want to go deeper. ~ Danny Crichton The MIT Bitcoin

It’s impossible to discuss the seismic shift toward automation without a conversation about job loss. Opponent of these technologies criticize a displacement that could some day result wide scale unemployment among what is often considered “unskilled” roles. Advocates, meanwhile, tend to suggest that reports of that nature tend to be overstated. Workforces shift, as they

Mary Ann Azevedo Contributor Mary Ann Azevedo covers startups and tech at Crunchbase News. More posts by this contributor Two Austin-based VC firms are each raising $100M funds Investor momentum builds for construction tech After SoftBank announced its plans to launch a $5 billion innovation fund in Latin America, we reached out to the good folks

Beatrice Fihn Contributor “Atomic bombs are primarily a means for the ruthless annihilation of cities.” Those are the words of Leo Szilard, one of the scientists who pushed for the development of nuclear weapons. He wrote them as part of a petition signed by dozens of other scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project

Y Combinator revealed yesterday that its president, Sam Altman, is stepping down from his role to become the accelerator program’s chairman. This change, said YC, will allow Altman to “spend more time focusing on OpenAI,” the San Francisco-based nonprofit that was cofounded by Altman and Elon Musk three years ago to get ahead of the

One answer: E-commerce, Chrome extensions, mobile apps, enterprise SaaS, SMB SaaS — in that order Julian Shapiro 8 hours Julian Shapiro Contributor Julian Shapiro is the founder of BellCurve.com, a growth marketing agency that trains you to become a marketing professional. He also writes at Julian.com. More posts by this contributor Founder Stories: Webflow’s Y

U.S. smart speaker owners grew 40 percent over 2018 to now reach 66.4 million – or 26.2 percent of the U.S. adult population – according to a new report from Voicebot.ai and Voicify released this week, which detailed adoption patterns and device market share. The report also reconfirmed Amazon Echo’s lead, noting the Alexa-powered smart

Leica is a brand I respect and appreciate but don’t support. Or rather, can’t, because I’m not fabulously rich. But if I did have $5,000 to spend on a fixed-lens camera, I’d probably get the new Q2, a significant improvement over 2015’s Q — which tempted me back then. The Q2 keeps much of what

French cloud hosting company Scaleway is rolling out new instances with an Nvidia Tesla P100 GPU. The company is opting for simple pricing with a single configuration that costs €1 per hour ($1.13). Many companies now use GPU instances to train models for their machine learning-powered app or service. Some companies also leverage these cloud

Taxify, the ride-hailing company from Estonia backed by Didi and Daimler and now active in 30 countries, is making a key shift in its business today as it gears up for its next stage of growth. The company is removing “taxi” from its name and rebranding as Bolt, the same name that it has been

Homeland Security could do more to protect election infrastructure ahead, according to a new report by the department’s watchdog. The report from the inspector general, out Wednesday, said progress had been made but Homeland Security, the department charged with protecting elections and the back-end voting machine infrastructure, still “does not have dedicated staff” focused on

In one of the most significant milestones for depression treatment in decades, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced today that it has approved a new drug with esketamine, a derivative of ketamine. Made by Johnson & Johnson under the brand name Spravato, the drug is meant to be taken as a nasal spray in

The official trailer for the final season of Game of Thrones has landed. Behold: [embedded content] As you can see, we’ve been blessed with peeks at a few scenes that promise a climactic final season. The trailer includes dragons flying over Winterfell, Gendry, sinister Cersei, and a teaser for the battle fans have been waiting

Facebook is rolling out a new feature for memorialized accounts that will allow people to leave messages in a Tributes section that is separate from the rest of the profile’s timeline. Depending on a memorialized account’s privacy settings, friends can currently still post on its timeline, including in the comments of posts the person made

Office Depot, one of the many big box stores feeling the impact from Amazon’s e-commerce dominance, announced on Monday a significant partnership with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which will see the companies working together to better serve the needs of U.S. small to medium-sized businesses. The deal includes a co-branded e-commerce site on Alibaba.com, and