News

France doesn’t want to wait for European tax reform to tax tech giants
France’s Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire held a press conference earlier today to announce that France will tax big tech companies starting on January 1st, 2019. This has been a long-rumored tax reform, and it looks like France is changing the scope of the new tax. After a couple of years of negotiations at the […]

Google still claimed to be blocking search rivals on Android, despite Europe’s antitrust action
Mobile licensing changes made by Google this fall, when it tweaked terms for OEMs wanting to license its Android smartphone platform on devices destined for the European market, don’t appear to be offering succour to search rivals — despite being triggered by an antitrust ruling intended to reset the competitive playing field. The European Commission […]

Moglix raises $23M to digitize India’s manufacturing supply chain
We hear a lot about India’s e-commerce battle between Walmart, which bought Flipkart for $17 billion, and Amazon. But over in the B2B space, Moglix — an e-commerce service for buying manufacturing products that’s been making strides — today announced a $23 million Series C round ahead of a bigger round and impending global expansion. […]

With trust destroyed, Facebook is haunted by old data deals
As Facebook colonized the rest of the web with its functionality in hopes of fueling user growth, it built aggressive integrations with partners that are coming under newfound scrutiny through a deeply reported New York Times investigation. Some of what Facebook did was sloppy or unsettling, including forgetting to shut down APIs when it cancelled its […]

Facebook’s got 99 problems but Trump’s latest “bias” tweet ain’t one
By any measure Facebook hasn’t had the best of years in 2018. But while toxic problems keep piling up and, well, raining acidly down on the social networking giant — from election interference, to fake accounts, faulty metrics, security flaws, ethics failures, privacy outrages and much more besides — the silver lining of having a core […]

Bright spots in the VR market
Virtual reality is in a public relations slump. Two years ago the public’s expectations for virtual reality’s potential was at its peak. Many believed that VR would transform the way we connect, interact and communicate in our personal and professional lives.

3D-printed heads let hackers – and cops – unlock your phone
There’s a lot you can make with a 3D printer: prosthetics, corneas, firearms — even an Olympic-standard luge. You can even 3D-print a life-size replica of a human head — and not just for Hollywood. Forbes reporter Thomas Brewster commissioned a 3D-printed model of his own head to test the face unlocking systems on a range of […]

Ada nets $19 million Series A to grow its customer service chatbot
Ada is on a mission to build chatbots powered by artificial intelligence. The company today is announcing a $19 million Series A that will go far in helping it reach that goal. The company sees the capital fueling international expansion and launching products into new verticals, as well as doubling down on employees. Chatbots were […]

On stock prices and Nvidia
Yesterday’s analysis of Nvidia’s challneges triggered a surge of mail from readers. The company has lost about half of its value over the past two months, and has mostly blamed a “crypto hangover” for the problem. But as I pointed yesterday, it’s really the three Cs: “Crypto, customers, and China.” There are nuances here worth […]

Amnesty International used machine-learning to quantify the scale of abuse against women on Twitter
Update: Twitter’s response has been added to the end of this post. A new study by Amnesty International and Element AI attempts to put numbers to a problem many women already know about: that Twitter is a cesspool of harassment and abuse. Conducted with the help of 6,500 volunteers, the study, billed by Amnesty International […]