Category: Technology Trends

Scooter unicorn Bird Rides is going public, per an agreement to merge with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. After rumors and reports circulated for months about an imminent deal, it has finally arrived. First, a quick overview of the agreement and the players involved: Bird is merging with Switchback II at an implied valuation of $2.3 billion. Fidelity Management & Research Company will lead the deal’s $106 million in private investment in public equity, or PIPE. Apollo Investment Corp. and MidCap Financial Trust provided an additional $40 million in asset financing. (Disclosure: Apollo is buying TechCrunch’s parent company.)

After a couple of generations making phones with flip-out cameras and increasingly large displays, Asus has taken the ZenFone 8 in a totally different direction: small. The flipping camera concept lives on in the also-new ZenFone 8 Flip, but it’s no longer a standard feature across this year’s ZenFone lineup. Instead, priced at €599 (about Read More…

Asus is taking a slightly different turn with this year’s ZenFone series. While the ZenFone 8 Flip looks a lot like previous years’ phones, with its large screen and flip-out camera mechanism, the company went back to the drawing board for the flagship ZenFone 8 and redesigned it as a smaller one-hand-friendly device: kind of Read More…

Planck co-founders (from left to right): David Schapiro, CEO Elad Tsur and CTO Amir Cohen Planck, the AI-based data platform for commercial insurance underwriting, announced today it has raised a $20 million growth round. The funding came from 3L Capital and Greenfield Partners, along with returning investors Team8, Viola Fintech, Arbor Ventures and Eight Roads. This brings the New York-based startup’s total raised to $48 million, including a $16 million Series B it announced in June 2020. Planck said it currently works with “dozens of commercial insurance companies in the U.S.,” including more than half of the top-30 insurers. It

Slate is getting into the audiobooks business. The online magazine and podcast subscription seller is launching its own audiobook store today in partnership with multiple publishing companies. The store will list and sell popular titles but with the added benefit of making the audio accessible through listeners’ preferred podcast app instead of a separate audiobook-only Read More…

As far as I can tell, low-code and no-code services are rapidly proving that prior models for products as broad as enterprise app creation and AI-powered data analytics were lackluster. My evidence? A mix of public- and private-market low- and no-code companies are putting up impressive results. The Exchange caught up with Appian CEO Matt Calkins after his enterprise app software company reported its first-quarter performance to discuss the low-code market and what he’s hearing in customer meetings. To round out our general thesis — and shore up our somewhat bratty headline — we’ve compiled a list of recent low-code

Cisco announced this morning that it intends to acquire Indianapolis-based startup Socio, which helps plan hybrid in-person and virtual events. The two companies did not share the purchase price. Socio provides a missing hybrid event management component for the company to add to its Webex platform. The goal appears to be to combine this with the recent purchase of Slido and transform Webex from an application mostly for video meetings into a more comprehensive event platform. “As part of Cisco Webex’s vision to deliver inclusive, engaging and intelligent meeting and event experiences, the acquisition of Socio Labs complements Cisco’s recent

Ken Harlan Contributor Ken Harlan is the founder and CEO of MobileFuse, a U.S.-based. in-app advertising and DOOH platform that serves leading organizations across retail, food and beverage, restaurant, tourism, government, and healthcare. The digital media industry often talks about how much influence, dominance and power entities like Google and Facebook have. Generally, the focus is on the vast troves of data and audience reach these companies tout. However, there’s more beneath the surface that strengthens the grip these companies have on both app developers and publishers alike. In reality, software

The past year, a lot of people were laid off or otherwise unable to pay for basic necessities. So the stimulus package passed by Congress in December included a provision to pay for broadband and other basic tech for those who, because of job loss or other financial difficulties, can’t afford to pay for it Read More…

Best Buy is hosting a one-day flash sale on a few items, and its small assortment of gaming laptops stood out from the rest. The Razer Blade 15 Base seems like a good midrange laptop with its hexa-core Intel Core i7-10750H processor, Nvidia’s GTX 1660 Ti graphics chip, and 16GB of RAM. This model costs Read More…