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 Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman wants everyone to know that’s not going to Uber. Bloomberg and Recode had reported that she was on the short list for the CEO spot, but she took to Twitter to make it clear that it’s not happening. In a three-part tweet, she concluded that the “rumors” have “become a distraction,” so she wants everyone to know… Read More

 Purple, a Utah-based mattress startup announced today it will merge with Global Partner Acquisition Corp (GPAC) in a deal that would value the company at $1.1 billion. Purple was already well on its way to that valuation when we got to take a sneak peek at operations at the company’s headquarters in the small town of Alpine, Utah and its giant factory an hour away in rural… Read More

 Dropbox may be taking another step in its very slow shuffle toward an IPO, and is now working with Goldman Sachs to prepare documents that could be filed as soon as this year, according to a report by Bloomberg. The company is expected to hire Goldman Sachs as the lead advisor of the IPO process, according to the report. Read More

At TechCrunch’s event in Shenzhen last month, we had a chance to test out the WT2, a clever and ambitious device from startup TimeKettle. It’s a pair of wireless earpieces; each person in a multilingual conversation wears one, and they translate what’s said into the language spoken by each participant. Essentially it’s a Babel fish, though admittedly a rough draft of one. Read More

The growing might of Google parent Alphabet, Apple Inc., Facebook and Amazon has been a recurring theme, particularly since last year when America's five tech kings became the five most valuable public companies in the world.

 Technology isn’t necessarily the best solution for forging new real life connections, whatever the collective marketing spiel of the web’s social giants likes to claim. But Patook is having a crack at the tricky feat of remotely sparking friendships, without inviting in the creeps… Read More

 The invoicing and payments process in the commercial construction industry is broken. It takes a median of about 70 days to get paid, which means contractors are often stuck without enough working capital. Net30, a startup in Y Combinator’s current batch, wants to solve that problem. Read More

 For architects, complying with building codes means navigating labyrinthine layers of regulations that vary between municipalities. Sorting through different codes and keeping track of updates is a daunting task and, in a worst-case scenario, a mistake can cost thousands or even millions of dollars to tear out and fix. Firms that can afford it hire building code consultants, but a startup… Read More

 Peer5, which helps publishers stream video to large audiences, is announcing that it has raised $2.5 million in seed funding. I wrote about the startup earlier this year when it was part of Y Combinator. CEO Hadar Weiss said he raised the funding after YC Demo Day from investors including FundersClub, Oriza Ventures, Tank Hill Ventures, Leorsa Group, Ed Roman and Buddy Anheim. In… Read More

From $10 hacks to wind farm meltdowns, Black Hat speakers share the state of security this week in Las Vegas.

GigaSpaces Technologies announced today that its business unit for Cloudify, the open source orchestration and cloud management platform, will be spun off into a new company focused on its core markets — cloud and telecoms.

 French speaker maker Devialet just announced a brand new speaker in partnership with British broadcasting company Sky. The Sky Soundbox is a single speaker designed for your TV. It’s roughly the size of a gaming console and it is supposed to produce surround-like sound. This partnership is something brand new for the French startup. Most people know Devialet for its expensive,… Read More

 Imagine if you could go to the profile of a friend of Foursquare and instead of scrolling through the long list of coffee shops they’d checked into in Berlin, you could simply click a button and add all their recommendations to your personal map in one go. That’s essentially the offering of Cool Cousin, an app and web site which is mining one of the last bastions of social media… Read More

 Brolly, a U.K. ‘insurtech’ startup that offers an app to help you manage and purchase various insurance products, has raised £1 million in seed funding. Valar Ventures, the U.S.-based venture fund backed by Peter Thiel, led the round, with Pi Labs co-leading. Entrepreneur First (EF) also participated via the company builder’s £40 million “Next Stage Fund”. Read More

Business VoIP market from the perspective of all its current trends that are influencing it is important to understand in order to obtain the most rounded ...

 When SoftBank announced the first close of its $93 billion Vision Fund back in May, it was hard to understand how the company would even manage to deploy so much capital in an already saturated ecosystem. For starters, it seemed like a good idea to keep a running list of all Vision Fund investments for reference. We will update this list on a regular basis. Read More

They were also accused of running VoIP scams. The arrests and deportations happened after Chinese authorities alerted their Cambodian ...

 Medium has a new head of product, while the startup behind the defunct texting app Talkshow appears to be done for good. Talkshow Industries was led by Michael Sippey, who’d spent two years as vice president of product at Twitter. The company’s first product was the Talkshow app, which allowed you to follow other users’ text message conversations. The app was shut down at the… Read More

 Instagram seems to be down for some users. According to the live outage map on Down Detector, the service is not performing well for some folks in the U.S. and Europe. While it went down for me for a hot second, it’s back up and running now. That said, Twitter is still freaking out, so it seems it may not be functioning properly for everyone at this time. Instagram has yet to say… Read More

 A new week brings a fresh Google initiative targeting AI startups. We started the month with the announcement of Gradient Ventures, Google’s on-balance sheet AI investment vehicle. Two days later we watched the finalists of Google Cloud’s machine learning competition pitch to a panel of top AI investors. And today, Google’s Launchpad is announcing a new hands-on Studio program… Read More