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Payoff, a 7.5-year-old Costa Mesa, Ca., startup that makes loans to help people pay off credit card debt, has just raised a bunch of money, and it’s looking to raise even more. According to a new SEC filing, the company has raised $46.7 million as part of a round expected to close at $67.4 million. The company had previously raised $38.4 million from investors, including FirstMark… Read More... →

Didi Chuxing, the largest ride-hailing app in China, confirmed today that it has closed a $7.3 billion financing round that includes its recent investments from Apple and China Life. The news was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, whose sources say Didi Chuxing’s valuation is now pegged at more than $25 billion. Read More... →

I don’t want VR to be boring. It’s strange to think that something so futuristic and promising, something we’ve looked forward to for decades, could be boring, but I can’t deny it, since experienced it myself. The fact is that with hundreds of companies joining the VR gold rush, we’re going to be panning a lot of silt for every grain of gold. Read More... →

Performance Horizon, a company aiming to help advertisers manage their relationships with marketing partners, is announcing that it has raised $15.4 million in Series C funding. The company’ says that with its software, brands and agencies can bypass the affiliate networks that online publishers usually rely on to get paid by marketers for driving purchases or other consumer actions. Read More... →

Posted by RuthBurrReedy[Estimated read time: 16 minutes] On February 17th, sports news and opinion blog SB Nation posted a longform story titled “Who is Daniel Holtzclaw?” The story, which took a sympathetic viewpoint on convicted rapist Daniel Holtzclaw, sparked a huge amount of controversy among SB Nation readers and garnered the blog a great deal of media attention. It took less than 24 hours for SB Nation to pull the piece, calling it “a complete failure.” In the aftermath, SB Nation’s parent company, V... →

We’ve become accustomed to staying connected whenever and wherever we are. All this connectivity is great, but it has also blinded us to the associated risks of being online at all times. Connected devices — especially smartphones — are vulnerable to cyber attacks, so security is of the upmost importance. Just a little further down the road is the next major connected device:… Read More... →

The FBI steadily, stealthily compiled a massive facial recognition database without oversight and in disregard of federal law, according to a report released today by the Government Accountability Office. The bombshell report reveals that the FBI dipped into driver’s license photo databases from 16 states, as well as passport and visa photo databases from the State Department, feeding… Read More... →

The Apple Watch needs an action button. Something to allow you to confirm, acknowledge, activate and navigate using a physical press. There’s even a button right there, on the side, waiting for the task. The button, located right below the scroll wheel, was originally used by Apple for the People function. So few folks used this feature that Apple is canning it in watchOS 3 and replacing… Read More... →

Победители смогут получить гранты от фонда «Сколково»... →

In these earliest days of commercial viability, virtual reality is running up against the same wall as so many technologies before it: how does a company translate it for the majority of consumers who won’t be able to demo it in the wild? HTC’s mixed reality is an interesting sort of work around, adding augmented reality to the equation, in order to offer a sort of voyeuristic… Read More... →

The very mention of e-sports tends to conjure up titles like Bethesda’s Quake, the arena shooter, or Valve’s Dota 2 and Riot’s League of Legends, both arena battle games, which are played by professionals for piles of cash with prize pools in the millions of dollars. But a San Francisco startup called Skillz paid out 21% of last year’s e-sports prizes worldwide, and is… Read More... →

After building out an editorial team focused on using data to cover San Francisco’s neighborhood news, Hoodline CEO Andrew Dudley said the startup has begun to explore new ways to make money. Not that Hoodline has been avoiding revenue, but the only way it has monetized until now is through advertising. Dudley told me the team agreed that Hoodline’s long-term business needs more… Read More... →

In what is the latest in a growing number of legal troubles for the ridesharing giant, Uber has agreed to pay a group of San Francisco drivers $7.5 million in fees involving background checks. The drivers took Uber to court over allegations the company acquired their consumer background reports without permission. Uber agreed to pay $100 million to San Francisco and Massachusetts drivers in… Read More... →

Between Oculus, HTC, Samsung and a slew of smaller hardware manufacturers, 2016 is the year that VR presence played out like a hockey stick graph at E3. To say it’s the story of the show is to greatly under represent just how big a role it’s played over the course of the last few days here in downtown Los Angeles, serving as the focal point for a majority of big companies… Read More... →

Как предприниматели из Ташкента покоряют Россию... →

Microsoft has been searching for ways to strengthen its flagging Dynamics customer relationship management (CRM) tool, and it made a couple of moves this week (one quite significant) with an eye toward making life easier for sales people and enhancing its marketshare in the process. For starters, you might have heard that Microsoft bought LinkedIn on Monday for a cool $26 billion.… Read More... →

The Newstweek is a small device that plugs into a wall outlet and allows you to modify the contents of news sites for readers using public Wi-Fi networks without their awareness. According to their website, the discrete gadget is intended to “provide opportunity for citizens to have their turn to manipulate the press, generate propaganda or simply ‘fix facts’ as they pass… Read More... →

Uber, fresh off $3.5 billion from the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund, is in talks to close another $1-2 billion in the form of leveraged loans. Over the last 24 hours, the term “leveraged loans” has been thrown around a lot, but few in the startup world have seen this term before. Read More... →

Blavity is the bee’s knees — the cream of the crop media platform and community for black millennials in the digital age. Founded by Morgan DeBaun and Aaron Samuels, Blavity ultimately aims to become a lifestyle brand with both online and offline experiences geared toward underrepresented millennials. Oh, hey, das me! This year at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, DeBaun, the CEO of Blavity,… Read More... →

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...... →