Page 31 - Extra Crunch News Today

Human Capital: Ex-Pinterest employees who alleged discrimination say ‘no progress has been made’ This was quite the week for Pinterest, and not in a good way. While the company settled the gender discrimination lawsuit brought forth by its former COO, the hefty $22.5 million settlement highlighted some of the tech industry’s inequities.  Meanwhile, Airbnb outlined some new goals around diversity and inclusion, despite having not produced a diversity report since last year, when it disclo...

Extra Crunch roundup: ‘Nightmare’ security breach, Poshmark’s IPO, crypto boom, more The rest of the world may be slowing down as we prepare for Christmas and the new year, but we are not taking our foot off the gas. Alex Wilhelm keeps a close watch on the public markets in his column The Exchange, but this week, he branched out to look at some of the metrics underpinning soaring cryptocurrency prices and turned his gaze on StockX, the consumer reseller marketplace that just raised $275 m...

Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors. Sweet dreams are made of IPOs, so merry f****** Christmas We’re all very tired but there’s still so much news to go over I am sorry Can you IPO sneakers? Also, this is the last Exchange roundup of the year Hello everyone, hope you are well. This is the final Exchange newsletter of 2020. There will be a handful of columns next week before I take some time off. Equity will publish episodes throughout the termination of this accursed an...

The big story: Amy Klobuchar discusses Amazon Halo concerns Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar recently wrote an open letter to Alex Azar of the Department of Health and Human Services, in which she discussed Amazon’s Halo fitness tracker and expressed concern that “the Halo appears to collect an unprecedented level of personal information.” Klobuchar elaborated on these issues in an interview with TechCrunch. HHS, she said, “should play a larger role in ensuring data privacy when it comes...

Orbital refueling and manufacturing go from theory to reality in 2021 The idea of satellites and other spacecraft being able to refuel, repair or even add new capabilities while in orbit has generally seemed like a “nice in theory” one, but as leaders from Maxar, Astroscale and Orbit Fab explained at TC Sessions: Space, 2021 will be the year that theory becomes reality — or at the very least, realistic. Once they go up, satellites are generally considered fixed assets that only depreciate...

Unpacking Poshmark’s IPO filing From posting regular losses in 2019 to generating net income in 2020 So much for a year-end IPO slowdown. We’ll have more on the bloc of IPO news in coming posts, but as Poshmark has provided hard numbers and a fascinating business 2020 story, we’ll start here. We’re going to range a little wider than usual in this IPO dig, including more notes on investor ownership and what the company does. That’s in case you, like myself, had forgotten. So, we’ll s...

Peter Beck on Rocket Lab’s expanding orbit Just a few years ago it seemed like Rocket Lab was going to be an up-and-comer in the launch world, and so they are today — in addition to going reusable, creating a low-cost satellite platform, and planning a mission to Venus. CEO and founder Peter Beck, speaking at TC Sessions: Space, talked about how he and the company have taken on ever more responsibilities without burning out. The company just had a successful launch earlier this week, and a ...

Lockheed Martin’s Lisa Callahan on building a lunar lander collaboratively (and during COVID) NASA’s Artemis mission is just starting to get underway, and among the commercial partnerships vying for the privilege of building the lunar landing system is one between Lockheed Martin and Blue Origin, which is leading the effort. Lockheed VP and GM of Commercial Civil Space Lisa Callahan says that the collaboration has been surprisingly smooth and fruitful. Speaking at TC Sessions: Space, Callah...

Is rising usage driving crypto’s recent price boom? Everything is dumb until it works. As 2020 comes to a close, the cryptocurrency world is experiencing another late-year surge of consumer interest as prices climb in value. Bitcoin is over $23,000 as I write to you, an all-time high. Ethereum’s cryptocurrency has recovered sharply as well, returning to mid-2018 prices. These gains have created a huge amount of wealth for crypto holders. According to CoinMarketCap, after falling under $140 ...

The big story: Facebook escalates Apple criticism Facebook took a big swing at Apple’s upcoming app tracking restrictions today with full-page ads in the print editions of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post that argued the social networking giant is “standing up to Apple for small businesses everywhere.” In other words, while Facebook will obviously be affected by Apple’s change (apps will have to ask users for permission before it can track their IDFA i...