Tech

Vinyl has been coming back for the last few years, but unlike MP3s, CDs, or even cassette tapes (also coming back), records aren’t easy to record on your own. This tiny toy record maker makes it easy, though you probably shouldn’t expect that famous vinyl sound quality. The Easy Record Maker was created by designer

Notion, a startup that operates a workplace productivity platform, has raised $50 million from Index Ventures and other investors at a $2 billion valuation, the company told The New York Times. A Notion spokesperson confirmed the raise and valuation to TechCrunch. As startups across the board begin looking at layoffs or raising at less than

Many TikTok videos don’t start from scratch, so neither can its competitors. TikTok is all about remixes where users shoot a new video to recontextualize audio pulled from someone else’s clip, or riff on an existing meme or concept. That only works because TikTok’s had time to build up an immense armory of content to

Xerox announced today that it would be dropping its hostile takeover bid of HP. The drama began last fall with a flurry of increasingly angry letters between the two companies, and confrontational actions from Xerox including an attempt to take over the HP board that had rejected its takeover overtures. All that came crashing to

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said Tuesday he has ordered the city’s human rights commissioner to investigate Amazon’s decision to fire a warehouse worker who organized a strike at its Staten Island warehouse. Chris Smalls, a warehouse worker at the facility, known as JFK8, organized a strike on Monday to call attention to

The impending shortage of ventilators for U.S. hospitals is likely already a crisis, but will become even more dire as the number grows of patients with COVID-19 that are suffering from severe symptoms and require hospitalization. That’s why a simple piece of hardware newly approved by the FDA for emergency use — and available free

Even though this might seem to be the absolute worst time to try to round up funding for a restaurant-related startup, Allset is announcing that it’s raised an $8.25 million Series B. It was not, to be clear, an easy process. CEO Stas Matviyenko (who founded the company with COO Anna Polishchuk) admitted that when

Facebook has diverted from its policy of not fact-checking politicians in order to prevent the spread of potentially harmful coronavirus misinformation from Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Facebook made the decisive choice to remove a video shared by Bolsonaro on Sunday where he claimed that “hydroxychloroquine is working in all places.” That’s despite the drug still

Confluence, Atlassian’s content-centric collaboration tool for teams, is making it easier for new users to get started with the launch of an updated template gallery and 75 new templates. They incorporate what the company has learned from its customers and partners since it first launched the service back in 2004. About a year ago, Atlassian

JD.com is one of the biggest e-commerce and logistics company in China. Zhang Peng | LightRocket | Getty Images BEIJING – JD.com, a major Chinese e-commerce company, is looking to become the technology platform of choice for U.S. customers in a cloud computing market dominated by Alibaba. JD is best known in China for its

New York University is among the many academic, private and public institutions doing what it can to address the need for personal protective equipment (PPE) among healthcare workers across the world. The school worked quickly to develop an open source face shield design, and is now offering that design freely to any and all in

One of the newer companies attempting to join the rarified group of private space launch startups actually flying payloads to orbit has redirected its entire UK-based manufacturing capacity towards COVID-19 response. Skyrora, which is based in Edinburgh, Scotland, is answering the call of the UK government and the NHS to manufacturers to do what they

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry saw a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App Annie’s “State of Mobile” annual report.

In a Twitter thread on Tuesday, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, outlined an 8-step plan to keep people safe, find treatments and a vaccine for the COVID-19 virus, while working to find a way to get people back to work safely. He also asked that all CEOs take “a 90 day “no lay off” pledge” to

Kyle Matson and Tracy Meng had to postpone their March 28th wedding in Kauai, Hawaii. Source: Evan Chung Tracy Meng and Kyle Matson had planned to get married Saturday, March 28. Instead, they’re hosting a Zoom ceremony. Welcome to the new normal. Meng, 32, a vice president at Checkout.com and Matson, 32, Chief of Staff at Robinhood, had

More than a decade after announcing that it would keep Polaroid’s abandoned instant film alive, The Impossible Project has done the… improbable: It has officially become the brand it set out to save. And to commemorate the occasion there’s a new camera, the Polaroid Now. The convergence of the two brands has been in the

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of hopping on Zoom with betaworks’ John Borthwick and Matt Hartman to discuss the tech world’s adaptation to this new locked-down world, the future of new media and answer questions from the audience. We discussed whether new media companies can raise capital right now, and touched on emerging trends around

A social media platform used to match advertisers with thousands of influencers has been hacked. Social Bluebook, a Los Angeles-based company, allows advertisers to pay social media “influencers” for posts that promote their products and services. The company claims it has some 300,000 influencers on its books. But in October 2019, the company’s entire backend

Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are the landlords. Amidst the Coronavirus economic crisis, startups need a break from paying rent. They’re in a cash crunch. Revenue has stopped flowing in, capital markets like venture debt are hesitant, and startups and small-to-medium sized businessesf are at risk of either having to lay off huge numbers of employees

A worker assembles a box for delivery at the Amazon fulfillment center in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S., April 30, 2019. Clodagh Kilcoyne | Reuters As the coronavirus outbreak has worsened, many Americans have hunkered down in their homes and are turning to online marketplaces like Amazon to get essentials like toilet paper, food and hand sanitizer