More automakers will soon offer vehicles through subscription services. Lexus today announced its upcoming UX crossover would be available through one and Bloomberg published a report today stating BMW is about to announce a subscription pilot.
These automakers join a growing list of makers offering models through new financing vehicles. Currently, Volvo, Cadillac, Ford and Porsche have a service that ditches traditional financing in favor of a more flexible and innovative way to drive the latest car. Several startups, like Drover and Fair, are also looking at this market as demand increases.
Current subscription services live between short-term rentals and several-year leases. Most of the services give users the ability to swap vehicles or bundle insurance with the cost of the vehicle. The goal is to offer consumers the latest vehicles as efficiently as possible.
The Lexus UX will be the first vehicle Lexus offers through a subscription.
Likewise, BMW is reportedly about to launch a pilot subscription next week in Tennessee. Apparently, it will be called Access by BMW and offered by a local BMW dealership.
Terms of both the Lexus and BMW service have yet to be announced.
Source: TechCrunch
The superhero 2019 film will be set in the 1990s, which allows it to resurrect a familiar face from “The Avengers,” plus two “Guardians” villains.
Source: CNET
The Dow surged 669 points on Monday after trade tensions eased.
Tech stocks like Amazon and Apple saw gains, but the biggest winner of all was Microsoft .
The Seattle tech giant, which is a Dow 30 company, benefitted not only from the solid stock market day, but also because a Morgan Stanley analyst had kind things to say about it.
Keith Weiss wrote in a note to clients that he’s raising his 12-month price target to $130, an almost 50% increase from the $90 shares traded at last week. This would give the company a market cap of $1 trillion.
He’s particularly bullish on Microsoft’s cloud business. He believes that it will continue to do well, despite competition from Amazon and Google. He also likes the Office 365 software.
The race to $1 trillion has been talked about for several years. Apple is currently in the lead with a market cap of $877 billion. Amazon is at $753 billion. Alphabet is at $731 billion. And After Monday’s strong day of trading, Microsoft is nearing it at $722 billion.
In general, stocks have done very well in recent years, with the Dow up nearly 10,000 points from where it was five years ago.
Microsoft is up 44% in the past year alone.
The company has done particularly well since Satya Nadella took the helm in February 2014. He’s Microsoft’s third CEO, coming after Bill Gates and then Steve Ballmer.
Source: TechCrunch
Los algoritmos de aprendizaje automático pueden encontrar patrones para identificar a personas en riesgo de padecer la enfermedad y a los pacientes óptimos para tratamientos experimentales. También podrían predecir su gravedad en cada caso y arrojar luz sobre sus causas
Source: MIT
Aunque suele ser una compañía reservada, desde su conferencia MARS arrojó pistas sobre sus próximos pasos: aplicaciones en asistencia médica, drones de interior, ondas gravitacionales y el reloj de los 10.000 años
Source: MIT
The first Chrome OS tablet was announced alongside the news that the latest version of Android on Chromebooks was being tested by Google. The results from our Twitter poll show that people are more confused than anything else.
The post What’s weirder: A Chrome OS tablet or an Android laptop? appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Dropbox’s surge on the stock market has continued, with the company going up another 7% on its second day on the stock market.
The company saw its shares close at $30.45, giving the company above a $13 billion market cap, fully diluted.
When it priced its IPO, there was a question as to whether Dropbox would surpass the $10 billion valuation it achieved in its last private round. It eliminated those concerns overnight.
The first few days have been a strong indicator of investor demand for the cloud storage company.
To recap, Dropbox initially hoped to price its IPO between $16 and $18, then raised it from $18 to $20. Then it ultimately priced its IPO at $21, closing the day above $28. And it still continues to go up.
Investors like Dropbox’s improving financials.
It brought in $1.1 billion in revenue in its most recent year. This is up from $845 million in revenue the year before and $604 million for 2015.
Yet while it’s been cash flow positive since 2016, it is not profitable. Dropbox lost nearly $112 million last year. But its margins are looking better when compared with losses of $210 million for 2016 and $326 million for 2015.
Monday was a good day on the stock market in general. The Dow surged 600 points, partly due to gains from tech stocks.
Co-founder and CEO Drew Houston is the largest shareholder, owning 25.3% of the company ahead of its IPO. Sequoia Capital owned 23.2% of Dropbox.
Although Dropbox is very different than Spotify which intends to list next week, investors will view this favorable debut as a sign that the IPO window is “open,” meaning that there is strong demand for newly public tech companies.
Zuora, Pivotal and Smartsheet also unveiled IPO filings recently, suggesting that they will go public in April. And we broke the news that DocuSign’s IPO is coming up.
Source: TechCrunch
Homelessness in Santa Clara County has gotten worse, with the overall homeless population increasing 13 percent to 7,394 in 2017 over the course of two years. That puts Santa Clara’s homelessness crisis in the same ballpark as San Francisco’s, which has a homeless population of 7,499, according to a 2017 homeless census and survey. Santa Clara also has the third highest rate of chronic homelessness in the entire country.
Today, Cisco announced a $50 million donation to Destination: Home over the next five years. The idea is to help put an end to homelessness in Santa Clara County — an area of Northern California that is home to the tech industry’s Silicon Valley. This area consists of cities like Cupertino (home to Apple’s headquarters), Mountain View (home to Google/Alphabet), Palo Alto (home to Facebook), San Jose and Sunnyvale.
“We have said for a long time that it is up to all of us to end homelessness in our community,” Destination: Home CEO Jennifer Loving said in a statement. “Cisco has fully embraced that concept, and is stepping up in a big way to provide the type of critical private sector leadership and substantial funding that is necessary to address this crisis head on. We couldn’t be more thrilled or grateful to have Chuck Robbins and the Cisco team at the table.”
Cisco has donated an initial $20 million chunk to Destination: Home through its Cisco Fund. The plan is for this money to invigorate Destination: Home’s efforts to achieve its five-year plan to end homelessness, which entails disrupting and transforming homeless response systems, building new housing opportunities and deploying client-centered solutions.
Since implementing the plan in 2015, Santa Clara County has been able to permanently house 5,154 people, according to Destination: Home’s March 2018 progress report.
Click to enlarge
“I believe that this commitment is a smart, long-term investment in the work that Destination: Home does, allowing them to buy land and build additional housing, pioneer technology solutions around homelessness, enhance data collection capabilities, and test promising social service intervention model” Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins (pictured above) wrote in a blog post. “This is also an investment in the place that has been so good to us as a company – the place where so many of us are fortunate not just to work, but to have a home.”
As tech companies grapple with their roles in the displacement of non-tech workers, it’s promising to see some of them try to tackle the problems they helped to exacerbate. It’s worth noting Cisco is not the only tech company putting money behind social good efforts. In October, Google committed $1 billion in grants to train U.S. workers for jobs in the high-tech industry.
Source: TechCrunch
Lerer Hippeau Ventures, the New York-based early-stage venture firm, is taking over the $125 million debut fund created by Binary Capital, a young San Francisco-based venture firm whose cofounder’s misdeeds became the talk of Silicon Valley last summer.
Axios reported the development earlier this morning. Lerer Hippeau tells us it’s not commenting on the news.
The portfolio includes 25 startups, including Bellhops, a five-year-old, Chattanooga, Tn.-based local moving services startup, and Unikrn, a three-year-old, Bellevue, Wa.-based e-sports wagering service that raised $31.4 million via an initial coin offering last fall. (Billionaire Mark Cuban is also an investor.)
What happens to Binary’s second fund is apparently an open question. Jonathan Teo, a cofounder of Binary, didn’t respond to our requests for more information this morning, but Recode reports that firm has “bogged down in various legal matters, including an attempt by Teo to have his fate decided in arbitration.”
Teo’s cofounder, Justin Caldbeck, had brought the firm to the brink of ruin. Last summer, an in expose published by The Information, Caldbeck, who’d previously been an investor with Lightspeed Venture Partners, was accused of making unwanted sexual advances toward six women who said they were groped and propositioned during their professional relationship with him.
Caldbeck initially denied the claims, telling The Information’s reporter, “Go f— yourself.” A day later, he was apologizing for his behavior and, within short order, was forced to resign under pressure.
Teo had apparently hoped to hang on to the firm, which he’s created with Caldbeck in early 2014. Judging by Recode’s report, he’s still fighting to stay involved.
Caldbeck meanwhile showed up at his alma mater, Duke University, last fall to discuss the male-dominated world of finance. “If we’re going to make change, men need to behave better,” Caldbeck told the school newspaper afterward. “Part of what needs to happen is more education around these issues.”
Caldbeck separately told Bloomberg that he planned to release a website dedicated to the topic of “bro culture” and how to address it.
To the relief of his many critics, he appears not to have moved forward with those plans.
Pictured above, left to right: Teo and Caldbeck.
Source: TechCrunch
Notes posted on the Chromium boards suggest that Android support on Chrome OS may jump to v9.0 “P” rather than move to v8.x “Oreo.” Chrome OS currently supports Android v7.x “Nougat” on most Chromebooks.
The post Chrome OS may jump straight to eating Android Pie rather than munching on Oreo appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends