The “quick build” process used to put up the span that fell and killed six people is actually quite common—and has been around for decades.
Source: Wired
Fitbit this week announced the Versa, the company’s latest attempt at a full-on smartwatch. We want to know your thoughts on Fitbit’s newest offering!
Source: CNET
Upload, the VR startup which was rocked by a sexual harassment suit exactly one year ago, is shutting down both its San Francisco office and its 20,000 sq. foot Los Angeles co-working space as it struggles to secure new funding, multiple sources tell TechCrunch.
All of the company’s LA employees were laid off yesterday. The company’s SF office lease has already been taken over. The startup’s VR-focused trade publication, UploadVR, which operates independently of the company’s other ventures, has not been affected yet, sources tell us.
The layoffs and office shut downs come as the company has had trouble raising new funding and managing its reputation following a bombastic lawsuit from the company’s former social media manager that landed the startup on the front-page of the New York Times and on a CNN special feature talking about the company’s toxic workplace environment.
The sexual harassment and wrongful termination lawsuit, which we first reported, alleged — among other things — that the company had a “kink room” with a bed in its office where male employees had sex. As the company wrestled with the fallout, at least one additional former female employee was also threatening to sue the company’s leadership over sexual harassment claims, a source tells us.
In the aftermath of the lawsuit, the company brought on CircleClick CEO Anne Ward as COO to turn things around at the troubled startup. Ward left the company just six weeks later, and soon sent a cease and desist letter threatening a restraining order against Upload CEO Taylor Freeman and President Will Mason after what she alleged was “repeated harassment.”
Though the initial lawsuit was later settled out of court, the bad behavior didn’t end there for Upload. In a subsequent incident, an employee at the startup was reported to management for having sex with a client in the office. That employee was not fired and the person who reported them later quit, we are told.
Despite few of their company’s previous investors wanting to have anything to do with them, the co-founders have managed to keep things afloat thanks to personal investments from a close friend of theirs, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey.
“Nobody else will touch them but the Nazi sympathizer,” a former Upload executive told TechCrunch.
Multiple sources tell us that Luckey has personally invested as much as $2.5 million in Upload to keep the company running after it spent through the last of a $4.5 million Series A which it had raised in late 2016 from Colopl, General Catalyst and others. The Oculus founder, who left Facebook nearly one year ago following an extended controversy swirling around his personal politics, has maintained a close relationship with the company’s leadership but has been reluctant to invest further.
Luckey did not respond to a request for comment. We’ve reached out to Upload for comment.
Source: TechCrunch
Facebook’s upcoming $199 cordless headset reportedly won’t arrive for a couple more months.
Source: CNET
Boeing successfully completes the first test flight of its 737 MAX jetliner outside of Seattle.
Source: CNET
Apple sent out invites to a rare off-campus event at a Chicago high school later this month.
Source: CNET
There’s a new twist in the BroadQualm saga this afternoon as Qualcomm has said it won’t renominate Paul Jacobs, the former executive chairman of the company, after he notified the board that he decided to explore the possibility of making a proposal to acquire Qualcomm.
The last time we saw such a huge exploration to acquire a company was circa 2013, when Dell initiated a leveraged buyout to take the company private in a deal worth $24.4 billion. This would be of a dramatically larger scale, and there’s a report by the Financial Times that Jacobs approached Softbank as a potential partner in the buyout. Jacobs is the son of Irwin Jacobs, who founded Qualcomm, and rose to run the company as CEO from 2005 to 2014. Successfully completing a buyout of this scale would, as a result, end up keeping the company that his father founded in 1985 in the family.
All this comes following Broadcom’s decision to drop its plans to try to complete a hostile takeover of Qualcomm, which would consolidate two of the largest semiconductor companies in the world into a single unit. Qualcomm said the board of directors would instead consist of just 10 members.
“Following the withdrawal of Broadcom’s takeover proposal, Qualcomm is focused on executing its business plan and maximizing value for shareholders as an independent company,” the company said in a statement. “There can be no assurance that Dr. Jacobs can or will make a proposal, but, if he does, the Board will of course evaluate it consistent with its fiduciary duties to shareholders.”
Broadcom dropped its attempts after the Trump administration decided to block the deal altogether. The BroadQualm deal fell into purgatory following an investigation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, and then eventually led to the administration putting a stop to the deal — and potentially any of that scale — while Broadcom was still based in Singapore. Broadcom had intended to move to the United States, but the timing was such that Qualcomm would end up avoiding Broadcom’s attempts at a hostile takeover.
BroadQualm has been filled with a number of twists and turns, coming to a chaotic head this week with the end of the deal. Qualcomm removed Jacobs from his role as executive chairman and installed an independent director, and then delayed the shareholder meeting that would give Broadcom an opportunity to pick up the votes to take over control of part of Qualcomm’s board of directors. The administration then handed down its judgment, and Qualcomm pushed up its shareholder meeting as a result to ten days following the decision.
It’s not clear if Jacobs would be able to piece together the partnerships necessary to complete a buyout of this scale. But it’s easy to read between the lines of Qualcomm’s statement — which, as always, has to say it will fulfill its fiduciary duty to its shareholders. The former CEO and executive chairman has quietly been a curious figure to this whole process, and it looks like the BroadQualm saga is nowhere near done.
Source: TechCrunch
The next version of Boeing’s 737 aircraft has the longest range of any MAX plane.
Source: CNET
Paul Jacobs may launch a bid to take over Qualcomm, which his father co-founded.
Source: CNET
From burgers to chicken nuggets, several companies are producing meat from a petri dish.
Source: CNET