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Howard Boville Contributor Share on Twitter Howard Boville is head of IBM Hybrid Cloud. He leads the global cloud business at IBM and helps develop market-leading capabilities to drive digital transformation for enterprises. More posts by this contributor The ‘Frankencloud’ model is our biggest security risk Ransomware attacks on the JBS beef plant, and the …
Continue reading “The rise of cybersecurity debt”
You’ll need to prick up your ears up for this slice of deepfakery emerging from the wacky world of synthesized media: A digital version of Albert Einstein — with a synthesized voice that’s been (re)created using AI voice cloning technology drawing on audio recordings of the famous scientist’s actual voice. The startup behind the …
Continue reading “AI-driven audio cloning startup gives voice to Einstein chatbot”
The pandemic made remote work and on-demand delivery normal far faster than anyone expected. Today, as the world beings to emerge from the pandemic, location doesn’t matter like it did a year ago. As shocking as it sounds, we could be entering a much better era for small, local businesses. Modern society produced superstar cities …
Continue reading “The return of neighborhood retail and other surprising real estate trends”
The pandemic made the internet a lifeline for shopping, earning a living and maintaining personal relationships. Now, as lockdowns start to lift, the real estate industry has to figure out what that means. Seeking answers, I surveyed the people who are betting on the biggest and most surprising changes in the sector — proptech investors. …
Continue reading “10 proptech investors see better era for residential and retail after pandemic”
While London, Paris, Berlin and Stockholm feature regularly in tech coverage, the rest of Europe has been busy. The Czech Republic may be better known for beer, hockey and the sights of Prague, but its entrepreneurial community is as ambitious as any. Pipedrive is an EU-based CRM company with offices in eight countries, but it …
Continue reading “8 Czech VCs on green shoots, pandemic impacts and 2021 opportunities”
There is so much data sitting inside companies these days, but getting data to the people who need it most remains a daunting challenge. Polytomic, a graduate of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 cohort set out to solve that problem, and today the startup announced a $2.4 million seed. Caffeinated Capital led the round with …
Continue reading “Polytomic announces $2.4M seed to move business data where it’s needed”
With record funding levels and three unicorns to show, local investors are buoyant about Romania’s prospects heading into 2021. We caught up with eight of them recently, and heard how the country’s technical talent pool, broadband access and low cost of living have positioned it for the era of remote-first global companies across industries. The …
Continue reading “8 investors tell us the story behind the Romanian startup boom”
Israel’s startup ecosystem raised record amounts of funding and produced 19 IPOs in 2020, despite the pandemic. Now tech companies across industries are poised for an even better year, according to more than a dozen investors we talked to in the country. Mainstay sectors like cybersecurity continue to matter, they said, but are maturing (more …
Continue reading “After a record year for Israeli startups, 16 investors tell us what’s next”
Even in a non-hell year, running a successful startup is a tremendous lift. After the events of 2020, however, no doubt many already lean businesses are hanging on by the skin of their teeth. For every company that saw increased interest in their offerings during the pandemic, there were several that simply couldn’t make it …
Continue reading “Remembering the startups we lost in 2020”
Welcome to TechCrunch’s 2020 Holiday Gift Guide! Need help with gift ideas? We’re here to help! We’ll be rolling out gift guides from now through the end of December. You can find our other guides right here. We published the TechCrunch list of the best books of 2020 last week, which included such titles as …