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Bitcoin Extends Losses, Slips Below $14,000 On Bitstamp Exchange

22Dec By reutersNo Comments

News

Bitcoin Extends Losses, Slips Below $14,000 On Bitstamp Exchange

Bitcoin fell more than 10 percent to below $14,000 on the Bitstamp exchange on Friday, extending overnight losses. It was last down 11 percent at $13,872. The cryptocurrency, which was at about $1,000 at the year’s start, had climbed to a record high of $19,666 on Sunday in lead up to exchange giant CME Group’s launch of bitcoin futures before losing steam. Bitcoin is known to go through wild swings. In November, it tumbled almost 30 percent in four days from $7,888 to $5,555. In September, it fell 40 percent from $4,979 to $2,972.

Uber rival Didi Chuxing gets $4 bn from SoftBank, others for global expansion

21Dec By reutersNo Comments

FUNDING

Uber rival Didi Chuxing gets $4 bn from SoftBank, others for global expansion

Chinese ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing Technology Co has raised $4 billion in a new funding round, the firm said on Thursday, boosting its war chest as it looks to expand overseas and intensify a challenge to Uber Technologies Inc. The fundraising will help fuel the firm’s global expansion plans as well as help it develop its business into areas like artificial intelligence (AI), Didi said. The round values the firm at over $50 billion and pre-existing investor SoftBank Group Corp is a participant, a person familiar with the deal told Reuters. SoftBank did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “With a substantial cash reserve, Didi plans to scale up investments in AI talent and technologies,” Didi said in a statement. The funds would also help the firm “bring more ...

21Dec By reutersNo Comments

News

Uber Names Ex-Orbitz Executive As COO

Uber Technologies Inc on Wednesday named the former chief executive of Orbitz to be its chief operating officer, second-in-command to new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who has been revamping the leadership team in hopes of turning around the ride provider and preparing for an IPO. Barney Harford, who was CEO of online travel service Orbitz Worldwide Inc, will join Uber on Jan. 2 and will be tasked with overseeing global ride-hailing operations, marketing, customer support and the food delivery business. A familiar face at Uber, he been an adviser since October, Khosrowshahi said in an email to employees. With Khosrowshahi flying to Europe and South America to address regulatory issues, Harford will have an important role in Uber’s day-to-day business. He must also help figure out how to...

Samsung Develops ‘World’s Smallest’ DRAM Chip

20Dec By reutersNo Comments

Tech

Samsung Develops ‘World’s Smallest’ DRAM Chip

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd said on Wednesday it has developed the world’s smallest DRAM chip, widening its technical lead on competitors as it tracks towards a record operating profit in 2017 driven by the semiconductor business. The “second-generation” 10-nanometre class, 8-gigabit DRAM chips with improved energy efficiency and data processing performance would be geared toward premium data-crunching electronics such as cloud computing centres, mobile devices and high-speed graphic cards, Samsung said in a statement. The global leader in computer chips, televisions and smartphones said it would shift most of its existing DRAM production capacity to 10-nano chips in 2018. This “aggressive” production expansion would “accommodate strong market demand,” said Gyoyoung Jin, president ...

Facebook To Notify Users When Photos Of Them Are Uploaded

20Dec By reutersNo Comments

News

Facebook To Notify Users When Photos Of Them Are Uploaded

Facebook Inc said on Tuesday it would begin using facial recognition technology to tell people on the social network when others upload photos of them, if they agree to let the company keep a facial template on file. The company said in a statement that it was making the feature optional to allow people to protect their privacy, but that it thought some people would want to be notified of pictures they might not otherwise know about. The feature would not immediately be available in Canada and the European Union, Facebook said. Privacy laws are generally stricter in those jurisdictions, though the company said it was hopeful about implementing the feature there in the future. Tech companies are putting in place a variety of functions using facial recognition technology, despit...

Ride-Hailing Firm Grab Launches Services In Cambodia

19Dec By reutersNo Comments

News

Ride-Hailing Firm Grab Launches Services In Cambodia

Ride-hailing firm Grab, the biggest Southeast Asian rival of Uber Technologies Inc, on Tuesday said it has launched services in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, expanding its presence to an eighth country in the region. The Singapore-headquartered firm said it signed a memorandum of understanding with Cambodia’s Ministry of Public Works and Transport to support infrastructure development. The launch marks the latest development in a quick-moving industry, coming just three months after Uber likewise began services in what the World Bank ranks as the sixth-fastest expanding economy. In October, Grab secured $700 million in debt financing to expand its fleet and signed an exclusive partnership with Singapore public transport operator SMRT. Earlier this month, Singapore taxi firm ComfortDelG...

Facebook Reveals Data On Copyright And Trademark Complaints

19Dec By reutersNo Comments

ANALYSIS

Facebook Reveals Data On Copyright And Trademark Complaints

Facebook Inc announced Monday that it removed nearly 3 million posts, including videos, ads and other forms of content, from its services during the first half of 2017 following complaints of counterfeiting and copyright and trademark infringement. The worldwide data on intellectual property-related takedowns is a new disclosure for Facebook as part of its biannual “Transparency Report,” Chris Sonderby, a deputy general counsel at the firm, said in a blog post. “We believe that sharing information about (intellectual property) reports we receive from rights holders is an important step toward being more open and clear about how we protect the people and businesses that use our services,” Sonderby wrote. The ninth Facebook transparency report also showed that government requests for i...

Uber Ties Up With BBM Messenger On Ride Booking

18Dec By reutersNo Comments

News

Uber Ties Up With BBM Messenger On Ride Booking

Uber Technologies said on Monday it has joined forces with BBM Messenger to allow users around the world, including in the application’s biggest market of Indonesia, to book rides via the messenger service. The partnership agreement is with Creative Media Works, operating as BBM Messenger, the company said in a statement. ”With this partnership, BBM users can quickly request an Uber ride via BBM despite variations in quality of location, network speed, or device features,” said Chan Park, Uber’s general manager in Southeast Asia. The agreement means that BBM Messenger users, including both Android and iOS users, can book an Uber ride without leaving the BBM app, or being required to have a stand-alone Uber app on their phone, the company said. Creative Media works is a unit...

Uber Should Have Given Court An Ex-employee’s Letter About ‘Fraud And Theft’ In Waymo Case

16Dec By reutersNo Comments

USA

Uber Should Have Given Court An Ex-employee’s Letter About ‘Fraud And Theft’ In Waymo Case

Ride hailing company Uber was obligated to turn over to a U.S. federal judge a letter from a former employee that told of the company’s “fraud and theft” and mentioned evidence of stolen trade secrets nailed “like a scalp” to the wall, a court official said Friday. Special master, John Cooper, assigned to a lawsuit against Uber Technologies Inc by Alphabet Inc’s self-driving car unit, Waymo, released a report on Friday stating the company should have produced the letter and was wrong in keeping it from the court. The letter, from former Uber security analyst Richard Jacobs alleging Uber engaged in illegal and unethical competitive tactics and had stolen trade secrets, is at the heart of Waymo’s lawsuit against Uber. The letter was sent to Uber’s in-house lawyer in May and shared ...

16Dec By reutersNo Comments

News

North Korean Hackers Behind Attacks On Cryptocurrency Exchanges, South Korean Newspaper Reports

South Korea’s spy agency said North Korean hackers were behind attacks on cryptocurrency exchanges this year in which some 7.6 billion won ($6.99 million) worth of cryptocurrencies were stolen, a newspaper reported on Saturday. The cyber attacks attributed to North Korean hackers also included the leaking of personal information from 36,000 accounts from the world’s busiest cryptocurrency exchange Bitthumb in June, South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo reported, citing the country’s National Intelligence Service (NIS). Attacks also included the theft of cryptocurrencies from accounts at exchanges Yapizon, now called Youbit, and Coinis in April and September, it said. The 7.6 billion won of stolen cryptocurrencies are now worth about 90 billion won ($82.7 million), Chosun Ilbo reported. It al...

Google Crunches Data To Help NASA Find Two New Planets

15Dec By reutersNo Comments

USA

Google Crunches Data To Help NASA Find Two New Planets

Alphabet Inc’s Google and NASA said on Thursday that advanced computer analysis identified two new planets around distant stars, including one that is part of the first star system with as many planets as Earth’s solar system. The research by Google and the University of Texas at Austin that used data from NASA raised the prospects of new insights into the universe by feeding data into computer programs that can churn through information faster and more in-depth than humanly possibly, a technique known as machine learning. In this case, software learned differences between planets and other objects by analyzing thousands of data points, achieving 96 percent accuracy, NASA said at a news conference. The data came from the Kepler telescope which NASA launched into space in 2009 as ...

Bitcoin Fever Exposes Crypto-Market Frailties

14Dec By reutersNo Comments

News

Bitcoin Fever Exposes Crypto-Market Frailties

As bitcoin raced to another record high on Tuesday, one of the biggest providers of digital currency wallets, Coinbase, went down under the weight of traffic, leaving many of its more than 10 million customers unable to access their funds. At the same time, Bitfinex, the world’s biggest bitcoin exchange by trading volume, said it was under a heavy denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, meaning its servers had been intentionally flooded with junk online requests, taking down its website and crippling its services. The latest outages show how the market infrastructure for an immature and volatile instrument that millions of investors have piled into may be ill-equipped to cope with sudden shifts in demand, which is worrying some investors. During a particularly volatile period of trading ...