Saturday, September 23

USA

Read the latest news on startup companies in USA, entrepreneurs, funding, investments, tech news and successful businessman stories on Pixr8.

Automaker Mahindra Wants To Sell Electric Vehicles In U.S.
USA

Automaker Mahindra Wants To Sell Electric Vehicles In U.S.

Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd, one of India’s oldest vehicle manufacturers, is testing autonomous tractors, trucks and cars, while moving closer to bringing electric vehicles to the United States, Chairman Anand Mahindra said on Monday. The company, which opened a new North American headquarters north of Detroit on Monday, is considering when to begin U.S. sales of the vehicles, Anand Mahindra said in an interview. It is also weighing whether the vehicles should carry the Mahindra brand or those of its affiliates Pininfarina, the famed Italian design house; and Ssangyong Motor Co, a Korean manufacturer of utility and crossover vehicles, he added. Mahindra & Mahindra bought Ssangyong in 2011 and Pininfarina in 2015. The Indian parent is collaborating with both companies on the developm...
Russian Twitter Accounts Promoted Brexit Ahead Of EU Referendum: Times Newspaper
USA

Russian Twitter Accounts Promoted Brexit Ahead Of EU Referendum: Times Newspaper

Russian Twitter accounts posted almost 45,000 messages about Brexit in the 48 hours around last year’s referendum in an attempt to sow discord during the vote on whether to leave the European Union, the Times newspaper reported on Wednesday. The Times cited research from an upcoming paper by data scientists at Swansea University and the University of California, Berkeley, which it said showed accounts based in Russia had tweeted about Brexit in the days leading up to the June 23 vote. The Times said most of the tweets seen by the newspaper encouraged people to vote for Brexit, although a number advocated remaining in the EU. It quoted Tho Pham, one of the paper’s authors, as saying “the main conclusion is that bots were used on purpose and had influence”. The research tracked 156,...
Uber Locks On Multibillion Dollar Deal With Japanese SoftBank
USA

Uber Locks On Multibillion Dollar Deal With Japanese SoftBank

[dropcap]J[/dropcap]apanese multinational telecommunications and Internet corporation SoftBank Group has reached a multibillion-dollar deal with San Francisco based Uber Inc, it confirmed in a statement. Although the details of the deal have not been yet disclosed, but as per the reports, the deal could be worth up to $10 billion of Uber's stocks. It is also estimated that this deal would be a resolver of legal battles between Uber's former CEO Travis Kalanick and prominent shareholders. Venture capital firm Benchmark, an early investor with a board seat in the ride-services company, and Kalanick have reached an agreement over terms of the SoftBank investment. “We’ve entered into an agreement with a consortium led by SoftBank and Dragoneer on a potential investment,” an Uber spokesm...
Lyft May Claim A Third Of U.S. Market Soon!
USA

Lyft May Claim A Third Of U.S. Market Soon!

Lyft is expected to take over a significant amount of U.S. market, and has gained much on its rival Uber Technologies Inc, according to a private Lyft investor report obtained by Bloomberg. The investor is depicting in the report that by the end of the year, Lyft's shares will see a boost in its U.S. ride-hailing business by about 61 percent. The gains that the company got are under the disturbed reputation of Uber after a series of events like executives stepping down and the distress among its drivers. These series of events has kept Uber distracted for a long time, while it was busy with internal management conflicts, Lyft gained on that and may emerge in the coming months. Besides gaining market share, Lyft has boosted its profitability and sales, the document mentioned. Accor...
Former Yahoo CEO Apologizes For Data Breaches, Blames Russians
USA

Former Yahoo CEO Apologizes For Data Breaches, Blames Russians

Marissa Mayer, former CEO of Yahoo on Wednesday, apologised for the two historic data breaches at their company. She blamed the Russian agents, saying they were behind at least one of these breaches, at a hearing on the growing number of cyber attacks on major U.S. companies. ”As CEO, these thefts occurred during my tenure, and I want to sincerely apologise to each and every one of our users,” she told the Senate Commerce Committee, testifying alongside the interim and former CEOs of Equifax Inc and a senior Verizon Communications Inc executive. “Unfortunately, while all our measures helped Yahoo successfully defend against the barrage of attacks by both private and state-sponsored hackers, Russian agents intruded on our systems and stole our users’ data.” she added. Yahoo's most of t...
These Russian Ads Deceived Users on Facebook and Instagram- Leaked
USA

These Russian Ads Deceived Users on Facebook and Instagram- Leaked

The Russian ads that influenced the Americans came under many disguised faces. They ran all across Facebook and Instagram attempting to influence the public's opinion through social media in a manner we hardly can imagine! The content that went along with it could hardly be traced now, but we managed to get some of the screenies of those social media ads. It's clear from the testimony of internet companies that these ads aimed at "election interference". Go through the examples in the below images of how they planned to discredit a candidate (Clinton being the reliable target), and foment division on existing issues. The Russian ads targeted the far left and the far right, seeking to manipulate black activists, Muslims, Christians, LGBTQ people, gun owners and even fans of Ivanka ...
Former Yahoo CEO, Equifax CEO to testify at U.S. Senate hearing
USA

Former Yahoo CEO, Equifax CEO to testify at U.S. Senate hearing

Former Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer and the current and former CEOs of Equifax Inc will testify before a U.S. Senate panel on Nov. 8 on two massive data breaches, the committee said Wednesday. Verizon Communications Inc, the largest U.S. wireless operator, acquired most of Yahoo Inc’s assets in June. Yahoo disclosed in October that a 2013 data breach affected all 3 billion of its accounts, compared with an estimate of more than 1 billion disclosed in December. The Senate Commerce Committee said Mayer, interim Equifax CEO Paulino do Rego Barros Jr. and former Equifax CEO Richard Smith would testify, as well as Karen Zacharia, Verizon’s deputy general counsel and chief privacy officer. Verizon and Equifax did not immediately comment. Mayer plans to appear, a representative fo...
U.S. Senators Hammer Facebook For Power Over Elections
USA

U.S. Senators Hammer Facebook For Power Over Elections

U.S. senators on Tuesday pressed Facebook Inc’s chief lawyer on why the company did not catch 2016 election ads bought using Russian rubles, why its investigation of them took so long and how much it knows about its 5 million advertisers. Democrats and Republicans at the Senate crime subcommittee hearing fired questions for much of two hours at Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch, who said that in retrospect the company should have done more. “In hindsight, we should have had a broader lens. There are signals we missed,” Stretch said under questioning from Democratic Senator Al Franken about how the company missed political ads bought with Russian money. Stretch called the Russia-based ads “reprehensible” for their political divisiveness. The hearing marked the first time tech exec...
Russian Groups Made 43 Hrs Of YouTube Video During U.S. Elections
USA

Russian Groups Made 43 Hrs Of YouTube Video During U.S. Elections

Google has recently revealed reports about Kremlin-linked groups spending around $4,700 on advertising platforms, during the 2016 U.S. elections. These ads were although not targeted to any specific group of users or no evidence of targeting by geography were found. It was also revealed by Google, that its YouTube, which strictly prohibit things like ​hate ​speech, ​violent ​or ​graphic ​content; found 18 channels closely associated with this campaign that made videos, which were in English-language, public, with the political content in them. There ​were ​1,108 ​such ​videos ​uploaded, ​representing- ​43 ​hours ​of ​content ​and ​totaling ​309,000 U.S. ​views ​from ​June ​2015 ​to ​November ​2016. The report also said that these “videos ​were ​not ​targeted ​to ​the ​U.S.” and th...
Facebook Says 126M Americans May Have Seen Russia-Linked Political Posts
USA

Facebook Says 126M Americans May Have Seen Russia-Linked Political Posts

Facebook Inc said on Monday that Russia-based operatives published about 80,000 posts on the social network over a two-year period in an effort to sway U.S. politics and that about 126 million Americans may have seen the posts during that time. Facebook’s latest data on the Russia-linked posts - possibly reaching around half of the U.S. population of voting age - far exceeds the company’s previous disclosures. It was included in written testimony provided to U.S. lawmakers, and seen by Reuters, ahead of key hearings with social media and technology companies about Russian meddling in elections on Capitol Hill this week. Twitter Inc separately has found 2,752 accounts linked to Russian operatives, a source familiar with the company’s written testimony said. That estimate is up from a ...
Twitter Overstated Its Monthly Users Figures For 3 Years
USA

Twitter Overstated Its Monthly Users Figures For 3 Years

Twitter said on Thursday that it overstated its monthly user numbers since 2014 after accidentally including third-party application's data in its count. The revelation came when the company reported that its net loss had slowed in the third quarter and that the number of daily active users had risen by 14 per cent. The disclosure, however, could further damage Twitter's reputation as the company criticizes Russia's role in its efforts to interfere in the presidential election and complains about what critics have called scattershot efforts to prevent abuse and harassment on its platform, and skepticism among some investors, who are concerned that global growth in users is falling. At least initially investors were not particularly worried about the excessive number of users. Twit...
USA

Twitter To Label Election Ads After U.S. Regulatory Threat

Twitter Inc said on Tuesday it would add labels to election-related advertisements and say who is behind each of them, after a threat of regulation from the United States over the lack of disclosure for political spending on social media. Twitter, acting a month after Facebook Inc launched a similar overhaul of political ads, said in a blog post it would start a website so people could see identities of buyers, targeting demographics and total ad spend by election advertisers. Silicon Valley social media firms and the political ads that run on their websites have generally been free of the disclaimers and other regulatory demands that U.S. authorities impose on television, radio and satellite services. Calls for that to change have grown, however, after Twitter, Facebook and Alpha...