Vodafone is teaming up with Google’s cloud division to jointly develop data services they can eventually sell to other companies, in the latest sign of convergence between the telecoms and technology sectors. Around 1,000 workers in the UK, Spain and the US will be seconded by the two companies to create a new cloud-based storage…
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Investors are tuning into psychedelic stocks. A succession of market newcomers is raising funds to explore the use of mind-altering drugs for mental disorders. It is a controversial area of research. But given the need for better treatments, the nascent market could grow rapidly. Atai Life Sciences, a Berlin-based company backed by tech investor Peter Thiel,…
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“I think the psychology of the leader often becomes the psychology of the organisation,” says Brian Chesky, reflecting on a year in which his company, Airbnb, was thrown into disarray by the global pandemic. There was no panic, the chief executive and co-founder of the accommodation-booking platform says, even as bookings plummeted by more than…
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This week, we welcome guest Hana Mohan to our podcast Found. Hana is the co-founder and CEO of MagicBell, a new startup she created with Josue Montano that just recently graduated from Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 cohort. MagicBell is a full-featured, plug-and-play notifications inbox aimed at developers who want to build one into their own…
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Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. If you want it in your inbox every Saturday morning, sign up here. Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors. TechCrunch isn’t a public-market-focused publication. We…
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My mom cuts to the chase when she is describing my beat to others. In her words, I cover companies like Uber before they become companies like Uber. And honestly? I can’t exactly disagree with the description. The best feeling in tech journalism is telling a story about a startup before it becomes a household…
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The writer is chair of the NHS Confederation The starting gun has been fired on the most significant NHS reforms for a decade and a partial reversal of the market-based reforms introduced by David Cameron’s government in 2012. The NHS white paper, published in February, was warmly received by NHS leaders. Reorganisations are never top…
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When Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sat down with Chinese officials in Anchorage, Alaska for the first high-level bilateral summit of the new administration, it was not a typical diplomatic meeting. Instead of a polite but restrained diplomatic exchange, the two sides traded pointed barbs for almost two hours.…
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Startups constantly talk about being mission-oriented, but it’s hard to take most of those messages seriously when the mission is optimizing cash flow for tax efficiency. However, a new generation of startups is emerging that are taking on some of the largest global challenges and bringing the same entrepreneurial grit, operational excellence, and technical brilliance…
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There’s an old saw from Mark Twain about how truth is stranger than fiction, and I think it’s fair to say we’ve lived through a very strange reality this past year. With all the chaos and change, we’re led to a foundational question: what’s the purpose of speculative fiction and its adjacent genres of science…
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