World Of News

Medical startup Nines , which has developed an AI-based triage tool that has received clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use, is making that tool available for free to all until June 30 to help address the growing burden on radiology diagnostics departments as COVID-19 continues to reshape the healthcare landscape in the U.S. NinesAI is designed to identify possible emergent cases of intracranial hemorrhage and mass effect conditions in patients, helping radiologists prioritize cases to review for further study. NinesAI is a supplemental tool, providing an early signal that some CT scans merit further investigation by trained radiologists, but even that can help tremendously in decreasing workload and eliminating manual early steps that are time-consuming. This is a great example of where applied AI makes a lot of sense. Nines, which is co-founded by Udacity founder and Google self-driving car pioneer David Stave’s and county Dr. Alexander Kagen, NYC Mt....

Okta released a special COVID-19 edition of its app usage report today, and you don’t need a Ph. D. in statistics to guess what they found. Indeed, Zoom surged 110% on the Okta network, leading the way in usage growth just as you would expect, but another whole class of tools besides collaboration also saw huge increases in usage. As Okta wrote in the report, “We see growth in two major areas: collaboration tools, especially video conferencing apps, and network security tools such as VPNs that extend secure access to remote workers.” These plumbing tools might not be as sexy as the collaboration tools or boast triple digit growth like Zoom did, but they are seeing a substantial increase in usage as company IT departments try to bring some order to a widely distributed workforce. As Okta pointed out in the report, bad actors have been looking to take advantage of the situation, as they tend to do, and these folks do love to sew some chaos. Image Credit: Okta The biggest winn...

Even before the COVID-19 shutdown, venture funding rounds and total deal volume of VC funding for esports were down noticeably from the year prior. The space received a lot of attention in 2017 and 2018 as leagues formed, teams raised money and surging popularity fostered a whole ecosystem of new companies. Last year featured some big fundraises, but esports wasn’t the hot new thing in the tech world anymore. This unexpected, compulsory work-from-home era may drive renewed interest in the space, however, as a larger market of consumers discover esports and more potential entrepreneurs identify pain points in their experience. To track where new startups could arise this year, I asked seven VCs who pay close attention to the esports market where they see opportunities at the moment: Peter Levin, Griffin Gaming Partners Beth Ferriera, Firstmark Ethan Kurzweil, Bessemer Venture Partners Jens Hilgers, BitKraft Ventures Doug Higgins, Sapphire Sport Rick Yang, NEA Kevin Baxpehler,...

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we’re taking our final look back at Q1 venture capital through the lens of AI-focused startups. New data out this week paints a mixed picture of the AI startup landscape. Venture dollar volume in Q1 was pretty good, though there was weakness in certain startup stages. Exit data was weak, however, and some Q1 numbers were juiced by a single deal. AI-focused startups have grown past their history as the hot new thing (remember when every new tech company was doing AI for 45 minutes?) into a more mature niche; TechCrunch has spent a reasonable amount of time digging into their economics , and just this week a new, $180 million AI-focused fund caught our attention . In the post-hype days, then, let’s check in on what global AI startups got done with investors in Q1. We’re leaning on this report from CB Insights , which breaks down the quarter’s numbers for us. Let...

In just a few hours, the TechCrunch crew is chatting with investor and entrepreneur Mark Cuban . Kicking off at 8 am PT, 11 am ET and 3 PM GMT, Jordan Crook and Alex Wilhelm will talk startups and the economy with Cuban as part of TechCrunch’s new Extra Crunch Live series ( you can join here ). In the past few weeks, the first episodes in the series with Cowboy Venture’s Aileen Lee and Ted Wang , Precursor Ventures’ Charles Hudson , and Kapor Capital’s Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor have been a hit, so we’re excited to keep going. Cuban’s up next. You can hit up the Zoom info below to join the call directly ( and ask your own questions ) or simply sit back and watch the live streaming version on YouTube. All details are after the jump. Cuban rose to prominence in the business world in the 90s, selling MicroSolutions, a software reseller and system integrator, for $6 million in the first year of the decade. By the end of ’90s, he’d added a few zeroes to his deals, selling Bro...

Amazon workers across the world are formalizing their activism with the creation of the Amazon Workers International. Its first action is a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Amazon Director of UK Customer Fulfillment Stefano Perego in which the group demands the company makes permanent certain steps Amazon has implemented amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In light of the global health crisis, Amazon made some positive changes — changes that workers want to ensure stay long beyond the pandemic. Those changes include an increase of $2 per hour and an extra five minutes’ worth of break time. The company also got rid of productivity feedback, which incentivizes workers to do more, faster. “They’re talking about taking that away,” Christian Zammarròn, an Amazon warehouse worker in Chicago, told TechCrunch. “I don’t think they should take it away. These are things we need not just during a pandemic but all the time.” As of April 24, Amazon said it would extend the increased hourly pay throu...

Microsoft today announced a slew of updates to various parts of its Microsoft 365 ecosystem. A lot of these aren’t all that exciting (though that obviously depends on your level of enthusiasm for products like Microsoft Endpoint Manager), but the overall thrust behind this update is to make life easier for the IT admins that help provision and manage corporate Windows — and Mac — machines, something that’s even more important right now, given how many companies are trying to quickly adapt to this new work-from-home environment. For them, the highlight of today’s set of announcements is surely an update to Windows Virtual Desktop , Microsoft’s service for giving employees access to a virtualized desktop environment on Azure and that allows IT departments to host multiple Windows 10 sessions on the same hardware. The company is launching a completely new management experience for this service that makes getting started significantly easier for admins. Ahead of today’s announcement, B...