Blog
You are here: Home / Blog
✎

Semiconductor startup CNEX Labs alleged Huawei’s deputy chairman conspired to steal its intellectual property

23 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Catherine Shu

A San Jose-based semiconductor startup being sued by Huawei for stealing trade secrets has hit back in court documents, accusing the Chinese firm’s deputy chairman of conspiring to steal its intellectual property, reports the Wall Street Journal. In court filings, CNEX Labs, which is backed by the investment arms of Dell and Microsoft, alleges that Eric Xu, who is also one of Huawei’s rotating CEOs, worked with other Huawei employees to steal its proprietary technology.

The lawsuit, set for trial on June 3 in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas, started in 2017 when Huawei sued CNEX and one of its founders, Yiren “Ronnie” Huang, a former employee at Huawei’s Santa Clara office, for stealing its technology and using unlawful means to poach 14 other Huawei employees. CNEX filed a countersuit the following year. Huawei has denied the startup’s allegations in court filings.

The lawsuit is happening at a fraught time for Huawei. Last week, the Chinese telecom equipment maker (and the world’s second-largest smartphone brand), was placed on a trade blacklist by the Trump administration, which also signed an executive order that would make it possible to block American companies from doing business with Huawei …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

✎

Tencent CEO warns companies must keep innovating to survive amid US-China tensions

22 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Rita Liao

On Tuesday, Tencent’s usually low-profile founder and CEO Pony Ma made rare comments to weigh in on escalating tensions between the United States and China, calling domestic tech companies to build more self-reliance in a bid to stay competitive.

“China has come to the forefront of development. There is less and less room for taking the best from outside and improving on them. As the ZTE and Huawei cases have intensified recently, we are also constantly watching whether the trade war will turn into a tech war,” said Ma at an event in China’s Yunnan Province per a transcript Tencent provided to TechCrunch.

Ma’s concern is not unexpected. As recent US-China negotiations show, the Shenzhen-based telecommunication and smartphone giant has become deeply entangled in the trade spat. The Commerce Department last week restricted American companies from selling components and other technology to Huawei — which the Trump administration has labeled as posing a national security threat — though it has since scaled back the ban. That would eventually cut Huawei off from certain services from Google, chips made by Qualcomm and Intel, and its other American suppliers.

Despite China’s efforts …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

✎

Google brings release channels and Windows Container support to its Kubernetes Engine

21 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Frederic Lardinois

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, the bi-annual gathering of cloud-native computing boffins, Google today announced that it now offers three release channels for its Google Kuberentes Engine (GKE): Rapid, Ragular and Stable. With these, Google Cloud users can decide whether they want the freshest release or the most stable one — or easily evaluate the latest updates in a development environment. This new feature is now in alpha testing.

“Each channel offers different version maturity and freshness, allowing developers to subscribe their cluster to a stream of updates that match risk tolerance and business requirements,” Google explains in today’s release.

The company is launching this new feature into alpha with the first release in the Rapid channel, which will give developers early access to the latest versions of Kubernetes .

With this release into the Rapid channel, Google is also bringing early support for Windows Containers to GKE. Over the course of the last few releases, the Kubernetes community brought improved Windows support to the platform and now Google will offer support for Windows Server Containers in June.

In addition to these features, the company is also releasing Stackdriver Kubernetes …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

✎

Several chip companies, including Qualcomm and Intel, have reportedly stopped supplying Huawei after blacklist

20 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Catherine Shu

Several key suppliers are reportedly cutting off Huawei after the Trump administration added the Chinese telecom equipment and smartphone giant to a trade blacklist last week. According to Bloomberg, semiconductor companies Intel, Qualcomm, Xilinx and Broadcom will no longer supply Huawei until further notice. This follows another report earlier today that Google has suspended some trade with Huawei, leaving it with access only to the open-source version of Android.

In addition to impacting Huawei’s business, the blacklisting has ramifications for telecom providers who are getting ready to launch 5G networks. In China, the three big telecoms (China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom), which are all heavily reliant on Huawei, may be forced to delay 5G rollout. Meanwhile, U.S. carriers, especially smaller ones, may have to spend millions of dollars replacing Huawei equipment they have already installed or looking for new suppliers.

In tweet last week from the account Huawei Facts, the company called the blacklist a “lose-lose” situation. In a more recent tweet, it said “Oops! The U.S. is already coming to its senses over a ban on #Huawei, with a government official admitting that it cannot distance itself from the tech giant as easily as …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

✎

Equity transcribed: Away’s $1.4B valuation and CrowdStrike’s S-1

18 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Kate Clark

Welcome back to another transcribed edition of Equity, the wildly popular TechCrunch podcast that digs deep into the week’s news about … equity.

There were no IPOs this week so there was only one episode, but it was jam-packed with news about direct-to-consumer scooters, luggage funding and fake meat. This is where tech has taken us this week.

Oh, and Slack set the date for its direct listing.

Kate: So [Away] raised a 100 million, series D. This round was led by Wellington Management, so not by a traditional venture capital firm. Though Away is backed by big name faces like Forerunner Ventures, which is responsible for investments in pretty much direct to consumer companies. So this valued Away at 1.4 billion, and that’s obviously quite large, but what’s particularly surprising about that valuation is that Away was valued at just 400 million the last time they raised money, which was a series C of 50 million, maybe about 1 or 2 years ago.

Alex: Oh gosh.

Kate: I’m not sure exactly when that was. But we’re seeing a major, major, major uptick in its valuation. And the reason why is because at its series C, Away was profitable already. Like I was telling …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

Thumbnail for 37156✎

How an immigration crackdown is hurting UK startups

18 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Natasha Lomas

The two people who sat down in reception without an appointment would not leave the startup’s office until the end of the day.

Two months later, a letter followed informing the company it had been suspended from the United Kingdom’s register of licensed sponsors, the database of companies the government has approved to employee foreign workers. The business had 20 working days from the typed date to make “representations” and submit “evidence” and “supporting documents” to counter the “believed” infractions spread across 12 pages, threaded through with copious references to paragraphs, annexes and bullet points culled from the Home Office‘s official guidance for sponsors.

Early in the new year another letter arrived, and an assessment process that had begun with an unannounced visit one autumn morning delivered its final verdict: The revocation of Metail‘s sponsor license with immediate effect.

“There is no right of appeal against this decision,” warns paragraph 64 of the 22-page decision letter — in text which the sponsor compliance unit has seen fit to highlight in bold. “Whilst your client can no longer recruit sponsored workers under Tier 2 and 5 of the Points Based system, they can continue to recruit UK and EEA workers as well …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

✎

China’s Luckin Coffee raises up to $651M in upsized US IPO

17 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Jon Russell

Another week, another cash-burning tech IPO in the U.S. Following on from Uber’s high-profile listing, ambitious Chinese startup Luckin Coffee has raised up to $650.8 million on the Nasdaq after it priced its shares at $17.

Despite concern at its high losses and little chance of near-term profitability, Luckin seems to have been greeted positively by investors. The company priced its shares at the top of its $15-$17 range and it upsized the share offering to 33 million, that’s three million more than previously planned. That gives Luckin an initial net raise of $571.2 million, although that could increase to $650.8 million if underwriters take up the full additional allocation of 4.95 million ‘greenshoe’ shares that are on offer.

The company will list on Friday under the ticker ‘LK.’

Luckin filed to go public last month, just weeks after it closed a $150 million Series B+ funding round led by New York private equity firm Blackrock, which interestingly holds a 6.58 percent stake in Starbucks. The deal valued Luckin at $2.9 billion and it took the three-year-old company to $550 million raised from investors to date.

The company has burned through incredible amounts of cash as it tries to quickly …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

Thumbnail for 37153✎

Xnor’s AI2GO serves up custom edge AI models with a few clicks

16 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Devin Coldewey

AI would be useful for tons of everyday tasks for small businesses and other operations — if people just knew how to build and deploy their own machine learning agent. Unfortunately, few do. Edge-based AI startup Xnor.ai aims to let non-experts put state of the art AI to work as easily as they might update their website.

The company just kicked off a new platform called AI2GO that basically collects all the most common applications and hardware platforms for edge-based AI in one place and lets you download them with little or no expertise.

“Developing AI is just hard,” founder and CEO Ali Farhadi told TechCrunch. “There’s not a lot of people who can do it. And deploying to an edge device is even harder — you have to worry about power consumption, memory limits, and all that. So now you have to have both AI and systems experts.”

Good luck snagging those if you’re a small business owner who just thinks it’d be cool to know how many people are in their restaurant at any given time. Even relatively accessible, widely available frameworks like TensorFlow on which to train and deploy AI are impractical for anyone …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

✎

Last call: Sign up for the TC Hackathon at VivaTech 2019

15 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Emma Comeau

This one’s dedicated to all the genius hackers, coders and creators who also happen to be inveterate procrastinators. Right here, right now — this is your final opportunity to participate in the TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech 2019 in Paris on 17-18 May. The application is free and the process couldn’t be easier, so drop whatever you’re doing and sign up today.

If you snooze, you lose — lose the chance to flex your mighty coding skills and build something creative and amazing from scratch in 24 hours. Don’t be that person. A rich, exciting — and potentially lucrative — experience awaits. Here’s what goes down at the TC Hackathon at VivaTech.

Teams of 4-6 people will select one of the five sponsored hack challenges. Don’t worry if you arrive solo, we’ll help you find a team once you’re onsite. Our sponsors include EDHEC, Eramet, Sanofi–Cegedim–IBM, Galeries Lafayette / Publicis Sapient and Corvid by Wix. Specifics on the challenges are below:

EDHEC Challenge

Making an impact can have different meanings, and we believe that one of them is about improving how we support students’ careers. Have you ever asked yourself “have I …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

✎

Shares of SoftBank Group, Uber’s biggest stakeholder, slide after its disappointing IPO

14 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Catherine Shu

As Uber’s biggest shareholder, SoftBank Group had high hopes for the ride-sharing company’s stock market debut last week. Instead, the Japanese conglomerate’s shares have been sliding along with Uber’s following its disappointing initial public offering. SoftBank shares began sliding at the end of last week after Uber set its IPO price at the low end of its planned range. Since the start of trading on Friday morning, SoftBank Group shares have fallen 14.4 percent in value from 11,700 yen (about $106.69) to 10,020 yen (about $91.37)

On paper, SoftBank Group, which became an investor in Uber in early 2018, had expected to make a profit of $3 billion from its debut. According to its IPO filing, SoftBank Group is Uber’s largest shareholder, owning 16.3 percent of pre-IPO shares through its Vision Fund.

After shares continued falling on their second day of trading, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told employees in a memo that “like all periods of transition, there are ups and downs. Obviously, our stock did not trade as well as we had hoped post-IPO. Today is another tough day in the market, and I expect the same as it relates …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

May 2019
M T W T F S S
« Apr    
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031