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Michael Broughton was the first in his family to go to college. But he almost didn't, when he had trouble securing the necessary financing to pay his tuition. The experience stuck with him, and when he met Ayush Jain at the University of Southern California, the pair bonded over their belief th

It’s been said that no one uses Alexa for voice-based shopping. But retail giant still sees the potential for Alexa as a shopping companion — just in a different way. That’s why this month the company quietly rolled out a new feature designed to boost consumers’ use of Alexa

Roku is making its top-of-the-line device a better deal as competition with Fire TV heats up. The company today announced that its high-end Roku Ultra (originally $89) will now include the Roku Voice Remote Pro ($30) in a bundle that will be available for $99.99 at Roku.com today and at major retai

South Korean e-commerce platform Coupang said its first-quarter net loss shrank by 29% from a year earlier. The company posted a net loss of $209.2 million in Q1 this year, in contrast to last year's net losses of $295 million in Q1 and $404.9 million in Q4, respectively.  Investors cheered

Bubbles, a startup that pitches its platform as the “anti-Zoom” for video messaging, today announced that it closed an $8.5 million funding round led by Khosla Ventures, Craft Ventures, Streamlined Ventures, 468 Ventures and Bain Capital. Co-founder and CEO Tom Medema said the money wil

Stock-outs, unpredictable prices of farm produce and a lack of working capital are among the challenges that plague small restaurants and food vendors in emerging markets. These are some of the pain-points that TopUp Mama (previously Kibanda TopUp) is working to alleviate since its launch in Kenya&

More consolidation is apace in the world of payments: Nexi, the Italian fintech that scooped up rivals Danish-based Nets and then Italy’s SIA to create a $12.5 billion European payments giant, has made another acquisition, this time to dig deeper into financial services for small and medium b

A controversial Texas law that would open social media companies up to lawsuits from aggrieved users just notched a surprise win. A trio of federal appeals court judges issued the ruling Wednesday, which pauses a temporary injunction that blocked the law from taking effect last year. The law, HB 20

The Walt Disney Company reported earnings for its second fiscal quarter ended April 2, 2022, announcing a 7.9 million increase of subscribers for Disney+, which brings the total to 137.9 million subs. This was ahead of analyst forecasts of 5.2 million new subscribers and follows a tough quarter for

At the Google I/O developer conference today, the company introduced several changes designed to make it easier for Android app developers to generate revenue via subscriptions, particularly when trying to reach users in emerging markets. Most notably, the company said it will now allow developers

At Google's I/O developer conference, the company announced that it’s releasing the second public beta of Android 13 today. The beta comes with a number of new features and user controls, along with updates to privacy and security. With Android 13, Google says it’s giving users more

Last August, Google tried something different. The company offered a sneak peek at the Pixel 6 several months ahead of its official announcement. The reasoning seemed sound. The company had spent several years working to reinvigorate the flagging smartphone line, and it was ready to show it off. Ev

Rosie Nguyen isn’t your typical startup founder. Her Instagram grid perfectly depicts the two sides of who she is: In one post, she's live on CNBC speaking out against Apple's developer fees. In the next, she poses on a wood floor with the caption, “day 89 without sex: sitting on th

During the first of two Google I/O keynotes this week, Google announced LaMDA 2, the follow-up to an AI system, LaMDA, that the company introduced at Google I/O 2021. Short for Language Models for Dialog Applications, Google claims that LaMDA 2 can break down complex topics into straightforward, di