For Your Information Blog: 09/11/21

Tuesday, November 9, 2021

Malicious hackers gain access to 7 million Robinhood customer names, emails

Tuesday, November 09, 2021 • By Alex Wilhelm

Hello friends! Welcome to Daily Crunch for November 9, 2021. Today we have lots of good news and some bad news. The good? Another startup is taking on the incumbent web search provider, and we're seeing more funds in more places raise bigger investing vehicles. The bad? Well, it depends on whether or not you are a Robinhood user. — Alex

Image Credits: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg / Getty Images

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Robinhood's data breach steals from the user and gives to the hacker: A social-engineering hack led to Robinhood's internal tools being accessed by an external party. Per TechCrunch reporting, "more than 5 million customer email addresses and 2 million customer names taken, as well as a much smaller set of more specific customer data." For a company that recently posted somewhat lackluster earnings, it's not a great look.
You.com wants to take on Google: The list of startups taking on Google search is starting to get somewhat lengthy. Brave is at it. So is Neeva. DuckDuckGo has been working on the matter. And now You.com has $20 million to help with its search service, which, I found today while testing it, has a somewhat radical interface on display.
Twitter gets the blues: But it's pretty happy about it. Why? Because Twitter's subscriber service, Blue, is now out in more markets. This led to a wave of folks signing up and playing around with the service, at least on my timeline. So far people seem to like it. It's cheap, and given how much time so many of us spend on Twitter, something of a no-brainer at this stage.

How Leading Tech Companies Use Embedded Analytics

15 sectors pi Ventures expects deep tech to disrupt in the next 5 years

Deep tech holds a lot of potential for changing how our world functions, but many applications are still years away from reaching the market.

Looking to the future, Anna Heim analyzed pi Ventures' Deep Tech Shifts 2026 report, which explores 15 deep tech subsectors expected to reach an inflection point in the next five years.

“If you invest too early in an innovation, then you will have suboptimal returns," said founding partner Manish Singhal. "If you invest too late, you may also end up getting suboptimal returns, because it is no longer a cutting-edge thing.

"If investment and the timing of innovation getting to a resonance point come together, then good things happen."

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15 sectors pi Ventures expects deep tech to disrupt in the next 5 years image

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman

Big Tech Inc.

People are surprised that a very rich person owns some crypto: That the person in question is Tim Cook does make the news a bit more well, newsy, but still not surprising. The Apple CEO did not make any news regarding his company, other than to indicate that it doesn't appear to have near-term crypto hopes and or dreams. Still, is it possible to be surprised that any person with a wealth roughly the size of the moon or greater owns some crypto assets? No.
Everyone wants to get into games: TikTok has gaming news today, as does Netflix. Basically, games are huge business and any platform media company probably has to have a gaming strategy in time.
Microsoft takes on Chromebooks: With a new, cheap laptop running a Windows 11 variant, Microsoft wants to fight back against Google's successful classroom push on the back of its Chromebook effort.
Airbnb boosts host safety, consumer confidence: Look, there's a lot of news in Jordan Crook's latest piece on Airbnb, but what matters the most is that the home-rental company is bringing better WiFi speed reporting to its platform. Rejoice!
Lyft to bring driverless taxis to Vegas in 2023: The steady drumbeat of actual commercial news from self-driving cars continues today, albeit with news from Lyft that is both market constrained and far off. Still, every bit of news indicating that self-driving cars are coming makes my heart sing.

TechCrunch Experts

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