Author: Fitz Tepper

Bumble is suing Match Group for 0M for fraudulently obtaining trade secrets Two weeks ago Match Group (Tinder’s parent company) sued Bumble for patent infringement and misuse of intellectual property. Bumble has now returned the favor by filing a separate lawsuit accusing Match of multiple improprieties in regards to interactions between the two companies over the past few months. To be clear, this lawsuit isn’t a response to Match’s initial lawsuit, and instead is a separate action raising new allegations against Tinder’s parent company. Bumble had previously published a letter in…

Morning Brew is a daily business briefing built for millennials What’s the best way to stay up to date on things happening within your industry? Seasoned finance professionals read the Wall Street Journal. Anyone who wants to work in politics reads The Washington Post. In Silicon Valley we have industry-specific news sites like TechCrunch supplemented by Hacker News and others. But what about young business professionals who either don’t plan in staying in one industry their whole life or just want to stay up to date on the broader business/tech/startups/politics…

Ben is a chatbot that lets you learn about and buy Bitcoin It’s generally a given that whenever a new technology takes off people rush into the space to build everything under the sun, and eventually natural selection kicks in and only the truly useful remain. For example, chatbots became trendy last year and we quickly began seeing chatbots for weather, movie recommendations, personal finance, etc. Some of these are useful, but until natural language processing improves you’re probably better just doing the task yourself. But there are a few exceptions,…

CryptoKitties raises M from Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures CryptoKitties, the virtual collectible kitten game that turned into a viral sensation has raised $12M in funding and will be spun out from Axiom Zen, the Vancouver and San Francisco-based design studio that originally built the game. The round is being led by Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures, both of which have quickly developed a reputation for backing fast-growing cryptocurrency startups like Coinbase. A bunch of notable angels also participated, including Naval Ravikant (CEO and founder of AngelList), Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga)…

Bumble responds to Match’s patent lawsuit Yesterday we reported that Match, the parent company of Tinder, was suing Bumble for patent infringement and misuse of intellectual property. Specifically, Match alleged that Bumble “copied Tinder’s world-changing, card-swipe-based, mutual opt-in premise” for which a patent was filed in 2013 (before Bumble was founded) but just granted a few months ago. Today Bumble has responded to Match’s lawsuit with a letter published on their own blog and other news outlets. The full letter is linked here and we’ll also include it in full at the…

Drake and Ninja are playing Fortnight live on Twitch What do Drake, Ninja the professional esports player, Kim Dotcom, Travis Scott and NFL player JuJu Smith-Schuster have in common? They’re all playing Fortnight together right now and live-streaming it on Twitch . Yes, seriously. You can tune in to Ninja’s channel here to check out the action. Right now the amount of live viewers is hovering around 600,000 which smashes Twitch’s previous record of 388,000 live concurrent viewers. Drake and Ninja started playing together a few hours ago on Ninja’s…

Square Cash now supports direct deposits for your paycheck It seems like each new feature Square adds to its Cash app brings it one step closer to being a de-facto bank account for its users. Case in point, the app just rolled out support for ACH direct deposits, meaning users can now get their paycheck or other deposits put directly into their Cash app balance. Like other features in the peer-to-peer payments app setting up direct deposits is almost too simple. After accepting a disclosure you’re given an account number…

Coinbase is launching its own cryptocurrency index fund When you’re the runaway leader in a growing industry you typically have two opinions: A) Stay in your lane and let other companies pop up to solve the industry’s problems. B) Try to offer as many products as possible and own the entire customer experience from A-Z (no Amazon pun intended). If there’s any doubt which option Coinbase is gunning for, that’s now gone. The digital currency giant just announced they’re expanding in yet another direction by launching a passively-managed cryptocurrency index fund. The…

Intelligo is using AI to make background checks relevant again To realize that the background check industry needs an overhaul look no further than the backlog of 700,000 background checks faced by the federal agency that handles all background checks for sensitive government positions. This backlog has essentially rendered background checks useless, as many agencies are able to give security clearances on a temporary basis before a background check is even started. Intelligo is an Israeli company trying to make background checks relevant again by using AI and machine learning…