Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and former Twitter COO Adam Bain have launched a San Francisco-based startup advisory and investment firm called 01 Advisors, Axios has learned from multiple sources.
The bottom line: Costolo and Bain have been angel investing and advising together for the past couple of years, including in companies like TripActions, but are now formalizing their efforts.
Comcast announced today its largest-ever eligibility expansion for Internet Essentials, the cable giant's program that subsidizes basic broadband service and low-cost computers to help increase adoption for low-income households in the cities Comcast serves.
Why it matters: Households living in cities with the highest poverty rates are up to 10 times more likely than those in higher earning communities to not have access to wireline broadband internet service at home.
Apple today begins processing the first applications from consumers to get the new Apple Card, the credit card it is debuting in conjunction with Goldman Sachs.
Why it matters: It's part of a broader push into services from Apple, but also puts the company in direct competition with the banks and credit cards already part of Apple Pay.
The exclusive club of companies that have built billion-dollar content distribution businesses has a new member: SmartNews, the Japanese news discovery app that has amassed 20 million subscribers in the U.S., and raised $28 million in its latest funding round.
The big picture: It's a small club, mainly because the media industry is in turmoil as Facebook and Google siphon ad dollars. Companies have struggled to maintain their highest valuations amid issues like missed revenue goals, layoffs and management changes.
Broadband technologies are getting better and faster — but access to them is still concentrated in metro areas and suburbs, leaving vast swaths of the country with marginal service or nothing at all.
Why it matters: Benefits of the broadband advances are mostly going to consumers who already have plenty of options for robust internet connections. Despite efforts to narrow the digital divide, rural areas, small towns and low-income neighborhoods in big cities still struggle to have access to reliable and affordable broadband service.
Tech companies are willing to work more closely with law enforcement to fight white nationalist terrorism, but the industry is skeptical of the White House's seriousness on the issue.
Why it matters: President Trump called on social media to do better monitoring in the wake of recent mass shootings, but the companies point out the White House still has yet to sign on to recommendations made in the wake of the Christchurch shooting.
Alphabet, Amazon and Apple are looking into services and tools to help people with diabetes manage their disease, CNBC reports.
The big picture: The services could be useful to diabetes patients, who currently monitor their blood sugar using a fair amount of guesswork. But it's also likely a huge business opportunity for the tech companies, as the number of Americans with diabetes is high and growing.
IBM charts a 200% rise in destructive malware attacks on business networks in the first half of 2019 over the last half of 2018 in a new report.
Why it matters: Destructive malware damages systems or data. It adds a tremendous burden to companies recovering from attacks; the same IBM report calculates a $239 million average cost to a business to recover from a destructive attack.
