As automakers ramp up their connected car initiatives, a company that has built a solution to link vehicles up to mobile networks globally has raised a significant round of funding from a group of investors that includes Audi and Qualcomm. Cubic Telecom, a startup out of Dublin, Ireland, that has built a virtual networking solution that lets cars (and other devices) automatically connect to… Read More

 Silicon Valley venture firm Social Capital plans to help startups go public without the dreaded IPO process. And it’s something different than what Spotify is doing.  Social Capital is creating a shell company known as a “SPAC” that exists solely to merge with a startup. These types of transactions are not rare outside of the venture world but have little precedent with… Read More

 Google is launching its public Wi-Fi program, which offers free connectivity at railway stations and other locations such as universities, in Indonesia, the company announced today. The Indonesia launch is the first expansion of ‘Google Station’ — as the program is called — since it debuted in India some 18 months ago. The project is quite simple, it offers a free way… Read More

 Flytrex wants to prove that drones are a realistic option for on-demand logistics with a new delivery program that took off in Iceland’s capital today. While other companies, including Amazon, have tested drone deliveries, Flytrex says this is the first time a fully operational on-demand drone delivery service has launched in an urban area. Drones will take orders from online… Read More

We get a look at SpaceX’s Spacesuit, Galaxy Note 8 makes its return, a recap of YC Demo Day 2 and Apple’s latest iPhone could come on September 12th. All this on Crunch Report. Read More

 Veteran Facebook exec Andrew “Boz” Bosworth is taking over consumer hardware efforts at the company, including projects under groups like Building 8 and Oculus. The announcement was made internally by Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer, Business Insider reports. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the appointment to TechCrunch. Bosworth, who joined Facebook in January of 2006, has been… Read More

 Susan Fowler, the former Uber engineer whose blog post about the company’s troubling internal workings eventually led to the ouster of its CEO Travis Kalanick, has a new message for the Supreme Court: get rid of arbitration agreements. In a development first reported on by The Recorder, Fowler’s legal team at the San Francisco-based firm Baker Curtis & Schwartz has filed an… Read More

 With a lifetime of observing the world informing our perceptions, we’re all pretty good at inferring the overall shape of something we only see from the side, or for a brief moment. Computers, however, are just plain bad at it. Fortunately, a clever shortcut created by a Berkeley AI researcher may seriously improve their performance. Read More

 Now is the time for startups to engage in strategic planning so that future liquidity needs will be met. This article discusses market trends and how debt financing and other protective measures can engineer optionality that can help a startup not only survive, but potentially thrive during a period of financial distress. Read More

 Anyone haunted by annoying link cruft will be relieved to hear that iOS 11 will transform Google AMP links back into their original forms when sharing a story from Safari. MacStories editor Federico Viticci first spotted the change, which appears to be live in the new iOS 11 beta 7. Very nice: when sharing AMP pages to iMessage or Reading List, iOS 11 Safari automatically removes… Read More

 Swiss startup Dacuda’s 3D scanning division was acquired by Magic Leap in February, but it seems the company’s founder, Michael Born, is just getting started with computer vision. He and three others who didn’t go over to the much-hyped and intensely secretive AR company have formed a new one: PXL Vision AG, focused on real-time image classification and Read More

 Ethan and Hila Klein, the husband-and-wife team behind the popular H3H3 YouTube channel, appear to have won their legal battle against Matt Hosseinzadeh, a.k.a. Matt Hoss. A New York judge today issued a summary judgement in favor of the Kleins. Read More

 The future of food is going to get weird. Read More

 Uber’s past six months have been tumultuous, with lawsuits and allegations of harassment. The company doesn’t even have a CEO right now, but newly released financials suggest that most users don’t care. First reported by Axios, Uber has confirmed to us that Uber’s $8.7 billion in gross bookings were up 17 percent in the second quarter. Global trips increased 150… Read More