Matthew Lynley
I’ve covered various segments of the tech industry, ranging from enterprise technology to social networking companies like Facebook and Twitter. I’m also dabbling in a little bit of Web (Python) and Android development. I studied mathematics at UNC-Chapel Hill, with an applied mathematics skew toward fluid mechanics, modeling and behavior of special functions.
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Latest from Matthew Lynley
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Amazon did a lot of funky stuff this year and it’s paying off
Holy hell, it’s been a year for Amazon. Jeff Bezos’ former-online-bookstore dumped $13.7 billion to buy a bunch of grocery stores, that speaker you talk to in your living room that Amazon makes is really popular and a bunch of server farms Amazon runs generate more than $10 billion in revenue annually. Read More
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The AI chip startup explosion is already here
All eyes may have been on Nvidia this year as its stock exploded higher thanks to an enormous amount of demand across all fronts: gaming, an increased interest in data centers, and its major potential applications in AI. But while Nvidia’s stock price and that chart may have been one of the more eye-popping parts of 2017, a year when AI continued its march toward being omnipresent in… Read More
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Snap and Twitter now have roughly the same market cap
While we won’t call this a huge watershed moment per se, something nominally interesting in the world of Weird Social Media Things happened this morning: Snap and Twitter are now worth the same based on their market caps. With some small moves on both companies’ shares, both companies are now hovering around $18.7 billion in market cap. There are some extra mechanics that go into… Read More
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Stitch Fix is crashing after its first-ever earnings report
Stitch Fix’s first earnings report is not going well for the company, as its shares went into a tailspin after a significant run up over the past month following its IPO when it delivered its results its most recent fiscal quarter. Stitch Fix, a personalized apparel company that ships a box of recommended items that users can buy or send back, closed up just 1% on its first day of… Read More
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SendBird raises another $16M to help developers add chat functions to a service
If you go to any company’s website these days, you’re probably starting to see some chat functionality more and more often — and for good reason, as it’s a quick way for those companies to get in touch with their potential customers. And SendBird, which launched in February this year out of Y Combinator, has tried to quietly begin eating up this space by giving… Read More
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Former Nike CFO Don Blair joins Dropbox’s board of directors
As Dropbox continues its inevitable march toward an IPO, it’s going to look to bring in people with a lot of experience handling the operations of larger public companies — and it’s getting one today. Dropbox today said it is adding former Nike CFO Don Blair to the company’s board of directors. Blair will be joining the audit committee, the company said, and comes in with… Read More
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Used car marketplace Shift appoints a co-CEO alongside George Arison
Toby Russell was one of the first people to get Shift founder George Arison into used cars — and now he’s going to be running his company alongside him as Shift said today it is appointing Russell co-CEO of the company. Arison said he was naming Russell co-CEO of the used car marketplace to help split off the role into what each executive would be best at, with Russell handling a… Read More
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Twitter is soaring today as its stock hits a high for the year
Twitter is finally having a good day on Wall Street as it heads into the final weeks of the year, and this time around it may be a result of a little bit of optimism from investors. There were two big moves for the company today: first, Twitter said it would begin enforcing new rules related to how it handles hateful and abusive content on the platform, which is a problem that has been… Read More
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Netflix will look for a repeat play in 2018 after a strong year
Netflix had a pretty good year by very Netflix-y standards: it added a ton of subscribers; its international growth plans seem to be playing out as hoped; it cleaned up in the Golden Globe nominations, and users are watching a ton of Netflix. While the company has continued to show growth with its existing strategy — investing a ton in its original content strategy in the hope that… Read More
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Dog-walking app Wag may be raising a huge round of funding
It looks like Wag may get another huge injection of cash following a big financing round earlier this year, according to a report by Recode, and also based on what we are hearing. We had heard a bit ago that Wag was looking to raise around $100 million, which the Recode report also suggests. But it now looks like Softbank is in talks to invest around $300 million in the dog-walking app. Read More
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Fitbit is having a bad day
Fitbit is, again, not having a good day after spending the year in mostly middling status as it looks to prove there’s a market for fitness trackers and its own smartwatch. The culprit today: a Wall Street firm slapped a “sell” rating on the company’s stock, which often results in a rejection of its potential and sparks a sharp drop-off in the company’s share value. Read More
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Gfycat wants to fix your low-fidelity GIFs with machine learning
We all love to share GIFs — and there are plenty of ways to do that, through online portals or keyboards — but often times because there is so much content, you’ll end up surfacing up a lower-fidelity GIF. There can be plenty of copies of the same video clips as a GIF, or maybe it’s just difficult to capture and upload, but Gfycat hopes that it can be solved at a… Read More
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This app will help you figure out if you can fit that Costco-sized paper towel box in your apartment
You’re probably going to get a better deal when you buy consumer products — like paper towels — wholesale, but at the same time you’re also buying a very, very large package of said consumer products. So, they might not always fit in your apartment. Wholesale goods are the primary play for a startup called Boxed, a retailer looking to play the sort of… Read More
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Facebook will no longer always divert international advertising revenue to Ireland
Facebook today said it is shifting to a “local selling structure” in countries outside the U.S. That means that rather than directly route its revenue to its international headquarters in Dublin, local policymakers and governments will potentially get an opportunity for greater visibility into the company’s revenue related to local advertising sales. Read More
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Descript gets $5M to make sound editing like a Word document
Right before jumping on the phone Friday afternoon, Andrew Mason, who then ran a walking tour startup called Detour and ran Groupon, was hand-correcting a transcription of a speech by John F. Kennedy — which was transcribed by some new software he and his team built in-house. But Descript, Mason’s new startup that’s spun out from Detour, isn’t designed to just… Read More
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Pinterest brings on a new head of corporate and business development
Pinterest today said it is hiring a new head of corporate and business development, bringing on former Facebooker Gary Johnson as it looks to continue to expand. The hiring comes at a time when Pinterest recently saw its president, Tim Kendall, depart to start his own company. Read More
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Lyft’s self-driving pilot with nuTonomy begins rolling out in Boston
Lyft is beginning its self-driving car pilot with self-driving car company nuTonomy in Boston as it looks to ramp up its self-driving efforts, and is now matching its riders with self-driving vehicles in parts of Boston, nuTonomy said today. Lyft announced its partnership with nuTonomy in June this year, indicating that the pilots would begin in the coming months. Read More
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Foursquare VP of business development Mike Harkey has left for Google
Foursquare’s VP of business development Mike Harkey, who has been with the company for more than five years, has left to join Google as its director of global product partnerships. Read More
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Pinterest integrates deeper with Facebook with a new bot and messenger extension
As Pinterest looks to further expand beyond just the audience you’d expect to use it, it’s going to have to start chasing down users and meet them on different territories — and that includes messaging apps. So today Pinterest is launching a pair of updates that is going to help it tap into that audience of people that are sharing content on Facebook Messenger. Read More
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Apple’s hand is down and its $1 trillion dream now rests with consumers
As we head into the end of 2017, it’s pretty safe to say that Apple’s fate — barring any major issue with its phones — is now in the hands of its consumers. With the iPhone X now in stores (if you catch them at the right time), Apple has now laid down its hand and waits to see where consumer demand lands. Read More
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