Kiran Upadhyay

Apple, the word’s most valuable corporation, has a new cash tally: $194 billion. That’s to say that if you add up its cash, cash equivalents, short-term marketable securities, and long-term marketable securities, it totals $194 billion. Cash is a loose term that is usually employed at the corporate scale to include accreted value that remains functionally liquid. Apple, which has more money than any other corporation that I know of, invests the majority of it in longer-term vehicles than many companies. That’s because Apple is so frakking rich that it can stash $160 billion in long-term securities, and still have plenty of cash around the globe to fund its operations and then some. While Apple has been stacking the cash in various vaults, the company is also growing its debt pool. Apple’s long-term debt rose from $28.99 billion at the end of its quarter concluding on September 27, to more than $40 billion today. Why would a company as wealthy as Apple hire debt when it has s...

Loop Commerce, a company that has developed an alternative checkout technology for e-commerce sites that allows customers to more easily buy gifts for friends without having to worry with product details like size or color – or even recipient’s shipping address – is today announcing an additional $16 million in new funding. The round, led by Houzz, Chegg, and Audible investor Oren Zeev, comes largely from the company’s previous investors and brings the startup’s total raise to date to $30 million. As before, Loop Commerce focused on bringing in a number of strategic investors versus traditional venture capital. Others in the round included family office Wicklow Capital; PayPal; Don Katz (EVP at Amazon); Mark Carges (former CTO at eBay); Dan Rose (Facebook VP, partnerships and strategy); Ken Seiff (former EVP e-commerce at Brooks Brothers); Michael Scharff (former SVP at Toys R Us and Best Buy); Chuck Geiger (CTO of Chegg, former CTO of PayPal); Roy Rubin (founder at Magento); An...

If you’re familiar with Gett, you probably know it as a service akin to Uber, enabling users to request rides via black cars on-demand. Pretty soon, however, it wants to be known as a platform for ordering all sorts of “essential” products and services via mobile app. Founded as GetTaxi in 2010, the company is rebranding as Gett in all markets as it expands into new verticals of on-demand and scheduled services. Today it operates in 32 cities throughout the U.K., Russia, and Israel, as well New York City in the U.S. Over the coming months, the company plans to enable customers in each of its markets to begin ordering new services beyond its initial car service. Just as it simplifies the process of ordering a car on mobile, with a flat, non-surge pricing structure for rides, the company hopes to make it ultra-simple to order products or services without having to do a whole lot of searching online. The hope is that it can reduce the friction and time it takes to order sushi or a ...

Dan Fredinburg, a respected Google executive who headed privacy for Google X and lead its product management team, has died in the avalanche on Mount Everest which was triggered by the huge earthquake in Nepal. The natural disaster has already killed over 2,000 people in the region and devastated infrastructure. Some 18 other climbers have been killed in what is being described as the worst earthquake to hit Nepal in the last 80 years. By all accounts, Fredinburg was an experienced climber who had also co-founded Google Adventure, a company team that filmed Google Street View images in “extreme, exotic locations like the summit of Mount Everest or the Great Barrier Reef off Australia.” Fredinburg’s sister Megan confirmed his death via his Instagram account, while Google’s privacy director Lawrence posted the following earlier today: “Dan Fredinburg, a long-time member of the Privacy organization in Mountain View, was in Nepal with three other Googlers, hiking Mount Everest. He h...

Say goodbye to calls from unknown numbers. Facebook’s newest app Hello instantly matches phone numbers of incoming and outgoing calls to Facebook profiles to show you info about who you’re talking to, block calls from commonly blocked numbers, and search for businesses to call. Today, Hello is rolling out for public testing in the US, Brazil, and Nigeria, but the catch is that it’s Android-only since iOS won’t let apps interact with phone calls. Hello’s caller ID feature could clue you in to whether you want to pick up a call from a number you don’t have saved by showing their name and profile picture — as long as they haven’t changed the default privacy setting that lets people search from using their phone number. You’ll then see whatever info they share publicly or with you, like city, employer, website, and more. Technically, nothing is changing about Facebook privacy, though it does make personal info more readily visible. Hello essentially just runs an immediate Facebook ...

As rumored for months, Google has just announced plans to offer its own wireless cellular service. Here’s what we know so far: It’s called “Project Fi” It’s for Nexus 6 owners only, at first. It’s invite only right now. You can sign up for an invite here. It’s built on top of Sprint and T-Mobile’s networks No contracts Subscribers pay $20 for unlimited talk/text, and then pay $10 per gig of data. So a 3GB plan would be $30 on top of that $20, coming out to a total of $50. You only pay for what you use, but in sort of a strange way: if you pay for 3GB of data per month ($30) but only use 1.5GB, you’ll get $15 back at the end of the month. It’s all tied into Google Hangouts, which will allow you to place calls from your number on any Hangouts-enabled tablet or laptop in addition to your phone. WiFi Tethering is included. This is what their US Coverage map currently looks like (Montana gets basically no love):

As the world moves from web to mobile, we’ve been thinking deeply about how people will discover mobile products and services and how we will find and access all the things we need in our digital lives. Search (largely Google) has long been the access and discovery point for web services. This model was pull-driven (i.e. we proactively find information on websites as we need), and worked pretty well as large category killers (Facebook, Amazon) owned the lion’s share of traffic (and revenue). Google was happily profitable owning the distribution channel. The mobile world started out as a pull-driven model — discovery and access was/is largely driven by a combination of the app store and the “grid of apps.” This model, however, is starting to break, as some significant trends are driving it to failure. Primary among these is the volume of information that’s now available and regularly accessed; we have hundreds of apps on our phone (though we only actively engage with a handful), and...