California has become the first state to allow self-driving vehicles to operate on public roads without having an operator inside. The new law, approved by California Governor Jerry Brown, was created to allow a project at the Bishop Ranch office park in the city of San Ramon to deploy driverless shuttles. While primarily operating on ...

Distributed derivatives startup Velocity has debuted a demo of their new blockchain smart contract on price feeds platform. Built using blockchain technology and Ethereum smart contracts, the platform aims to make derivatives trading more transparent, accessible and secure. The decentralized options platform provides support for users to enter into a collar option using a smart contract ...

Australian cryptocurrency directory and merchant hub BitScan Pty. Ltd. has partnered with custom blockchain token platform Waves to create a new blockchain-based, merchant-defined loyalty and rewards network. Called the Incent Loyalty Network, the platform is being designed to be transportable between brands by consumers, delivering independent value outside of the issuing merchant and subsequently removing ...

A jury in Texas Friday ordered Apple Inc. pay VirnetX Holding Corp. $302.4 million in damages for over Apple’s use of VirnetX’s patented Internet security technology without permission. Apple is alleged to have used VirnetX’s Virtual Private Network on Demand (VOD) technology in its Facetime software. The case, which dates all the way back to 2010, ...

Person-to-person (P2P) mobile payments startup Remitly Inc. has raised $38 million in a mix of new equity and debt financing from IFC and Silicon Valley Bank. Founded in 2011, Remitly offers a mobile payments service that enables consumers to make P2P international money transfers from the United States and Canada to people located in Asia, ...

Chinese open source blockchain startup Antshares has raised more than $4.5 million in a crowdsourced fundraising. Founded in 2015, Antshares is building a decentralized and distributed network protocol based on blockchain technology that will allow users to digitalize assets or shares, and accomplish financial transactions through a peer-to-peer network including registration and issuance and actual ...

Google Inc. has opened Waze Rider, its formerly experimental carpooling service, to the San Francisco Bay Area. The service, first rumored to be coming in August, works differently from alternatives offered by the likes of Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. Riders pay the Waze carpool driver 54 cents per mile, a number based on ...

Mexican bitcoin exchange Bitso SAPI de CV (Bitso) has raised $2.5 million Series A in a round led by Monex Group that included Variv Capital, Xochi Ventures, Digital Currency Group, FundersClub, Bitcoin Capital and Blockchain Tech Limited. Founded in 2014, Bitso is Mexico’s First Bitcoin Exchange and offers a platform for trading bitcoin for Mexican ...

A dubious cryptocurrency is under investigation by police in the United Kingdom following allegations that it is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme. Called Onecoin, the cryptocurrency first appeared in around 2015 and is being promoted as the next bitcoin. The coin was promoted through a series of seminars and websites, which bizarrely offered to ...

Marking an end of an era, BlackBerry Ltd. has announced that it will stop developing and making its own phones. The once famous phone maker’s decision to abandon the phone business follows a strategic move by the company to shift its business model towards software and security development, a strategy that had already started to ...