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1. Joi Ito resigns as MIT Media Lab head in wake of Jeffrey Epstein reporting
Joi Ito and the MIT Media Lab were already facing criticism for the funding they’d received from disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, and the criticism intensified after a New Yorker piece reported that Ito and others at the media lab worked to conceal Epstein’s contributions.
In an email to the university administration, Ito wrote, “After giving the matter a great deal of thought over the past several days and weeks, I think that it is best that I resign as director of the media lab and as a professor and employee of the Institute, effective immediately.”
The Versa gave Fitbit a way forward beyond simple fitness trackers, and Brian Heater says the new smartwatch is a worthy update.
3. The Vivaldi browser lands on Android
Vivaldi for Android retains the desktop browser’s look, feel and speed without getting bogged down trying to bring all of its features to mobile.
4. Top VCs say the landscape for enterprise startups is changing
We sat down with Jason Green of Emergence Capital, Rebecca Lynn of Canvas Ventures and Maha Ibrahim of Canaan Partners, who said that startups shouldn’t expect a big M&A event right now. (Extra Crunch membership required.)
5. AppZen nabs $50M to build AI tools for expenses and other finance team work
To date, AppZen’s biggest product has been a service that automatically audits expenses — comparing, for example, an employee’s charges with the travel they’ve undertaken.
6. Pagerduty’s Jennifer Tejada and Box’s Aaron Levie will talk IPOs at TC Disrupt SF
Tejada and Levie both guided their companies to successful IPOs, with Box going public in 2015 and Pagerduty listing its stocks only a few months ago.
7. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts
Speaking of Box, the latest edition of Equity includes a discussion of why the content management company is underappreciated, while the Original Content team reviews the Amazon series “Carnival Row.”
