Catherine Shu
Catherine Shu is a TechCrunch writer based in Taipei, Taiwan who covers startups in Asia and breaking news. Her other interests include anything related to fiber and textiles, design and cats. Catherine was raised in California and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. She can be reached at shu@techcrunch.com or @catherineshu on Twitter.
Disclosures: None
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Latest from Catherine Shu
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OMG Digital, the “BuzzFeed of Africa,” raises a seed round of $1.1M
OMG Digital, the Ghana-based media startup dubbed the “BuzzFeed of Africa,” announced today that it has raised $1.1 million in seed funding. Its main site, OMG Voice, already has versions for Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya, and the new capital will be used to expand into more countries. Read More
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JD.com invests $397M into luxury marketplace Farfetch as part of a new strategic partnership
JD.com, China’s second-largest e-commerce company after Alibaba, is pumping $397 million into Farfetch, a marketplace for luxury brands, as part of a new strategic partnership. JD.com founder and CEO Richard Liu will take a seat on Farfetch’s board as part of the deal, which makes JD.com one of its largest shareholders. Read More
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Etsy will cut 15 percent of its workforce in a new round of layoffs
Etsy has announced its second round of layoffs in as many months. In a statement today, it said it will cut 140 positions, or about 15 percent of its current workforce. When combined with an earlier downsizing announced in early May, this round brings total eliminated positions to about 230, or about 22 percent of what Etsy’s total workforce was at the end of 2016. Read More
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Bill Gurley to leave Uber’s board of directors
Benchmark’s Bill Gurley is set to leave Uber’s board of directors, one day after the company announced the resignation of CEO Travis Kalanick following months of controversy over its corporate culture. A Benchmark spokesman told Bloomberg, which first reported the news of Gurley’s departure, that his board seat will be filled by Matt Cohler, another Benchmark general partner. Read More
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Mercari hires John Lagerling from Facebook’s management team to guide its U.S. strategy
When Mercari became Japan’s first startup unicorn with a $75 million round last year, the funding was earmarked to fuel its goal of becoming the top secondhand marketplace app in the U.S. Now Mercari is doubling down on its efforts to succeed where no other Asian e-commerce company has. Today it launched a refreshed version of its American app and announced the hiring of John Lagerling… Read More
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YouTube updates its policies after LGBTQ videos were blocked in Restricted Mode
Earlier this year, several LGBTQ YouTube creators noticed that their videos were hidden in Restricted Mode, even though they didn’t contain mature content. YouTube apologized and promised to fix its system. Now CEO Susan Wojcicki has detailed the steps YouTube is taking to make its policies more inclusive. Read More
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Wonderschool gets $2M to help solve America’s childcare quandary
In the U.S., childcare presents a nerve-wracking quagmire for parents. It’s expensive—almost a fifth of American families spend more than a quarter of their income on childcare—but that doesn’t mean it’s a lucrative business. In fact, many caregivers make so little that they can’t afford childcare for their own kids and drop out of the workforce. Read More
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Headspace’s revamped app helps busy people turn meditation into a habit
After years of struggling to make it part of my daily routine, I’ve started to suspect that if I were mindful enough to remember to meditate, then I probably wouldn’t need to meditate in the first place. To get the attention of people who, like me, spend more time thinking about meditating then they do actually meditating, Headspace has launched a new version of its app with… Read More
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Korean e-book service Ridibooks scores $20M Series C
E-book sales may be declining in the U.S. and U.K., but in South Korea, many people still enjoy swiping instead of leafing through their reading material. E-book sales there are growing steadily each year, driven in part by the popularity of web comics. Ridibooks, which claims to be Korea’s largest e-book provider, has raised a $20 million Series C to take advantage of the market. Read More
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Facebook rolls out the GIF button for comments to all users
Reply threads on Facebook are about to get a lot more animated. To mark the 30th anniversary of the GIF format, all users will get the new GIF comment button that Facebook began testing three months ago. Facebook also announced that almost 13 billion GIFs were sent on Messenger over the past year, with 400 million GIFs sent just on New Year’s Day 2017. Read More
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Intudo Ventures launches $10M fund for Indonesia’s fast-growing startup ecosystem
Indonesia is one of Southeast Asia’s most promising startup ecosystems and today it gained a new investor. Intudo Ventures’ debut fund has more than $10 million to invest into about 12 to 16 early-stage Indonesian startups, as well as joint ventures with overseas companies that want to break into the market. Read More
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Quarterly launches PageHabit to give book lovers a peek into the writing process
Quarterly started in 2011 as a highbrow subscription box service, with boxes (delivered every three months, as its name suggests) curated by celebrities like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Pharrell Williams, and Gretchen Rubin. Now the company wants to take its brand philosophy further with a new literary subscription service called PageHabit. Every month, PageHabit’s subscribers will get a… Read More
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Mobike will launch dockless bike-sharing in the U.K., its first market outside of Asia
Mobike, one of China’s largest bike-sharing companies, will launch in Manchester and Salford, its first cities outside of Asia. The service is slated to arrive on June 29, the Beijing-headquartered company said, and will start with 1,000 bikes. Read More
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Taiwan will finally get its first Apple Store
Apple is getting ready to launch its first retail store in Taiwan. According to its Taiwan website, the Apple Store will be in Taipei 101, the landmark skyscraper, and decorated with papercut art by Yang Shiyi, whose work is already featured on a sign marking the shop’s future location. Read More
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MIT gets a $140M anonymous gift with a lot of flexibility
MIT has received a donation that is notable for its size and the lack of strings attached to it. An anonymous alumnus gave the university $140 million designated as an “unrestricted” gift, which gives MIT a lot of leeway in deciding how it is spent. Read More
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Upbeat gets $1.5M to create a data science-driven alternative to PR agencies
Out of all the how-to guides ever written about pitching journalists, I’ve never seen one address the truth—that most are simply too busy trying not to get murdered by their inboxes to even open emails. Upbeat wants to use data science to create PR pitches that don’t automatically end up in the Trash folder. The San Francisco-based startup (formerly called PRX.co) launched… Read More
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Career site Workey raises $8M to replace headhunters with artificial intelligence
One of the ways companies fill their ranks with good employees is by scouting “passive talent,” or people who aren’t currently looking for new jobs but might be convinced with the right offer. This usually takes hours of networking, but a Tel Aviv-headquartered startup called Workey uses artificial intelligence to streamline the process by matching companies with… Read More
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Uber hires Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei to solve its leadership problems
In a bid to heal its fractured company culture, Uber has hired Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei as its new SVP of leadership and strategy. According to the company’s announcement, Frei will report to CEO Travis Kalanick, “work as a partner” with chief human resources officer Liane Hornsey, and serve as an executive coach for Uber’s leadership team. Read More
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Intel reveals its new 18-core, 36-thread “extreme” Core i9 processor at Computex
At its Computex event in Taipei today, Intel unveiled its new Core X-series of processors. The debut of its latest high-end desktop CPUs wasn’t a surprise after plans were leaked earlier this month, but the series’ flagship model — the 18-core, 36-thread Intel i9-7980XE —
still makes a very loud splash. Read More -
Asus skips robots at this year’s Computex event and flaunts super-thin laptops instead
Remember Zenbo, the cute humanoid robot that stole the show at Asus’ Computex press conference last year? Zenbo was absent from the stage this year, as were ZenFones. Instead, in an unusual departure for the event, the focus was solely on Asus’ new laptops, with the spotlight shining on the newest additions to its ZenBook line: the ZenBook Flip S and the ZenBook Pro UX550. Read More
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