BardTech

Betterment, which Barron’s recently declared the largest independent online financial adviser, is betting that the future of online investing includes a blend of robot and human advisers. And the plan is working, according to chief executive Jon Stein. However, incumbents like Vanguard have leveraged existing strengths to move in to the market, and other startups like Robinhood have carved out swathes of the fast-growing market. In response, Betterment has launched a series of new high-touch features on the platform, including “advice packages” that its users can buy to receive one-time advice from professional human experts. In the interview below, Stein shares new details on the company’s growth, its plans to fend off the rise of commission-free trading, an eventual bear market and the many other challenges in the space, and eventually going public. Gregg Schoenberg: Things have changed a lot for Betterment and the entire sector since we first sat down in early 2017. What are...

Some users are reporting that they are unable to post today’s big story about a security breach affecting 50 million Facebook users . The issue appears to only affect particular stories from certain outlets, at this time one story from The Guardian and one from the  Associated Press , both reputable press outlets. Facebook is preventing users from posting The Guardian's report on the Facebook data breach. Ouch. https://t.co/IGU685PjdK pic.twitter.com/GGGrKqBZEc — Jed Bracy (@JedBracy) September 28, 2018 When going to share the story to their news feed, some users, including members of the staff here at TechCrunch who were able to replicate the bug, were met with the following error message which prevented them from sharing the story. According to the message, Facebook is flagging the stories as spam due to how widely they are being shared or as the message puts it, the system’s observation that “a lot of people are posting the same content.” Update:  After attention was...

The Pentagon is going to make one cloud vendor exceedingly happy when it chooses the winner of the $10 billion, ten-year enterprise cloud project dubbed the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (or JEDI for short). The contract is designed to establish the cloud technology strategy for the military over the next 10 years as it begins to take advantage of current trends like Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and big data. Ten billion dollars spread out over ten years may not entirely alter a market that’s expected to reach $100 billion  a year very soon, but it is substantial enough give a lesser vendor much greater visibility, and possibly deeper entree into other government and private sector business. The cloud companies certainly recognize that . Photo: Glowimages/Getty Images That could explain why they are tripping over themselves to change the contract dynamics, insisting, maybe rightly, that a multi-vendor approach would make more sense. One look at the Reques...

At a Senate hearing this week in which US lawmakers quizzed tech giants on how they should go about drawing up comprehensive Federal consumer privacy protection legislation, Apple’s VP of software technology described privacy as a “core value” for the company. “We want your device to know everything about you but we don’t think we should,” Bud Tribble told them in his opening remarks. Facebook was not at the commerce committee hearing which, as well as Apple, included reps from Amazon, AT&T, Charter Communications, Google and Twitter. But the company could hardly have made such a claim had it been in the room, given that its business is based on trying to know everything about you in order to dart you with ads. You could say Facebook has ‘ hostility to privacy ‘ as a core value. Earlier this year one US senator wondered of Mark Zuckerberg how Facebook could run its service given it doesn’t charge users for access. “ Senator we run ads ,” was the almost startled response, as ...

At a Senate hearing this week in which US lawmakers quizzed tech giants on how they should go about drawing up comprehensive Federal consumer privacy protection legislation, Apple’s VP of software technology described privacy as a “core value” for the company. “We want your device to know everything about you but we don’t think we should,” Bud Tribble told them in his opening remarks. Facebook was not at the commerce committee hearing which, as well as Apple, included reps from Amazon, AT&T, Charter Communications, Google and Twitter. But the company could hardly have made such a claim had it been in the room, given that its business is based on trying to know everything about you in order to dart you with ads. You could say Facebook has ‘ hostility to privacy ‘ as a core value. Earlier this year one US senator wondered of Mark Zuckerberg how Facebook could run its service given it doesn’t charge users for access. “ Senator we run ads ,” was the almost startled response, as ...

Joanna Glasner Contributor More posts by this contributor Bots replacing office workers drive big valuations Getting personal: Funding rises for software-driven tastemakers A lot of people still get paid to sit in offices and do repetitive tasks. In recent years, however, employers have been pushing harder to find ways to outsource that work to machines. Venture and growth investors are doing a lot to speed up the rise of these worker-bots. So far this year, they’ve poured hundreds of millions into developers of robotic process automation technology, the term to describe software used for performing a series of tasks previously carried out by humans. Process automation funding activity spiked last week with a $225 million Series C round for one of the category leaders, New York-based  UiPath . Sequoia Capital and Alphabet’s CapitalG led the financing, which brings total capital raised by the 13-year-ol...