From the beginning, Elizabeth Holmes knew how to tell a good story. She launched her blood testing company, Theranos, with a tale of a powerful vision to revolutionize health care and change an old, outdated industry. She presented herself as Steve Jobs, part two. She sketched out a picture of someone in control. That Holmes, and that story, is what prosecutor John Bostic worked to reset back to during his rebuttal argument, the last word before the case went to the jury on Friday afternoon. It wasn’t reasonable to think the CEO of a company didn’t know exactly what impression…
Author: Mike Harrison
RJ Pierce, Tech Times 17 December 2021, 02:12 am Meta’s acquisition of the VR fitness app Supernatural is now the target of a new antitrust probe by the FTC. (Photo : Kelly Sullivan/Getty Images for Facebook)MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA – OCTOBER 28: Facebook debuts its new company brand, Meta, at their headquarters on October 28, 2021 in Menlo Park, California. Meta will focus on ushering in a future of the metaverse and beyond. The Verge reports that the probe is due to regulators wanting to look deeper into the company’s sudden interest in buying up VR startups recently. It used to be…
Prosecutor Jeffrey Schenk opened his closing arguments in the case against Elizabeth Holmes by talking about a banker. Holmes knew Theranos, the company she founded, was running out of money, and she was on the phone asking her banker to clear a check early. “Holmes had a choice to make,” Schenk said. She could figure out a way to raise funds to keep the company moving, or risk seeing it wither away. And her choice, he said, was to raise the funds through fraud. The prosecution’s closing statement on Thursday was a reminder of what this trial is really about:…
UrBox – Vietnam B2B e-reward platform raises $2.2 million in Pre-Series A financing round led by Touchstone Partners UrBox, a B2B Commerce platform for gifting and loyalty rewards has raised $2.2 mil in Pre-Series A funding led by Touchstone Partners. Co-investors include Pavilion Capital and existing shareholder VinaCapital Ventures. Founded in 2017, UrBox is a digital gifting and loyalty platform for enterprises with a network of more than 200 suppliers and 15,000 points of acceptance online and offline across Vietnam. The startup has been providing services for more than 500 top domestic and international brands across multiple industries in…
When a new biotech company leapt into public consciousness with the bold promise of a product that could run hundreds of medical tests in a doctor’s office on a single drop of blood, it sounded too good to be true. David Grenache says he was skeptical from the very beginning. “That was a fantastical claim,” says Grenache, former president of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry. “I think myself and all of my colleagues just looked at each other and said, ‘No way. That’s not possible. The technology doesn’t exist.’” The technology didn’t exist. Theranos, despite all its flashy promises,…
As the trial of Elizabeth Holmes comes to a close, many questions have surfaced about what — or who — enabled Theranos to rise to such heights. As charismatic and ambitious as Holmes was, none of her success would have been possible without the nearly $945 million in funds she received from notable investors like Rupert Murdoch or the Walton family. It’s not unusual for investors to blindly place their money into companies with little to no knowledge of their technology. But when those companies end up on trial for more fraud charges than you can count on two hands,…
Google employees who haven’t been vaccinated could be put on forced leave and then let go from the company if they fail to follow its COVID-19 rules, according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC. The policy will reportedly affect employees that would have fallen under the jurisdiction of President Biden’s vaccine mandate, which is currently facing challenges in the Senate and court system. According to the memo, Google gave its employees until December 3rd to upload proof of vaccination or receive approval for a medical or religious exemption. The company says that anyone who doesn’t do either of those…
Kronos ransomware attack is one of the latest security breaches that affected a giant company. Specifically, this new cybersecurity attack affects an HR management company, Ultimate Kronos Group, which handles many agencies and other businesses. (Photo : Photo by ROB ENGELAAR/ANP/AFP via Getty Images)A laptop displays a message after being infected by a ransomware as part of a worldwide cyberattack on June 27, 2017 in Geldrop. – The unprecedented global ransomware cyberattack has hit more than 200,000 victims in more than 150 countries, Europol executive director Rob Wainwright said May 14, 2017. Britain’s state-run National Health Service was affected by…
Apple is again requiring customers to wear masks in all its US retail stores after it had reportedly rolled back the mandate for around half of its locations. In an email to The Verge, the company said that “amid rising cases in many communities, we now require that all customers join our team members in wearing masks while visiting our stores.” While employees have been required to wear masks throughout most of the pandemic, customers haven’t always had to, which has led to outbreaks at some Apple stores. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman also reports that some locations will have occupancy limits.…
Artificial intelligence programs that check medical images for evidence of cancer can be duped by hacks and cyberattacks, according to a new study. Researchers demonstrated that a computer program could add or remove evidence of cancer from mammograms, and those changes fooled both an AI tool and human radiologists. That could lead to an incorrect diagnosis. An AI program helping to screen mammograms might say a scan is healthy when there are actually signs of cancer or incorrectly say that a patient does have cancer when they’re actually cancer free. Such hacks are not known to have happened in the…