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Apr 24, 2018
Under the leadership of Travis Kalanick, Uber was late to the game in producing its first diversity report. Now, under the leadership of new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, things are starting to look a bit different at Uber. Uber has not only brought on a chief diversity officer but also continues to make progress in terms […]
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Apr 24, 2018
A new - and theoretical - system for blockchain -based data storage could ensure that hackers will not be able to crack cryptocurrencies once we all enter the quantum era. The idea, proposed by researchers at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, would secure our crypto futures for decades to coming using a […]
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Apr 24, 2018
In the era of fake news and controversies over how brands' advertising — via programmatic platforms — unwittingly ends up alongside content with which they'd rather not be associated, Oracle has made an acquisition to beef up its ability to help customers with these marketing challenges. It has announced that it will acquire Grapeshot, a […]
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Apr 24, 2018
Kidbox, a clothing-in-a-box startup aimed at a slightly younger crowd than StitchFix, has raised $15.3 million in Series B funding to expand and scale its business. The round was led by Canvas Ventures, and includes participation from existing investors Firstime Ventures and HDS Capital, as well as new strategic partners Fred Langhammer, former CEO of The Estée Lauder Companies […]
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Apr 24, 2018
Rumors have been swirling around Spotify's big event in Manhattan for weeks on end now. But we've known since the invites went out that the big show is about one thing, and one thing alone: free. The feature has long been rumored to be a thorn in the side of record labels and artists, everywhere. […]
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Apr 24, 2018
Today at the Gramercy Theater in NYC, Spotify's Chief R&D Officer Gustav Söderström announced a brand new free version of the Spotify mobile app. By leveraging their investment in machine learning, Spotify's new free tier recommends music to users on the fly. That said, the free tier has always limited users to shuffle. With the […]
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Apr 24, 2018
With recent changes, Flipboard has been placing a big emphasis on allowing readers to go deep on their interests. Now it's adding even more features around one particular interest, in the Technology section of the Flipboard website and app. "We want to make Flipboard definitive for tech insiders and enthusiasts," said CEO Mike McCue . This […]
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Apr 24, 2018
Last fall, Roku launched its own channel to provide its cord-cutting customers with access to free movies and TV shows in a single destination. Today, it's adding live news to its channel, too. In partnership with ABC News and others, The Roku Channel will now feature live news streams and linear news programming, alongside its […]
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Apr 24, 2018
San Francisco-based robotics company Marble announced this morning that it's just closed a $10 million Series A. The round, which involves the likes of Tencent, Lemnos, Crunchfund and Maven, brings the startup's total funding to $15 million. In press material tied to the announcement, Marble's careful not to get hung up on the whole food […]
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Apr 24, 2018
Credit Karma is best known for being the only reason anyone is ever willing to peek at their credit score, but the company has other things it wants you to be less stressed out about too. After introducing a free identity monitoring tool for its users late last year, Credit Karma is widening the scope […]
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Apr 24, 2018
BuildingConnected, which provides software linking contractors and developers has raised $15 million from a strategic investor — Brookfield Ventures, the new venture arm from real estate developer Brookfield Asset Management. The new investment bumps the total raised by BuildingConnect to $53 million. Previous investors in the company include Crosslink Capital, Brick & Mortar Ventures, Freestyle Capital, […]
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Apr 24, 2018
Mitel, the enterprise communications company that tried but failed to buy Polycom for $2 billion, is now being acquired for $2 billion itself. The company today announced that it has agreed to be acquired by Searchlight Capital Partners in an all-cash transaction of $2 billion, a deal that will also see the company going private. […]
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Apr 24, 2018
Every year your faithful friends at TechCrunch spend an entire week looking at bags. Why? Because bags - often ignored but full of our important electronics - are the outward representations of our techie styles and we put far too little thought into where we keep our most prized possessions. To that end we need […]
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Apr 24, 2018
DoorDash is about to make a huge move into grocery delivery, but instead of going all out as a delivery service on its own, it's instead going to be working behind the scenes to power delivery networks for larger companies — with Walmart as its first big partner. While Instacart looks to control the end-to-end […]
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Apr 24, 2018
Xiaomi and Ant Financial are two of a cluster of major tech names being linked with IPOs in Hong Kong. But, despite a burst of upcoming tech listings and new measures that are tipped to encourage more, the country still has some way to go to match the U.S. as a destination for startup exits, […]
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Apr 24, 2018
Cowboy, the startup that's building a new, smarter electronic bicycle, quietly launched in its home country of Belgium this past week, whilst simultaneously disclosing it has raised $3 million in seed funding. Notably, the round is led by Index Ventures. The London and San Francisco-based VC appears to be particularly bullish on electric-powered mobility, recently […]
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Apr 24, 2018
Last week, I was sitting in the office, waiting for an Amazon package to be delivered to my house. Typically, the driver would just leave the package at the door, where anybody could steal it. But this time around, the process was a bit different because the driver arrived, used his phone to unlock the […]
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Apr 24, 2018
Alibaba is jumping behind the wheel after it announced that Daimler, Audi and Volvo will bring its voice assistant to their vehicles. The assistant — Tmall Genie — is scheduled to go into cars "in the near future." When it does, Alibaba said it will enable drivers to check fuel levels, mileage, battery levels and engine status use […]
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Apr 24, 2018
Uber is planning to tweak the historical pick-up and drop-off logs that drivers can see in order to slightly obscure the exact location, rather than planting an exact pin in it (as now). The idea is to provide a modicum more privacy for users while still providing drivers with what look set to be remain […]
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Apr 24, 2018
Facebook has never before made public the guidelines its moderators use to decide whether to remove violence, spam, harassment, self-harm, terrorism, intellectual property theft, and hate speech from social network until now. The company hoped to avoid making it easy to game these rules, but that worry has been overridden by the public's constant calls for […]
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Jan 31, 2018
Lego bricks (or, if you're not a pedant, Legos) are highly precise and highly consistent plastic objects. Anywhere you go in the world the Lego is the same. That means that scientists at MIT can use these little sole stabbers to create very precise scientific systems. Their first tests involves creating a microfluid pump and sorter using basic Lego parts. Because they can trust Lego… Read More
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Jan 31, 2018
Not every self-driving car has to be able to move passengers from point A to point B. Take, for example, Nuro: The startup just revealed their unique autonomous vehicle platform, which is more of a mobile small logistics platform than a self-driving car.
The company, which has been working away in stealth mode in Mountain View until now, has raised a $92 million Series A round led by Banyan… Read More
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Jan 31, 2018
Fujifilm announced this week that it's set to take a majority stake in Xerox. The news comes as the U.S. tech stalwart and photocopying synonym struggles to cope with an eroding demand for office printers and photocopies. The boards of both companies agreed to the deal this week, giving Fujifilm a 50.1-percent stake in the combined companies.
The naming conventions on this one are… Read More
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Jan 31, 2018
Google is rolling out a few new features to its Google Flights search engine to help travelers tackle some of the more frustrating aspects of air travel - delays and the complexities of the cheaper, Basic Economy fares. With the regard to delays, Google Flights won't just be pulling in information from the airlines directly, however - it will take advantage of its… Read More
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Jan 31, 2018
Trifacta, a big-data business intelligence startup that is building tools to help businesses structure and analyse data that gets generated in their networks through customer interactions and other actions, is today announcing that it has closed out its Series D round at $48 million, with a notable list of strategic and financial investors that includes Google, Ericsson, the Deutsche Börse,… Read More
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Jan 31, 2018
Nintendo's Switch has only been on sale for 10 months but already it has outsold its predecessor, the Wii U, the flop that heralded Nintendo's first step into hybrid gaming. The Japanese tech giant shifted a little over 13.5 million Wii U consoles across its entire lifecycle, and today Nintendo revealed that the Switch has reached 14.86 million sales to date. Business was so… Read More
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Jan 31, 2018
Uber is launching a bike-sharing service next week in partnership with JUMP, a startup that recently received the first and only permit to operate dockless bike-sharing in San Francisco. JUMP's contract with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency enables it to launch 250 of its dockless, electric bikes in San Francisco. After the first nine months of the program, the SFMTA… Read More
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Jan 31, 2018
Google has announced some tweaks to search snippets to try to avoid creating problematic information hierarchies. Read More
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Jan 31, 2018
What began as a movement among couture culturati with the success of Rent the Runway has moved into everything from cars (Porsche's got a subscription service ) to construction equipment and furniture.
Well, the Los Angeles-based startup Joymode has just raised $14 million to be the subscription service for nearly everything else. Read More
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Jan 31, 2018
Asana, the productivity and collaboration service, is getting a major infusion of cash after Generation Investment Management, a London-based firm backed by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, led a $75 million investment. Investment Management was joined in this Series D round by existing backers 8VC, Founders Fund, Y Combinator President Sam Altman who also participated in the round.… Read More
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Jan 31, 2018
Fresh from toppling Intel as the planet's biggest seller of chipsets, Samsung has confirmed that it has begun manufacturing ASIC chips which are used to mine bitcoin, ether and other cryptocurrencies.
"Samsung's foundry business is currently engaged in the manufacturing of cryptocurrency mining chips. However we are unable to disclose further details regarding our… Read More
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Jan 31, 2018
Bench, the TechStars-backed bookkeeping service for SMBs, has today announced the close of an $18 million B-1 funding round led by iNovia Capital. Existing investors, including Bain Capital Ventures, Altos Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank, also participated in the round.
Bench first launched out of TechStars NYC in 2012. Back then, the company was called 10Sheet, and it aimed to providing… Read More
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Jan 31, 2018
SoftBank is partnering up with messaging app Line to help develop its Line Mobile telecom service. Line announced that it has agreed to allow SoftBank to take a 51 percent in the business via an issuance of new shares. The deal is expected to close by March. From the documents, its mobile business is valued at around $15 million (1.7 billion JPY) but a company spokesperson told TechCrunch… Read More
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Jan 31, 2018
A new vertical fund from pan-European VC firm Speedinvest is officially outing today. Dubbed "Speedinvest x" and targeting a final closing of €25 million, of which €20.5 million has already been committed, the micro VC fund will target early-stage marketplace startups exclusively. Read More
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Jan 31, 2018
Samsung has ended Intel's 25-year run as the world's biggest seller of chipsets after it posted its 2017 end of year financials. The Korean tech giant's chipset division — which has long been its biggest hitter — grossed total revenue of $69 billion in 2017, eclipsing the $62.8 billion Intel reported for last year. That was a record year for Intel — and… Read More
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Jan 31, 2018
Spotify is testing an app that sees it move firmly into Pandora's territory.
‘Stations' is a new Android-only app that is being piloted by the company in Australia — it was first noticed by app analytics firm Sensor Tower on Tuesday.
This app offers a ‘lean-back' option to listen to music based on genres and managed playlists. In the description, Spotify… Read More
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Jan 30, 2018
Amazon, JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway are building a healthcare company, Facebook is banning cryptocurrency ads and TrackR lays off 42 people. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
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Jan 30, 2018
With a president as mercurial as Trump, it was anyone's guess what would happen during his first State of the Union address. The appearance is the president's most high profile public speaking moment of the year and Trump was expected to touch on some of the issues of the moment, including funding for a border wall, infrastructure and an immigration deal. While less likely if… Read More
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Jan 30, 2018
Line, the messaging app with around 200 million monthly users, is embracing bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to fend off increased competition from Facebook and others. The Japanese company today announced the creation of a new financial services division which will spearhead a move into cryptocurrencies and other services including loans and insurance. Line already operates a payment… Read More
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Jan 30, 2018
The only thing growing faster than the global drone population is the population of people thinking "how can I knock these annoying things out of the sky?" DroneShield offers a way to do just that, and now in a much more portable package, with the DroneGun Tactical — that is, if you're an authorized government agent, which I doubt. Read More
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Jan 30, 2018
QR code style markers — those lil' barcode-looking boxes you'll see on ads from time to time, meant to be scanned with your phone to launch some website or app — have yet to really find their footing in the US. But that's not going to keep Amazon from taking a stab at it. Amazon is rolling out its own take on the concept and calling them "SmileCodes".… Read More
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Jan 30, 2018
What if you could look down and see your actual arms and legs inside VR, or look at other real-world people or objects as if you weren't wearing a headset? Imverse's team spent five years building this incredible technology at universities in Switzerland and Spain. "We were working on this before Oculus was even created" says co-founder Javier Bello Ruiz. Now its… Read More
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Jan 30, 2018
Valuation concerns are top of mind for many investors. For those in tech investing, this concern is perhaps most acute, given the generally high multiples assigned to the sector. There are good articles addressing how revenue multiples have moved over time or why this methodology even came to be, but I'm still curious as to how a revenue multiples ties to some fundamental unit of… Read More
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Jan 30, 2018
Investors panicked this morning upon the news Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway were teaming up to launch a health insurance company for their U.S. employees. Healthcare is one of the biggest operating costs for Fortune 500 companies, and the three iconic companies have joined forces to build a new health insurance company for all U.S. employees in an effort to improve… Read More
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Jan 30, 2018
Amazon announced today it's launching a new messaging feature for Alexa devices in the U.S. that will allow you to send texts - yes, SMS messages - to your friends and other contacts using your voice. Customers can now ask Alexa to send a message to a specific contact, and Alexa will figure out how to route it appropriately - using either the previously launched… Read More
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Jan 30, 2018
Google is launching a digital store that will offer cloud-based software to companies and other organizations. Bloomberg, which reported the news a bit earlier, notes the move is just the juggernaut's latest effort to ensure that cloud leaders, and specifically Amazon Web Services, don't leave the company in the dust. Read More
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Jan 30, 2018
JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway have joined forces with Amazon to form a new healthcare company for all U.S. employees. Details are sparse; there's not even a name associated with the new company. But this is big news for the industry, and it could have ramifications not only for health insurance giants, but also smaller tech companies open to partnering with the company —… Read More
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Jan 30, 2018
The U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission are jointly investigating Apple's communications about the software update that slowed down older models of the iPhone, Bloomberg is reporting. Citing sources familiar with the matter, the government has reportedly requested details on the company's communications about the software update. The Bloomberg… Read More
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Jan 30, 2018
Is there such a thing as bad publicity? It's an interesting and contested question. To wit: Self styled ‘digital contraception' app, Natural Cycles — which relies on a set of proprietary algorithms and women inputting their morning body temperature to predict fertility levels each day — has claimed that negative headlines generated after a clinic reported a number… Read More
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Jan 30, 2018
A preliminary report from the FCC has revealed additional details about the situation that caused a false missile threat alarm in Hawaii earlier this month. It really was human error, as initial reports indicated, but now the nature of that error (errors, really) is a bit clearer. Read More
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Jan 30, 2018
Facebook has a new advertising policy pertaining to cryptocurrency, binary options and initial coin offerings. The policy specifically prohibits ads that promote those types of products and services "that are frequently associated with misleading or deceptive practices," Facebook Product Management Director Rob Leathern wrote in a blog post today. Read More
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Jan 30, 2018
UPDATE: SpaceX has scrubbed this until tomorrow's backup window at least due to unfavourable conditions. SpaceX is launching a rocket today - no, not the Falcon Heavy, that's still targeting February 6, but a Falcon 9 carrying a satellite bound for Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO). The mission, GovSat-1, is set to take place during a launch window which opens today at 4:25… Read More
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Jan 30, 2018
Google is expanding the reach of Howard West, which began last year as a three-month residency for students at Howard University. Now, it's going to be a full academic year and available to students from other historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). In the fall, 100 students from Howard and other HBCUs will participate in a nine-month immersive CS program at Google. Read More
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Jan 30, 2018
The Boring Company is getting decently well-capitalized on the back of sales of its flamethrower (yes, flamethrower). The no-doubt overpriced piece of knack, which can be made yourself at home using likely around $30 in parts, is selling for $500 and has already netted Elon Musk's digging venture $7.5 million. That's after just over a day of being on sale, and not counting the… Read More
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Jan 30, 2018
As Pinterest increasingly tries to sell itself as a startup specialized in computer vision that it plugs into visual discovery, it's continuing to pick up additional pieces to help continue to build that out. Today, the company said it is hiring former Google computer vision research lead Chuck Rosenberg. Read More
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Jan 30, 2018
Heptio holds a special place in the Kubernetes startup ecosystem. Its co-founders are, after all, two of the co-founders of the Kubernetes project. Heptio has raised millions, but it was never clear what their business plan looked like beyond offering training and professional services. It's becoming clearer now, as the company today announced the launch of the Heptio Kubernetes… Read More
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Jan 30, 2018
The relatively open nature of Android has made it a target for malware authors and other bad actors of all stripes who often try to get their wares onto your phone through both the official Google Play Store, third-party app stores and any other way they can think of. For most users, though, the main Android app store is Google's own Play Store and as the company announced today, the… Read More
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Jan 30, 2018
Instagram today made a long overdue change to its product that social media managers have wanted for some time - it will allow businesses on Instagram to schedule their posts. Before, there were unofficial means to aid with this - like tools that would send out a push notification to remind you to publish a post at a given time, for example. But no functionality was available in… Read More
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Jan 30, 2018
After a bit of a misstep with Warcraft, director Duncan Jones has a new movie that he's describing as a successor to his debut Moon.
To be clear, I kind of liked Warcraft, and it made a lot of money in China. Still, most critics hated it, and the film bombed in the U.S.
And whether you appreciated Warcraft or not, Mute looks like Jones' return to a more cerebral and personal… Read More
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Jan 30, 2018
Yet another defeat in the courts for the UK government's use of mass surveillance as an indiscriminate and, as it frequently turns out, unlawful investigatory tool. Read More
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