TechCrunch understands from a source close to the transaction that FinLeap’s latest round gives the company a post-money valuation of €121 million (based on a €100 million pre-money valuation). Read More | Continue reading
Apple is holding a keynote ahead of its annual WWDC developer conference today at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, and the company is planning once again to live stream the event. At 10 AM PT (1 PM in New York, 6 PM in London, 7 PM in Paris), you'll be able to watch the eve … | Continue reading
Once a year, Apple gathers thousands of developers and journalists to show off all of the secret things the company has been working on for the past many months.Today is that day — and we’re there live! Tune in for all the news the second it breaks. Read More | Continue reading
Can’t beat ’em, join ’em. That appears to be the motto of China Life, Asia Pacific highest valued insurance firm, after it backed Chinese taxi app Didi Chuxing barely months after investing in its fierce rival Uber China. Read More | Continue reading
Some things you should probably know about me before we dive in here: I am a full-grown adult. I have health insurance and a 401K. I drink bourbon and to NPR. I’m wearing a button up shirt right now. I own many fine sweaters. I do not presently have children. If you send me a sm … | Continue reading
These are strange days for the Electronic Entertainment Expo. The (ostensibly) trade-only event draws immense attention, but it has long been fraying at the edges. Yet we’re here anyway because this year E3 comes at an auspicious time for technologies that could represent a major … | Continue reading
Walgreens has terminated its three-year partnership with blood analysis startup Theranos, citing the myriad bad test results and an on-going federal investigation as the reason for ending the relationship “effective immediately.” Theranos promised the drugstore chain it could det … | Continue reading
For the moment, at least, cyberterrorists have not harnessed the technology needed to destroy Western civilization from a basement lab in some remote corner of the world. Although a “cyber-Armageddon” scenario is unlikely any time soon, new technological developments have the pot … | Continue reading
Today the Hadoop distribution war comes down to a final battle between Cloudera’s CDH and Hortonworks’ HDP. That wasn’t always the case. At the peak of the market’s fragmentation, numerous companies offered Hadoop distributions in one form or another. Read More | Continue reading
Like a fly frozen in amber, the App Store’s fundamental deal has remained unmoving since its inception. As an enormous ecosystem swelled around it, crystalline structures of new rules and avenues of customer interaction have also grown — but not nearly fast enough for most develo … | Continue reading
David Fine is the author of a three part series about the future of “Civic Technology” and the idea of Smart Cities. His theory – and it’s a good one – is that “as Moore’s Law continues apace, cities will continue to blanket themselves in all sorts of cheap, reliable, and (we hop … | Continue reading
When I think about the behavior of many business people today, I imagine a breadline. These employees are the data-poor, waiting around at the end of the day on the data breadline. The overtaxed data analyst team prioritizes work for the company executives, and everyone else must … | Continue reading
Each candidate is working off a different operating system, representing a completely different media paradigm. According to media commentator Douglas Rushkoff, Bernie Sanders is the candidate of the radio age, Hillary Clinton of the tv age and Donald Trump of our internet age. R … | Continue reading
When I walked into a conference room last Tuesday at the Cloud Identity Summit in New Orleans to interview Ping Identity CEO Andre Durand, it was my first chat with him since the company had been sold the week before for $600 million (as reported by The Information), a tidy exit … | Continue reading
I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Toronto and learned there’s more to this city than Drake calling it home and the recent successes of their professional sports teams. We made one investment there in 2015 and the experience — with the company specifically and the city generally … | Continue reading
Mobile phones have emerged as the dominant alternative payment method to cash for buying and selling goods and services in emerging markets. And with a service akin to alternative payment providers like M-Pesa and Pagatech in Africa and a slew of alternative payment platforms in … | Continue reading
Your parents were right, dear reader. You are a precious, unique snowflake. Your ears, at least. I can’t really speak for the rest of you, but, hey, you seem great. Of course, your special, unique snowflakiness presents a challenge to our friends in the headphone industry. – even … | Continue reading
As companies race to make autonomous vehicles a reality, investment activity in the space is heating up. The AV investment landscape is complex. It includes both hardware and software players; it features competitors ranging from early-stage startups to large publicly traded corp … | Continue reading
Benita, a portal designed to deliver the latest news on fashion, beauty and lifestyle, debuted in Iran this May. The portal will offer daily content produced by a team of local Iranian staff writers and a forum where users are encouraged to share and discuss the topics that matte … | Continue reading
You should walk away from anyone who says there can be an “Uber for healthcare.” It is the equivalent of someone saying they “have a bridge to sell you.” Or, more precisely, it shows a complete lack of understanding for how healthcare works and how positive health outcomes are ac … | Continue reading
You know when you just keep pressing the predictive text button on your mobile phone and the sentence just starts making less and less sense? The team behind Sunspring used the same technology to write a screenplay. Then they found some actors — including Thomas Middleditch, who … | Continue reading
Speech recognition technology has been around for more than half a decade, though the early uses of speech recognition — like voice dialing or desktop dictation — certainly don’t seem as sexy as today’s burgeoning virtual agents or smart home devices. Read More | Continue reading
Today, the former co-editor of TechCrunch, Alexia Tsotsis, is graduating from Stanford’s MSx program at the Graduate School of Business. She’s coming away with a masters of science in business degree — and she did it in a year. I’ll always remember her as a fantastic work partner … | Continue reading
What would software programs look like if they were people? Artist Reef1600 dreamed up these awesome personifications and let us share them with you. Check out his art, buy his work on Gumroad, and click/scroll through to see the rest: Read More | Continue reading
For your convenience. For your security. To better serve you. To offer you the best experience. To better fit our future plans. To comply with regulations. To optimize our resources. These are the blandly vicious lies that companies proffer when they want to take something away f … | Continue reading
It’s been a weird few days for Tesla.In a span of just 72 hours the Model S was accused of having major suspension issues, the NHTSA supposedly got involved, Tesla explained that there is nothing wrong and the NHTSA isn’t actually investigating the issue, and Elon Musk tweeted th … | Continue reading
It’s just about impossible to get your hands on Microsoft’s impressive mixed-reality Hololens platform these days — unless you’re a computer science student at the University of Washington. Then you get to play with them whenever you want. Read More | Continue reading
Remember MCNs? Those quaint multi-channel networks — aggregators of YouTube channels — that generally focused on a specific vertical audience? In the past year or so, something curious happened — companies shied away from the “MCN” moniker. Some did so violently, contending they … | Continue reading
About two years ago, Pinterest launched a different flavor of search engine called Guided Search. Instead of relying on deep data on the user, it would create a network of related topics that users can dive deep into. The idea being that a search like “iPhone” would net additiona … | Continue reading
Gawker files for Bankruptcy, Line will IPO on July 14 on the New York Stock Exchange, Greg Kumparak goes in-depth with the mobile game Pokemon Go from Niantic, Andreessen Horowitz closes a $1.5 billion dollar fund, and Meem is both storage and a charging cable. All this on today’ … | Continue reading
Dango is an emoji suggestion chatbot — wait, where are you going? Stay with me, this is actually pretty cool.Okay, so Dango is one of those virtual assistants that lives in your chat apps, and this one is based on a neural network that has been trained with millions of examples t … | Continue reading
RaisedBy.Us, an organization that facilitates charitable giving at startups, has added three entrepreneurs and investors to its board of directors — Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer (pictured above), VaynerMedia CEO Gary Vaynerchuk and Bonobos CEO Andy Dunn. The nonprofit works with start … | Continue reading
One million dollars. A student will earn that much more in life with a four-year college degree as opposed to just a high school diploma. That’s according to a recent study from Georgetown University, which offers just such a degree. But most students need financial aid. And when … | Continue reading
Even though several huge data breaches have recently exposed hundreds of millions of social media login credentials online, users aren’t re-setting their passwords — which means you’ll probably continue to see celebrities’ social media accounts getting hijacked. Racial justice ac … | Continue reading
Gawker files for bankruptcy, Verizon inches closer to buying Yahoo, what to expect at Apple’s WWDC conference next week and more headlines to stay on top of this week’s tech news. Read More | Continue reading
Since the dawn of technology, we’ve been afraid of technology eliminating our jobs. Look at the birth of the steam engine. When it was invented in the late 1700s, people believed its arrival signaled the end of manual labor and thousands of hardworking individuals would be out of … | Continue reading
In March, we told you that Andreessen Horowitz was targeting $1.5 billion for its fifth and newest fund. This morning, the seven-year-old, Sand Hill Road firm is confirming that it has closed on that amount, having secured the capital commitments from its previous investors. The … | Continue reading
Attention. Project code-name Electrolysis is a go. Mozilla’s long running project to bring multi-process architecture to hundreds of millions of Firefox users has finally met release criteria for a full scale rollout. Nearly every other browser on the market has adopted multi-pro … | Continue reading
Apple is about to kick off its annual developer conference in San Francisco on Monday. As usual, the company will get things going with a good old keynote filled with secret and not-so-secret announcements. Here's what I expect to see.A good chunk of the conference should be … | Continue reading
Chat and collaboration app Slack is experiencing serious outages today, but we’re not sure of the nature or extent of the disaster, because status.slack.com is also inaccessible! What? This is like a fire station burning down! Read More | Continue reading
Gawker Media filed for bankruptcy today, according to documents filed in a Southern District of New York court. The filing comes as Gawker’s legal battle with the wrestler Hulk Hogan (real name Terry Bollea) drags on. Hogan sued Gawker after the site published a clip of his sex t … | Continue reading
Looking forward to seeing you all in Warsaw and Krakow. There will be much rejoicing and smalec. It is my understand that you all are watching “football” matches in the “Eurozone Cup” (Americans know nothing about “soccer”) but I think it’s a great opportunity to network in Polsk … | Continue reading
Facebook is continuing its heavy-handed push to get users to install its private photo-sharing app Moments. The company’s latest move – warning people some of their photos will be deleted if the app isn’t installed – has managed to make Moments the number one app in the App Store … | Continue reading
In an interview with the Financial Times, Sony Interactive Entertainment president and global chief executive Andrew House confirmed that the PlayStation 4 ‘Neo’ is real. But don’t expect to see it next week at the E3 conference in Los Angeles. House has said Sony doesn’t plan to … | Continue reading
Foursquare, Google Latitude and Facebook Nearby Friends failed to change the way we all meet up. That’s because intent, not location, is the most important thing when connecting people offline. If we want to meet up for food, coffee, drinks, the gym, a party or just to chill, it’ … | Continue reading
If your early days on the internet involved dial-up modems, slow-loading pages, and low-res graphics, then you’ll get a kick out of a new app called BitCam. The app, which hails from Iconfactory, best known as the makers of popular Twitter client Twitterrific, lets you snap retro … | Continue reading
Attention, budget-conscious tech enthusiasts. Today is the last day to get Disrupt SF tickets at the deeply discounted extra early-bird price point of $1,795 apiece, $1,200 off the full ticket price and $200 cheaper than they’ll be tomorrow. Read More | Continue reading
There’s been no shortage of disruption in the venture industry over the last decade of so, yet someone is always trying to introduce a new way of doing things. Among the latest is Propeller, a six-month-old outfit that’s hoping to entice family offices and sovereign wealth funds … | Continue reading