Delivery fiends rejoice, you can now use Apple Pay to get your food delivered even faster. Grubhub just rolled out an update to the Grubhub and Seamless iOS apps that let customers check out using Apple Pay. Considering the company did $2.4 billion in food sales last year, and 60 … | Continue reading
Tribune Publishing, owner of newspapers including the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, just announced that starting on June 20, it will rebrand as tronc*, Inc. — short for “tribune online content.” The company is pitching this as part of its broader move to digital, which a … | Continue reading
Facebook’s attempt at a real-time, notification-based news app is shutting down. Today Facebook sent an alert to users telling them “Thanks for using Notify. We’re transitioning parts of Notify into other Facebook products, and the app will no longer be supported.” Facebook launc … | Continue reading
It appears that the Apple App Store, on both mobile and desktop, is experiencing some technical difficulty.The outage is reported to have started around 3:30pm ET, and Apple’s Support site confirms the outage.At first, it was only the App Store that was malfunctioning, not allowi … | Continue reading
The field is getting mighty crowded, but Samsung’s not backing down from its big fitness push. Today the company is unveiling two new wearables — an update to its Gear Fit activity tracker and the IconX, a pair of completely wireless earbuds aimed at runners. The company kicked o … | Continue reading
Recently, I wrote about Wyper, the Tinder of car shopping. That prompted Andy Kim, cofounder of Wype, to contact me. His business is one letter off from Wyper, after all, so in the interest of disamibguation, here’s the scoop on the car detailing company that is more like Uber th … | Continue reading
Chick-fil-A just launched Chick-fil-A One, their new app that offers mobile payments, order ahead, a rewards program, and more. Specifically, customers will be able to customize their order on the app before heading into the restaurant, so they can skip the line upon arrival. And … | Continue reading
The reports of commerce’s death at Twitter have been greatly exaggerated, according to a tweetstorm by Nathan Hubbard, Twitter’s head of commerce. Last month BuzzFeed reported that Jack Dorsey had put Buy Buttons, product pages, and other commerce efforts on the “back-burner”, an … | Continue reading
There is something magnetic about Elon Musk. A visionary, the CEO of two companies, and a builder of the future, Musk has a way of discussing highly complex topics — from space travel to the business of battery technology to the consequences of AI — with a clarity and optim … | Continue reading
When Eric Schmidt took the stage today in New York City, he spent less time talking about business at Google (where he was previously CEO and now serves as executive chairman of parent company Alphabet), and more time focused on new technologies and the bigger picture. Schmidt wa … | Continue reading
Hillary Clinton has often been depicted as an enemy of government transparency in the long-running controversy over her use of a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State. It took several lawsuits under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a law that gives th … | Continue reading
As the tech world chips away at making virtual reality a Thing™, augmented reality — VR’s less-flashy-but-equally-awesome cousin, the idea of blending 3d models and visuals into a view of the real world — quietly gets better and better.But there are problems to be solved before A … | Continue reading
The Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest is a yearly competition in which writers attempt to create the worst possible opening sentence to a novel. Google, for several reasons, should enter this year — in its latest self-driving car project report, the company writes: “As our honking al … | Continue reading
A group of angry Uber drivers say they’ve been screwed over by their own lawyers in a worker misclassification lawsuit and are asking lead attorney representing the drivers in the case, ShannonLiss-Riordan, to step down.Uber drivers filed a class-action lawsuit claiming they have … | Continue reading
This is probably pretty far down everyone’s list of necessary Olympic athletic equipment to pack for the 2016 Rio games, but Visa’s gonna be Visa, because it’s everywhere you want to be and life takes Visa, etc. The credit card giant is offering up a new NFC-enabled payment ring … | Continue reading
Gawker Media CEO Nick Denton joined Kara Swisher on stage at Vox Media’s Code Conference next to an empty chair — reserved for Peter Thiel, who is involved in a lawsuit against Gawker, who did not attend the conference. The conversation centered around Gawker’s decision to publis … | Continue reading
The venture arm of Naspers Ltd. has invested $60 million in Udemy, an online marketplace for education. For the unfamiliar, Naspers is a Johannesburg-listed tech and media firm that operates robust online classifieds businesses in emerging markets, with a strong presence in India … | Continue reading
In a world where engineers truly are the new rock stars and markets continue to be moderately funded, it is not uncommon to witness or experience the engineering “prima donna effect.” I’ve gently suggested this term in the past and it struck a nerve. Read More | Continue reading
VSCO, the popular image editing app, is getting a complete redesign on both the Android and iOS platforms, which will be rolling out in the coming weeks. Most of the new key features are improvements, like a new camera interface, gesture-based navigation, a redesigned personal sp … | Continue reading
It’s hard enough for a grown human to figure out how to navigate a crowd sometimes — so what chance does a clumsy and naive robot have? To prevent future collisions and awkward “do I go left or right” situations, Stanford researchers are hoping their “Jackrabbot” robot can learn … | Continue reading
Medium has acquired a small startup called Superfeedr, an API to turbocharge the way you handle RSS, Atom and JSON feeds. For a company like Medium, Superfeedr can generate feeds with a ton of items and push them in real time to PubSubHubbub-compliant services.According to Superf … | Continue reading
Gillmor Gang – Keith Teare, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, Rob DeSisto and Steve Gillmor. LIVE recording session today, June 2 2016, starting at 10amPT/1pmET.Our live chat stream during the show broadcastGillmor Gang’s Facebook page HEREG3’s archive on ustreamG3’s Facebook page HERE … | Continue reading
New emoji are coming! The organization that approves new emoji before they hit your keyboard has just announced 72 more emoji which will be added to the Unicode standard (Unicode 9.0) later this month. This selection includes several fun additions, including those reflective of i … | Continue reading
Geeky commerce startup Loot Crate is announcing that it has raised $18.5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Upfront Ventures, with participation from Breakwater Investment Management, Time Inc., Downey Ventures (startup investment arm of Team Downey, the production … | Continue reading
Sure Pebble put its best forward when it launched not one but three new products the other week, but a startup’s got to stagger a little bit of news to keep us interested ahead of launch (though judging by its current tally of $9.7 million on Kickstarter, the company is doing jus … | Continue reading
Google today is launching a new tool aimed at helping business owners determine how well their website performs on the mobile web, including on both smartphones and tablets. Given that mobile searches surpassed desktop search for the first time last fall, it’s critical for websit … | Continue reading
The weather is heating up (er… in some places…) and so is the anticipation for our big meetup later this month in Tel Aviv! Presented by Leumi Tech, with participation from Blonde 2.0, the event will be on June 22, at Trask, between 6-10 p.m. The event is in two parts: The first … | Continue reading
Machine learning will have a barbell effect on the technology landscape. On one hand, it will democratize basic intelligence through the commoditization and diffusion of services like image recognition and translation into software broadly. On the other, it will concentrate highe … | Continue reading
Notion, a connected home startup headquartered in Denver, closed 3.2 million in additional funding as part of the second tranche of a previous seed round from last year. XL Innovation led the deal with Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures participating. Notion has now raised a total … | Continue reading
Pier 48 served as the temporary home for Disrupt SF 2014 after our multi-year run at The Concourse ended when they decided to turn the Concourse into condos. After moving to the historic Pier 70 for the 2015 show, we’re thrilled to announce that Disrupt will once again take over … | Continue reading
Fast moving fintech startup Digit closed a $22.5 million Series B today just a year after closing an $11.3 million Series A. Ribbit Capital led the round with support from all prior investors including General Catalyst. This new round brings their total fundraising to $36 million … | Continue reading
Instacart this morning announced a new partnership with Food Network, which will see the grocery delivery service’s technology integrated across the network’s sizable websites, FoodNetwork.com and Food.com, which today include over half a million recipes. This will allow users wh … | Continue reading
Internet connected button maker, bttn has launched a smaller version of its push-to-activate-a-digital service gadget. Read More | Continue reading
Running out of room on your smartphone is a problem many mobile consumers have today, thanks to sizable photo, video, and music libraries saved on their device. That means that when these users try to download a new app, that process may fail due to a lack of disk space. Since mi … | Continue reading
While Uber continues its push into Africa the company is making allowances to local markets and testing unique service models users wouldn’t see in other parts of the globe. Anyone can now use the mobile app to hail a car in 12 cities across South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Morocco … | Continue reading
With Tesla’s growing popularity, Uber’s continued global expansion, incessant rumors of Apple’s entry into transit, the ascent of drones, Google’s exploration of self-driving cars and the billion-dollar sale of Cruise Automation to GM, the transport sector has never looked hotter … | Continue reading
Facebook is making its Safety Check feature more stable and easier to deploy, which means that you might start seeing more Safety Checks on the platform. Before today, engineers had to type code to deploy a Safety Check. Now, there’s a simple form that any Facebook employee on th … | Continue reading
Women Who Code is the latest diversity non-profit to enter Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley accelerator that has helped produce companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe and Instacart. Although Y Combinator first started accepting non-profits in 2013, and has since been including no … | Continue reading
Another parliamentary committee that has been scrutinizing UK surveillance legislation currently before parliament says changes are needed to remove concerns the Investigatory Powers Bill would afford state security agencies powers that are too broad. Read More | Continue reading
Uber is cozying up to cyclists in Amsterdam, a city where there are more bicycles than people, with the launch of UberBike. UberBike lets cyclists order a car that is equipped with a bike rack. The idea here is that lots of people cycle, but not everyone wants to ride everywhere … | Continue reading
IBM has been giving a push both to its Watson artificial intelligence and Internet of Things businesses as part of its bigger strategy to grow new streams of revenue to offset declines in older ones. Today came the latest development on that front: IBM has inked a deal with Cisco … | Continue reading
Most startups just want to reenforce your phone case or maybe make your speakers a bit more portable. And then there are the ones that have the weight of the world on their shoulders – the companies that look toward their young children and wonder what they can do to make the fut … | Continue reading
If you’ve been trying to search for something on Amazon.com for the past few hours, you’ve been receiving a “service unavailable” Error 500. That’s because Amazon is currently suffering an outage. While the homepage and the product pages are still working, you also get an error i … | Continue reading
To help people find lost, stolen or misplaced personal effects with the proverbial touch of a button, a startup called Tile has raised $18 million in a Series B funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. For the unfamiliar, Tile makes square, waterproof tags that employ Blue … | Continue reading
With less than 2 weeks to go to this year’s The Europas Startup Conference and Awards — the new type of tech conference devised in partnership with Techcrunch — I’m delighted to announce the full speaker line up for the day. In addition, the public vote on the shortlist across 27 … | Continue reading
The marketplace industry will be just fine. It is uncertainty – rather than a fundamental flaw in the business model – that is the root cause of the sector’s present turmoil. There’s uncertainty over the platforms’ internal monitoring processes, over the veracity of loan data, ov … | Continue reading
Xiaomi just unveiled a brand new wearable device, the Mi Band 2. Despite the name, it’s the company’s third fitness tracking device after the Mi Band and Mi Band Pulse. It track your steps, monitors your heart rate and (for the first time) features a tiny display. It costs RMB 14 … | Continue reading
Droom, one of several startups taking advantage of India’s booming secondhand vehicle market, is planning to enter new countries after raising a Series B from Beenext and Digital Garage. The company hasn’t disclosed the amount of the round, but TechCrunch has learned that it’s be … | Continue reading