Indiegogo wants to step out of Kickstarter’s shadow by embracing commerce beyond crowdfunding. That means helping sell pre-orders and finished products from entrepreneurs who are done raising money. So today Indiegogo announced it’s acquired Celery, the “pre-commerce” platform th … | Continue reading
FileMaker, a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple, makes it easy for those without any programming knowledge as well as experienced programmers to build line-of-business apps for the iPhone, iPad, Windows PC and Mac. The product has been around since the 1980s (back then it was calle … | Continue reading
There’s a new corporate venture arm in town.Roughly six months after Hewlett-Packard finalized its division into two companies — Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which focuses on servers, storage, networking, and security; and HP Inc., which continues to sell PCs and printers — the la … | Continue reading
Consolidation is afoot in the online classifieds space as two popular startups born in Barcelona are in advanced talks to merge operations in the U.S.. Wallapop and LetGo — which both provide platforms for consumers to post used items for sale and negotiate the sales offline — wo … | Continue reading
Only 18 percent of undergraduate computer science degrees and 26 percent of computing jobs are held by women. It’s worse at the top of the corporate world — just 5 percent of leadership positions in the technology industry are held by women. Read More | Continue reading
After more than a decade spent focused on enterprise networking, San Jose-based Ubiquiti is looking to apply its workplace wireless expertise for a home audience. The company, co-founded by ex-Apple employee turned Memphis Grizzlies owner, Robert Pera, is making the move into the … | Continue reading
Walgreens, the largest drug retailing chain in the U.S., has launched a partnership with Mental Health America, and a telehealth company MDLIVE, to encourage people to screen themselves for mental health problems, and if they need to, seek help from a therapist online. More than … | Continue reading
The GoFundMe platform seems to be everywhere these days; my social media feeds are never too many posts away from a campaign from the company, raising funding for a cause or a goal. The appeal is simple: The crowd-giving platform enabling tiny acts of charity and philanthropy bet … | Continue reading
Oakland, Calif. startup MegaBots Inc. has raised $2.4 million in seed funding to bring the robot-fighting stuff of manga and anime to a venue near you. According to MegaBots cofounders, Gui Cavalcanti, Matt Oehrlein, and Brinkley Warren, the startup aspires to follow in the foots … | Continue reading
Internet performance management company Dyn has raised $50 million in Series B funding. Dyn was founded back in 2001, with its first product being a DNS service called DynDNS. Over time, it’s expanded into a broader suite of products that allow companies including Pfizer, Visa, N … | Continue reading
ICE Contact takes a fresh take on emergency messaging apps. It uses ‘delayed messages’ to tell your friends something’s gone wrong if you don’t return when you planned to — even if you are out of mobile phone coverage areas. Create a message and a time to send; if you make it bac … | Continue reading
Microsoft announced today that it will shut down MSN China, its web portal for China, early next month. Read More | Continue reading
The Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission announced today that they are teaming up for an inquiry into how security updates to smartphones and other mobile devices are released in the United States. Read More | Continue reading
Rancher Labs, a container management platform that supports both Kubernetes and Docker Swarm, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series B round. This new funding round was led by new investor GRC SinoGreen, a Chinese private equity and venture capital fund, with par … | Continue reading
People love their smartphones but hate poor battery life. We love having access to the world’s information at our fingertips but tire of the need to constantly plug in to the world’s electricity grid. The recharging model of batteries fails us — the marketplace is ready for a new … | Continue reading
Twenty-five years after the introduction of the World Wide Web, the Information Age is coming to an end. Thanks to mobile screens and Internet everywhere, we’re now entering what I call the “Experience Age.” Read More | Continue reading
Last week, Kuang-Chi, a Shenzhen-based technology conglomerate, launched a $300 million Israel fund in Tel Aviv to tap the country’s smart city know-how, according to the company’s founder Ruopeng Liu. Read More | Continue reading
Virtual reality can deliver on its promise to bring new and immersive experiences to the masses, but the current iteration of hardware will need to evolve first. Read More | Continue reading
A company called Laugh.ly wants to make streaming sets from the best comedians as easy as streaming music on Pandora. Though not yet available to the public, Laugh.ly’s iOS application will allow users to follow both big-name comedians like Louis C.K., Kevin Hart, Aziz Ansari, an … | Continue reading
A month before Disrupt, Yu Zhou sent us an email titled, “We want to help solve the Flint water problem.” WaterO’s CEO wasn’t claiming to have the catchall solution to the lead problem plaguing the Michigan city, but his company was in a unique position to lend a hand. Since then … | Continue reading
Most businesses live or die on Google search rankings. If you can’t crack the top few results, it’s almost impossible to consistently drive organic traffic to your site. But how does Google decide which sites appear at the top of the results list? It uses Googlebot, a proprietary … | Continue reading
Artveoli is a biotech startup that’s building an air purifying device that aims to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen in indoor environments by harnessing the photosynthetic properties of algae. The startup is officially launching on stage here at TechCrunch Disrupt New York. Rea … | Continue reading
OverNest, a startup that was launched just over a year by several technology industry veterans, announced its first product called GitZero today at the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield competition in Brooklyn, NY — and it’s a pretty exciting product that makes encrypted cod … | Continue reading
We’re heading into summer, but the chilly relationship between government bodies and private tech businesses is growing frostier by the day. In the latest development, it has emerged that Twitter requested one of its key B2B partners, Dataminr — a service that offers advanced soc … | Continue reading
As self-driving cars are not quite ready yet, bike accidents are still a thing, unfortunately. Sometimes, stupid monkey brains can’t see someone riding a bike. Lumenus wants to fix that with smart clothes and accessories for runners, cyclists and motorcyclists. The company is tak … | Continue reading
Facebook says it’s against the company’s trending topic curation policy to suppress or prioritize specific political views in its Trending topics, and that it has guidelines in place to preserve consistency and neutrality there. This would imply that blame for any deviation from … | Continue reading
Today, Uber and Lyft took their ride hailing services offline in Austin, Texas, leaving drivers scrambling for other means of making income, and riders stranded or seeking another mode of transportation.Here’s why: this week, Austin voters upheld a rule that would require Uber, L … | Continue reading
There’s no shortage of ways to get a satisfactory caffeine fix these days, and some of them are mighty high-tech. Spinn Coffee’s new machine, demonstrated on stage at Disrupt NY today, claims one of the most high-tech of all — but this elaborate centrifugal brewing method may be … | Continue reading
Halo Neuroscience wants to build a new category of wearable. Not for passively tracking human activity, as so many existing wearables are, but for actively and positively influencing physical abilities — or that’s the claim — using an existing neurostimulation technique called tr … | Continue reading
What if finding a job were as easy as playing a game? Well Scoutible, thinks its smartphone games have what it takes to assess the aptitude and traits required for certain professions. The company launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York on Monday. With work experience at the W … | Continue reading
Practically everyone who has ever considered a tattoo know the old parental refrain of “you’ll have it forever.” It’s a fairly stark warning tinged with the regret of a generation covered in inked relics of disco and popular culture past. Some temporary solutions do exist, includ … | Continue reading
Jeet Raut’s mom was told she no longer had breast cancer. But it turned out to be a false diagnosis and she had to undergo further treatment. She’s okay now, but that medical mistake could have cost her life and it gave Raut the idea to build a better way to catch medical abnorma … | Continue reading
When B.J. Novak, best known for exec producing, writing and starring as Ryan on “The Office,” teamed up with Dev Flaherty to create a mobile application that allowed people to create lists and share them with others, they gave it a playfully anti-tech name: “The List App.” But fo … | Continue reading
The gaming community is one of the most vibrant and powerful groups on the internet. The power of platforms like Twitch to unite gamers interested in watching streams of other people playing video games seems intensely foreign to those outside the community but has quickly become … | Continue reading
Foursquare’s business looks a whole lot different than it used to. New CEO Jeff Glueck and co-founder Dennis Crowley know it — and they still have a plan to hit $100 million in revenue, and profitability, in the next few years. The talked about some of their efforts, like focusin … | Continue reading
The latest update for Periscope adds drone integration, a search function and an ability to save live streams. It’s a significant update for a social network that revolves entirely around sharing moments and interactions through comments on a live stream. The saving feature is st … | Continue reading
The tech industry’s diversity problems are exasperated by its obsession with genius coders and brilliant founders, Carissa Romero, a partner at the diversity consulting startup Paradigm, said today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY. Romero, who took part in a panel of diversity advocates, … | Continue reading
You never know what you’re going to get when you sit down with Parrot CEO Henri Seydoux. The executive is every bit as unpredictable as the company he runs – and just like Parrot’s products, he always puts on a good show.Seydoux’s panel at Disrupt today was largely focused on the … | Continue reading
If Nearpod CEO Guido Kovalskys has his way, overhead projectors and PowerPoint presentations will never bore students again. Instead, he wants to see cutting-edge technologies and interactive content become standard tools of the teaching trade. To that end, Nearpod has raised $9. … | Continue reading
Today, onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, Siri creator Dag Kittlaus showed off the first public demo of Viv, an AI virtual system that aims to be “the intelligent interface for everything.” In a live presentation that mentioned the word “paradigm” at least a dozen times, Kittlaus … | Continue reading
Digital rights group Privacy International has filed a judicial review in the UK High Court of an earlier decision by the oversight body of the UK’s security agencies to sanction the use of so-called “thematic warrants” — aka a highly intrusive investigatory capability that can c … | Continue reading
Image management and distribution platform Musikki raised a first round of funding in 2014 to become “the IMDB of music”. It’s now inked a deal on another $1M in funding from Portugal Ventures, the biggest VC in Portugal. It’s also launching Exclusiph, an image management and dis … | Continue reading
Siri co-founder and CEO Dag Kittlaus has been quietly working on a much-anticipated voice assistant powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning and integrations with third-party services. This product is called Viv and, in a world first, Kittlaus just gave us a demo at T … | Continue reading
Today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, we had both the founder of AdBlock Plus Till Faida and Interactive Advertising Bureau CEO Randall Rothenberg on our stage — but not at the same time, mostly because Rothenberg refused to even shake hands with Faida in public. Read More | Continue reading
Pivotal filed a Form D last week with the SEC indicating that last week’s $253 million round was actually closer to $653 million. Where did the extra money come from? Well, existing investors EMC converted $400 million in debt to equity to account for the additional money recorde … | Continue reading
Ad blocking software’s usage on the web, and now mobile, has forced the media and publishing industry to look to new revenue models. And one of the most notable players in ad blocking is German firm Eyeo, the makers of AdBlock Plus, whose software is dominating the space and stil … | Continue reading
Some exciting news from the John McAfee camp today: America’s favorite (and most entertaining) cybersecurity expert has a new gig! MGT Capital Investments, a publicly traded company that owns and operates social gaming apps, has announced the appointment of John McAfee as Executi … | Continue reading
All the energy for venture funds flows from LPs — the money goes from LPs to partners at funds, which in turn invest in startups. But since the number of IPOs and exits has started to dry up, the pressure is starting to rise on LPs, and Venture Investment Associates’ Chris Douvos … | Continue reading