It’s easy to see a rainbow when it’s in the distance, but more difficult to discern when you are in its midst. Though it’s still early days, we’re now in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution. Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, says the impending “tran … | Continue reading
One of the big challenges with crowdfunding is that once the campaign ends, most crowdfunding platforms wash their hands of the process from there on. FwdForce does things differently. It lets anybody submit a pitch for a product they want, and establishes checks and balances to … | Continue reading
I’ll be honest: I was kind of nervous about this one. In the run-up to this weekend’s release of Captain America: Civil War, I’d seen some fond recollections of the decade-old comic book (written by Mark Millar and pencilled by Steve McNiven) that the movie is based on, but here’ … | Continue reading
Hard to believe that Disrupt NY is just around the corner! TechCrunch has partnered with an amazing array of sponsors who promise to make your experience at the conference better and better.Official Event App: Download the newest version of the official Disrupt app to connect and … | Continue reading
“But among them was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a steel sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eyehole through which he could look, and welded to that eyehole were six feet of pipe… He was also strapped to a steel lattice which was bolted to … | Continue reading
Want to go party the night away but not sure where to go? Bar Roulette’s brand new iOS app has you covered. Press a button to summon an Uber, and it will take you to a bar picked from the highest-rated bars on Yelp and Foursquare. The twist? The app won’t tell you where you are g … | Continue reading
West Ham United has become the first football team in the UK to embrace e-sports after the club signed pro gamer and World Cup runner-up Sean Allen, aka Dragonn. Read More | Continue reading
“For our group it’s become an interesting case study in how quickly a group can mobilize in the face of an outbreak,” Dr. James Collins explains over the phone. The MIT biomedical engineering professor has been fielding press inquiries all day, in light of a newly published paper … | Continue reading
Today’s mapping applications are focused on helping you navigate to one spot to the next, or discovering the businesses around you. But they tend to be utilitarian in nature, and not what anyone would describe as “fun” to use. A new mapping application called Relay changes that. … | Continue reading
Gillmor Gang – Dan Farber, John Taschek, Keith Teare, Robert Scoble, and Steve Gillmor. LIVE recording session today at 1pmPT/4pmET.Our live chat stream during the show broadcastGillmor Gang’s Facebook page HEREG3’s archive on ustreamG3’s Facebook page HERE Read More | Continue reading
Many people scoffed in January 2014 when Cisco CEO John Chambers pegged the “Internet of Everything” as a potential $17 trillion market, five to 10 times more impactful on society than the Internet itself. Two years later, it seems that Chambers’ prediction for the phenomenon mor … | Continue reading
Chinese tech giant Lenovo is investing $500 million in startups after it announced a new fund. Read More | Continue reading
In the list of things that we want science to solve I suspect the creation of a wireless 5.1 speaker system that is easy to use and set up ranks up there in between a cure for shingles and the colonization of Mars. Thankfully, there are people on the job.Enclave Audio has been wo … | Continue reading
The first thing you do upon developing a flexible holographic smartphone display? Fire up a game of Angry Birds, naturally. All the rest of that smartphone functionality can wait until you’ve finished a few rounds of slingshotting avian missiles. Maybe not the first thing – but i … | Continue reading
Musical.ly, the app that makes it easy to create music videos, is in the process of raising about $100 million in funding, at around a $500 million post-money valuation, TechCrunch has learned. The details are still being finalized, but the plan is for GGV Capital and Qiming Vent … | Continue reading
TechCrunch is gearing up for the Disrupt NY Hackathon and conference. This week, the battle between Brazilian authorities and WhatsApp continued, Tesla shared details about how effective its bioweapon mode is, and Uber got hit with another lawsuit. Here are the stories you don’t … | Continue reading
These days, you can’t swing a bag of cats around without hitting some sort of social influencer. But how do these people make money from their content? RewardStyle, a Dallas-based startup, provides a platform for influencers and bloggers to get paid for all the sales they inspire … | Continue reading
Taxi app Uber, which continues to battle regulatory clamp downs and legal confrontations in Europe, has appointed a former VP of the European Union’s executive arm, the European Commission, to its public policy advisory board as it looks to grease the gearbox of its regional fort … | Continue reading
Communities of color don’t have the luxury of such complacency. For too long, unwarranted and unconstitutional surveillance has targeted the most vulnerable Americans — people of color, immigrants, welfare recipients, and political activists who challenge the status quo. Read Mor … | Continue reading
The tech geeks are coming to government. Whether they’re in our cities as Code for America volunteers or part of the federal U.S. Digital Service and 18F, programmers, data scientists and UX designers are starting to find their place in the public sector. This is a good thing. Th … | Continue reading
Google today announced that it is bringing some of its Google Cloud Platform and Google Apps tools a little bit closer together. BigQuery, Google’s serverless analytics data warehousing service, will now be able to read files from Google Drive and access spreadsheets from Google … | Continue reading
Hello startup friends! The TechCrunch team had a great idea — the summer is right around the corner, so we’re going to celebrate Nordic startups with a Meetup + Pitch-Off in Stockholm for the first time ever on June 7. “What a great idea, how do I get involved?” you’re probably t … | Continue reading
Can two wearables be better than one? Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) will be presenting some new research next week in which they demonstrate a technique aimed at extending the available screen space for smartwatch wearers by adding an ad … | Continue reading
I used to answer ever message. Not any more. When Messenger buzzes, now I don’t know if it will be a friend or a bot. Every chime forces me to do a little Turing test in my head. Was I expecting to be pinged by a pal? Or is it 8:11pm again and TechCrunch’s bot is sending me anoth … | Continue reading
The TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon kicks off tomorrow, and we’re honored to welcome the hackathon’s stellar judges. Read More | Continue reading
Amy Ogan, an educational technologist at Carnegie Mellon University, calls herself a “CMU lifer” and for good reason. She nabbed both her undergraduate degree and Ph.D from the school. For the last couple of years, she has also worked at the university as an assistant professor, … | Continue reading
Amazon’s game streaming service Twitch is getting more social. The new “Friends” feature teased in April has now launched into beta, allowing users to search for, add, and view a list of friends, see when they’re online, and easily chat with them. The company says it has sent out … | Continue reading
Swedish edtech startup DigiExam, which also has offices in the U.S. and U.K., offers software-as-a-service for academic testing and grading. It enables students to take tests digitally and in turn teachers to grade the results more efficiently. Read More | Continue reading
A new mobile application called Earny has launched with the goal of getting you your money back. That is, the app connects with your email and Amazon accounts in order to track your online purchases and find your e-receipts, then price check those items to see if you got the best … | Continue reading
Alibaba has broken the seal on its startup fund for Hong Kong after it backed its first three companies in undisclosed deals. The companies are unsurprisingly in the e-commerce space: Yeechoo is online fashion store focused on renting not buying, Shopline helps online sellers use … | Continue reading
Amid news that Apple Music is getting a makeover come this summer, Apple today launched a new plan to boost subscribers to its streaming music service and competitor to Spotify, SoundCloud, Tidal and others. It’s introducing an Apple Music student plan which will discount the ser … | Continue reading
SpaceX successfully launched the Japanese communications satellite, JCSAT-14 on their Falcon 9 rocket at 1:22am EST today from Cape Canaveral, Florida. After the launch, the company soft-landed the first stage of the rocket on their drone ship “Of Course I Still Love You” – the s … | Continue reading
The eight-year-old, New York-based venture firm ff Venture Capital, has raised roughly $53.8 million for its fourth seed-stage venture fund, according to an SEC filing that shows fundraising began in the fall of 2014. The firm had closed its third seed-stage fund fund in January … | Continue reading
So, I’m sitting aboard a flight to Boston at the moment. I just finished a bout of midterms at Northwestern University that allegedly went well enough for me to make it through undergrad. I have an $8 beer in my hand that Spirit Airlines is using to subsidize their garbage servic … | Continue reading
“The key was to create an instrument for all children,” explains Skoog co-inventor Dr. Ben Schögler. “That includes kids with disabilities, whether physical or learning disabilities. It was made to be an inclusive instrument, because musical instruments are beautiful, they’re fan … | Continue reading
In late January, Nature magazine announced that a computer designed by Google’s DeepMind defeated a human master in the ancient Chinese board game, “Go.” This impressive achievement once again raised the expectations for a predicted future in which computers will have artificial … | Continue reading
It takes some serious engineering magic to build low-latency group mobile video chat and simultaneous content viewing. That’s why Sean Parker’s recently relaunched video chat room app Airtime acquired vLine, which offered video chat infrastructure to SaaS companies. Founded in 20 … | Continue reading
SAP announced a broad partnership with Apple today to bring iOS to SAP’s enterprise customer base. The announcement comes almost two years after Apple made a similar deal with IBM. As with IBM, SAP hopes to take Apple’s design sense and marry it to the enterprise capabilities of … | Continue reading
You may remember Launcher as the once-banned iOS widget which Apple booted from the App Store after its approval, then months later allowed back in. The problem Apple had with the app, seemingly, is that its sole existence was to be a widget provider – the app by itself didn’t of … | Continue reading
Anything is possible if we all work together — and no one gets left behind. That is the lesson these tiny “VelociRoACH” robots taught me today. Read More | Continue reading
Imagine for a moment that you’re a fly on the wall of a Samsung executive board meeting. It’s pretty easy to imagine why the Family Hub Refrigerator seemed like a great idea. Someone probably said something about leveraging the smart home and disrupting the kitchen and they were … | Continue reading
Quizlet, the makers of popular web and mobile study tools, hired a new CEO, Matt Glotzbach, former Vice President of Product Management at YouTube. Glotzbach led the creation of YouTube’s music subscription service, and fan-funding business platforms. But Quizlet will not be his … | Continue reading
TrapTap, which has raised over $200,000 on Kickstarter with about a week to go, alerts drivers to speed traps, school zones, speed zones, and red light cameras by blinking red, green, or blue. But it’s not a radar detector; it’s more like connected car training wheels. TrapTap sa … | Continue reading
eBay announced today that it is acquiring Expertmaker, a Swedish company that specializes in analysis of big data with a machine-learning twist. Read More | Continue reading
Amazon has hired Xerox PARC employee and AI researcher Ashwin Ram to head up R&D for Alexa, the e-commerce behemoth’s AI-driven virtual assistant. Ram first tweeted about his appointment on Tuesday, and a spokesperson for Amazon has now confirmed the hire but declined to offer an … | Continue reading
It’s easy to move your money between banks. What’s annoying is moving your apps.There’s been a recent explosion of fintech products in spaces like stock trading, wealth management, payments, loans, remittance and insurance. It’s been fueled by a massive uptick in venture investme … | Continue reading
Via bills itself as an ‘on-demand transit company’ and in some ways is competing with Uber, specifically within the city carpooling space. Today the company announced $100 million in Series C funding, when actually only $70 million of that has closed, with, we’re told, another $3 … | Continue reading
Netflix announced this morning a new way for consumers to control how much data its app uses when they’re accessing the service by way of a mobile device. In the updated version of the iOS or Android application, there will be a new setting called “Cellular Data Usage,” where you … | Continue reading