Digital content is one of the most consumed “goods” in the online marketplace. However, buyers and sellers still can’t seem to agree on a fair price for these goods. Read More | Continue reading
SigFox, the French startup that is building dedicated cellular networks for Internet of Things objects from connected smoke alarms and refrigerators to interactive billboards, traffic systems and factory robots, has announced a big move into the U.S. market. The company said that … | Continue reading
Beginning life as a Kickstarter campaign back in 2014, the team at Roost found a compelling, low-cost backdoor into the world of smart smoke alarms dominated by the team at Nest. Roel Peeters and James Blackwell, both formerly of Wi-Fi chip maker Ozmo, applied their Wi-Fi know-ho … | Continue reading
Club W, a wine club startup based in Los Angeles, is rebranding as Winc. The team has also raised an additional $17.5 million in funding co-led by the Beijing-based Shining Capital and existing investor Bessemer Venture Partners. Originally just an online marketplace, the company … | Continue reading
VTS, a commercial leasing and asset management platforms for landlords and brokerages, today announced that it has raised a $55 million Series C funding round led by Insight Venture Partners. Previous investors OpenView and Trinity Ventures also participated. This round brings VT … | Continue reading
Choosing this year’s Disrupt NY Startup Battlefield winners will be a tough job. There is an exceptionally strong and unique group of young companies competing in Startup Battlefield next week with 20 companies showcasing their innovative solutions to solving important and critic … | Continue reading
Amidst the seeming chaos of social media, brands need the ability to discover valuable social media content, the metrics and visualize it. At the same time they need to build and launch campaigns, collect all the data, and use it in CRM and marketing platforms. It’s a tall order … | Continue reading
Charge is a new mobile internet provider who aims squarely at the generation of people who prefer to tap on their mobile devices rather than talk into them. Next week, the company is launching a $10 per month SMS-and-data plan, and a $20 per month plan that adds unlimited voice, … | Continue reading
I first saw the ROLI Seaboard GRAND backstage at a show during SXSW 2013. Someone had tipped me that some startup was showing off a strange new piano that let the player bend its keys like a guitar string. It was strange and rubbery and fascinating — a silicone piano that made it … | Continue reading
Passport Inc. raised $8 million in a Series B round of funding to help cities make parking and transportation systems easier for people to use, and harder for them to abuse.MK Capital led the investment in Passport, joined by Grotech Ventures and Relevance Capital. The new round … | Continue reading
The problem with most holiday search engines is that accessibility features are either listed in terms too generic to be entirely reliable or useful, or not listed at all. Enter U.K. startup Accomable, which is setting out to become the ‘Airbnb for the mobility sector’ or perhaps … | Continue reading
New data has suggested that Ola, the $5 billion valued taxi on-demand service, may be more than twice as large as Uber in India. Read More | Continue reading
Opera looks to be throwing the ad industry a bit of a bone on the ad-blocking front by saying it wants to work with the IAB on a standardization effort around so-called Lean ads, perhaps with a view to whitelisting these ads in future. Read More | Continue reading
Opera today announced that its built-in ad blocker, which was previously only available in the experimental developer release channel, is now coming to all of its desktop users. In addition, it is now also bringing this same feature to mobile, starting with Opera Mini for Android … | Continue reading
Quantum computing is still very much in the early research stage, but IBM is hoping to accelerate the progress around it by making a quantum computer available to researchers as a cloud service. It is a bold and ambitious idea, although still very much a small step in trying to u … | Continue reading
Astronomers are getting closer to finding Earth’s twin in the universe. NASA announced that three planets with sizes and temperatures similar to Earth and Venus have been discovered orbiting around an ultra-cool dwarf star 40 light-years from Earth. While astronomers believe ther … | Continue reading
Asia-Pacific leads the global digital infrastructure as home to half of the world’s mobile phone subscribers and the largest number of wireless Internet connections. However, the region also has historically attracted less than one-third of global mobile marketing spend — making … | Continue reading
If you need (or just want) to get out of the lease on your apartment, a startup called Flip can help you do it — and you might even make money in the process. The company launched back in December, and now it’s joining as the “anchor startup” for the second class at MetaProp NYC, … | Continue reading
Access to WhatsApp has been restored in Brazil, roughly 24 hours after telecom providers began blocking the messaging app in response to a court order. A judge in the Brazilian state of Sergipe ordered local phone carriers to block access to WhatsApp for 72 hours, but his ruling … | Continue reading
There’s a lot to like about Google’s own self-driving cars, but if you’ve got kids, you’d need a fleet just to get them to the soccer game and back. That, presumably, is why the Google initiative’s first direct collaboration with an automaker will automate a nice, roomy new Pacif … | Continue reading
Another day, another confirmation that the shadowy figure called Satoshi Nakamoto is indeed Craig “Verbal” Wright. This time Wright himself claims that he will offer “extraordinary proof” that he is Satoshi. This means, we can assume, he will sign messages using Satoshi’s private … | Continue reading
With the exponential growth in technology, the world has seen not only profound change in various industries, but also a fundamental shift in the structure to our global society. To unwrap this bit of jargon, let’s look at the intersection of human rights and technology. The fund … | Continue reading
Adobe today announced that it plans to acquire Livefyre, the service that’s probably best known for its online commenting system. On top of this service, the company also offers a number of tools for brands to engage with their audiences as well, which is likely what Adobe was mo … | Continue reading
Bowers & Wilkins, an audio gear brand that has been familiar to millions for decades, is being bought out by EVA Automation, a two-year-old company that has never released a product. Yet the old company’s name and CEO will remain. You’re not going to hear about a weirder deal tod … | Continue reading
The local transit app Moovit announced today that it will soon be integrated with the ride-sharing app Uber in 131 cities in 22 countries. This is kind of the chocolate and peanut butter of urban travel. Moovit uses official transit data plus crowdsourced data to give riders the … | Continue reading
Prete is a new blowout startup launching today in San Francisco and Los Angeles that wants to hook you up with unlimited hair styling. No cuts, color or anything else, just as many blowouts as you want for $129 a month. Some of you may recall a story I wrote about a similar blowo … | Continue reading
Google today made HTTPS connections the default for all of the sites on its Blogspot domain. Google first enabled HTTPS for Blogspot last September, but at the time, it was an opt-in feature. Starting today, encrypted connections are enabled by default. It’s worth noting that thi … | Continue reading
Spotify is one of the more popular music streaming apps, but it’s not necessarily the most beautifully designed (that was long-lost Rdio, unfortunately). Navigating through the various sections of its app took a lot of tapping, and often wasn’t very intuitive. Today, Spotify is a … | Continue reading
Disrupt NY is right around the corner. The event starts on May 9th and we’re delighted to reveal the agenda. The lineup is stellar and for the first time, we will be hosting Disrupt NY in Red Hook, Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal. We say this every year, but this is set … | Continue reading
Despite the headlines today, Uber says it does not have plans to nix surge pricing in the U.S. It did away with surge in Dehli, India, but has now reinstated the feature there as well. An earlier report from NPR claimed Uber would be doing away with surge, a feature on the Uber a … | Continue reading
What’s more lucrative than a video ad? Multiple videos in a single ad. To help businesses show different sides of their products in vivid motion, today Instagram is launching video ad carousels. It’s a savvy way for the company to give advertisers more flexibility through horizon … | Continue reading
Designer Fund, a San Francisco outfit that looks to invest in seed-stage startups that feature designers on their founding teams, has raised $20 million in funding from unnamed individual investors, most of them successful designers looking to support the next generation. The fou … | Continue reading
The makers of a virtual nutritionist app, PlateJoy, have partnered with Instacart to offer same-day delivery of the foods that they recommended to users through the PlateJoy app A subscription to PlateJoy costs $59 for six months. Users get food recommendations for themselves and … | Continue reading
A giant war room of diversity advocates in Silicon Valley has formed under the name Project Include. The effort consists of former Reddit interim CEO Ellen Pao, Pinterest engineer Tracy Chou, Kapor Capital Partner Freada Kapor Klein, Slack engineer Erica Baker, ReadySet founder Y … | Continue reading
Microsoft today announced that it has acquired Solair, an Italy-based IoT service that was founded in 2011 (and not the U.S.-based company that makes retractable awnings). Solair already used Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform to offer its services, so it’s no surprise th … | Continue reading
Some startups raise a lot of money with much fanfare before they’ve ever shipped a product, but some grow under the radar, building something that clicks, and then slowly amassing users and revenues before most even realise they’ve arrived. Now, one of the latter — an education s … | Continue reading
While there are a number of mobile apps that serve as a panic button of sorts – alerting friends or family when you feel you’re in danger – last year’s TechCrunch Disrupt NY hackathon winner Witness resonated with the event’s audience because it also promised a way to discreetly … | Continue reading
This year’s TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon is set to be the best yet. We’re a week away from the main event and are giddy with excitement.Throughout the week, we’ll be releasing information about the event, and we figured where better to start than with details about spectator t … | Continue reading
A Brazilian judge has denied an injunction against a countrywide ban filed by messaging app WhatsApp, according to local media reports. Read More | Continue reading
Twitter has announced a new feature designed to make it easier for users to find interesting and relevant accounts to follow on its service: a new “Connect” tab. Available on both iOS and Android, the tab combines the ability to find friends and family from your phone’s Contact l … | Continue reading
It’s that time again. TechCrunch is headed to Austin and Seattle for the 2016 TC Meetup + Pitch-off. If you were looking to pitch your startup to the TechCrunch team, local VCs and your local community, this is the moment you’ve been waiting for. Ten companies will be selected to … | Continue reading
Electricity is ambient. It’s all around us. We turn on lights and plug in devices without even thinking about the complex electrical grid that supplies us with juice at will. It’s become a necessary infrastructure that will never go away — but it’s only the bottom of the stack. T … | Continue reading
Twilio, the cloud-based communications platform, announced today that it is partnering with Virgil Security to enable developers to build strong encryption into their messaging services. Just like Twilio lets developers easily add text messaging, voice calls and chat to their app … | Continue reading
Perhaps you missed the excitement in amongst the deluge of gadget news that is the International Consumer Electronics Show, but back in January Chinese handset maker Huawei introduced this pair of strange specimens. The incredibly unsubtly named Elegant and Jewel are the company’ … | Continue reading
With all of Giphy’s integrations with chat platforms, it was only a matter of time before the betaworks-backed GIF platform launched its own keyboard. World, welcome Giphy Keys into the mix. The Giphy Keys third-party keyboard launches on iOS today, and lets users send GIFs from … | Continue reading
GoPro is going more mobile. Today the company announced two new mobile apps — one creates GoPro-ish videos automatically and the other gives the user more control. Both are free and both are welcomed additions to the GoPro ecosystem. These apps might sound familiar. Earlier this … | Continue reading
Postmates to date has scored deals with a number of high-profile retailers and restaurants, including Apple, Walgreens, Starbucks, Chipotle, and 7-Eleven. Today, it’s expanding its reach again via a partnership that will bring a number of smaller businesses – even down to mom-and … | Continue reading
If you listened carefully to business news last week you could hear the sound of a giant tree falling in a quiet forest. It happened when Rovi bought TiVo for $1.1 billion. It was a merger of convenience, a way for TiVo to get out of its slump and die a gracefully without much sh … | Continue reading