Let’s be honest, most concept videos suck. They show you an imaginary device that looks nothing like the final product and defy the laws of physics. But some software concept videos tick all the right boxes, like this one from MacStories.Federico Viticci and Sam Beckett teamed up … | Continue reading
Amazon made waves last year when it introduced a $50 Fire tablet that was actually a fairly decent device for the price. Today, the company is rolling out a middle-of-road option for those who want a bit more storage, but who still aren’t interested in paying for the higher-end F … | Continue reading
The online advertising industry continued a six-year streak of double digit growth, according to a new report prepared by PwC US for the Interactive Advertising Bureau.The report found that digital ad revenue in the United States reached $59.6 billion in 2015, a 20 percent increa … | Continue reading
Google says it will soon add live TV listings to its search engine, allowing web users to find out when their favorite shows or movies will be airing. But in a nod to the many non-traditional ways that consumers watch TV today, the company says that it will also display the apps … | Continue reading
A comprehensive study of Brits’ usage of and attitudes to digital media, conducted annually by telecoms watchdog Ofcom, suggests there is growing concern among web and app users about the privacy of their personal data. Read More | Continue reading
Nonprofit research organization SRI International is spinning off part of its robotics division into a new company called Superflex. It won’t be focusing not on industrial robots or the like, but rather robotic augmentations for people — mainly to help the disabled take on everyd … | Continue reading
Brayola, the service that helps women find the perfect-fitting bra, has today announced the close of a $2.5 million Series A round. Investors include Haim Dabah of HDS Capital and FirstTime Capital’s Jonathan Benartzi. The company is also unveiling its own marketplace, leveraging … | Continue reading
It’s a big day for Linguistics Departments across the English-speaking world, as Merriam Webster has just added more than 1,400 new words and phrases to the dictionary. Some newly defined words include ‘waggle dance’, ‘wacky tobacky’, and ‘hella’, which may lead you to believe th … | Continue reading
Everything seems to be going mobile these days, but the Product Hunt community actually uses their desktops more for finding and upvoting products they find online says founder Ryan Hoover. So to keep hunters happy, the Product Hunt team introduced a new Mac desktop app today. Th … | Continue reading
Luxury consignment site The RealReal, which focuses on authenticated, high-end resale items for women, men, and the home, announced this morning it has raised an additional $40 million in Series E financing. The round, led by Greenspring Associates, comes on top of a $40 million … | Continue reading
The Disrupt NY Hackathon at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal is so close we can almost taste the greasy pizza and beer. The best Hackathon in the Big Apple is just over two weeks away, and we’re thrilled to announce that the next wave of free tickets to the Hackathon is available now … | Continue reading
In “Silicon Valley’s Unchecked Arrogance,” Ross Baird and Lenny Mendonca boldly ask an important question that’s becoming a white elephant in the Silicon Valley pitch room: How can we enable great people, regardless of zip code, to solve messy societal problems? To get to an answ … | Continue reading
Last summer we reviewed Aces, the in-app concierge service from HotelTonight. And while we enjoyed using the service, our main gripe was that it was limited to just five cities, and even there it was only limited to select users. But today that changes, as HotelTonight has announ … | Continue reading
In-memory database platform MemSQL today announced that it has raised a $36 million Series C funding round. The round was led by new investors REV and Caffeinated Capital and existing investors Accel Partners, Khosla Ventures, Data Collective, IA Ventures and First Round Capital … | Continue reading
Privacy campaign group Privacy International says documents it has obtained through a legal challenge to the UK security agencies data-harvesting practices illustrate the extent to which spies have systematically and secretly amassed a cache of data on UK citizens for the past 15 … | Continue reading
Preempt Security, a startup still in stealth, came out of hiding today enough to announce an $8 million Series A round. Beyond that we know only a limited amount about what makes them worth such an investment. The round was led by General Catalyst with participation from Mickey B … | Continue reading
No word on Yahoo from Verizon, one of the strong contenders to buy the troubled Internet giant, but today the carrier (which now owns TechCrunch) reported its own mixed earnings for Q1. Dragged by worse sales in wireless, the company posted total revenues of $32.2 billion and ear … | Continue reading
Fraud prevention company Forter today announced a $32m series C funding led by Scale Venture Partners and with follow-on funding from Sequoia and NEA. The company uses its Decision as a Service algorithms to help online retailers analyze their exposure to fraud at the time of che … | Continue reading
Online custom framing company Framebridge is continuing to take its market square on and is expanding growth with a Series B round of investment announced today. NEA and Revolution are back for a follow-up round, while SWaN & Legend Venture Partners are new in the picture for thi … | Continue reading
When I met Aydin Senkut in 2006, it was just months after he’d resigned from Google, where he was a senior manager responsible for strategic partner development in Asia Pacific. He was among a small number of “Googlaires” who had lots of money, great connections, and the ability … | Continue reading
China’s biggest travel booking sites are quite literally taking to the skies. Fresh on the heels of Qunar’s plan to launch an airline alongside unnamed partners, Ctrip has announced a 3 billion CNY ($460 million) investment in China Eastern Airlines, a state-run airline that clai … | Continue reading
It looks like Sony is finally gearing up to add two-factor authentication to the PlayStation Network — some five years after a massive data breach compromised the details of millions of users, including potentially exposing users’ credit card data. Read More | Continue reading
Acorns, the investing app, is announcing a $30 million strategic investment from PayPal, with participation from the Rakuten Tech Fund. This brings the team’s total funding to $62 million. With 850,000 active investment accounts, Acorns works by rounding up purchases and investin … | Continue reading
Belgium’s Tricount offers an app to help groups of friends or couples share and settle expenses, and counts the likes of Splitwise, and Splittable as competitors. Read More | Continue reading
Another day, another new European VC fund. This time it’s the turn of London-based Backed VC, which today is officially outing its €30 million pan-European seed-stage fund, although it’s been active since last year and has already made several investments. The aim, founding partn … | Continue reading
Slowly but surely, French startup Le Wagon is becoming a leading coding bootcamp in Europe. Not only the company is executing quickly and expanding to a bunch of new cities, but Le Wagon is also refining its approach to coding bootcamps by using technology as much as possible. Le … | Continue reading
When Opera acquired the virtual private network (VPN) service SurfEasy last March, it obviously did so to build that technology into its browser and maybe its Opera Max data-savings app. It took more than a year, but now Opera is actually launching a built-in version of SurfEasy … | Continue reading
Question and answer site Quora has made its first push to monetize after it added advertising. Read More | Continue reading
Zalora, the fashion-focused e-commerce site backed by Rocket Internet that’s in the process of selling off two of its 11 country businesses in Asia, has lost two key executives, TechCrunch understands. Read More | Continue reading
A federal judge ruled today that the FBI did not obtain the proper warrant before hacking a child porn website and that the evidence it collected against one of the defendants, Alex Levin, must be suppressed. The case centers on a child porn site called Playpen, which was hosted … | Continue reading
What if I told you that you can strengthen your own core while liquid cooling your PCs? That’s the dream, right? Better still, you can accomplish all of that in a single product — which is precisely the sort of innovation one has come to expect from a computer accessory manufactu … | Continue reading
A search engine that lets travelers find and book a stay in non-hotel lodgings, Tripping.com, has detected a burgeoning “budbnb” trend in Colorado. San Francisco-based Tripping.com aggregates vacation rental listings from the likes of HomeAway, Booking.com, VRBO and other sites, … | Continue reading
Billion-dollar customer insight startup Qualtrics hopes to recruit top Silicon Valley talent to its home base in Utah as it continues to grow and part of that strategy involves adding professional tech coach Kim Scott to the board of directors. Qualtrics become one of a handful o … | Continue reading
After years of VC exuberance, 2015 marked the end of an investment cycle for the adtech industry. Quite a few companies with high valuations stumbled, downsized, restructured and pivoted in order to achieve, or at least progress on a path toward, sustainable profitability. Yet, d … | Continue reading
To achieve market scale along the lines of GoPro and FitBit, effectively working with big retailers is a necessary part of the process. Despite the growth of online channels, over 90% of the $200B U.S. consumer electronics sales still comes from brick and mortar stores. Read More | Continue reading
My kids don’t turn off the damn lights. Ever. And now, with Curb, I have a new way to see when they leave on their lights. All I have to do is look at an app. This is the future of parenting — and, well, energy monitoring. Curb is a comprehensive household energy monitoring syste … | Continue reading
The celebrity gossip and news startup The Shade Room is back on Facebook, the startup announced today, albeit under a new moniker. It’s previous page, which had racked up over 4 million followers was “facebook.com/theshaderoom” and the new profile is “facebook.com/shaderoominc.” … | Continue reading
Messaging app Viber rolled out its own end-to-end encryption update yesterday, following in the footsteps of its competitor, WhatsApp, and allowing users to keep their calls and messages private. But researchers are questioning whether Viber’s messages are really as secure as the … | Continue reading
Mindie does with soundtracks what Instagram did with filters: it makes boring imagery interesting. And with the insane amount of video that teens are sharing, the music video making app seemed too useful to die when its creators shut down Mindie in December. So Mindie’s technolog … | Continue reading
Rolltape is a voice messaging app that’s supposed to help you share personal, emotional moments with friends. Now, with the launch of Rolltape Radio, it can help you share those stories on a broader scale. The change is pretty straightforward. Previously, Rolltape messages (which … | Continue reading
Michael Arrington — who famously cofounded TechCrunch in 2005 and just as famously parted ways with the outlet in 2011, one year after selling it to AOL — is now taking on a reduced role at the venture fund that he cofounded when he left TC. After an SEC filing surfaced earlier t … | Continue reading
After more than 60 years since its conceptual inception — and after too many hype-generating moments — AI is yet again making its presence felt in mainstream media. Following a recent WEF report, many perceive AI as a threat to our jobs, while others even go so far to assert that … | Continue reading
Captiv8 announced today that it has raised $2 million in seed funding.Created by the founders of mobile ad exchange Moblix, Captiv8 is one of a number of companies connecting marketers with influencers on social platforms like Instagram and Twitter.However, the startup says it us … | Continue reading
The Zeitgeist electric bike was designed to solve one problem: getting uphill on a bike. That led to other goals, like creating a battery that only had to be charged every two weeks and was hidden within the structure of the bike. This, then, led to favoring design and performanc … | Continue reading
Jump on the party line or hear the voices of your whole family with Facebook Messenger’s latest feature. Rolling out globally over the next 24 hours on Android and iOS for free, users can start a group VoIP audio call from any group chat. Just tap the Phone icon, select which of … | Continue reading
If Apple really is working on a car, it won’t be the Ultimate Driving Machine™. BMW and Daimler have discontinued talks with Apple over a potential automotive collaboration, Handelsblatt reports. Read More | Continue reading
The Huffington Post, owned by AOL, owned by Verizon, is buying a virtual reality studio called RYOT to build VR content production on the site according to a blog post from site co-founder and editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington. The studio will also be providing their services to … | Continue reading
Keep, Google’s note-taking service, is getting an update today that introduces support for hashtag-style labels and an update Chrome extension that will make it easier to save links to sites and add notes right from the browser. None of these updates are revolutionary, but they a … | Continue reading