Azure Media Services, Microsoft’s collection of cloud-based tools for video workflows, is about to get a lot smarter. As the company announced at the annual NAB show in Las Vegas today, Media Services will now make use of some of the tools Microsoft developed for its machine lear … | Continue reading
The ink is barely dry on Alibaba’s billion dollar investment in Southeast Asia’s Lazada, but already we have news of another Rocket Internet divestment. Zalora, Rocket Internet’s fashion-focused site that raised over $250 million and was once on an equal footing with $1.5 billion … | Continue reading
Announcing our very first Meetup + Pitch-off in Stockholm and Berlin! We’ll be doing some amazing drinking, some amazing pitching, and some amazing networking. We’ll all have a blast. Tickets will be on sale soon. Sign up for our newsletter via the links below to be notified when … | Continue reading
Hitch — not to be confused with the dating app of the same name — is a new product from the team behind API Changelog and plays in roughly the same space. It promises to offer Software-as-a-Service to help API owners manage and grow their API community, either internally or exter … | Continue reading
What if your reflection in the mirror could tell you to get your lazy butt back to the gym? We have the technology. A San Francisco startup called Naked Labs began taking preorders for its 3-D body scanning system today. CEO and co-founder Farhad Farahbakhshian says the company’s … | Continue reading
It’s 1997. An IBM computer named Deep Blue defeats reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov. It was viewed as a milestone for AI, the true arrival of computer intelligence. The world celebrated the achievement of technology — or offered doomsday predictions of a robot revolut … | Continue reading
Alexis Maybank, one of the founders of Gilt Groupe (recently acquired by the owner of Saks Fifth Avenue), has a new startup in the world of fashion and shopping — Project September. Maybank told me her aim is to “make the visual world shoppable.” In other words, if you see a phot … | Continue reading
EdCast, the online and mobile platform for distributing educational content from a network of industry experts, has raised $16 million in its latest round of funding. Led by G.E. Asset Management, an investment arm of one of EdCast’s existing customers, the new round will be used … | Continue reading
Bots seem to be all the rage this week, thanks to the release of Facebook’s Messenger Bot program at F8, but not everyone sees bots as the way to keep up with the customer service glut. DigitalGenius, a former TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield finalist, thinks there’s a better way u … | Continue reading
Most integrated development environments (IDEs) and text editors are full of useful features, but, for the most part, they aren’t connected to the Internet. Because of this, developers often have to switch context to Google the solution to a problem or look at a language’s manual … | Continue reading
The final vote on reforms to Europe’s data protection laws has just taken place in the European Parliament, with MEPs agreeing the new data protection directive — bringing to a close some four years of work to update existing legislation which dates back to 1995. Read More | Continue reading
Barcelona has just clocked up its biggest ever exit — albeit the price-tag on the sale of veteran Spanish ecommerce player Privalia, headquartered in the city, to France’s Ventee-Privee has not been disclosed. Recent rumors swirling about a possible exit for Privalia pegged the p … | Continue reading
Many of Google’s services are blocked in China, but the company is still finding ways of maintaining ties with startups there. Today People Squared, which runs tech hubs in Beijing and Shanghai, announced that it has joined the Google for Entrepreneurs program. That means it will … | Continue reading
We already know that Alibaba’s decision to invest $1 billion to buy a controlling stake in Lazada, the Southeast Asia-based e-commerce firm started by Rocket Internet, was down to money since Lazada nearly ran out of cash. But now the situation has become all the more clear after … | Continue reading
The rise of on-demand startups and other fast-growing businesses like online marketplaces has created a need for reliable ways to verify new hires and customers to make sure they are cut out for the task. Onfido, one of the group of startups building software-based solutions to d … | Continue reading
EdCast, the online and mobile platform for distributing educational content from a network of industry experts, has raised $16 million in its latest round of funding. Led by G.E. Asset Management, an investment arm of one of EdCast’s existing customers, the new round will be used … | Continue reading
Through a new partnership announced this week, United Launch Alliance (ULA) will work with Bigelow Aerospace to launch a large inflatable habitat on an Atlas V rocket in 2020. The size of the habitat will be based off of Bigelow’s B330 module, which is named for its total expande … | Continue reading
Between the current advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and the future, completely autonomous car rests in some potentially treacherous semi-autonomous territory. Renault has enlisted the help of gesture-control experts at gestigon to help ease the transition from vehicles … | Continue reading
The President has just released the list of appointees to the Committee on Enhancing National Cybersecurity — and it’s more or less what you’d expect: higher-ups from the big players in tech, plus some academics and the former director of the NSA. Wait, what? Read More | Continue reading
Despite the objections of many privacy advocates and security professionals, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) is now the law of the land. Slipped into the 2016 federal omnibus spending bill, CISA permits private entities to share information about cyberthreat indi … | Continue reading
Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein released the official version of their anti-encryption bill today after a draft appeared online last week. The bill, titled the Compliance with Court Orders Act 2016, would require tech firms to decrypt customers’ data at a court’s reque … | Continue reading
After separating from eBay, PayPal has been on a march to grow both its international business and transactions beyond basic e-commerce, and today it is taking a step to do both, with the UK launch of PayPal Credit — a service that lets consumers use their PayPal accounts to spre … | Continue reading
Facebook debuted chatbots for Messenger this week to much fanfare, promising consumers a new way to interact with their favorite businesses over the company’s popular messaging service. The idea is that Messenger users could simply “chat” with these automated software programs to … | Continue reading
Wearables may be the next big thing, but what about the wearables we already wear? Integrating electronics into everyday clothes is still some distance off, but researchers at Ohio State University have taken an important step: weaving circuits into clothes with enough precision … | Continue reading
The sharing economy, which is sometimes referred to as collaborative consumption, has become a household term — at least in the tech industry — that signifies peer-to-peer exchanges through technology. “The fact that there are so many terms going around these things is almost a f … | Continue reading
Former Reuters journalist Matthew Keys was sentenced today to two years in prison on hacking charges. He faced a maximum sentence of 25 years. During his sentencing hearing, Keys tweeted, “This whole process has been exhausting.” Keys was convicted of violating the Computer Fraud … | Continue reading
Maybe you’ve delighted in reading some of Hillary Clinton’s more humorous emails, released in several stages over the past year — there’s the one where she calls Harriet Tubman her “home girl,” or the time she jokes about Chinese hackers messing with her contacts. But imagine som … | Continue reading
Vine, Twitter’s social network turned entertainment platform, is today announcing a new way to consume content on the app. The company is introducing a “Watch” button, which will let users watch a particular channel or account without needing to scroll. When a user presses the wa … | Continue reading
In an interview with Walt Mossberg, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said threaded messaging — perhaps one of the service’s most important missing components — is finally coming. Butterfield told Mossberg that Slack had been using threading internally for months while testing what t … | Continue reading
Theranos might find itself homeless in the next little bit. A federal agency plans to force founder Elizabeth Holmes out of her blood analysis startup for two years and take away the California lab’s federal license. First reported in the Wall Street Journal, the Centers for Medi … | Continue reading
Talent wars may never cease in Silicon Valley. Facebook today announced it has hired former Google Vice President of advanced technology and projects, Regina Dugan, to head up a new group dubbed Building 8. According to a company statement, Dr. Dugan’s department will combine R&D … | Continue reading
Longtime Apple industrial designer Danny Coster is joining GoPro. Coster had worked at Apple since the early 1990s, and helped Apple re-establish itself after Steve Jobs returned. Now he has to do that to GoPro. GoPro’s stock popped on the news and is trading up on the day. The n … | Continue reading
Facebook is making big strides in using its artificial intelligence systems for image recognition, but it’s also working on bringing this technology to video. As the company demoed at its F8 developer conference in San Francisco today, it has a team working on automatically taggi … | Continue reading
Developers, start your fastboots! Android N’s Developer Preview 2 is now live for OTA updates or manual flashing. This update brings a mixed bag of features and fixes. Read More | Continue reading
With the recent announcement of the Apple CareKit, an open-source platform to simplify the development of healthcare apps for iOS devices, it appears that the digital health industry is primed to become even more robust in 2016. As the convergence of healthcare and technology con … | Continue reading
Probably the most impressive of Facebook’s connectivity projects is its solar-powered Aquila drone for enabling Internet access in remote areas. But while the technology behind Aquila is impressive, more traditional terrestrial connectivity systems are often still more practical. … | Continue reading
Oculus wants to let you go anywhere in the world instantly and even take a photo while you’re there, and today it demoed how at F8. Facebook’s CTO Mike Schroepfer strapped into Oculus’s Toy Box social den. There, 360 photos will appear as handheld spheres you can rotate to look a … | Continue reading
React Native was originally developed by Facebook to allow its developers to take React, a framework for helping developers build single-page apps the company developed in-house, and allow them to use these same skills to build native mobile apps for iOS and Android. As the compa … | Continue reading
Google today announced the launch of version 0.8 of TensorFlow, its open source library for doing the hard computation work that makes machine learning possible. Normally, a small point update like this wouldn’t be all that interesting, but with this version, TensorFlow can now r … | Continue reading
The chatbot craze has claimed another victim. I mean, acquisition. Shopify, the makers of a popular platform used by over 243,000 businesses, from smaller online merchants to big names like Tesla and Budweiser, announced today it’s buying a startup called Kit CRM. The company hel … | Continue reading
Chatbots, Live video, and VR technology are all on the docket for Facebook’s F8 developer conference, and you can watch the livestream here at 9:30am PST with Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote starting at 10am. There’ll also be more streamed sessions all day today. Read More | Continue reading
New York Jets wide receiver Brandon Marshall paid a visit to Silicon Valley this week to explore opportunities and potential partnerships with tech companies around mental health issues. Part of the reason for his visit was because, in 2011, Marshall was diagnosed with borderline … | Continue reading
Maybe it’s the modern-day equivalent of endless channel-surfing — turning on Netflix or some other streaming video service, then going through page after page of movies and TV shows, never quite settling on what to watch next. It’s even worse when you add another person, or a who … | Continue reading
Poshmark, the site for buying and selling women’s fashion, has announced that it has raised $25 million in a round led by GGV Capital. Hans Tung, managing partner at GGV Capital is joining the company’s board of directors.Attracting 1.5 million sellers since its launch, Poshmark … | 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
Today Snapchat revealed its new 3D stickers that can be pinned to objects in a video and stick with them no matter how they or your camera move. Add an emoji face to your pet as it walks around, or give the moon sunglasses that grow with it as you zoom in. By bringing augmented r … | Continue reading
What does Facebook’s new chatbot platform mean for your business and the future of mobile? Find out at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, where Facebook Messenger’s head of product Stan Chudnovsky will offer insights on the next wave of messaging. Stan’s been in social since before Facebook … | Continue reading
VC Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz thinks it’s a lot harder to predict financial cycles than it is to see a new computing platform coming down the pike. As he noted in a recent post, new cycles tend to begin every 10 to 15 years; assuming the 2007 introduction of the iPhone ki … | Continue reading