Sling TV, the Dish-owned online streaming service that promises live TV via the internet, has been plagued with one serious problem since launch: you could only stream Sling TV to one device at a time. Today, the company is attempting to address that issue with the launch of a ne … | Continue reading
Climb Credit has launched with a $400 million loan facility to move student lending to an outcomes-based model. Read More | Continue reading
While Amazon, Google, and a number of startups like Instacart, Postmates, Shipt and others are focused on quick, same-day deliveries of groceries and household items, Walmart has been taking a different approach. It has instead tapped into its large brick-and-mortar footprint to … | Continue reading
Classpass made its name — and picked up 17 million reservations — around a services that let people take an unlimited number of fitness classes for a flat $100 monthly payment. Today, all of that is changing. See, Classpass functions based on the usage habits of their users. Folk … | Continue reading
How did you get into venture capital? And why did you decide on that versus another startup? These are two questions aspiring VCs often ask. While I usually hop on 15-30 minute calls with those looking to learn more, I thought it might be more impactful to share my experience her … | Continue reading
After raising $25 million in a Series C round of funding in October, civic technology specialist OpenGov — the startup co-founded by Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale that works with government organizations to collate, analyse and publicly present their data — today announced its first ac … | Continue reading
If you were under the impression that a new data transfer agreement had been locked down between Europe and the US — to restore legal confidence in commercial data flows across the Atlantic — think again. Read More | Continue reading
Even before the blockbuster acquisition of Cruise Automation by General Motors for more than $1 billion, venture firms were looking for big ideas in autonomous vehicles. The latest company to attract a round of funding for driverless car technology is Palo Alto-based NAUTO, co-fo … | Continue reading
True to earlier reports, Amazon’s Kindle Oasis is the smallest and lightest Kindle yet and comes with a handle for gripping. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos teased an “all-new, top of the line” Kindle last week and Chinese site Tmall.com sent the e-reader world in a tizzy when it accidentall … | Continue reading
Obviously, water and electricity don’t mix. But one Seattle company called Pure Watercraft has taken up the engineering challenge of building a Tesla-like EV motor for boats. The startup began taking pre-orders for its Pure Outboard today with a $500, refundable deposit via its o … | Continue reading
Emerging market entrepreneurs need what Silicon Valley insiders take for granted: first-hand experience scaling a startup Read More | Continue reading
The biggest news of the day, with a hint of snark. That’s theSkimm, which tells you everything you need to know about current events, in an email newsletter geared towards millennials. TechCrunch is pleased to announce that theSkimm founders Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin will … | Continue reading
In an effort to foster growth in early-stage virtual reality content companies looking to build momentum, today GREE announced the $12 million GVR Fund. The fund is primarily aimed at VR content companies, and Teppei Tsutsui, Managing Director at GREE VR Capital, tells me that he … | Continue reading
Your tolerance for watching video ads online may vary, but how would you feel if the video ad watched you back? That’s the premise of a new ad unit from Berlin-based ad tech startup Vyking. Dubbed ReactivAds, the new suite of interactive video ad formats promises to leverage “emo … | Continue reading
It’s hard to call a billion dollar exit from an emerging market anything more than a major win, but Lazada, the Rocket Internet-backed e-commerce firm in Southeast Asia, nearly ran out of money before Alibaba swooped in with a $1 billion investment announced yesterday. Read More | Continue reading
Affirm, the alternative lending site started by Paypal co-founder Max Levchin, has raised a $100M Series D led by fellow Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. The all equity round, which was confirmed to TechCrunch by the company, also included participation from existin … | Continue reading
Sean Parker, the self-made billionaire who, at the tender age of 19, sparked the digital music revolution, has been at the forefront of some of the most meaningful disruptions of our day from file sharing to social engagement. Cancer immunotherapy is his next big bet. The Napster … | Continue reading
PicMix, a photo-sharing app based in Indonesia, will build more features and venture into new international markets after raising a Series A totaling $3 million. Read More | Continue reading
Google Calendar has launched a new feature called Goals that uses machine learning to help you figure out when you have time to pencil in stuff like spending time with your family or exercise. The feature is now available for Calendar’s Android and iOS apps. Read More | Continue reading
When terrorists attacked and killed 14 people in San Bernardino, an iPhone 5c was recovered. The phone was said to contain pertinent information that the FBI really wanted their mitts on, and the Washington Post today reports that it was able to, with the help of professional hac … | Continue reading
The biggest problem in marketing in the tech world today is that too many marketers do not know the first thing about marketing. Read More | Continue reading
Consumer gadgets standby Logitech has acquired JayBird, a maker of fitness-focused wireless earbuds and trackers, for $50 million in cash, the companies announced today. “The Jaybird team will have all the scope to innovate they had before,” said Rory Dooly in a post on the Logit … | Continue reading
Mobile testing startup Testlio today announced it raised a $6.25 million round of funding led by Altos Ventures and Vertex Ventures. The company is aiming to make it easy to do QA for mobile app developers, making it easier to test their apps on a variety of devices in a variety … | Continue reading
“You never slow down, you never grow old.” Tom Petty isn’t playing the F8 after-party, but his song encapsulates the point of Facebook’s conference — a social network won’t go extinct if it’s reactive, personalized, and urgent. Everything launched today is designed to eschew the … | Continue reading
Ah, spring — when a young engineer’s fancy lightly turns to harvesting icy moons for rover fuel. NASA has announced the recipients of its yearly National Innovative Advanced Concepts awards, and they’re just as out there as the planets and other stellar objects they propose to mi … | Continue reading
We’ve written about a number of air purifiers before, but Sprimo is taking a different approach — instead of trying to clean all the air in the room, it creates a personalized stream of clean air for individual users. Now, a phrase like “personalized stream of clean air” might so … | Continue reading
At Day 1 of Facebook’s F8 developer conference, Mark Zuckerberg laid out the company’s 10 year roadmap and made tons of new announcements. From the Live API to chatbots to a whole new VR camera, here’s everything you need to know. Read More | Continue reading
As previously announced, Facebook today opened its Instant Articles format to all developers. Using Instant Articles, publishers can show Facebook mobile users a fast-loading and mostly distraction-free view of their posts while still also showing them a limited amount of their o … | Continue reading
No sooner had Facebook announced it was opening up Messenger for developers to build bots, when two players with an eye on sales and service in the enterprise — Salesforce and Zendesk — announced new products to manage Messenger traffic on their respective platforms.Salesforce an … | Continue reading
There’s an epidemic of stolen videos on Facebook. Business Pages rip videos from YouTube, TV, or other Pages, and then post them on Facebook as their own to gain more engagement and fans. This is known as “freebooting”. Video makers were pissed off about it because they were losi … | Continue reading
Habito, founded by Daniel Hegarty, pitches itself as the UK’s “first digital mortgage broker” — though Trussle may disagree — and offers an ‘fully automated’ brokering service to help you find the most suitable mortgage and make an application. Read More | Continue reading
You hear a lot these days about the potential for impending doom as AI becomes ever smarter. Big names are calling for caution: the futurist optimism of protagonists like Ray Kurzweil is outweighed by the concern expressed by Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking. And Swedish … | Continue reading
Facebook launched its Messenger chatbot platform today, but how will it make money on it? By charging businesses to send re-engagement messages to people who’ve already voluntarily started a conversation with them. These “Sponsored Messages” are currently in testing with a small … | Continue reading
Uber released its first-ever transparency report today, following in the footsteps of other major technology companies and detailing the kinds of information it shares about riders and drivers with the U.S. government. Between July and December 2015, Uber disclosed information ab … | Continue reading
According to a new study published by the data science team at Hired, a jobs marketplace for tech workers, the average female candidate sets her expected salary at $14,000 less than men. Relatedly or not, 69 percent of the time, men receive higher salary offers than women for the … | Continue reading
Facebook today launched the Facebook Profile Expression Kit, which gives third-party developers a way to publish videos recorded on their apps as profile pictures on Facebook. The service was announced at the company’s annual developer conference, f8, in San Francisco today. Vide … | Continue reading
Marfeel, a startup that helps publishers adapt to mobile, now supports publishing Instant Articles on Facebook. That might not sound like a big breakthrough — basically, it just means Marfeel can repackage articles for Facebook’s new, native publishing format. However, it illustr … | Continue reading
Messenger is all about bots now. As expected, Facebook unveiled the Send and Receive API at its F8 conference. It lets you create bots for Messenger to search for things and interact with businesses. But what if you want to use machine learning and create more complex scenarios? … | Continue reading
Facebook Live could take live video to a new level of popularity. Now third-party developers will get a chance to participate. Today at Facebook’s F8 developer conference, the company said it’s releasing an API for developers who want to plug into Facebook Live, and it also annou … | Continue reading
While chatbots might be the highlight of today’s F8 conference, Facebook is also releasing a slew of tools for developers that help them build, grow, and monetize their apps. Despite Facebook shutting down its Parse development platform, it’s still adding new widgets, buttons, an … | Continue reading
At Facebook’s F8 developers conference this morning, the company shared some interesting metrics related to the traction and growth of its popular messaging applications, Messenger and WhatsApp. One especially notable figure CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled was that Facebook’s two me … | Continue reading
How can Facebook get more 360-degree video in the News Feed and VR content on Oculus? By inventing its own virtual reality camera from scratch and open sourcing it so people can build their own and start shooting. Today at F8, Facebook revealed the “Surround 360”, a 17-lens 3D VR … | Continue reading
An upgrade to Twitter’s Moments feature, originally designed to offer users a curated “best of Twitter” experience, now turns Moments into a source for tweetable playlists. Through an ongoing partnership with music streaming service SoundCloud, Twitter Moments will now allow cura … | Continue reading
Facebook will now allow businesses to deliver automated customer support, ecommerce guidance, content, and interactive experiences through chatbots. By providing utility through its huge developer and business ecosystem, Facebook could boost loyalty with Messenger, one-up SMS, an … | Continue reading
Anyone who cares about display quality in their handheld devices has probably come across DisplayMate reviews, and the latest product to be evaluated by Ray Soneira is the new iPad Pro 9.7″. Spoiler: “It is by far the best performing mobile LCD display that we have ever tested.” … | Continue reading
Some of the earliest Oculus Rift pre-orderers are facing further delays to get their hands on the long-awaited hardware. Read More | Continue reading
This is the new Tesla Model S. And it looks like a Model S, but slightly different — gone is the false grille. The new Model S features a Model X-like nose, in line with the recently announced Model 3. Instead, Tesla has opted for a subtle black T ‘moustache’ like on the Model X. … | Continue reading