Today Facebook launches its full assault on YouTube with a dedicated hub for watching Live and recorded videos in its mobile app. A Video tab is taking over Messenger’s prime, center spot in the navigation bar at the bottom of the screen, turning Facebook into a destination for d … | Continue reading
In Europe, London tends to grab most of the fintech limelight but other tech hubs in the continent are producing their fair share of fintech companies with comparative success, not least in Germany. Enter Hamburg-based Finanzcheck, the consumer loans marketplace, which today is d … | Continue reading
If you’ve been procrastinating about getting a tattoo here’s a neat little AR app, called InkHunter, that’s aiming to help you decide what and where to ink without having to regret that snarling wolf facial tat after the fact. Read More | Continue reading
Healthcare identity startup CrossChx announced this morning that they raised a $15 million Series C financing round from Khosla Ventures, Drive Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, NCT Ventures and Moonshots Capital. This brings their total funding to $35 million since being founded in … | Continue reading
Atom Bank, which is backed by Spanish banking giant BBVA, has become the first of the four so-called UK ‘challenger’ banks out the gate — sort of.Having secured a much-coveted banking license late last year, the mobile-first bank has made its iOS app available to users who pre-re … | Continue reading
Haptik, a mobile concierge style service in India, has landed investment from domestic media giant Times Internet. The size of the Series B raise was not disclosed, but TechCrunch understands from a source close to the deal that is $11.2 million. Read More | Continue reading
South China Morning Post (SMCP), the Hong Kong-based media firm, has dropped the paywall on its website after Alibaba completed its acquisition the company. Its physical newspaper and PDF editions will continue to be subscription based. Read More | Continue reading
After more than a year of public alpha and beta releases, the Vivaldi browser is hitting its 1.0 release today.Vivaldi, which was founded by Opera co-founder and former CEO Jon von Tetzchner, prides itself as being a browser for power users — a group of users, von Tetzchner and h … | Continue reading
Mirantis, one of the last pure play OpenStack startups left standing announced a major win today when VW chose them over Red Hat for an enormous OpenStack implementation. It was huge for Mirantis and for the open source OpenStack project. VW knew it wanted to run a private cloud … | Continue reading
It may have started as a Bitcoin wallet but veteran entrepreneur Jeremy Allaire’s fintech startup Circle has since shifted focus to social payments, launching an app in Q4 last year that lets users send U.S. dollars to settle IOUs between each other, with its pitch being it makes … | Continue reading
Way back in December, Google added a to-do function called Reminders to the Google Calendar iOS and Android apps. Now, at long last, it is available for the web. Read More | Continue reading
CompareAsiaGroup, a consumer finance startup backed by Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, has appointed Sam Allen as its new chief executive officer. Allen previously worked at KKR, where he was a director on the private equity investment firm’s portfolio operations team. Read Mo … | Continue reading
Land grab! Net neutrality! Imperialism! There was a lot of justified outrage (and perhaps delight) when Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of bringing the Internet to rural Indians came crashing down recently, fueled by the 11 million people who contacted the Telecom Regulatory Authority of … | Continue reading
Everybody likes a good fitness tracker, but nobody is thinking about the children. The poor dears are being left out of the wearable revolution — looks like it’s up to Adidas to put a gadget on every wrist and a smile on every PE teacher’s face. Read More | Continue reading
Collaborative Fund is launching a new fund today. Called the Collab+Consumer fund, it’s part of Collaborative Fund’s third $70 million fund that’s geared toward finding companies that make consumer goods — like food and clothing. To be sure, the space is heating up. There are eme … | Continue reading
How would you feel if a robot asked you to touch its butt? Maybe it sounds like a silly question (actually, there’s no maybe about it), but as robots proliferate and anthropomorphize, it’s actually something that needs to be considered. So scientists at Stanford considered it. Re … | Continue reading
The sophisticated neural networks underlying systems like Google’s Deep Dream and all manner of interesting experiments require a great deal of computing power. Nvidia proposes to put all that horsepower in a single box, specially engineered to meet the needs of AI researchers. R … | Continue reading
Slack has a lot of functions, but end-to-end encryption isn’t one of them, which makes the platform a no-go for some users. Along comes ClearChat to serve the needs of the slightly more security-conscious teams, with chat, file transfer and more. ClearChat describes its service a … | Continue reading
There is nearly as much confusion as there is excitement about augmented and virtual reality. While VR could be big and AR could be bigger (and take longer), there are more questions than answers out there. I’ll be doing a deep dive on one aspect of AR/VR every month. This month … | Continue reading
Fenox Venture Capital is bringing on TiE Global Chairman and the founder of TiE Angels, Venktesh Shukla, as General Partner. For the unfamiliar, TiE is a non-profit mentoring network for entrepreneurs and promoter of entrepreneurship worldwide. Its annual conference, TiECon, is i … | Continue reading
A company tapping into consumers’ growing desire for healthier food and organic products, Thrive Market, is today bringing its online grocery store to Android users with a launch of a dedicated mobile application. The new app will allow users to shop for natural and organic produ … | Continue reading
It’s a security project that’s taken around two years to complete, but messaging giant WhatsApp has now fully implemented strong end-to-end encryption on its platform and across all mobile platforms for which it offers apps. Read More | Continue reading
Meadow already lets you get prescription for medical marijuana over video chat and order from a nearby shop that delivers. Now it wants to be the backbone of the weed business too. Pot dispensaries can’t use standard point of sale or inventory software because they aren’t complia … | Continue reading
While nowhere near as big as this morning’s news that Twitter will live stream the NFL’s Thursday Night Football, the company is announcing another change to its service today aimed at increasing the functionality and usage of its Direct Message (private messaging) feature. Start … | Continue reading
Lydia and Slack are two charming services and I like using them. So when I learned that the two of them were having a baby together, you bet I was excited.Lydia is a French payment app, a sort of Venmo for Europe like stealth startup Cookies. It lets you instantly send and receiv … | Continue reading
Cookies wants to become the Venmo of Europe with a consumer app to pay back your friends in no time and with no fees. The company promises a speedy onboarding experience and a great design. And today, the company is showing a bit more about the app.With the following screenshots, … | Continue reading
WordPress sites make up a massive chunk of the Internet, so it’s no surprise that there are also plenty of services that specialize in hosting them. WordPress hosting and management service Flywheel, which focuses on designers and creative agencies, today announced that it has ra … | Continue reading
It seems like barely a day passes without some notable mention of chat bots in the tech industry. Now one of North America’s most used chat apps has jumped on the wagon after Kik, the billion dollar mobile messaging service particularly popular with young people, opened its doors … | Continue reading
A few months after teasing the feature on Twitter, Sony is adding remote play on Windows and OS X with the new PS4 3.50 update that is going to be available tomorrow.This isn’t uncharted territory for Sony as you can already stream your games to your PlayStation Vita and some Son … | Continue reading
With the launch of a new service called Pattern, Etsy is making it easier for people to sell custom goods on their own websites.Apparently, more than one-third of Etsy’s 1.6 million active sellers have said they’re interested in setting up their own site, but they found the proce … | Continue reading
Ikea is coming to VR, but it’s sadly leaving the Swedish meatballs behind in regular reality. The cheapo furniture company unexpectedly announced this morning that they were releasing a pilot experience for the HTC Vive on the SteamVR store. Gameplay in the app is limited to wand … | Continue reading
PayPal is taking a strong stance in favor of the LGBT community. A couple of weeks ago, North Carolina lawmakers passed a disappointing law that prohibits protecting the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. This law also discriminates transgender people by for … | Continue reading
DreamHost is best known as a web hosting service, but the company has also long been a major contributor to the open source OpenStack platform for enterprises. For the last few years, it’s also been running its own OpenStack-based cloud computing service DreamCompute in beta. Tod … | Continue reading
The advent of email tracking has caused quite a bit of ruckus, and is generally, rather creepy. A NY-based startup called One More Company made an attempt to tackle this head-on with a service called Trackbuster, but now they’re interested in something else: “enhancing emails” by … | Continue reading
Medium is releasing a new set of tools for publishers to convince them to drop their good old content management systems. And it seems to be working as a few independent publishers are going all-in on Medium, such as The Awl, Pacific Standard, | Continue reading
Numerous startups now sell class passes for children’s activities, including KidPass, which announced $325,000 in seed funding in January, and Pearachute (it raised $1.2 million last month). Now, a Brooklyn-based startup named Sawyer is trying to separate itself from the little k … | Continue reading
Another premium cable TV network, Starz, is taking the plunge into the streaming video market with today’s launch of its own standalone streaming service, aimed at cord cutters. The move follows the launches of HBO’s over-the-top offering, HBO NOW, introduced last year, as well a … | Continue reading
Yep, ads are going to be a big topic Disrupt New York. We’ve already announced speakers from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and AdBlock Plus, but we’ll also be joined by Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s vice president of ads and commerce. Despite the transition to mobile, Google r … | Continue reading
One of the toughest things about VR gaming is explaining it to people who have never played it. That can be a tough obstacle to companies trying to get consumers to buy expensive virtual reality headsets. After months and years of anticipation, the HTC Vive virtual reality headse … | Continue reading
The concept of the Internet of Things is getting a big boost from emerging industries like autonomous cars and robotics, and today Intel announced an acquisition that could help it make sure that its own developments and products in this market are fault-free: it is acquiring Yog … | Continue reading
Roku this morning introduced the third generation of its lower-cost streaming service, the Roku Streaming Stick, priced at $49.99, and a competitor to other sticks and dongles, like Google’s Chromecast or Amazon’s Fire TV Stick. The new device now includes a quad-core processor w … | Continue reading
The HTC Vive virtual reality headset drops today at a $799 price point just a week after Facebook’s Oculus released its highly-anticipated Rift headset. In comparison, the Vive has kind of flown under the radar outside of developer and VR junkie circles during the past couple yea … | Continue reading
Gone, the on-demand service for selling all your old crap, is making some changes to its business today. Most importantly, Gone is launching a verified second-hand electronics marketplace. Usually, Gone will come and pick up your old stuff, list it on one of the many marketplaces … | Continue reading
In a flurry of news this morning, it would appear that Twitter has won a deal with the NFL that gives the social network the right to stream Thursday Night Football live on the platform. Beyond the live stream of the game, the partnership will also include pre-game Periscope broa … | Continue reading
The open source VoIP engine and standards initiative, known as WebRTC, is finally starting to get some traction. Earlier this month, Slack followed Facebook Messenger’s lead and launched its voice calling feature based on WebRTC. Though exciting, this launch is limited — it only … | Continue reading
Sometime today you’re going to read a marketing message that was probably written by Persado’s software — and if you haven’t, Goldman Sachs has led a $30 million investment into the company to make sure you will soon. Read More | Continue reading
Video ad startup Virool has raised $12 million in Series A funding. The company works with publishers including Mashable, Adweek and The Onion. It offers what it calls an Inline video ad unit, which has already been served across more than 2,000 online properties and which create … | Continue reading
After months of rumours that the startup was raising, Jinn, the same-hour ‘shop on your behalf’ delivery app, is disclosing $7.5 million in Series A funding, money that it plans to use to expand to more UK cities — the service is currently in central London and most recently Manc … | Continue reading