Microsoft is holding its annual Build developer conference in San Francisco this week and the company is kicking off the event with its first of two major keynotes this morning. You can watch the live stream of the event right here. The keynote is scheduled to start at 8:30am Pac … | Continue reading
Fullscreen, a media company whose creators’ videos reach 600 million subscribers across YouTube and other social networks, today announced the launch date and details regarding its subscription video-on-demand service for mobile devices. The company had previously confirmed its p … | Continue reading
Fantastical is back with a huge update on OS X. There are ton of new things, like native Exchange support, checking your coworkers’ availability, notifications for shared calendars in iCloud, printable calendars and more. But enough with the release notes, and let’s talk about ca … | Continue reading
Lobster, the marketplace for buying and selling user generated content, has just announced an integration with Facebook. This means that Facebook users can sign up with Lobster to sell their content to advertisers. Here’s how it works: Facebook users can sign up with Lobster to h … | Continue reading
Things seem to be turning around for Matt Joseph, the Y Combinator-backed startup founder who went on an epic tweet storm ahead of demo day about the elephant room — racism and raising money as a black founder. Post tweetstorm and demo day, is receiving offers from investors for … | Continue reading
When it comes to motion sickness in VR, one bad experience can leave a person with little or no desire to ever try on a headset again. One of the major problems is the mismatch between the visual perception of motion given by the VR headset and the inner ear telling you that you’ … | Continue reading
Technology companies have faced years’ worth of criticism for being behind the times in dealing with political pressure. Unlike other, more old-line industries that saw regulations, taxing and spending policy and government contracts as critical to their success, tech has not bee … | Continue reading
The wait is over, Hackathon fans. Today, we’re thrilled to release the first wave of tickets to the Hackathon at Disrupt NY 2016, and you can secure your spot by grabbing a ticket here. The Hackathon takes place May 7-8 at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal in New York City, and you’re … | Continue reading
When you hear from people who know about security, the discussion often turns to end users, who are considered the weakest link in the security chain. While IT and the powers that be struggle to secure their networks and IP, the employees are forever screwing up succumbing to phi … | Continue reading
Watch out Braintree, Stripe and other online checkout systems, Square is going after you. The company launched new APIs today for offline and online stores. But the bigger news is that e-commerce merchants can now process credit card payments using a simple form. Behind the scene … | Continue reading
Tribeca Shortlist, the streaming movie service from Lionsgate and Tribeca Enterprises (the organization behind the Tribeca Film Festival), is releasing its Apple TV app today. Why does anyone need another movie subscription, even if it only costs $4.99 a month? Tribeca Shortlist … | Continue reading
Parrot has been a pioneer in the drone industry. The company started working on drones nearly ten years ago before it was cool. That’s why we’re glad to announce that Parrot founder and CEO Henri Seydoux will join us on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt New York on May 9-11, 2016. Read … | Continue reading
Millennials may be slowly forgetting that their mobile phones make calls, but there’s still a good amount of cash/intelligence to be had in gathering enterprise call statistics to gain more complete portraits of customers. Invoca is looking to help companies measure analytics on … | Continue reading
If you live outside of China, it can be easy to forget that Alibaba’s business aspirations go far beyond e-commerce and into many aspects of daily life. This week, the company took another step toward building its health business by making an investment worth RMB 225 million (abo … | Continue reading
Foxconn’s proposed acquisition of Sharp, a deal that was sensationally put on hold last month after Sharp had announced it, has been completed today after both companies confirmed the agreement. Read More | Continue reading
French startup Frichti is making the news again with yet another round of financing. This time, the company is raising $13.4 million (€12 million) from Idinvest, existing investor Alven Capital, as well as busin Read More | Continue reading
Near a week after being silenced because the internet taught her to be racist, Microsoft’s artificial intelligence bot “Tay” briefly returned to Twitter today, whereon she went on a spam tirade and then quickly fell silent again. Read More | Continue reading
India’s e-commerce space might be about to get a shake-up after the government appeared to open the door to overseas companies owning majority stakes in domestic internet sales companies. Read More | Continue reading
Cyan Banister, a renowned angel investor and startup founder, has joined Founders Fund. She’s the 11-year-old firm’s first female investing partner. According to a Bloomberg story, investors at the San Francisco-based outfit now include its billionaire cofounder Peter Thiel; cofo … | Continue reading
Uber added a ride request button to let third-party apps add the ability to order a ride last year, but today it has introduced a more feature-rich option that it says caters to requests it has received from Asia. Read More | Continue reading
Planday, the Danish startup that offers a cloud-based “shift planning” solution for various types of businesses that employ a flexible workforce, such as restaurants, hotels, stores, call centers and gyms, has scored $14 million in Series B funding. Read More | Continue reading
The MLB is taking a page from the NFL’s playbook and equipping teams with tablets to use during games for the 2016 season. But, instead of Microsoft Surface Tablets, the MLB has made a deal with Apple to provide all 30 MLB teams with iPad Pros to use. The iPads will give coaches … | Continue reading
There’s good news in the fight against rogue USB-C cables, some of which have caused major problems with smartphones and laptops, after Amazon tightened the regulations around the type of cables that it sells. Read More | Continue reading
Ignore Snapchat at your own peril. It’s a lot more than sexts and ephemeral photos. Today’s Chat 2.0 update makes Snapchat a competitor to your phone itself. What started as an app for horny high school kids has blossomed into the most vibrant communication platform on the market … | Continue reading
Our team has been active as investors in the Internet of Things and hardware space over the past two years. We’ve read pitches from hundreds of companies, met with dozens, read hundreds of research reports and spoken with various experts. We’ve invested in six IoT/hardware compan … | Continue reading
On-demand streaming music is inevitable, so Spotify is taking whatever fuel it can get to win the race against Apple. Whoever can sign up customers faster to consume their data and network effect could earn money off them for a long, long time. So it makes sense that Spotify woul … | Continue reading
Ebay announced this afternoon that it’s acquiring an auto industry technology company known as Cargigi, a large provider of advertising and marketing services on a number of popular free classified websites, like Craigslist and others. Deal terms were not revealed, though eBay de … | Continue reading
With Strata + Hadoop World kicking off, it’s always fascinating to step back and look at the contents of the sessions as a way of understanding what’s happening in the world of Big Data.For those of you who have attended this conference for the more than five years that the event … | Continue reading
Renaissance Capital, the IPO research firm, has published a new report about the first quarter of this year, and, as you might expect, it doesn’t paint a pretty picture. For starters, it notes the U.S. IPO market hit the lowest levels in the first quarter since the financial cris … | Continue reading
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and Equality NC just released a letter addressed to North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, urging him to repeal the provisions of House Bill 2. H.B. 2 gets rid of non-discrimination ordinances and effectively writes discrimination against LGBT people … | Continue reading
Razer’s Ripsaw is far from the first game capture card, but it leapfrogs the competition nicely and takes aim at a growing population of streamers who are willing to pay good money for an easily set up solution with industrial-strength capabilities. Read More | Continue reading
Comparably, the Glassdoor-like platform for self-reporting employment and compensation data, has released some data around culture at tech companies. Within a couple of weeks of launching, over 2,000 people have submitted data around what it’s like working at their respective com … | Continue reading
Economic experts are trying to figure out a question that just two decades ago seemed ridiculous: If 90 percent of human jobs are replaced by robots in the next 50 years — something now considered plausible — is capitalism still the ideal economic system to champion? No one is ce … | Continue reading
Most people are terrible at shooting video. Any longer than 15-seconds and it will probably be boring. That’s why Instagram capped videos at a quarter-minute when it launched the feature in 2013. Yet today it extended the length to 60 seconds for user-shot or uploaded videos. Tha … | Continue reading
This morning, the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Volkswagen Group of America, charging that it “deceived customers with the advertising campaign it used to promote its supposedly ‘clean diesel’ VWs and Audis,” according to the FTC press release. As I’m sure you … | Continue reading
For his most recent cover of Bob Dylan’s Just Like a Woman, Jeff Buckley’s creative team has pulled out all the stops. Dropping today is an interactive music video with a gabazillion possible iterations for the viewer to explore, creating a unique listening experience every time. … | Continue reading
Google Fiber may be the holy grail of Internet service for many, but many people still rely on landlines for everyday communication purposes or emergency use. In order to allow its subscribers to sever connections with the old local ISPs and telecoms completely, Google will soon … | Continue reading
Back in 2007 co-founders John Zimmer and Logan Green envisioned a new kind of mass transportation carpooling system connecting riders and drivers across the nation. They called it Zimride. But it turned out a lot more people wanted to get around the city than wanted to go the dis … | Continue reading
As Pinterest continues to ramp up the parts of its business that generate revenues (namely advertising), it’s also expanding the free features that might entice users and brands to linger around for longer and engage more on it’s image-based social network for sharing ideas. Toda … | Continue reading
On their next trip to the International Space Station (ISS), SpaceX will be carrying an inflatable space habitat built by Bigelow Aerospace. The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) will be folded up for its April 8th launch, and then fully inflated once it’s properly connec … | Continue reading
Most people in business and finance (and most people, frankly) think that the new economy (of artificial intelligence and autonomous machines) is like the old economy: satisfying customers’ needs for products and services. But, the real heart of the new economy will be about help … | Continue reading
Tim Attia, co-founder and CEO of Slice Labs, said there’s “a ticking time bomb” threatening the on-demand economy — namely, insurance and liability. Attia’s tackling that problem with Slice, which will offer insurance for on-demand workers and providers, starting with rideshare d … | Continue reading
Hopper, the makers of a handy travel application that tells you the best time to fly in order to find the best deals, has now raised additional capital to continue to grow its business. It has also scored a partnership with American Airlines which allows it to sell AA’s tickets t … | Continue reading
Screen sizes on smartphones are getting bigger and bigger, but battery tech is lagging behind. As a heavy user of your smartphone, you’ll know that dreaded feeling of your battery marching towards extinction. The most common solution to the problem is to carry a charger or an USB … | Continue reading
Vine, the six-second, looping video platform from Twitter, has just hired Hannah Donovan as the new general manager.Donovan has built her career in product and design leadership. Her most recent position was product lead at Drip, which was recently acquired by Kickstarter. Some e … | Continue reading
It didn’t quite add up when Fortune broke the news last week that Snapchat would spend a $100 million to acquire Bitstrips, the maker of personalized avatar stickers called Bitmoji. Snapchat didn’t have anywhere to put them. But today, Snapchat launched “Chat 2.0”, a huge product … | Continue reading
Dating app Tinder is acquiring Humin the San Francisco startup which took a high-wire approach to contact management, trying to merge lots of disparate information into one contact app. Terms were undisclosed by TechCrunch understands from multiple sources that this roughly equat … | Continue reading
Say what you want, how you want. That’s how Snapchat’s reps say CEO Evan Spiegel describes Chat 2.0, a massive set of new features launching today. It lets private conversations morph between mediums depending on what users want to show or tell, and whether they can speak up or m … | Continue reading