In a case of one news reader app helping another, Japan’s Gunosy has invested $5 million in Indonesia-based Kurio. Read More | Continue reading
I've been using Letterboxd for more than a year now, and I've really enjoyed the movie pages. For instance, if you look at Mustang (which is my favorite movie of 2015 – seriously if you haven't seen it stop reading this right now, go and watch it), it's an inf … | Continue reading
Google is launching a new product for enterprise marketers today that will directly challenge Adobe’s Marketing Cloud and similar services. The Google Analytics 360 Suite will combine Google Analytics Premium (now called Google Analytics 360) and Adometry (which it acquired in 20 … | Continue reading
Salesforce has its fingers in many pies when it comes to tracking customers, customer service and marketing, but up until now it left field service to third parties like ServiceMax. That changed today when the cloud giant announced a new field service product they have dubbed Fie … | Continue reading
Skyport Systems helps enterprises keep their data and applications secure by allowing them to host their services in a hardened appliance with embedded security features. The company today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series C round led by GV (the firm previously kn … | Continue reading
Altiscale, a company that has always been about reducing the complexity related to using Hadoop, has taken that to the next level today with the release of Altiscale Insight Cloud, a cloud service aimed at making Hadoop accessible to business users.Altiscale Insight Cloud provide … | Continue reading
The battle between Google’s artificial intelligence and Go world champion Lee Seedol concluded today after the former (AlphaGo) triumphed to win the five-game series 4-1. Read More | Continue reading
Skyhook Wireless has been working on location technology for longer than many of the biggest names in smartphones have been around. Today it launched a new SDK aimed at bringing location to wearables in an extremely small code footprint. The challenge with wearables when it comes … | Continue reading
Crate, the winner of our TechCrunch Disrupt Europe startup Battlefield in 2014, today announced that it has raised a $4 million seed round for its open-source SQL database technology. The round was led by London-based Dawn Capital, which was joined by existing investors Sunstone … | Continue reading
Sony has agreed to purchase the remaining 50 percent of Sony/ATV from Michael Jackson’s estate for a total of $750 million. The music publishing company was created in 1995 as a joint venture between ATV, which was owned by the late King of Pop, and Sony. It now owns or administe … | Continue reading
Verizon has signed an agreement that makes it the second U.S. carrier to offer direct roaming in Cuba. The deal with Etecsa, a government-owned telecom, will enable direct voice calls between U.S. and Cuba. Read More | Continue reading
Two months after General Motors announced a $500 million investment in transportation startup Lyft to work on autonomous cars, the pair are launching their first service together. No, it’s not a self-driving car fleet (yet); it’s a short-term rental program called Express Drive: … | Continue reading
Tomorrow morning Disney will launch Marvel Battlegrounds, a new four-player superhero fighting game built on top of their Disney Infinity platform.Disney Infinity producer John Vignocchi stopped by TechCrunch HQ to give us an early peek… and things got intense. WHO WILL TAKE HOME … | Continue reading
While many retired smartphones still work and have usable sensors like cameras, accelerometers, touch screens and bluetooth radios, large swaths of them remain unused or, worse yet, end up in landfills. The team at Phonvert created an open source software platform that can conver … | Continue reading
The first phase of ExoMars, an uncrewed Mars mission from the European Space Agency (ESA), successfully launched today from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Lifting off on a Russian Proton-M rocket, the Mars-bound spacecraft has begun its 7 month, 300 million mile long journey and is schedu … | Continue reading
Adtech is in trouble because many firms have gotten the cold shoulder from venture capital. Supposedly. Another way to say that, of course, is that smart venture capitalists passed on startups that failed to demonstrate how they would add value to the space. So is that bad news o … | Continue reading
Finnish startup Blooming is aiming to help stressed office workers re-take control of their lives, by using wearable tech to monitor and track stress levels, plus recommendation software and meditation to help give workers the space to stop and smell the roses. The service combin … | Continue reading
As 2015 came to a close and the new year began, many thought leaders in the financial technology space made their predictions on the trends and innovations that will get us excited in 2016. One of the most prominent technologies that repeatedly appeared on these lists was the blo … | Continue reading
Michael Goguen, the longtime venture capitalist who was asked to leave Sequoia Capital last week following a stunning breach of contract complaint, has just filed a counter complaint in San Mateo County Court. In reaction to claims that Goguen sexually and emotionally abused a wo … | Continue reading
After shelling out $2m in rewards to security bounty hunters in 2015, Google today announced it’s doubling the reward for revealing top security flaws from $50k to $100k. Google has been pretty serious about its security on everything Chrome, and has had a bug-hunting bounty in p … | Continue reading
We hear a lot about how companies like Uber are transforming car-based transportation, but today comes news of another play in the sector, this time covering rail services. Trainline, a U.K.-based ticket service for railway and long-distance bus journeys, has acquired Captain Tra … | Continue reading
Google has lost an appeal in a Russian court against an antitrust ruling pertaining to its Android mobile OS. The competition complaint was brought against Android back in February 2016 by local company Yandex. Read More | Continue reading
Netflix confirmed this morning the existence of what appeared to be a new Android beta testing program, but says it did not intend to make it available to consumers via Google Play. In addition, the company tells us that features in the beta app should not be taken as indication … | Continue reading
At this point, there's very little difference between the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4. But there was one key differentiating point. Xbox gamers could only play with Xbox and PC players as Microsoft was restricting access to the multiplayer component. Microsoft just announ … | Continue reading
While most of the discussions around blockchain have focused on its potential use in finance, startup Blockai is looking at something different — helping artists, photographers and other creators register their work so that they can protect it from potential copyright infringemen … | Continue reading
Google today announced a number of new services for game developers at its annual Developer Day at the Game Developers Conference. These range from new tools for managing virtual goods and currencies, to the launch of a video recording API so developers can make it easier for pla … | Continue reading
On the heels of the White House Computer Science For All initiative (#CSForAll) announcement and the celebration of National Engineers Week, we are excited about the work being done to make STEM opportunities accessible for all kids. The #CSForAll initiative is a plan to ensure … | Continue reading
This time the Berlin-based company builder (to use the preferred terminology) is investing and betting on the underlying regulatory and financial technology infrastructure — the picks ‘n’ shovels, if you will — in the form of solarisBank, a fully-licensed digital bank designed to … | Continue reading
Google doesn’t just offer its own web-based productivity apps, but it also offers a service for business users who want to use Google as an identity provider for accessing other online services using the widely used SAML standard. Today, Google is adding a few new options to this … | Continue reading
Square is acquiring the team behind Framed Data, a predictive analytics service, and will be deploying the team of data scientists to its Square Capital team. Square tracks merchants’ transaction history through its services in order to better determine their eligibility for loan … | Continue reading
Skype for Web, the browser-based version of Microsoft’s popular communications software introduced last year, is getting a slew of new features that brings it more in line with its desktop and mobile counterparts – most notably the added ability to dial mobile phones and landline … | Continue reading
Modern farming has a huge problem with food waste, stemming from the mismatch between specific food buyer requirements vs Mother Nature delivering an unsaleable overabundance and/or producing knobbly fruit and veg that gets devalued on aesthetic grounds. But what happens when you … | Continue reading
This weekend, Apple’s App Store head Phil Schiller responded to complaints that spam apps and rip-offs were appearing in the App Store’s “New” and “What’s Hot” sections for certain categories. Unfortunately, this has been a longtime issue for Apple’s third-party application marke … | Continue reading
Or do we even need one? At Disrupt New York in May, we’ll try to get to the bottom of that question. In a panel on the new frontier of digital dating, we’ll be bringing together some of the freshest minds in the space to discuss how niche dating services could be the next big thi … | Continue reading
Philips is arguably the largest connected light bulb manufacturer with its Philips Hue system, but its color light bulbs are quite expensive. A color light bulb costs around $60. In case you just want simple connected lights, the company has added new white light bulbs to its lin … | Continue reading
Alooma, an Israeli startup that helps companies process and work with big data in real time delivered as a cloud service, announced an $11.2 million Series A round today led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital. The product focuses on the people working with data li … | Continue reading
For the small minority who are not aware, Lowercase is the the fund started by Chris Sacca with $8.4m and resulted in what is believed to be the best performing fund in history with investments in Uber, Twitter, Instagram, Docker, just to name a few. Sacca went on to build what m … | Continue reading
Drones are expensive and crashes are inevitable. ParaZero has a solution: A parachute. With the ParaZero SafeAir product, a drone is fitted with a capsule containing a parachute that’s effective at very low altitudes and deploys in under a second. The company says the system work … | Continue reading
Another live streaming startup is hoping to grab its share of eyeballs. Tandem is a bootstrapping fitness-focused platform aiming to offer a low friction outlet where personal trainers, fitness teachers and so on can broadcast personal training sessions and other healthy lifestyl … | Continue reading
Prototyping suite InVision just announced they are acquiring Silver Flows, a tool that lets developers prototype directly inside Sketch. The acquisition comes just a few months after InVision acquired the code-based design tool Macaw, and is the company’s fourth acquisition to da … | Continue reading
Adobe today launched the first public preview of its new Experience Design CC tool, which was previously known as Project Comet. Experience Design CC is the company’s first tool that is purpose-built for user experience (UX) designers. It takes what Adobe has learned from working … | Continue reading
App Annie, the six-year-old app data and insights platform, continues a small shopping spree with the acquisition of AppScotch, an app marketing data company. Terms of the deal aren’t being announced, but the roughly 10 employees of AppScotch — which launched two years ago and ra … | Continue reading
If you have ever attended a TechCrunch Disrupt, you know the energy and excitement on the exhibit floor. Hundreds of entrepreneurs stand by their tables, and everywhere people are engaged intense conversation. Most attendees let serendipity be their guide through the ranks of sta … | Continue reading
Yet more proof that Minecraft is more than just a game comes our way today. Microsoft has plans to use the platform, which it bought for $2.5 billion acquisition, to help kids learn and for virtual reality, and we can add artificial intelligence development to that list, too. Rea … | Continue reading
Enterprise communications is not a sector that typically generates palpable excitement. In the enterprise, the plumbing is never as exciting as the fixtures, and people spend more time noticing what communications enables than how it’s delivered. It doesn’t help that enterprise c … | Continue reading
The UK government is continuing to try to push much criticized surveillance powers legislation through parliament, with the bill in question — the Investigatory Powers bill — getting its second reading in Parliament tomorrow. Read More | Continue reading
In 2009, the Obama Administration launched Apps.Gov, looking to revolutionize the way the federal government buys commercial technology and cloud-based products. The launch was a product of multiple factors: the desire for increased cloud-based products inside government, the pus … | Continue reading
Microsoft has quietly stopped supporting bitcoin payments just over one year after it (quietly) added support for the crypto currency within its Windows Store. Read More | Continue reading