TechCrunch sat down with Mark Suster, managing partner at Upfront Ventures. One of the most active investors in Los Angeles, Suster spoke of how local startups are able to draw upon the city’s creative talent to bring content, commerce and communication platforms to the next leve … | Continue reading
Samsung aimed to gather the best features of Galaxies past for their S7 line. That included features missing from the S6 like water resistance and a microSD slot, but the company also took the improved design from the S6 line and made it even better. Check out the photos above to … | Continue reading
Fitness gadget-maker Fitbit tumbled 16% in after-hours trading, with investors disappointed by the company’s guidance for the current quarter. Fitbit is forecasting $420 million to $440 million in revenue for the current quarter and adjusted earnings per share is expected to be b … | Continue reading
Uber is hosting a conference call regarding Uber driver Jason Dalton, who is suspected in the killing of six people in Kalamazoo, Michigan on Saturday night. The call, which includes Uber Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan, and Ed Davis and Margaret Richardson of Uber’s safety a … | Continue reading
Boy, am I excited! The TechCrunch Meetup + Pitch-off is coming to the greatest place in the world: Brooklyn, New York. I live in Brooklyn, and travel all over the country to visit cities with awesome startups. Now, I’m happy to announce that you guys are finally coming to me. The … | Continue reading
This year is already shaping up to be the year virtual reality (VR) goes mainstream. In January, Oculus Rift stole the spotlight at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas by (finally) announcing a $599 price and late Q1 ship date. HTC and Sony have also confirmed launc … | Continue reading
Birthdays on Facebook have become a dystopian chore. Typing “HBD” or just “Happy Birthday!” on a friend’s profile is basically the least human way to interact with them. So Facebook is pushing people to record more intimate greetings with its new Birthday Cam feature launching to … | Continue reading
Amazon’s X-Ray for Movies and TV Shows – the feature that brings additional content, like actor bios and other background information – is now available on Amazon Video and Prime Video on the web. HTML5 was actually one of the few major platforms Amazon had yet to address with th … | Continue reading
Mobile World Congress 2016 - February 22 — 25, 2016 | Continue reading
Skype Qik, Microsoft’s attempt at spinning off video messaging into a simplified mobile application, is shutting down. The app was first introduced in fall 2014 to serve a different audience than the larger, more fully-featured, Skype application. Instead of offering real-time ch … | Continue reading
Uh oh. You’re three cups of coffee into a busy work day, and you’re starting to get the ol’ caffeine rumble gut. But you don’t want to give up your prime table at the coffee shop.“Hey, can you watch my stuff?” you say to the nearest complete stranger.This box watches your stuff f … | Continue reading
One of the better features to emerge in iOS 9 is support for picture-in-picture mode on the iPad. But when you’re trying to surf the web while watching Netflix on your Mac, it’s not as easy to do – you often end up moving separate windows around on the screen, or switching back a … | Continue reading
Facebook had a high-profile setback when its Free Basics mobile connectivity program got blocked in India earlier this month over net neutrality issues, but its CEO Mark Zuckerberg is adamant — even upbeat — about the social network continuing to look for other ways to provide se … | Continue reading
Bonsai, part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch, is a company that has created a tool designed to guide freelancers through contract creation and invoicing. The two-person company bills itself as a system that takes care of contract creation, invoicing and payment processing for … | Continue reading
Snapchat is introducing yet another revenue stream today in the form of on-demand geo-filters. As it stands now, Snapchat already has two types of geofilters. Community Geofilters can not include logos or marketing and can be submitted for free. For example, where I live in Brook … | Continue reading
Google today announced that it is bringing its gigabit Fiber service to Huntsville, Alabama. As Google noted in today’s announcement, every city it has brought Fiber to is different. In Huntsville, the company is piggybacking on the fiber network that Huntsville Utilities is buil … | Continue reading
While a large part of the mobile industry swirls around the streets of Barcelona, IBM is playing host at its own big InterConnect event in Las Vegas, where it unveiled a rush of deals that underscore another major aspect of the growth of mobile: the rise of cloud services. Today, … | Continue reading
To most entrepreneurs, the road to venture capital financing is littered with criticism and rejection. Ranging from “limited traction” to “that’s a hard space,” VCs have an entire vocabulary of terms to pass on investments — and can sometimes even forgo that vocabulary with the “ … | Continue reading
Foursquare announced a new product today that should help brick-and-mortar advertisers measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. The company has already been expanding the ad side of the business, for example launching new ad targeting product last year and recently bringing … | Continue reading
When we last left Georgia Tech Professor Gil Weinberg he was building robotic friends who could bop and sing along to your favorite tunes. Now he has created a wearable robotic arm that adds a third hand to a drummer’s arsenal. “It responds to human gestures and the music it hear … | Continue reading
Ashley Carroll and Arjun Sethi never thought they’d be working as venture capitalists. Yet in the last year, both have landed at Social Capital, a 4.5-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based firm that incubates and invests in companies in healthcare, education, financial services, mobile … | Continue reading
Three years after its original eBike the Porteur, Faraday Bicycles is launching its second luxury eBike, the Cortland. Now available for preorder on Kickstarter, the Cortland will bring a better battery (290Wh for 25 miles of assisted riding), a more efficient motor, and better s … | Continue reading
In our wide-ranging interview, Tim talked about the development of the venture and startup ecosystem over the past decades. Read More | Continue reading
Trusona, launching today from stealth, is unveiling their iOS mobile identity authentication technology which helps ensure the identity of the person on the other side of the login, while also combatting malicious session replay attacks. Whether a company is looking to verify the … | Continue reading
Today in Barcelona, Spain at the Mobile World Congress 2016, Epson is showing the new Moverio BT-300—the latest and most advanced member of their Smart Glasses family of products. Pre-production models are on display at their booth in Congress Square and demonstrate many advances … | Continue reading
Copenhagen-based Motosumo has spent the last three years developing “gait analysis” systems based on body mounted sensors coupled with its own algorithm to model motion physics. It’s then been applying this tech to professional sports, physiotherapy, and athletics. Read More | Continue reading
Two years after Lenovo acquired Motorola, it looks like Motorola is doing fine. Or at least that’s what the business unit is trying to say. Today at a meeting with reporters, Motorola president Rick Osterloh said that the Moto brand is not going anywhere. You can expect more Moto … | Continue reading
The halcyon days of people clicking on Google search links and instantly converting into customers are over. But a startup called Qubit, founded by four ex-Googlers, has built a big-data analytics platform that it believes could make selling online today and in the future nearly … | Continue reading
Early this morning, Apple CEO Tim Cook sent an email out to employees about the FBI’s request to unlock an iPhone with the subject line ‘Thank you for your support’. The email outlines some responses to Cook’s open letter last week and paints the issue of Apple’s refusal to coope … | Continue reading
On the heels of the MindMaze round of $100 million, it is clear that Swiss tech is booming and beginning to tickle the curiosity of international investors. The startup had already closed an angel funding round of $10 million and recently announced the opening of their Series A r … | Continue reading
Here at Mobile World Congress 2016, the annual Barcelona-based flesh-pressing of the telco industry, Google and a bunch of carriers have put out a press release talking up how they are apparently ‘aligning’ to try to drive adoption of RCS. Read More | Continue reading
At 25, San Francisco resident Talia Jane was living on company-provided junk food, working as a customer support representative at Yelp Eat24 and crying herself to sleep every night in her bathtub. Those details, among many Jane provided in a heart-wrenching blog about the diffic … | Continue reading
Helsinki-based Lifeline Ventures launched a new 57 million euro ($63 million) fund to invest in startups.Founded in 2009, Lifeline Ventures has set up three funds and invested in 55 early stage startups with a number of successes.“We’ve had exits to King.com (NonstopGames), Faceb … | Continue reading
Sony is one company looking to take advantage of the blockchain, technology that underpins cyptocurrency bitcoin, after the Japanese company announced plans to build a centralized platform for educational assessment and testing scores. Read More | Continue reading
Even without a Prime membership, Amazon always offered free (and slow) shipping for orders over a certain minimum. For the longest time, that minimum was $25, but in 2013, the company raised it to $35. In its latest move to push its $99/year Prime membership with free two-day shi … | Continue reading
Typically, mobile apps are stand-alone experiences that play nicely with the operating system but aren’t fully integrated in it. Cyanogen — the company best known for its Android-based Cyanogen OS — is launching MOD today, a new developer platform that will give app developers th … | Continue reading
The Director of the FBI has claimed that the organization is not trying to break Apple’s encryption or set up backdoor access to the company’s devices and services. Read More | Continue reading
Adobe announced a number of new products at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today that will expand the company’s set of mobile core services in its Marketing Cloud and make it easier for enterprises to manage content for their mobile apps. Adobe’s Experience Manager, its enter … | Continue reading
With each of the six biggest global consumer technology companies now deeply invested and feverishly in development, VR/AR has become too big to fail. Facebook Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR (powered by Oculus), Google Cardboard and its Magic Leap investment (and perhaps even Googl … | Continue reading
Would the world be different if Neil Armstrong had worn a Fitbit wristband when he set foot on the moon? What if Nixon had been equipped with a cardiac sensor during Watergate? Read More | Continue reading
Zuck shocked everyone by appearing on stage for the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event for MWC 2016. He wasn’t there to push Samsung’s new phones or talk about Messenger, his time onstage was all about virtual reality. Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook (which, in case if you’ve forgot … | Continue reading
For years, many of the key components of wearables have been drafting off the strengths of the smartphone supply chain. During the last two years, the application processors and sensors for wrist and head-worn wearable products have more or less been taken off the parts bin of lo … | Continue reading
After exiting the smartphone market dramatically by selling its mobile making division to Microsoft for $7.2 billion back in 2013, Nokia has hinted it is looking to return to the smartphone business by a different route — taking advantage of a clause in its sale agreement that al … | Continue reading
What do you finance if you’re in the network business and need to encourage your customers to upgrade faster to the next generation of cellular tech (aka 5G)? Why the Internet of Things of course… Read More | Continue reading
The future will be filmed in 360 degrees. Samsung joins LG and others in announcing at MWC 2016 a new and compact camera that’s capable of filming everything thanks to two lenses. Called the Gear 360, the little sphere is designed to sit on a table or tripod or even hung from a d … | Continue reading
Lenovo is best known for its computers and smartphones like dozens of other OEMs. But the company is launching a new service that should differentiate its devices from the competition. With Lenovo Connect, you can connect around the world with a low-priced global roaming plan. Re … | Continue reading
Samsung showed off the new S7 and S7 edge at its Galaxy Unpacked event today at MWC 2016 in Barcelona. They’re retro. The new Galaxy phones are a tad thicker than the Galaxy S6 line, but that’s because they rock huge batteries. Samsung also went back to its roots and made the S7 … | Continue reading
Uber has confirmed one of its drivers, Jason Dalton, is the suspect in a shooting rampage across Kalamazoo, Michigan. Dalton allegedly picked up riders and pocketed fares in between the shootings, which have so far killed six people and gravely injured a 14-year-old girl Saturday … | Continue reading