Articles by Techcrunch from August 2015

 In the ever-escalating social media arms race, GIFs are the best way to get attention. Static photos are so 2013. But a new app called Giffiti (like graffiti with GIFs) lets you enhance you...

 Early in a startup’s life, the main focus is building the right product for the right market. For most B2B startups, this is the period when you start winning your first 10 customers. Thes...

 “Brace yourself, Marco…we’ve just been removed from the App Store.” With those words, I visualized everything we’d slaved over for months crumple itself into a ball...

 Josh Tetrick, the charismatic founder of Hampton Creek, a food startup in Silicon Valley, bills it as one that uses science and technology to change the way the world eats. However, Tetrick has ...

 Earlier this week, we sat down with venture capitalist Brian O’Malley of Accel Partners to talk about where he’s shopping now.We also asked O’Malley — who was recruited i...

 Solar energy in the United States has seen immense momentum throughout the years. When the Solar Energy Industries Association released its annual report in 2008, it concluded that U.S. solar ph...

According to a recent report, 2016 political candidates will spend a billion dollars on digital communications before November of next year. More than likely, only a fraction of that will be spent on ...

 HTC’s much-anticipated VR headset, created in partnership with games firm Valve, just had its launch delayed until the first quarter of next year, but that isn’t stopping the Taiwane...

 While hip hop may have ‘too many mc’s and not enough mics’, in tech, there are too many startups and not enough seasoned technologists. Over the last seven years, hopeful entre...

 One of the magical innovations of the Web 2.0 era was when the bigger social platforms opened their doors to third-party app developers. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter widely touted ,and profite...

 Elon Musk has warned us about robots taking over with the help of AI. He’s even donated money to make sure that it doesn’t happen. However, it sure does seem like Tesla relies on rob...

 What does it take to build a billion-dollar SaaS enterprise-software company? We gave a 30,000-foot answer to this complex — and fascinating — question in a recent TechCrunch post, T...

 “Transportation tech is not only changing how we get from A to B, it’s fundamentally altering the underlying infrastructure of our cities.” Read More ...

 The Gillmor Gang — Dan Farber, Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, August 28, 2015. A surprise guest in the chat center, benevolent Zuckership...

 There are more Kickstarter watches out there these days than grains of sand on the beach. Everyone with a quartz movement and a NATO strap figures they can make and sell some kind of fashion wat...

 There’s some leaks that can’t ever be taken back or patched over or fixed–and they’re generally things that, as things stand, aren’t even illegal. Read More ...

Notifications have a dirty job to do to grab the flittish eyeballs of tech users. But some of these digital chat-up-lines go about this unlovely task by attempting to pull the kind of weird moves that...

 Notifications have a dirty job to do to grab the flittish eyeballs of tech users. But some of these digital chat-up-lines go about this unlovely task by attempting to pull the kind of weird move...

 I am a tall straight white cisgendered Canadian man in excellent health, i.e. I won pretty much every available lottery on the day I was born. People expect me to excel at things, or at least th...

 As music fans go mobile, music festivals are following suit. The kids in America are rocking out to T-Swift with a Natty Lite in one hand and a mobile phone open to native festival apps in the o...

 Yesterday on Facebook, a man named Matt Neal sent out a plea. He’s 26, his blood type is B+ and he has a failing kidney. His ask? “One working kidney from a true sneaker head.”...

 One of the most critical metrics for software companies — but also one of the most difficult to measure — is the lifetime value of their customers (LTV). The lifetime value dictates ...

 One of the most critical metrics for software companies — but also one of the most difficult to measure — is the lifetime value of their customers (LTV). The lifetime value dictates ...

 Welcome back to another episode of CrunchWeek. We’re very glad that you are here. This time ’round, our fearless Matthew Lynley headed the ship, while our own Josh Constine and your ...

 A federal appeals court has just ruled againsta 2013 decisionorderingtheNSA to stop its bulk metadata collection program. The three-judge panelissued its ruling Friday, contending that conservat...

 Andre and Sandro De Moraes must really like to see people compete.The brothers previously created GoldMic, a now-defunct social network for hip hop battles. Now they’ve launched a new iOS ...

 Google has been working for some time to improve how it highlights mobile apps, and the data they contain, in its search results. And now, Android users performing Google searches for apps outsi...

 Uber has hired the duo behind a spectacular hack earlier this year that involved taking remote control of a Jeep Cherokee.Wired writer Andy Greenberg experienced this firsthand — he wrote ...

 Gillmor Gang – Dan Farber, Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. LIVE recording session has concluded for today.Gillmor Gang chatroom HEREGillmor Gang on Facebook HER...

 Gillmor Gang – Dan Farber, Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. LIVE recording session has concluded for today.Gillmor Gang chatroom HEREGillmor Gang on Facebook HER...

 We’ve heard from sources that Mobcrush, a live-streaming service centered around mobile games much in the same way Twitch is known for streaming popular eSports desktop games,has raised ar...

Welcome to the second edition of the TC Gadgets Podcast on Minecraft. This week, we’re discussing Apple CarPlay, the MixStik (which helps you to be an awesome bartender), the new full-size keybo...

 One of the lesser-known, but potentially groundbreaking, features arriving in the newversion of Apple’s next mobile operating system, iOS 9, is support for “content blocking” e...

 IBM’s Dr. John Kelly is joining the TechCrunch crew onstage at this year’s Disrupt SF. But he won’t be alone. Instead, Kelly is bringing Watson along with him. Watson is an IBM...

 Service marketplaces have recently become Silicon Valley darlings. The marketplace model has been a popular way for VCs to efficiently tap into the local economies at scale, specifically the $80...

 This week’s headlines saw the stock market plunge, Facebook’s new digital personal assistant, the launch of YouTube Gaming, and more. These are the stories to catch you up on tech ne...

 The battle between yellow cabs and Uber cars is about to get that much spicier. According to Crains New York, a new app called Arro is being beta tested among 7,000 yellow and green taxis in the...

 Like a lot of tech companies in Silicon Valley, Twitter last year published numbers about the different backgrounds and cultures of its employees, and its numbers were revealed to be rather whit...

 There’s a lot about this Kickstarter project to dissuade me from writing about it. First, this is a bass preamp, a little box that sits between the bass player and the amplifier. It is a d...

 Namely, a startup that does all the heavy HR lifting for you, is today announcing two new strategic hires in the form of Radhika Samant and Teresa Dietrich. Samant was previously CFO at Enterpri...

 Earlier this year, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that it would soon start beta testing an app that would help drone flyers understand where they can and — more import...

 After a one-week extension, today is the absolute last day to get your early-bird tickets to Disrupt SF 2015, so if you want to secure your spot to the hottest show in tech while saving a seriou...

 If you’ve been out of the Android game for a while you’d be hard-pressed to understand why people love OnePlus so much. These phones, conceived by the folks who initially launched Op...

 Apple Watch not for you? The Amazon preorder page for the Huawei Watch states that the device will support iOS. Now, at this point, it’s unclear if this is a typo or unreleased information...

 Avid Life Media CEO Noel Biderman is stepping down, the company announced this morning. Avid Life Media, or ALM, operates the dating site for cheaters, Ashley Madison, which was affected by a ma...

 Google’s Chrome web browser keeps getting better. According to a new post on Google+, the company says that, starting onSeptember 1st, Chrome will begin to pause many Flash ads by default ...

 Using a mixture of algorithms and human stylists, London-based Thread works on the premise that a lot of men hate clothes shopping, however much they like stylish attire.The online styling servi...

 You see a lot as an intern at a venture capital shop. Over the past three months I worked as an intern at the southeast Asian-focused venture firm Tigris Capital, under the tutelage of general p...

 You wait years and years for virtual reality to become a thing, and then suddenly a truck load of VR headsets pile into the tech hype cycle almost at once (thanks Oculus). But if you’re a ...

 ReBoard is a just launched iOS keyboard app from an indie dev team in India that’s targeting productivity-focused folk, by adding the ability to reach out to other apps right from the keyb...

 ReBoard is a just launched iOS keyboard app from an indie dev team in India that’s targeting productivity-focused folk, by adding the ability to reach out to other apps right from the keyb...

 Consumers in their twenties to early fifties are usually considered the most attractive age demographic because of their spending power. Unfortunately, this means that older people are often und...

 Best known as an Android utility app maker, Cheetah Mobile is now focused on global growth for its mobile advertising business. The Beijing-based company announced today that it will launch its ...

 YouTube isn’t the only one to introduce a live-streaming app this week. Just days after YouTube Gaming was outed, Japan’s DeNA — a prolific producer of games itself — has...

 European mobile payments player, iZettle, is expanding into what amounts to small business loans — announcing a capital advance product, called iZettle Advance, which will be available to ...

 A new Apple TV is on the way, though, and it could move the needle in more than one industry. According to information I’ve been able to compile from multiple sources, Apple is about to la...

 Vine, the six-second looping video app from Twitter, has today announced a significant feature update that brings more attention to the audio in users’ videos. Starting tomorrow (Friday), ...

 Facebook is the latest tech titan to try and bring a consumer-focused digital assistant to the largely uninterested populace. M is a largely text-based hybrid assistant that can rely on human kn...

 Facebook unveiledits M personal assistant yesterday, shelled out a few details and revealed that it was currently being beta-tested by a couple hundred random users in the Bay Area. The service ...

 The ancient Romans had a word to describe the most precious artistic works of the time: sincere. A technique made popular at the time involved inserting wax into a sculpture’s cracks as it...

 If you are part of the Windows Insider program, Microsoft’s tool to get new code into the hands of its hardcore users ahead of the general public, you get a treat today: Windows 10 build 1...

 People don’t like change. We just don’t. Especially when it comes to our favorite sites or apps. When you move our cheese we get confused and angry. In fact, Facebook can’t do ...

 Looking to builda bridge overthe technology industry’s (and the technology investment industry more specifically) chasm-sizedgender gap, a group of successful women entrepreneurs, investor...

 DJI didn’t start out as the best entry-level drone maker on the market but, at this point, it’s safe to say that they’ve taken the crown from Parrot and are truly creating flyi...

 PicsArt is announcing that it has hired Eric Edge as its vice president of marketing. Edge spent the past last four-plus years at Facebook (where he led the company’s marketing efforts in ...

 Facebook just achieved a major milestone, on Monday nearly 1 in 7 humans logged on to its site.Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg heralded the accomplishment in a post from his profile:On Monday, 1 in...

 Some founders keep returning to the same ideas over and over in new form. Jason Citron, a lifelong gamer, was the creator of OpenFeint, an early mobile social gaming network that he sold to Japa...

 As the market continues to mature, and as we watch a blossoming of SaaS activity in New York City, we believe that NYC is poised to become a genuine leader in the formation of companies leading ...

 Splash, the event page service that lets anyone create beautiful event landing pages, has announced an integration with Giphy, the betaworks-backed GIF search engine. This makes Splash the only ...

 Today, the WSJ reported that the NFL’s video test with Facebook ended “quietly” earlier this year. The publication also referred to it as a “partnership,” a term th...

 We’ve all been there: you’re exploring the vast interwebs, opening tabs rapid fire like the middle-clickin’ master you are. Suddenly one of the zillion tabs you’ve got op...

 Facebook didn’t get to be one of the largest video streamers on the web without making a few enemies. Unfortunately, up to this point, a lot of those enemies were the people actually creat...

 When it comes to politics, the Internet, it seems, has been a great disappointment. Read More ...

 The latest data breach victim to make the headlines is a big one — deeply personal and private information of more than 21.5 million current and former federal employees and over a million...

 Need a quiet spot to check your email? Looks like for many people, that’s the bathroom. According to a new study from Adobe, 42 percent of Americans use their time there to check their ema...

 We’re a little over five years into the EU’s antitrust investigation of Google and today’s back and forth is about Google Shopping results. Back in April, Europe’s antitr...

 While companies like iCracked have extensive repair networks allowing you to get a phoneor tablet repaired in just hours, getting alaptop repaired normally requires making an appointment, droppi...

 It would appear that the next-gen iPhone may come with some added flare. Sources told 9to5mac that the UI for the iPhone 6S may come with animated wallpapers, not unlike the animated watch faces...

 Workflow, the clever if somewhat geeky app aimed at iOS power users that helps you automate frequent tasks you perform on your iPhone or tablet, like ordering an Uber to your next event, making ...

 Workflow, the clever if somewhat geeky app aimed at iOS power users that helps you automate frequent tasks you perform on your iPhone or tablet, like ordering an Uber to your next event, making ...

 One in five photos or videos on Instagram show up with annoying whitespace around them because people use other apps to letterbox their landscape or portrait imagery to fit in Instagram’s ...

 Hey Siri, give me a hint. Apple just invited journalists to his annual September press event. It’s happening on September 9th at 10am. But the best part of this invite is the attention to ...

 “Hey Siri, give us a hint” is about all the hints we’re going to get on what’s coming up at the next Apple event. And of course some artwork that four people in a basemen...

 Last-minute hotel booking app HotelTonight is getting a fun update — from now until September 8, users can enter a contest tovisit to the Los Angeles set ofSilicon Valleywhile the HBO show...

 It doesn’t happen that often, but once in a while I find myself in the wild without my wallet and reallyneed to buy something. Because I absolutely never leave the house without my iPhone,...

 With theU.S. hurricane season about to kick off, Google announced today that it’s expanding theweather-related information that will appear in Google search results when web users search f...

 There are hungry makers, intent on building the next big thing. There are folks who have seen it all and are looking to be surprised. And there are the big fish looking to swallow the smaller fi...

 The ties that bind consumers to brands are growing stronger. At the same time, however, they are fading into the background, thanks to the Internet of Things. Today, a slew of devices, from refr...

 The window was supposed to close last week, but we’ve extended the deadline for early-bird tickets to Disrupt SF 2015 to this Friday, August 28. That means you have only three days left to...

 The window was supposed to close last week, but we’ve extended the deadline for early-bird tickets to Disrupt SF 2015 to this Friday, August 28. That means you have only three days left to...

 In June of 2014, TechCrunch launched Include, a program designed to direct TechCrunch’s resourcesto improve diversity in the startup community. In year one, our approach was simple. The he...

 Narvar, a startup that enables companies to better engage with customers after online purchases, said it has raised $10 million. Narvarprovides companies with software that improves the post-pur...

 I can’t wait to see @alex crying tears of joy when Twitter finally releases a standalone Twitter DM app. This day hasn’t come yet, but it doesn’t mean that third-party develope...

 We look because it’s there. We humans look towards violence in order to define it, to decide where we must run (or if we should stand and fight). We are fascinated by suffering. There is a...

 Amazon has today announced that two new companies, Musaic and Rachio, are being added to the Amazon Echo platform with investments from the $100 million Alexa Fund. With the Amazon Echo, which i...

 Life360, the maker of mobile applications for iOS, Android and Windows Phone that help keep families connected, has acquired Chronos Mobile Technologies, a startup behind a number of mobile apps...

 Two and a half years ago, Rose Broome had a moment that most San Franciscans are all too familiar with. She passed a homeless woman on the streets, but didn’t know what the best way to hel...

 Well, this is something you don’t see every day. According to a new report out of Consumer Reports, theTesla Model S P85D, all-wheel-drive electric sedan, performed “better in our te...

 According to a new report out this morning from IDC, Apple is now the number twowearable maker, thanks to itsApple Watch, coming in just behind market leader Fitbit during the second quarter of ...

 Brian O’Malley is good at his job. He’sgood enough,in fact, that two years, ago, Accel Partners plucked him out of his former firm, Battery Ventures, so he could bat for its team ins...

 The other day I was writing an article and I wanted to link to a piece I wrote when I was at CITEworld in 2013 — just twoyears ago. I went searching for it, but soon discovered that IDG, t...

 Piece by piece, Square is trying to provide all of the tools that businesses need to manage themselves. They have the payment processing part down, a payroll product, real-time analytics and now...

 Berlin’s reputation as a hotbed of adtech entrepreneurship seems unstoppableas VCs continue to pile money in. The latest example is mobile app marketing platform Remerge. Read More ...

 Fueled by apps and the web, ‘on-demand’ is a big business right now. Uber is on-demand transport and (eventually) logistics. PostMates is on-demand delivery. TaskRabbit is on-demand ...

 Apple continues looking at ways to improve its earbuds — including potentially ditching the iconic white cables which had such a starring role in iTunes ads, back in the day. According a p...

 A second Chinese drone startup has disclosed major funding this week. Intel announced it put $60 million into Shanghai-based Yuneec, just two days after rival EHANG publicized a $42 million Seri...

 Shipments of tablets are straggling as as phablets like the iPhone 6 Plus became more popular. Enterprise users, however, may be the tablet’s saving grace, boosting sales of higher-end mod...

 If you ever wanted to stuff a full-size keyboard inside your (big) pockets or bag, then LG’s got your back with its newest product. Read More ...

 Everyone has their own favorite email app, there are plenty out there to choose from, but one of the best under-the-radar offerings (and my personal choice) — Dispatch — just got an ...

 Evernote founder Phil Libin was succeeded as CEO by ex-Googler Chris O’Neill last month, and the new man at the top appears to be wasting little time making his mark after Evernote announc...

 American video-streaming services are like buses if you happen to live in Japan. Fresh off the news that Netflix is heading to the East Asian country next week, Amazon has revealed that its Prim...

 Slack opened the tech world’s mind to the potential of messaging inside organizations, but there are plenty of others working to bring the concept to different kinds of businesses. One suc...

 It’s no surprise that the major content players – Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Yahoo, etc. – continue to capture front page news and headlines every day for their strategic moves ...

 In the last couple weeks, I’ve seen a lot of media coverage on one former Google employee’s effort to bring more pay transparency to her workplace by creating a spreadsheet for co-wo...

 “Google is not an enterprise company and we are trying to become cognizant of what the enterprise needs,” Craig McLuckie, Google’s product manager in charge of its Kubernetes a...

 Earlier today, Rovio said it would lay off 260 employees. This was fascinating newsto the Internet, given Rovio’sstatus as one of the vanguards of mobile gaming as the iPhone and Android e...

 Garrett Camp, co-founder of StumbleUpon says he’ll soon be the site’s majority stakeholder. Again. The site originally launched in 2001. StumbleUpon was sold to eBay in 2007, but sol...

 It was supposed to take 18 months. But with React Native, Facebook built its iOS Ads Manager app in 5 months, and then ported it to Android in just 3 more months. That’s because React Nati...

 Today, NASA tested a 3D printed turbopump, one that was put together with 45 percent fewer parts than pumps made any other way. This obviously saves time and money, but come on…NASA is slo...

 Today, NASA tested a 3D-printed turbopump, one that was put together with 45 percent fewer parts than pumps made any other way. This obviously saves time and money, but come on…NASA is slo...

 While Uber, Lyft, and similar ride-sharing services can help you get from one place to the next, they aren’t practical for hauling your large purchases – like those from an IKEA shop...

 When we observed an increase in Series A fundings in the first quarter of 2015, we had two theories as to what was happening. First, people are attracted to the Series A figures more than Series...

 All messaging apps are the same no more. A few years ago, there were few differences between SMS and a slew of chat apps like WhatsApp, WeChat, Kik, Line, KakaoTalk and Facebook Messenger. But e...

 Ok, not really, but this is pretty cool. Vegemite is a disgusting yeast paste beloved by far too many people. While I wouldn’t recommend actively eating it, Professor Marc in het Panhuis a...

 Earlier today, Y Combinator President Sam Altman posted the type of numbers about which he gets asked “a lot” — calling them (humbly and probablyrightly) “very imperfect ...

 BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is acquiringFutureAdvisor, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based online financial advisory firm that aims to help people manage their existing ...

 Frustrated by how difficult it was to have spur of the moment get-togethers with friends, Stanford classmates Joseph Lau and Nikil Viswanathan spent a Friday afternoon in San Francisco’s S...

 Android Pay, Google’s forthcoming payments platform and rival to Apple Pay, will soon launch, allowing consumers to pay using their Android smartphones at point-of-sale as well as make pur...

 Not unlike those fortune-telling fish you used to get at joke shops a new form of 3D-printed microfish – fish, not fiche – can wiggle and jiggle and wriggle inside you, dropping off ...

 There has been a lot of discussion about startup valuation over the past few months. Luminaries across the industry have chimed in, suggesting we’re returning to a time of irrational inves...

 It seems that the #Uncarrier has a soft spot for pirates, but perhaps onlywhen they’re being asked to deal with them without a court order. T-Mobile’s Austrian branch is refusing to ...

 Microsoft is 7.5 percent of the way to its goal of a flat billion devices running Windows 10 in the next few years. Today the software giant announced that its latest operating system, Windows 1...

 We’ve been hearing rumblings that Facebook was working on an “assistant” within Messenger (along with others), but today we’ve gotten the details that pull it all togethe...

 YouTube just launched YouTube Gaming on the web, Android and iOS. As expected, YouTube Gaming goes head-to-head against Twitch, mirroring many popular features of the existing gaming streaming g...

 Why pay Kickstarter or Indiegogo 5% when most crowdfunding traffic comes from project creators and their own promotion? And why publicize a crowdfunding page that will only live for a month inst...

 Coin, the device that wanted to replace all of your credit cards with a… card, is prepped and ready to dig into the future with Coin 2.0. Coin 2.0 uses NFC and is EMV-compatible so that us...

 Amazon just announced a new store for Android apps and games called Amazon Underground. While the company already has the Amazon Appstore, Amazon Underground is a brand new section as well as a ...

 Amazon just announced a new store for Android apps and games called Amazon Underground. While the company already has the Amazon Appstore, Amazon Underground is a brand new section as well as a ...

 Simon Khalaf, Yahoo’s senior vice president of publisher products, today outlined some big shifts in the mobile ecosystem and unveiledsome new tools for mobile developers. He made the anno...

 Codementor, an open marketplace for code instructors, is ramping up its services with the launch of live group classes. The startup, a Y Combinator alum, also announced that it has doubled its s...

 There have been many mechanical keyboard solutions in the past few years, most notably an IBM Selectric with serial out that let you klack away like Ada Lovelace directly into a printed email. H...

 Apple has lost a challenge in the German court system that sought to overturn an earlier ruling, which voided its patent for ‘swipe to unlock’ in Europe. The patent (EP1964022) was g...

 PayPal today expanded its instant checkout service known as One Touch to 13 new markets worldwide, including a wide swath of European countries along with Australia. The system, which lets mobil...

 The Martian Voice Communicator tries hard make you think it’s not a smartwatch. The model I tested, a black faux diver with a non-working bezel and quartz movement, looks more like a drugs...

 Hello friends and welcome back to Bullish, a weekly show fromTechCrunch designed to see how long I can sit under lights and not sweat through my makeup. Jokes aside, Bullish is our first talk sh...

 Remember the coolest cooler? It was a cooler with a speaker, a blender, big wheels, USB power, lights and more. Sony is releasing its own version of the coolest cooler! Here it is, a weirdly sha...

 Portal, a recently launched Android app that lets you move large files between your computer and your smartphone via your Wi-Fi connection, has today made its way to iOS. The new version offers ...

 The U.K. government’s Department for Transport (DfT) has released updated statistics on the number of taxis and private hire vehicles operating in England — which shows a marked incr...

 Google’s Container Engine, its service for running and managing Docker containers on its cloud platform using its open source Kubernetes system, is now out of beta and generally available....

 Google’s Container Engine, its service for running and managing Docker containers on its cloud platform using its open source Kubernetes system, is now out of beta and generally available....

 Despite a growing number of direct-to-consumer brands, brick-and-mortar shopping still accounts for 94 percent of retail sales in the U.S. That’s whyStorefront, a startup that provides bra...

 BasharSoft, the startup behind leading Egyptian recruiting Wuzzuf, has spent the last 5 years surviving the turmoil of Egypt’s recent history. But it’s come through that to become a ...

 MOCACARE, the maker of heart tracker MOCAheart, plans to develop new products and find distribution channels in China after raising a $2 million Series A. Read More ...

 Velostrata, an early stage hybrid cloud startup, emerged from stealth today announcinga $14 million Series A investment. The round was led by Norwest Venture Partnersand Greylock IL Partners. Th...

 Intercom, a startup promising businesses a “fundamentally new” approach to communicating with their customers, has raised $35 million in Series C funding.Co-founder and CEO Eoghan Mc...

 Hyper, a curated video discovery platform, is launching today to provideyou with a daily dose of the best short-form video content that the Internet has to offer.Powered by $1.1 million in seed ...

 Docady, an iOS app that lets you store and manage all your important documents, has been doing well in the App Store since its official launch in mid-July, including being featured by Apple as a...

 It looks like Angry Birds maker Rovio is having some troubles to pay the bills. The Finnish company is about to cut 260 jobs after reducing its workforce by 110 employees in October 2014. At the...

 ZeroStack, a company that hopesto help mid-market companies set up a private cloud more easily, exited stealth today and announced $5.6 million in Series A funding. The round was led byFoundatio...

 ‘Sharing economy’ companies like Airbnb, Uber, TaskRabbit and others have grown popular for offering new types of work, and by association, additional incomes to people worldwide. Wh...

 With messaging apps like WhatsApp, Line, and Viber fighting for growth around the world, is there room for smaller, newer players? Charge Messenger thinks so and to prove that point, it just ann...

 Longtime Googler Nitin Mangtani (manager fora number of productsincluding Google Shopping) has founded a startup of his own, PredictSpring, where he’s working to help brands and retailers ...

 Intuit is laying off 249 employees, mostly in the company’s Small Business Group, according to an internal memo from CEO Brad Smith reviewed by TechCrunch. We first heard about thelayoffs ...

 Shares in technology companies have recently come under intense pressure, similar to other equities, markets, commodities and more. How far tech shops have declined, however, is worth digging in...

 I’ve always been fascinated by how labor markets work. People are the foundation for how things get done. How we organize across and within companies impacts both creativity and efficiency...

 I’ve always been fascinated by how labor markets work. People are the foundation for how things get done. How we organize across and within companies impacts both creativity and efficiency...

 Founders Fund, the venture firm co-created by Peter Thiel, is entering yet another surprising area that you don’t commonly see with Silicon Valley VCs. They’re backing a materials sc...

 For a while, Gmail data like flight information has been surfaced in Google’s search product. One could imagine that that data would make sense in other places…like Google Calendar. ...

 Los Angeles startup HelloTech is in the final stages of raising $10 million in Series A funding, according to sources with knowledge of the deal. Madrona Venture Group is leading the round. Foll...

Not going to lie: I have no idea what this is. My attempted explanation is that we were told that we should do video podcasts, and instead of turning on a webcam like normal people, we decided to reco...

 Tesla’s Model S, a “premium performance” sedan with dual-motor, all-wheel drive, is advertised as having a 265-mile range, according to the company. But Bjrn Nyland, a programm...

 I’ve watched from the sidelines for years as the debate has played out about race and gender in Silicon Valley, and tech at large. Recently, I read an article shaming Facebook, Google and ...

 Back in June, YouTube announced that it would be getting into the gaming game and launch its own Twitch competitor called YouTube Gaming. Tomorrow will be that day (in the US and UK), we’v...

 451 Media Group , the digital media company co-founded by Transformers director Michael Bay, is launching anew publishing division for graphic novels. The company was first announced this spring...

 Analysts at IDC have loweredtheir projections about how much they expect the smartphone market to grow in 2015. Earlier this year, IDC said shipments would grow at 11.3 percent year-over-year, b...

 Apple’s professional-level music creation tool, Logic Pro X, just received a major update today (10.2) that addsthe well-known Alchemy synthesizer into the mix, while also allowing artists...

 After a number of big fundraising rounds over the last few years, Houzz has now made its first acquisition. The company today announced that it has acquired GardenWeb, a garden and home communit...

 Popular radio service and app TuneIn just launched a new subscription service. For $7.99 per month, TuneIn Premium subscribers get a bunch of new premium content as well as a nifty ad-free featu...

 Hortonworks, the big data company built on Hadoop,bought early-stage startup Onyara today. The company, which launched at the end oflastyear, has its roots in the NSA — yes that NSA. The O...

 Slack’s true power is being a platform. A platform that other tools can plug into and play nice with. The company says there are 80+ of these types of integrations and thousands of develop...

 Facebook Moments, the social network’s recently launched photo-sharing app which aims to address the problem of getting friends to sendeach other the photos they’ve been hoarding on ...

 Butterfleye is a hardware startup aiming to build a connected home security camera that avoids coming across as creepily prying. Read More ...

 For many years, hardware has lagged behind software because of price, specialization, and the speed of innovation. Recently though, more startups are taking up the challenge thanks to the Intern...

 In the world of technology, change happens with the blink of an eye. But one thing that has remained relatively constant throughout the years is the good old mouse and keyboard. The Sensel Morph...

 As students return tocollege campuses this week, Tapingo is introducing three new features available at all 125 schools where the mobile ordering service is currently in use.With an average camp...

 The last time GoPro CEO and Founder Nick Woodman stopped by Disrupt SF, the company had yet to go public, the Hero3 had just been announced and VR was still a thing of the future. We’re ex...

 Following a similar move which saw itbecoming the first internet service provider todistribute HBO NOW to its broadband customers, New York-area cable TV company Cablevision announced this morni...

 Chic by Choice (CBC), a European startup which resembles RentTheRunway, has acquired its German competitor La Remia. Terms were undisclosed. Anna Mangold and Claudia von Boeselager, the founders...

 Amazon’s one-hour delivery service, Prime Now, is finally making its way to the company’s hometown with today’s launch in Seattle and surrounding regions. Included in the expan...

 The Philips Hue product line is great, but it’s also very expensive with some starter kits costing $200. But if you really want to be able to control multiple light bulbs at a time, Philip...

 In the last few years, there’s been a massive decoupling between private and public markets. A Goldman Sachs report shows that since December, five of the seven most recent exits for billi...

 Over three years afterits acquisition by LinkedIn, SlideShare this morning is getting deeper integration with theprofessional social network, a rebranding (now it’s “LinkedIn SlideSh...

 Airbnb has announced it will begin collecting tourist tax in Paris, the most popular city for home sharing on its platform, starting from October 1 — after which the remittance collection ...

 Drone startup EHANG has scored a $42 million Series B to develop its technology and launch new products. Led by GP Capital, the round also included participation from returning investors GGV Cap...

 French startup Mapstr just released the version 1.0 of its nifty map app, but it’s already thinking about the next steps. The company just raised $800,000 from angel investors and is worki...

 Salesforce.comlifted the curtain on Salesforce Lightning today, the completelyredesigned version of its core CRM product. As is often the case with Salesforce, theannouncement included several p...

 The Cyanogen flavor of open Android, which is pushing a more customizable version of Google’s mobile OS — helped along by some $115 million in funding in its coffers, including an $8...

 Spare5 lets businesses outsource menial tasks like tagging and describing images, cleaning up data and classifying content to smartphone users who want to earn a few cents while standing at the ...

 BlueData, a company that helps customers generatevirtualized big data clusters,announced a $20 million Series C round and a partnership with Intel today. Intel Capital led the round. Also partic...

 The fast-growing online education service Coursera today announced that it has raised a $49.5 million Series C funding round led by New Enterprise Associates. Other investors include Kleiner Per...

 Stay long enough in tech and you’ll see the same ideas being recycled, usually with a slight twist. To wit: Friendsy, a student-only social network that’s aiming to bringing Tinder-s...

 India’s Ola is taking its rivalry with Uber beyond taxis after it made its in-app payment service available within a range of other apps and services. Read More ...

 Zipcar looks like it is boosting the enterprise side of its car sharing business after it acquired Local Motion, a five-year old fleet management startup, in an undisclosed deal. Read More ...

 Aliyun, the cloud computing unit of Alibaba Group, is launching an artificial intelligence platform that it claims is the first in China. Called DT PAI, the service combines algorithms used by A...

 If you’ve ever wanted to play games or use apps from your phone on your desktop — web versions of messaging apps are certainly convenient — then Vysor is a new service for Andr...

 Sony has given the world the first peak of its upcoming drone project. Cool though it is — the craft takes off vertically in this YouTube video — consumers shouldn’t get too ex...

 ClearSky Data emerged from stealth today, offering an unusual approach to storage and data lifecycle management. It wants to combinethe speed of on-premises storage with the cost and elasticity ...

 Hackers have taken to the 36 million email list stolen during the Ashley Madison hack to attempt to extort folks who may or may not have used the app to cheat. Brian Krebs has spoken to an admin...

 As San Francisco’s population rapidly changes with an influx of new tech money and workers, a big question is what happens to the city’s K-12 schools and what tech’s ultimate i...

 Today, Twitter launched an emoji tied to the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards (which are happening this weekend). Users hash tagging either #VMA of #VMAs will get avery tinymoon man emoji to pop up i...

 It’s been party time for mobile, with massive growth and disruption helping VCs to raise huge funds, entrepreneurs to raise massive rounds, and valuations to skyrocket. With 89 mobile Inte...

 After a multi-year bull cycle that raised the prices of domestic equities to levels that made value-focused investors squirm, the U.S. markets are suffering from a stiff correction, dropping in ...

 “If the roast beef is right they’ll be back,” said Thornton Mellon and that has been the motto of Swiss watchmakers since the beginning of the burgeoning smartwatch revolution....

 In recent years, Kevin Busque began to notice something at TaskRabbit, the outsourced jobs marketplace that he co-founded seven years ago with his wife, and TaskRabbit’s CEO, Leah.The comp...

 The Russian government has instructed all ISP’s in the country to block Russian Wikipedia following their denied request to remove apost about preparingnarcotics. “Today, we have hea...

 Remember Windows 95? I mean, how could you not? Oh, you’re under 30? Yeah, then you probably don’t remember Windows 95. Its launch was a glorious day, it stood for the rise of graphi...

 Facebook just made makingyour donation to Our Lady of Perpetual Exemptiona biteasiermore visible. Today, Facebookannounced that it’sopening up its donate button as an available call-to-act...

 “We’re not trying to be the all-singing, all-dancing HR system. I don’t know how to be kickass at Payroll” says Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait. But what his startup is ...

 A group of high school friends, now UC Berkeley engineers, have created an app called Bash to make it easier for friends to organize hangouts, meetups and other events. Launching today on the Ap...

 Things didn’t look good this morning. When stock markets opened, Facebook was down 12.1 percent, Apple was down 10 percent, Google was down 6.5 percent, etc. But public tech companies are ...

 More than 30 diverse tech startups recently attended the first-ever White House Demo Day as part of President Obama’s Startup America initiative to call attention to the low numbers of wom...

 If you’re a Twitter on the web user, like I am, then you’ll be happy to know that the company has now introduced web notifications when you get a direct message. Just keep Twitter op...

 Uber lets us trade money for time. But the cheaper the rides, the more people who will use Uber. That’s why it’s testing a way to let you pay less money for a little less convenience...

 There are plenty of things that I don’t like, one of them is waiting. For just about anything. I’m not alone. The airport is one of those places where hours upon hours can disappear&...

 Back in 2013, Google started a preview of a new service that let developers ship their hard drives to Google for import into its Cloud Storage service. Today, it’s expanding this service a...

 If you enjoy reading TechCrunch, there’s a really good chance you’d enjoy the TechCrunch Radio show on Sirius XM. Yes, that’s a real thing. John Biggs and I discuss the latest ...

 This morning, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) suffered from a stark drop when the stock market opened. Its shares tanked 10 percent to $95.17 compared to Friday’s closing price. Shortly after, Apple b...

 After a private beta and a few leaks, Microsoft today launched the first public beta of its Siri- and Google Now-like Cortana personal assistant for Android. Microsoft describes the Cortana app ...

 Google launched a couple of updates to its Classroom educational platform today that will make life a little bit easier for teachers as they get ready for the next school year. Read More ...

 At a news conferenceon Monday, police in Canada revealed thatAvid Life Media, the company that operates the Ashley Madison website, is now offering a $500,000 reward to anyone providing informat...

 Many of you probably know CB Insights as the venture capital database that puts out reports about trendslikethe on-demand economy and compiles lists of unicorn startups. Today, the company is ex...

 Jon Callaghan is a founder and managing partner of True Ventures, an industry-leading venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology firms. We’re thrilled to announce that Cal...

 Though services dedicated to photos of food – like Foodspotting or Forkly, for example – have exited the scene (as well asconsumers’ collective consciousness) over the years, s...

 Tech companies are suffering from the current hostile stock market environment as stock markets around the world are plummeting following concerns over China. All tech companies are tanking righ...

 In a move that has some environmentalists up in arms, a group of retired Silicon Valley engineers and scientists are proposing a new approach to fighting climate change. They want to brighten cl...

 Two services that tracked deleted tweets by politicians and other diplomats in an effort to maintain a transparent, public record of statements made on social media, Politwoops and its sister si...

 Last week, Y Combinator ran investors through 105 presentations by early-stage startups in a two-day show it calls Demo Day. The pace of deal-making for such events, staged every summer and wint...

 The LA Dodgers Accelerator, an accelerator program in partnership with R/GA, is kicking off its first class today in the City of Angels with ten sports-related tech startups. In April, the Dodge...

 AdMobilize, a new monitoring and tracking technology that measures attention and traffic in stores and for outdoor advertising, is partnering with Verizon* to add 3G connectivity to its outdoor ...

 Building off the strength of a successful open source project, a new startup that provides newsfeed development and management as a service — Stream — has raised $1.75 million in its...

 Building off the strength of a successful open source project, a new startup that provides newsfeed development and management as a service — Stream — has raised $1.75 million in its...

 Everything But The House (EBTH), an online estate sale marketplace, has pulled in $30 million in new funding to help people who aredownsizingsell their stuff tobargain hunters and collectors aro...

 LG is going all-in on battery life with the second version of its G Pad tablet that was just unveiled today. The device itself won’t surface in the flesh until the IFA electronics show nex...

 Despite the government’s best efforts (and new pronouncements today) China’s public markets are collapsing. Read More ...

 Uber isn’t happy with its competitors in China. The U.S. ride-sharing goliath has “spoken out for the first time” about being blocked on WeChat, China’s hugely popular mo...

 Last October, Marantis, the pure-play OpenStack vendor announced a $100 million round. Just10 months later, it’s back with anidentical announcement. This time the investmentis led by Intel...

 Perhaps the greatest testimonial to those who endured Gamergate is not to remember it. To not talk about it all. So I won’t. However one aspect that I will talk about is what it did to ga...

 Elysium’s memorial services are part of the technological triumphs of a new generation of space industrialists, who have brought seemingly futuristic notions of asteroid mining, consumer s...

 In the wake of devastating personal information leaks, like Target’s back in 2014 affecting more than 70 million customers and the more recent Ashley Madison data breach, concerns over cyb...

 Violent extremism starts with an idea and an entrepreneur. On offer is a belief system that promises to upend the status quo, to change the world and take you with it. Investors commit at differ...

 It’s been more than five years since Steve Jobs wrote his infamous “Thoughts on Flash” letter citing the high level of energy consumption, lack of performance on mobile and poo...

 As the European startup scene has matured over the last few years so too has the VC scene. But a handicap has always been the issue of follow-on funding. Gradually, however, the most successful ...

 Talk of the bubble bursting eventually surfaces with every successful market. When valuations are increasing exponentially, excitement is building to a fever pitch, and companies are sprouting s...

 The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Frank Radice, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Saturday, August 22, 2015. President Trump dominated the Gang, leaving just enoug...

 Dropbox boasts a valuation in the $10 billion range. Last February the company hired a new CFO, which for many startups is a signal that their IPO moment is coming sooner rather than later. Nobo...

 Wearables currently decipher physiological biometrics — heart rate, pulse, caloric intake. But in the coming years, we’ll see emotion-sensing wearable technology that clues us into s...

 Can an app warn you that you might have skin cancer? Digital health startup SkinVision is using smartphone tech and vision algorithms to allow consumers to track changes to their moles. Users of...

 When I was in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia recently as part of the U.S. government’s delegation to the Third International Conference on Financing for Development, I was struck by how much the in...

 A lot of intriguing and conflicting things have been said about Bitcoin in the past few years. Some see it as the salvation of the financial system, others as a new toy, appealing only to the te...

 With the recent deluge of on-demand startups, many of us expect to get whatever we want with the push of a button, whether it’s food, a rideorpretty much anything else. So why not medical ...

 The most-watched Game of Thrones episode ever, this past season’s finale, had 8.11 million viewers. Meanwhile, Pentatonix, a musical a capella group on YouTube since 2012, gets 10 million ...

 Ford was one of the first major car manufacturers to bring connected car technology to its lineup with Sync in 2007, but while the first iterations of its Sync and MyFord Touch infotainment syst...

 Diversity inthe tech industry is dismal, with white men making up the vast majority of its workforce. That being said,tech companies are aware of the lack of diversity and some are even actively...

 Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. LIVE recording session today, Saturday August 22nd, at 10amPT.Gillmor Gang LIVE chatroom during the...

 I have been a huge science fiction fan as long as I can remember, and a recurring theme in both science fiction literature and movies is the creation of artificial intelligence. However, the sub...

 Apple Music could win over more power users with some changes. And now would be a great time, because everyone’s trial periods are about to expire. Here are 9 features that I believe Apple...

 There is so much to admire about Apple. They make superb, beautiful products. Their amazing comeback story is unparalleled in corporate history. Steve Jobs has become something akin to a modern-...

 If you’re anything like me you understand the power of Arduino but are stymied by limitations of education, imagination, or wireless connectivity to implement it into your own life. Thanks...

 Apple is offering iPhone 6+ owners the opportunity to replace the iSight camera on their device for free, after the U.S. company found that “a small percentage” of models produce blu...

 Most U.S. consumer Internet companies have a hard time breaking into China. Cultural differences and the Internet firewall are a huge barrier to entry. Even tech giants like Google, Facebook and...

 China recently published its GDP growth for Q1 of 2015 at 7 percent. While this figure is drastically lower than the double-digit growth seen in previous years, it has still attracted foreign co...

 We’ve pretty much all been there: you hand your phone to a friend to show them a picture. They look at the photo, they chuckle… and then they casually swipe to the next photo in your...

 Welcome back friends, we are here to cap off the week, taking a look at the biggest stories in the process. This time ’round, ourcoterie was helmed by none other than TechCrunch’s ow...

 Don’t say we never did anything for you. We’re offering an extension on the early-bird pricing for a limited time. You have just one more week to get your Disrupt SF (September 21-23...

 The second startup participating in the New York Daily News’ Innovation Lab began at the Daily News itself.Optimera was founded by Keith Candiotti (pictured above), the ad operations manag...

 Dropbox is perhaps one of the companies in the toughest position in Silicon Valley right now. It’s been a darling in the eyes of the tech industry, rising to a $10 billion valuation as of ...

 Back in May, Google and Twitter partnered to bring tweets into mobile search results. It was, and is, a pretty big deal for both companies. The relationship is apparently going well, as Google a...

 The global app industry has grown dramatically in recent years. Creative developers, enabled by harmonized platforms that incorporate inexpensive feature-rich devices and extraordinary software ...

 Giving out samples on the street is kind of silly. Taking a little cup of urine-colored sports drink or a nasty bag of chips offers little in the way of customer generation and it usually ends u...

 THE LEGAL AGREEMENTS SET OUT BELOW GOVERN YOUR USE OF THIS TECHCRUNCH POST (“TECHCRUNCH”). TO AGREE TO THESE TERMS, CLICK “AGREE.” IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THESE TERMS, DO ...

 Mozilla today announced major changes to how Firefox will implement add-ons going forward. The most important of these is the adoption of a new extension API that will be largely compatible with...

Today is the last day to save $1,000 on tickets to the hottest show in tech, so you need to head over to our ticketing page right now and get your tickets to Disrupt SF 2015. We’re thrilled with...

 This week, Amazon came under fire by The New York Times for harsh work culture allegations, Google surprised the world with a new router, and data from an extramarital affairs site was leaked on...

 Work isn’t all about fun and games, but QuizUp is trying as hard as it can to change that. The popular and frustratingly addictive trivia game is announcing a new initiative today to chang...

 We were on the coast of Croatia when we saw our first nude sunbather. He was an older gentlemen who probably looked good in a suit but now, skin pruned from the water and his body hair plastered...

 Reserve, a “dining concierge” startup that helps users with restaurant reservations and payments, has acquired bootstrapped New York City company Set for Service. Set for Service off...

 It would appear that Amazon has plans to team up with SmartThings to power various home automation features with the Amazon Echo, the voice-powered personal assistant device. According to a Goog...

 Many crowdfunding startups now make it easier for founders to reach a bigger audience of investors. The question is whether investors are as keen to continue fundingcrowdfunding sites.OurCrowd m...

 Many crowdfunding startups now make it easier for founders to reach a bigger audience of investors. The question is whether investors are as keen to continue fundingcrowdfunding sites.OurCrowd m...

 Got an iPhone? Got a dollar? That’s all you need if you want to take one of Samsung’s newest smartphones for a thirty day, “no obligation” spin. Read More ...

 Uber could become a public company as soon as next year, according to a leaked document published in a report from Reuters. Read More ...

 Uber could become a public company as soon as next year, according to a leaked document published in a report from Reuters. Read More ...

 There’s good news if you’re a ride-sharing app regular in India and sick of struggling with the country’s sometimes (/often) patchy mobile internet coverage. Both Uber and Indi...

 If you work on any kind of online content, you know it’s not enough to hit publish and then sit back waiting for traffic. Links have to be shared to Facebook and Twitter, excerpts posted t...

 Facebook refused to fill its site with flashy animated banner ads for a decade. Zuckerberg thought these interrupted the user experience, and could stunt growth. But after reaching near ubiquity...

 Navigating culture and business practices can be a trying task for any company going global. For tech companies, this often can mean coping with varying degrees of Internet connections from diff...

 At this point in the 3D-printing game it should be obvious why the tech exists and why we should all own 3D printers: because they can change lives. Nowhere is that point hammered home more than...

 At least Twitter isn’t alone. Alibaba also set a record low today. In the post-IPO market, Twitter is sucking air. After repeated quarterly reports detailing slowing, anemic user growth, s...

 For developers and users, mobile deep linking has been a fantastically anticlimactic technology. Deep linking has existed since iOS 2.0, a time when fewer than 1 in 10 of us had a smartphone and...

 Yesterday’s Y Combinator Summer 2015 Demo Day had a little something for everyone, with everything from condom delivery to server vulnerability monitoring thrown in the mix.Of the 52 that ...

 New York City’s tech industry is mostly white (62%) and male (60%),according to a recent analysis from the Center for an Urban Future.The fact that white men make up the majority of NYC...

 Why should Silicon Valley care about the 2016 election? According to Georgetown University’s Larry Downes, it’s going to be an election in which the most disruptive technologies R...

 HBO is expanding HBO Now, its subscription streaming service, to the Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick. As of today, you can watch all HBO series, movies and documentaries for $15 per month with ...

 Want to participate in the Disrupt SF Hackathon but missed out on the first wave of tickets? Well, good news. Today we’re releasing the next wave of Hackathon tickets to the general public...

 In June of last year, VC Experts discovered a filing that suggested ZocDoc, a roughly eight-year-old, New York-based online medical care schedule service, was raising a new round of funding wort...

 One of my favorite things to do is to watch and see what emojis become candidates for Unicode updates (don’t judge). Sometimes they’re really great and sometimes they’re, well,...

 Nine in 10 parents believe that teaching computer science is a good use of school resources. Two-thirds of parents believe CS education should be mandatory in schools. Eight percent of students ...

 In its quest to add a little fun through your (literal) journey through life, Swarm is launching version 3.0 of the app, bringing in a special new game that lets you compete with your friend net...

 What do you look for in an app? It might be something useful that helps to organise your life, it might be to connect with friends and family, or perhaps it’s a diverting game to while awa...

A new version of the bluetooth tracker tagTile just dropped on Amazon, Tile’s website and a host of T-Mobile stores. The updated item tracker nowboasts a ring that’s three times louder and...

 LawDingo users, meet DocDingo, CashDingo and PsychDingo.As I’ve written in the past, the Y Combinator-incubated startup promises to connect you with a lawyer instantly, usually over the ph...

 A few short weeks ago, Yuri Milner announced to the world that he’d be investing $100 million to find extraterrestrial intelligent life.Today, TechCrunch has its own announcement: Yuri Mil...

 Android Wear’s watch faces are getting a bit more interesting today. Developers were always able to display a lot of information on their watch faces, but users couldn’t interact wit...

 Without a doubt, Google Photos wants to be home to all of your photos. Whether you have a thumb drive, CD, DVD or undeveloped film laying around, the team wants you to consider uploading them to...

 As we fast approach the 2016 election cycle, the future of on-demand work platforms is at a crossroads, with Uber, TaskRabbit and other market leaders facing increased scrutiny and skepticism fr...

 Affirm, the lending company started by Max Levchin that offers customers payment plans for online purchases, has announced that the company’s financing options will now beavailable to all ...

 Finnish mobile maker Jolla has opened up additional pre-orders for its forthcoming Sailfish tablet. It said today that a “limited” batch of additional slates is now available to pre-...

 Voice-focused dating app Revealr, which lets you record a 20 second audio clip as a calling card for prospective dates, has been acquired by Venntro Media Group, owner of multiple dating propert...

 The clock is ticking. If you’ve been holding out on purchasing tickets to Disrupt SF 2015, you have just two days left to score them at the low, early-bird price of $1,995. You seriously d...

 Giphy, the search engine for all things gif, has today released a new app called Giphy Cam that lets users create their own gifs to send or share on social media. “Giphy has always wanted ...

 Add recreational vehiclesto the so-called sharing economy. Outdoorsy is a startup that provides an online marketplace for motorhome and trailer owners to rent out their vehicles when they’...

 [tc_on_aol code=”519023602″] WeChat dominates China with its messaging hub that lets you shop, call a taxi, and pay bills — all from one app. Now, mobile search app Vurb wants ...

 Nintendo just cut the Nintendo 2DS price tag to $99. And for this price, you also get Mario Kart 7. This cheap portable console can play all the 3DS games, which makes it a good console for your...

 As a cloud identity management service, Okta collects tons of data about how its customers use other cloud products. Today it released its firstOkta Business @ Work Report. Among the many compel...

 Lavaboom, a German startup that was building a zero access secure email service that focused on simplifying PGP encryption security to target a more mainstream user-base, is shutting down and fi...

 AppInside, a tool designed to help app developers check for security vulnerabilities, announced a $2.3 million seed round from Boston’s Accomplicetoday.When a company, whether a bank, hote...

 Shopping online for clothes can be a real pain, especially when you’re searching for something very specific. Sure, most retailers have filters for tops, pants, dresses, etc., but most don...

 There’s nothing like a sweet, sweet cocktail during summertime. But maybe you don’t know how to make great cocktails. Meet MixStik, a small connected stick that will help you make ta...

 Carbon3D, a startup building 3D printers for manufacturers, has pulled in $100 million in new funding to move 3D printing out of the prototyping phase and into production.Google Ventures led the...

 Twitter is unveiling several new features for advertisers who want their campaigns to go beyond Twitter itself. And it’s giving the program a new name, the Twitter Audience Platform.Last y...

 Boogie Boards are a lot of fun and the company just released a new model. Called the Jot 8.5, the slate combines the fun of a white board with the convenienceof an electronic writing screen. But...

 Mesosphere, the company that aims to build a container-centric “operating system for the data center” based on the Apache Mesos project, is giving the first public demo of Mesos runn...

 Grand Rounds, a service companies use to give employees access to healthcare advice and treatment around the U.S. irrespective of where they live, has raised $55 million in a new financing round...

 Finnish fitness startup Yoogaia has pulled in a $3 million seed to stretch its home exercise platform into more markets. Investors in the round are Nokia Growth Partners, Inventure, Sanoma Ventu...

 Viki, the global video site owned by Japan’s Rakuten, has made an acquisition of its own after it snapped up Soompi, an English-language news and fan site dedicated to Korean cinema and dr...

 It’s no wonder Google is expanding its efforts to broaden Android’s reach by working with OEMs in emerging markets, via its Android One smartphone affordability program; the latest g...

 Mobile messenger Line has unleashed its latest standalone app, a location-sharing service called Line Here. Line users can already share their location in chats, but Line Here extends that servi...

 Will it be enough? Sony just announced a new Sony SmartBand 2. It is everything you’ve come to expect from fitness tracker. It has a silicon band, it can track your steps for days and it c...

 If you were cheesed off when Square Enix launched a mobile version Final Fantasy XIII for gamers in Japan only, then we’ve got some news for you. Final Fantasy VII, a true classic in the s...

 RedMart, an online grocery service in Singapore, has closed a $26.7 million round in preparation for an upcoming Series C which will be used to expand its service across Southeast Asia. Read Mor...

 Copenhagen-based startup ChurchDesk is a cloud-based platform and mobile apps for iOS and Android to help church staff and volunteers run their church more efficiently and better engage with the...

 Eleven companies, including Alibaba-backed Paytm and several telecoms, can now offer a wide array of financial services after being granted provisional approval by the Reserve Bank of India, the...

 WhatsApp has finally added iOS to the platforms supported by its web app. This means that iPhone users can now sync their accounts and chats to WhatsApp Web. iOS is already listed on WhatsApp We...

 I was born an engineer and an introvert. The rest is pretty predictable. When I was three I obsessed over jigsaw puzzles. At five, LEGO. I showed whatever I built to my mom, and she gave me a st...

 If you long for the shitty quality videos of pre-2000, the ones shot on a camcorder, then this iOS app is for you. Fittingly, it’s called VHS Camcorder and it costs $3.99. It’s kind ...

 Hardware was the clear cut theme of Day 1, Demo Day 2 of Y Combinator’s Summer 2015 was a bit more eclectic. Moving services! Streaming services! Hotel booking, augmented reality, eSports...

 In keeping with that thought, I’m currently leaningback in an Eames Lounge Chair dialing inon a copy of the Citizen Kane of headphone-listening albums, The Dark Side Of The Moon Remastered...

 After seeing massive growth on our daily newsletter over the past year, we decided to rethink the product and see what else we could offer to our die-hard readers. The biggest takeaways were tha...

 It’s that time again: Hardware Alley time! We want you to exhibit at Disrupt this September and we won’t take “Ehhh, maybe.” for an answer. Disrupt runs from September 21...

 “Hey Robot, make me a sandwich”, I yelled over the ruckus of Y Combinator Demo Day’s break room. The traditional catered lunch had been replaced with a new buffet: hardware sta...

 Owlet, the teenie tiny bootie that goes on babies and informs you if they’ve stopped breathing, has raised a $7 million A round, adding some solid numbers to their already impressive $1.85...

 Urinary tract infections, or UTIs, are the second leading cause of doctor visits in the U.S., responsible for 10 million visits per year. They’re incredibly uncomfortable, require antibiot...

 International students in the United States who are working toward a science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) degree may soon find it a whole lot harder to work legally in the cou...

 Why do we care suddenly about working conditions when it turns out that white-collar employees are the ones getting shafted? The workers at Amazon fulfillment centers have much less choice and m...

 Rise, a service that connects users with diet coaches, has acquired healthy restaurant food recommendation startup HealthyOut. HealthyOut combs the menus of nearby restaurants to find healthy fo...

 Finding love using online dating apps and services can be tough, and even dangerous for anyone who’s not straight and cisgender (those who don’t identify as transgender). Yes, there ...

 Dropbox announced a pretty handy feature today that allows you to drag and drop URLs into Dropbox. Anyone with access to where you’ve dropped them can then open the web pages on any device...

 The public discourse about the “on-demand” economy gets a D+. Wherever I turn, whether it’s the Economist, New York Times, TechCrunch, ReCode, Forbes, Washington Post or Busine...

 Debt is a harsh mistress, especially for a startup tech company. Read More ...

 In recent days, Amazon has worked to soften the blow of a blistering piece about its culture in Sunday’s New York Times. In the article’s immediate aftermath, Jeff Bezos wrote a memo...

 The company behind dating site Ashley Madision, Avid Life Media, has issued a statement putting to rest some of the issues its users have been afraid of. Read More ...

 Meet the FrankenBlackBerry. Is it an Android phone? Is it a BlackBerry? No, it’s the new BlackBerry Android phone! If you ever wondered what would happen if you slapped a BlackBerry keyboa...

 Meet Cliick: another dating app wannabe, but one that’s taking a bit of a leftfield approach to the perennial problem of matching singles. Instead of proffering profiles for users to swipe...

 Smart mattress covers, RNA diagnostics, and photosynthetic grow lights were amongst the big ideas that shone brightest on stage at Demo Day 1 for Y Combinator’ Summer 2015 batch. 50 startu...

 At TechCrunch, we cover the latest in mobile, and it’s time for us to devote the same intensity to creating new TechCrunch apps on mobile platforms. To accomplish that, we aim to build out...

 While Demonsaw sounds like it would be an amazing metal band, it’s actually a sharing system built by a senior programmer at Rockstar Games. The creator, Eijah, was part of the core team f...

 Microsoft today published the third technical preview of Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016. As promised, this is also the first version of Windows Server to natively support Windows Ser...

 The RISD grads were so passionate about their idea that they bootstrapped their company with a binder full of credit cards and sold politically themed cereal boxes during the 2008 presidential c...

 Disrupt SF is right around the corner, and the deadline for getting early bird ticket pricing to the show ends this week. You seriously don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to save $1...

 Last week, Samsung held a big conference in New York. While many anticipated the announcements of the Galaxy Note 5 and the Galaxy S6 Edge+, the company also teased a new upcoming device —...

 Every year, 8 million people around the world die from cancer, and 14 million people find out they have the disease. Guardant Health and Flatiron Health are joining forcesin an aim to cut those ...

 White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer for data policy DJ Patil is coming on stage with us at TechCrunch DisruptSF 2015.We’re excited to have him come and chat with us about his role ...

 White House Chief Data Scientist and Deputy Chief Technology Officer for data policy DJ Patil is coming on stage with us at TechCrunch DisruptSF 2015.We’re excited to have him come and cha...

 Spredfast has acquired another social marketing company, Shoutlet.While the two companies are in the same industry, Spredfast CEO Rod Favaron (pictured above) said that when he looks at their pr...

 Happy Wednesday, friends, and welcome back to another episode of Bullish, a newshow from TechCrunch designed to force me to wear makeup at least once a week. This time ’round we’re t...

 SoftBank’s Nikesh Arora — the man who Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son is backing as his replacement at the Japanese company — is doubling down on his employer after he agreed to...

 Ankur Jain, the founder of Humin – an app that aims to organize your contacts better than your smartphone – is sitting across from me in a conference room in downtown San Francisco a...

 Fantasy sports company FanDuel is acquiring numberFire, in a deal that co-founder and CEO Nigel Eccles told me will help FanDuel pursue a vision that goes beyond fantasy sports.“Our ambiti...

 Disrupt SF 2015 is right around the corner, so we thought we’d catch up on one of last year’s Battlefield contestants — Cinder. Cinder didn’t win the competition, but the...

 Hacked data from online extramarital affairs website Ashley Madison has apparently been leaked online, after a threat by a group of hackers to do so earlier this summer if the service did not sh...

In December of last year, a new, mysterious phone entered the oligarchy of the smartphone world. It was called the OnePlus One, and it made a hell of a splash as one of the more capable indie phones o...

 Kindara, a startup that helps women track ovulation cycles and fertility, has raised $5.3 million in seed funding to bring big data to women’s health. Boston Seed Capital led the seed roun...

 Xiaomi may be best known for its competitively priced smartphones, which have soaked up marketshare in China at the expense of Samsung and other Android makers, but it also has its own version o...

 AlienVault, a company that delivers a hybrid threat management solutions combined with a crowd-sourced threat intelligence platform, announced a $52 million investment round today. The company b...

 Api.ai, a developer of AI and natural language tech that enables developers to add Siri-like conversational interfaces to their apps, has raised $3 million in additional funding. The startup has...

 Uber is once again upping its focus on India after the U.S. company announced it has closed a strategic investment from Tata Capital, one of India’s largest wealth management organizations...

 Which emojis do New Yorkers use more than other U.S. states? How diverse is California’s emoji usage? Do Alaskans dream of emoji fish? Read More ...

 The taskof locating a parking spot in a majorcity can be agonizing and at points seem downright impossible.SpotHero is aiming to simplify the process and help drivers locate parking and reserves...

 Rakuten, Japan’s top online retail firm, has pulled an Amazon after it launched its own branded Android app store today. Read More ...

 Mumbai-based IntelligenceNODE, a big data analytics startup that serves retailers, has raised $4 million in Series A funding led by New Enterprise Associates and Orios Venture Partners. The comp...

 There’s good news for aspiring YouTube stars in India after Google announced its first YouTube Space for the country. The production studio is the second of its kind in Asia, following the...

 GrabTaxi, the taxi-hailing app that rivals Uber in Southeast Asia, is in the money after announcing a $350 million Series E round from a range of investors that — interestingly — inc...

 Indian e-commerce platform Snapdeal has confirmed that it received $500 million of funding from three of Asia’s largest tech companies: Alibaba, Foxconn, and SoftBank. Returning investors ...

 Aliyun, the cloud computing unit of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, is taking another major step toward international expansion with the opening of a data center in Singapore. Aliyun received ...

 If you like short films from independent makers and have an Android device then there’s good news for you after Viddsee launched a native Android app. Read More ...

 Hardware took the spotlight at today’s Y Combinator Demo Day, reflecting a major shift of the accelerator beyond the cliche mobile app startup. Out of the 50 companies from the Summer 2015...

 Imagine a world where search engines proactively send recommended articles, people and companies to their users — and all of these recommendations are extremely helpful and relevant. This ...

 Google today announced that it wants to fix your home Wi-Fi, but internally, it has long been working on far more complex networking issues. To connect the hundreds of thousands of machines that...

 Adam Lisagor, an L.A.-based video producer, has more demand for his corporate videos than he can handle, thanks to the breakout success of product launch videos for Square, Airbnb, and Warby Par...

 Microsoft released a new Windows 10 build to its testing community today, noting in the process that thecadre of developer and fans that comprise its ‘Insider’ program will continue ...

 Thousands of cabs make their way through the streets of London. Hundreds of buses pick up and drop off passengers. Trucks carry their cargo. They are, of course, autonomous; like Google’s ...

 East Palo Alto sits in betweenFacebook and Google’s Silicon Valley campuses. But, despite their close proximity, they’re typically considered to be two different worlds.Formerly know...

 Okay, this one’s a little surprising: Anova, maker of an automated sous vide cooker, has acquired startup Get Fresh, with Get Fresh CEO Stephen Svajian becoming CEO of Anova.I wrote about ...

 Kik, the Canadian company behind the messaging app of the same name has announced $50M worth of funding from one of its partners, China’s Tencent (also the biggest internet company in Chin...

 Kik, the Canadian company behind the messaging app of the same name has announced $50M worth of funding from one of its partners, China’s Tencent (also the biggest internet company in Chin...

 Well it turns out that people who are willing to drop hundreds or thousands of dollars on gadgets like to use gadgets to spend more dollars. An exclamation point-laden report released today from...

 Has something changed with the algorithm for Apple’s spelling safety net? Read More ...

 The space game is hot and only the strongest are going to survive. One Canadian company feels like its in a good spot to succeed, having just been awarded the patent for a “space elevator....

 Sometimes a designer can get sucked so deeply into a project that they don’t even really know whether it looks good or not anymore. Feedback is an essential, yet strangelycomplicated, part...

 Yesterday, Kim Dotcom tweetedan audio recording of a phone conversationbetween himself and Universal Music Group, about a potential deal betweenthe music label and Megaupload. While the call was...

 Slick is a new GoPro accessory launching today with an Indiegogo campaign. Instead of attaching your GoPro directly to something, you can put your GoPro into the Slick stabilizer and then attach...

 Imagine a company that installs an appliance to monitor your network for malicious activity, thenbroadcasts that security data to a cloud service and has experts watchingand responding to any re...

 Silent Circle showed off the second generation of its pro-privacy Android-hardened smartphone, the Blackphone, back in March at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow — touting a summer launc...

 Sick of typing up meeting notes or interviews? Speech recognition master Nuance’s new Dragon Anywhere transcription app can turn what you say into text with no limit on recording time. Thi...

 Launching today, Cardwheel is an app that recalls a freshset of memories each day. However, unlike year-ago-remembering apps, Cardwheel uses machine learning to recall relevant, contextual memor...

 Google today surprised us by launching a router with the help of its partner TP-LINK. The $199.99 OnHub router promises to do away with many of the issues you’ve likely experienced with yo...

 Secure encrypted email provider ProtonMail, which runs a “zero access” PGP mail service based in Switzerland has now open sourced its webmail interface — meaning all the code t...

 Opera Max, Opera’s data-saving proxy for Android, has long allowed you to save some of your previous mobile data by compressing text, video and images when you surf the web or use apps lik...

 These days, you can get a subscription box for just about anything. And today, that includes customized nutritional supplements. WellPath, a company that puts together customized packages of mon...

 You love technology and you love money. Why not combine both of those loves by purchasing an early-bird ticket to Disrupt SF 2015 before Friday and save yourself $1,000 in the process? But you h...

 The blockchain provides the foundation to design complementary currencies that embellish community relationships, drive regional economic growth and encourage self-sustainability. The local mult...

 There are plenty of things on Steve Huffman’s to-do list since returning to Reddit as its CEO. Having a gifted technical mind himself, currently doing double duty as Hipmunk’s CTO, t...

 When Myke Hurley and Stephen Hackett launched Relay FM, they expected to build a small independent network of weekly tech podcasts. Just a year later, Relay FM features 16 different shows and de...

 Gone, an app that helps you sell off unwanted stuff, has just launched an SMS service to make unloading your crap even easier. Gone launched its concierge service in San Francisco and Austin las...

 EShares, which digitizes paper stock options, warrants and derivatives to create a real-time picture of who owns what at a startup, just raised $17 million in Series B funding at a post-money va...

 BuzzFeed just announced that it has raised $200 million from NBCUniversal.If the news sounds a little familiar, that’s because Vox Media announced a similar dealwith NBCUniversal last week...

 Drones are the future of photo journalism, but the problem is you usually need a dedicated pilot. Unless you have a Fotokite. It’s a quadcopter on a retractible dog leash. Strap a GoPro to...

 A conspiracy has been hatched by the world’s top Triple-A and indie developers to change the way computer games are financed. It’s called Fig. It’s a highly curated reward and ...

 Confide, the app that lets you send self-destructing messages, is now transitioning to the desktop. Confide launched 18 months ago as a mobile app on iOS and Android, offering users the chance t...

 Product Hunt, the online community where members upvote products, games and books they like, is helping that community get more of a heads up on “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) events today ...

 There’s a new service called Whimfor people who aretired of all the chattingin the current batch of dating apps,To be sure, there are other online dating servicesthat purport to focuson ma...

 I don’t carry cash anymore. Ever. Sometimes I get caught in a situation where I need it, mostly when I want to tip someone. I use either a credit card or Apple Pay to pay for things, and I...

 Datameer, the big data analyticscompany builton Hadoop, announced a $40 million Series E round today led by ST Telemedia, an investment firm based in Singapore. Top Tier Capital Partners, Kleine...

 Swipe, the web-based PowerPoint alternative that brings features such as audience analytics, real-time polls and live syncing to the humble presentation, is flipping the monetization switch toda...

 Tracksmith, a running apparel brand based in Boston, has pulled in $4.1 million in new funding to outfit a growing pack of runners in the traditional style of the world’s oldest sport.Pent...

 iPad point-of-sale platform maker Revel Systems has raised $13.5 million in funding from ROTH Capital Partners to fuel its rapid growth. A follow-up to Revel’s Series C, which it announced...

 Marvel, the U.K. startup that lets you turn sketches into mobile app “prototypes”, has picked up a new $2 million ‘seed extension’ round of funding. The company is also r...

 Google is ramping up its Android One affordable smartphone program with a push into Africa. The first Android One smartphone for the region is being made by OEM Infinix, and is launching in Nige...

 Roposo, a discovery platform for fashion products, has scooped up $15 million in fresh funding from returning investor Tiger Global. Based in Gurgaon, Roposo lets users save items from different...

 There are Google (Alphabet) moonshots such as its project to hack death/extend human life. And then there is the stuff shooting quite a lot lower than the moon — aka projects which also se...

 Based in San Francisco, Helix is aiming to be a central repository for personalized genetic information and provide a marketplace for applications potentially like the ones developed in Illumina...

 Twitter added just 14 million new users in its last quarter of business, and now it is making a big push to grow in Asia and the Middle East, two regions that collectively account for over half ...

 Dr. Dre’s new album premiered on Apple Music, as you might expect, and now Apple is leveraging its annual live music festival to promote its music streaming service. Read More ...

 Dr. Dre’s new album premiered on Apple Music, as you might expect, and now Apple is leveraging its annual live music festival to promote its music streaming service. Read More ...

 Platform9, a service that aims to make it easier for businesses to launch an OpenStack private cloud on their existing servers, today announced that it has raised a $10 million Series B funding ...

 BuzzFeed has signed a joint venture with Yahoo Japan, which until recently was the country’s top search portal before Google gained a slight lead. Read More ...

 500 Startups, the U.S.-led VC firm, is continuing its push into Southeast Asia after it hired two partners in Vietnam, a signal that it may be about to launch a local fund for startups the count...

 Researchers at the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base are working on a new form of electronics encased in a stretchy, bendable casing that allows you to wrap leads ...

 One of the most frustratingthings about living inan urban high-rise buildingis the close quarters you are forced to share with neighbors. However, one startup is trying to turn this annoyance in...

 As we approach the New Age, a thousand portents churn on the horizon. Dogs and cats begin living together. A man has found something he mislaid months before in a place he has already looked. An...

 One in four transgender people delay seeking healthcare due to discrimination, according to the National Center of Transgender Equality. A startup called MyTransHealth aims to address this with ...

 “Man, I sure hope I get to see a video of a massive robot stomping around a hiking trail today!”Your wish is my command, my friend. Read More ...

 Everyone wants to be free and standalone. Remember when Facebook Messenger got its own site that maybe people use but we’re not sure because they don’t talk about it? Google Hangouts...

 On the heels of our gallery looking into the best performing technology IPOs of the last twelve months, here is the other side of the spectrum, with help from CrunchBase data. Read More ...

 If you convince all your friends to go to a concert, shouldn’t the promoter give you a discount? Now they can with The Ticket Fairy, a full-stack events marketing and analytics suite comin...

 Need something to spark a bit of creativity this week? How about a super clever hack for Amazon’s $5, single-purpose Dash buttons? The Dash buttons were originally meant to serve as a quic...

 For investors of Zulily, today is a good day. The company has agreed to be acquired by the parent company of QVC in a roughly $2.4 billion deal. The agreement values Zulily at $18.75 per share, ...

 This past Saturdayin Oakland,CA, about 120 underrepresented people in tech — ranging from aspiring entrepreneurs to BlackGirlsCODE students to tech leaders — gathered inside ImpactHu...

 Facebook basically locked Notes in the basement for the past half-decade. Its bare-bones blogging feature launched in 2006 as a place for writing missives that wouldn’t fit in a status upd...

 Keen IO announced today that it’s open-sourcing one of its key features. The company allows customers to create their own analytics tools without having to develop the infrastructure from ...

 With a broader U.S. economic recovery under way, loans to small businesses that fall under the $1 million mark have still been slow to recover. A Y Combinator startup called Drip Capital is look...

 Xendit, a money-transfer service geared toward Southeast Asian countries, is launching today in Indonesia.The company is billing itself as a more private money-transfer service that’ll bea...

 Another hardware startup is sparking up in Finland. Helsinki-based startup Solu has taken in a $1.3 million seed round, ahead of a planned product launch this fall. Read More ...

 We’re a day away, people. The TechCrunch Meetup + Pitch-Off in NYC is going down in almost exactly 24 hours, and it simply wouldn’t be complete without you. Ten companies will have e...

 Google has made it a thing to name its Android OS versions after food. Letter by letter in the alphabet (har har). But not just any food, food that’s really bad for you. This version, whic...

 In a blog post to customers, secure P2P cloud storage service Wuala just announced that it is to shut down. Read More ...

 Google now lets you see if your house is a good candidate for installing solar panels. Project Sunroof, a 20 percent project by Google engineering lead Carl Elkin, shows you how much solar power...

 Between TVs, refrigerators, ovens, light bulbs, cars, fitness trackers and jewelry, it seems like everything these days is connected to the Internet. It’s probably safe to say that youR...

 Campus Job, a startup that connects college students with local job opportunities, has changed its name toWayUp. Launchedin September of 2014 by recent grads Liz Wessel and JJ Fliegelman, WayUpp...

 It’s 3.30am in the featureless Singularity University meeting room I’m peering into via Skype and I’ve just asked Marita Cheng to take a photo of the buttons on her co-founder,...

 Twitter-owned mobile ad exchange MoPub is releasing some new numbers about the growth of native advertising.Native advertising is a fuzzy term, but it usually refers to ads that have been custom...

 When it comes to the complex world of robotics, Helen Greiner is an expert. She was one of the co-founders of iRobot, the robotics company responsible for the wonderful vacuuming Roomba robot, a...

 Bringing down the cost of luxury goods through direct-to-consumer sales isn’t a new trend. We’ve seen companies like Warby Parker, Casper and more succeed in the space. But today, a ...

 If you somehow still haven’t picked up your ticket to Disrupt SF, the time to act is now. You only have until 11:59 p.m. PT on August 21 to purchase tickets at the early-bird price of $1,9...

 Uber is quietly rolling out an update today where Uber Eats (Uber’s prepared food delivery service available in NYC, Los Angeles, Toronto, Austin, Chicago, and Barcelona) is getting a majo...

 Circle Medical, launching from this summer’s Y Combinator batch, isa full service medical practice that will come to you. While other doctor-on-demand startupslike Heal have existed for a ...

 The U.K.’s MarketInvoice, which plays in the peer-to-peer lending space by enabling businesses to raise money from institutional investors and high net worth individuals by ‘selling&...

 This weekend’s must-read story from the world of tech was this long New York Times report on the working culture. (Go ahead and read it if you didn’t already.) Read More ...

 Housing.com, the SoftBank-backed real estate platform in India, recently let go of its controversial CEO. Today it’s back in the news for more positive reasons, after it announced a $2 mil...

 It’s 2015 andyou might think ofthe mainframe as a vestige of an earlier computing era, but these megamachines still play a roleinside large institutions running intensive workloads.And as ...

 You might not think that ‘Linux’ and ‘mainframe’ belong in the same sentence, but IBM has been putting various flavors of Linux on its mainframe computers for 15 years. T...

Two years ago, Seagate debuted a new technology for hard drives that essentially gives applications direct access to some of its drives over an Ethernet connection to store objects using key-value pai...

 The Linux Foundation and PLUMgrid today announced an alliance of hardware manufacturers, Linux distribution vendors and others that aims to advance Linux networking and virtualization for modern...

 In arecent TechCrunch articleI was quoted calling the one-time pad a “unicorn”. Inevitably, I wasroundlycriticized. But what none of the commenters (or myself) realized, however, was...

 The search for microbial life continues to be a high priority for Congress and NASA, while the search for intelligent life is left fighting for scraps. Milner’s $100 million investment cha...

 And then there were three. Earlier this week, Microsoft released a new set of updates for Windows 10, the third time it has done so since the operating system formally debuted in late July. Wind...

 HappyFunCorp has been living up to its name, according to co-founder Ben Schippers — at least if you associate happiness and fun with profits, growth and acquisitions. Last year, I visited...

 Compass recently published its second report on the global startup ecosystem. The report is the result of more than 200 interviews with entrepreneurs from 25 different countries, 11,000 startup ...

  Read More ...

 Founding a startup is difficult anywhere in the world, but it’s especially hard in Gaza. Since the war one year ago, Gaza has been nominally peaceful — but the norm is Gaza is not ea...

 Air traffic control (ATC) towers are an omnipresent feature of modern airports, second in recognition only to airliners themselves. Towers, though, represent only a small part of the vast networ...

 Today’s “invisible app” market could be classified as a passing trend, but it might also be the beginning of a significant multi-year shift in how we transact when we’re ...

 The evolution of personal communication has fundamentally altered the everyday lives of most people on our planet. Armed with a smartphone connected to a seemingly infinite ocean of information,...

 The so-called “sharing economy,” which some affectionately (or pejoratively) describe as the “gig economy,” is becoming a highly politicized issue in the 2016 presidentia...

 Index Ventures-backed veteran online glasses retailer MyOptique Group has expanded its customer base with two new acquisitions: German rival 4care, which owns Lensbest.de; and the U.K.-based pre...

 We’re so close! The TechCrunch Meetup + Pitch-off is in three days and time is running out to buy tickets. What is the TC Pitch-off, you ask? Ten pre-selected companies will have exactly s...

 Disney has announced that they will add multiple Star Wars-themed attractions to their two parks. You’ll be able to visit 14 acres of space worlds including a “never-before-seen plan...

 It’s clear, based on the fact that you’re reading this article, that you enjoy visually consuming TechCrunch content. But what if I told you that you could listen to TC on the radio?...

 The Lending Club IPO was a watershed moment for marketplace lending. One of the largest U.S. public Internet offerings ever, its success makes crystal clear that peer-to-peer lending is not only...

 There’s no shortage of tech accelerators and incubators, with the likes of Y Combinator, 500 Startups and TechStars. All three of them have addressed diversity in their own ways, but more ...

 Craft beers aplenty but not sure what your taste buds might like to try? Local Brewing Company is a newly opened brewery in the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco withan app for that. Brewmaster...

 As a VC that has been in the industry for 15 years, I have watched many trends come and go. For the first few years of my career, my colleagues and I spent most of our time sourcing these trends...

 Let us talk frankly about technology and sex, which are, as the old ad has it, two great tastes that taste great together. Let’s talk about vibrators, and teledildonics, and orgasms, and K...

You know those gift cards you see at the checkout counter in various stores? Well, it’s a kind’ve crazy business. Most people, when given gift cards, forget to spend them or that thereR...

 Today’s marketing industry is a long way from achieving its end-game of a system that delivers the perfect creative through the best medium at the optimal moment to each individual audienc...

 The Commander and Chief has just made his music streaming service allegiancesknown. The White House released a pair of playlists Friday morning that were allegedly hand-picked by Obama himself. ...

 As a Fulbright grantee, I spent part of the last year researching the sharing economy in Seoul. One of my main findings? Korea actually has two. The first is small-scale, hyper local and sociali...

 Ever wanted to travel to an exotic island for a week but didn’t have the cash? Well, thanks to MissTravel, that’s not a problem anymore — if, and it’s a big if, you’...

 Take a pretty picture. Slap some inspirational words on it. Post it on Facebook, then swim in a river of likes. If this is a thing you do, be afraid: you have been replaced by a robot. A wonderf...

 Slack! The email killer! It’s going to kill email! Welp, not today. The team clearly listens to its users, as the company announced a new integration (for Standard and Plus plan customers)...

What qualifies asa tech company? Everyone has their own definition. For this gallery, we’ve hewn closer to the Silicon Valley definition of tech with help from CrunchBase data. Every list has it...

 Mozilla is testing a new private browsing mode in Firefox that doesn’t just keep no trace of your porn browsing habits on your machine but that also blocks online services that could track...

 Samsung unveiled new phones and Samsung Pay this week, causing a bit of buzz in the world of mobile. Because we simply can’t resist it, we discussed the latest in 3D printing, while the Co...

 The premise is simple: tap a button, get into an Uber and have no idea where you’re going. Actually, that sounds like a really awful nightmare I had once.Bar Roulette is a fun mashup built...

 What are the pros and cons of Google reorganizing itself as Alphabet? Well, Larry gets to play with the future, Google can focus on more ambitious projects, and it could help the company retain ...

 Thanks to Apple updating Boot Camp, that is. If you have had a hankering to try out Microsoft’s latest operating system — and I can recommend at least taking it for a spin — no...

 A popular anecdote states that Henry Ford paid his assembly line workers a good wage so they could afford to buy their own company’s cars. Although the reasoning for this decision has been...

 This week, Google announceda major corporate restructuring, Samsung introducedtwo new flagship smartphones and Tinder took to Twitter ina full-blown PR meltdown. These are the stories to catch y...

 The RetroPie project has always been one of the best things about the Raspberry Pi. This software suite turns your tiny, single-board computer into a retro gaming engine and has powered such exc...

 The #ILookLikeAnEngineer movement, an effort to highlight diversity in the tech industry, is still going strong. Last night, over 200 underrepresented engineers and supporters came together in S...

 Bitcoin services provider Cubits.gr and Greek exchange BTCGreece have teamed up to help Greek citizens move cash out of the country to suppliers and business partners. Founded by Julian Mautner,...

 While businesseshave plenty of options if they want to push their employees to do more social media sharing, CultureSphere founder and CEO Danny Gordon said the existing tools all take a similar...

 Happy Friday, friends, and welcome to another episode of TCBTC, TechCrunch’s mostly-weekly podcast on all things bitcoin. This week John Biggs was in San Francisco, so we recorded the audi...

 If you’re a frequent flyer over here in TechCrunch airspace, then you know that there is an upcoming Meetup + Pitch-off going down in NYC in but four short days. Ten companies will have ex...

 While many in Europe are sunning themselves on beaches, a group of young tech entrepreneurs and investors have grouped together to address the crisis of refugees, many from Syria, which have com...

 Legal documents. If they didn’t already bore you to death imagine having to find the mistakes in them. This is the role of quite a number of poor humans who must screen these things, or su...

 There are estimated to be over 13 million scientists globally, almost all of whom have to enter the results of their work manually, often by hand in a notebook. Sure, much of it gets entered int...

 Who saw the recent sale of the Financial Times (FT) from Pearson to Nikkei for $1.3 billion coming? The sale of The Economist, also owned by Pearson, three weeks later, was less of a surprise, a...

 If you were intrigued by Livetext, the audio-free video messaging app launched by Yahoo last month, but don’t live in the U.S. or the handful of test markets where it was available, then w...

 Here’s a different kind of fitness tracker — Freewheel, a prototype developed by Chaotic Moon Studios.The Austin-based design and development studio was in the news recently because ...

 College students may soon be taking autonomousshuttles from class to class and wherever else they need to go on campus.YC-backed Auro Robotics is currently testing their driverless shuttle syste...

 College students may soon be taking autonomousshuttles between classes and wherever else they need to go on campus. Y Combinator-backed Auro Robotics is currently testing their driverless shuttl...

 Reddit has had a pretty bizarre last fewdaysin Russia. The entire site was blacklisted andbanned yesterday fora number of users inRussia following a clear threat made byRussia’s FCC, the R...

 Zero-fee, stock-trading app Robinhood is now on Android. The app launched on iOS late last year and has grown to “hundreds of thousands of customers” and made over $1 billion in trad...

Tim Kendall’s new job is to make sure Pinterest’s partners are finding new ways to make money off one of the most engaging platforms on the Internet. He’s been plenty busy since he g...

 Vimeo co-founder Zach Klein tweeted this morning that he’d found what looked like a used condom in a freshly cleaned bag of baby clothes from laundry startup Washio. “Hi @washioapp,&...

 When it comes to raising money in the U.S., corporate venture capital is seemingly synonymous with “Plan C.” If you can’t raise money from top-tier firms, you move on to Plan B...

 Apple just released a new diversity report with data about the race, gender and ethnic makeup of the company.Even though the company is still mostly white (54%) in the U.S., it’s promising...

 Welcome to INNOVATE2016, a weekly interview series focusing on how new technology and innovation is influencing the upcoming Presidential election. According to our first guest the 2016 election...

 It’s time. Tickets to the Disrupt SF 2015 Hackathon are now available, and you can get in on the action by snagging a ticket here. The event takes place September 19 and 20 at the historic...

 During an enterprisey event at Google SF today, the company announced a brand new Chromebook for enterprise, built by Dell. The Google for Work team has been tailoring all of Google’s cons...

 Parse, the backend platform for apps Facebook acquired back in 2013, today announced that it will open source all of its software development kits (SDKs). The Parse SDKs for iOS, Android and OS ...

 Today, Apple released an official iOS update (8.4.1) to users, aiming to fix a number ofbugs that have been plaguing those using Apple’s new music service.The update aims to reduce the gen...

 In a prospectus filed today by the company, Tesla announced the intention to sell up to 2,100,000 shares of common stock. Underwriters will also receive a 30-day option to purchase up to 315,000...

 Massdrop is announcing that it has raised $40 million in Series B funding. The company focuses on what it calls “community-driven commerce.” It allows people who are interested in th...

 Last night it was revealed that Sean Rad, cofounder and President of Tinder, would return to the CEO position he once held and, in March, handed over to Ebay exec Chris Payne. In a press release...

 Today at a big press conference, Samsung announced two new flagship phones, the Samsung Galaxy Note 5, and its new sibling, the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+. While a Note update was highly anticipate...

 Boku, the U.S.-based company that enables consumers to pay for goods via their phone bill or phone credit, has made another land grab in Europe with the acquisition of Italy’s Mobileview I...

 As expected (and amply leaked), Samsung has today whipped back the curtain on a pair of new flagship smartphones, announcing two new phablets: the Galaxy Note 5 and the Galaxy S6 Edge+ at press ...

 Today at Samsung’s Unpacked 2015 event, the company announced that its mobile payment feature, Samsung Pay, is launching in the U.S. in September. In many ways, Samsung Pay works like Appl...

 Simply Framed, the online shop that helps you get any artwork custom framed, is today announcing a host of new features to simplify the process.The company launched back in 2014 in collaboration...

 Samsung is holding a big press conference in New York at 11 AM EDT (8 AM PDT, 4 PM BST). The company is expected to announce two new flagship phones — the Samsung Galaxy Note 5 and the Sam...

 Stride Health, a startup that aims to be theHR teamfor all independent working Americans, is introducing two new features today to help freelancers better manage their health insurance. Launched...

 Fleksy, the popular third-party keyboard app for iOS and Android, has taken the next step to monetizing its service after it began enabling deep-linking to other apps. Read More ...

 No matter how advanced phone mapping technologies have become, stepping into an airport takes you back several decades into the era of physical maps. With no other way for unseasoned travels to ...

 HTC said last week that it would be cutting costs “significantly,” and today the struggling Android phone maker revealed that will make 15 percent of its staff made redundant as part...

 Who What Wear, the shoppable fashion site with 3.8 million uniques, has today announced the close of an $8 million Series B round with participation from Amazon and Bertelsmann Digital Media Inv...

 DigitalGlobe, the publicly traded, high-res imagery service that owns its own fleet of satellites, has long been known as a purveyor of fine satellite imagery to governments and large companies ...

 DigitalGlobe, the publicly traded, high-res imagery service that owns its own fleet of satellites, has long been known as a purveyor of fine satellite imagery to governments and large companies ...

 Customers of Salesforce’s Community Cloud will soon be able to add their own buy buttons. The Community Cloud allows businesses to build sites where customers can interact with the company...

 View, a company which specializes in creating something calleddynamic glass, raised a ton of new capital Thursday to fund their specialized windows that can changetint in response to weather con...

 Perhaps taking a leaf out of Facebook’s playbook, Apple is looking at ways to automatically share photographs with the people being snapped, according to a new patent filing. Read More ...

 Chinese mobile making upstart Xiaomi is gunning to steal Samsung’s thunder by launching a pair of phablet smartphone on the same day Samsung is due to unbox phablet-sized updates to its Ga...

 BigBasket.com, one of the biggest online grocery stores in India, is planning to expand into more cities after raising $50 million in new funding led by Bessemer Venture. Founded in 2011, the co...

Lenovo, the world’s largest PC maker and fifth largest smartphone firm, is laying off 3,200 employees as it bids to return to healthier finances following a disappointing last quarter. Read More...

 Chinese Internet giant Tencent, the maker of WeChat, has pinned down a strategic investment with indoor mapping startup sensewhere. The total amount of the deal was undisclosed, but the companie...

 The dust hasn’t completely settled on Google’s Alphabet move and we’re told that the new umbrella company will be nimble. Today, one of the groups inside of the company announc...

 If you’re sending emails or other messages to your customers, there’s a standard way to measure your success — you look at whether they opened those messages, and whether the o...

 Microsoft’s Surface Hub device will now ship on January 1st of next year. The delay comes after the firm signaled last month that a prior, fall ship date would be delayed. Microsoft promis...

 When I first got the job running marketing at Mint, founder and CEO Aaron Patzer told me that we had to get Mint to 100,000 users within six months of launching. The number itself didn’t i...

 Facebook plans to open up its Periscope livestreaming competitor to more than just celebrities. In replies to requests from Verified Pages about when they’d get access to the VIP-only Face...

 After Alibaba reported lower-than-expected financial performance in its second quarter, shares of Internet portal and mobile shop Yahoo fell around four percent in regular trading. Alibaba’...

 Google is now the largest subsidiary corporation of Alphabet, the newly established holding company that manages Google and all of the company’s side projects. But Alphabet’s website...

 NBCUniversal just announced that it has invested $200 million in Vox Media, which owns sites like Eater, SB Nation and the eponymous Vox.com, as well as tech news publications Re/code and The Ve...

 After the bell, Cisco reported its fiscal fourth quarter financial performance, which beatmarket expectations. The company detailed revenue of $12.84 billionin its fiscal period, resulting in ea...

 Quick hit here, friends: Microsoft dropped a new Windows 10 Mobile build today for ‘fast ring’ subscribers of its Insider program. The gist is that Microsoft is continuing apace with...

 Have you heard about the Tinder Meltdown (TM)? Some even called it a “stunt.”In case you haven’t, here’s the quick and dirty: a piece appeared on Vanity Fair that Tinder ...

 Manyof youprobably know the feeling you get when you only have thirty minutes to squeeze in a run between work and a dinner meeting, but you’ve drank enough coffee to keep going for miles....

 While you probably don’t think about them until you have to, automotive batteries — the chunky boxes that helps start your car’s gas engine — are pretty terrible. They di...

 In its latest attempt to foster and support diversity, Apple has partnered with CODE2040, a non-profit organization focused on empowering underrepresented minorities in the tech industry.Apple i...

Innovations on the good ol’ family television have moved from 3D to 4K to curved panel over the years. But what all of those evolutions have shared are a heightened price tag for a whole new dev...

 Dropbox today announced that it will now support security keys.Security keys are physical USB dongles from companies like YubiCo that allow you to bypass the traditional app- and text message-ba...

 Dear readers, I’m writing to inform you that the TC Meetup + Pitch-off in NYC is in less than a week, and tickets are selling out fast. I don’t want you to miss out. You don’t ...

 Intel just released a mid-year report diversity report, highlighting the progress its made in its effort to improve diversity over the next five years. Earlier this year, Intel announced its $30...

 Multiple recent leaks have indicated that Apple is working on a major new version of the iPad mini. You can expect a more powerful, thinner iPad mini, and it will let you take advantage of all t...

 Periscope may have just hit the impressive milestone of 10 million registered users after just four months, but what it wants you to focus onis the sheer volume of video content that its users a...

 PokItDok, the API provider for the healthcare industry, has today announced the close of a $34 million Series B. The company, launched back in 2011, provides software framework for things like p...

 While it might seem that the disruption du jour is all anybody is ordering these days — making innovation, growth and new value seem like insurmountable things — businesses should fo...

 They warned us back in June that this day was coming. I was in denial. Surely, Twitter wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Welp, they have. Get ready for people to drop a book into your DMs, because...

 Mobile messaging firm Kik is upping its focus on music after launching a new service to connect fans of top artists and bands via its popular chat app. Read More ...

 Who may be on first and What may be on second but This. is on its first seed round. The media company, incubated inside of Atlantic Media, is a “curation platform for people passionate abo...

 We were promised flying cars, and we got them — they’re just virtual. But we still want people to pilot them in between hearing the top tech CEOs speak at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in Se...

 German startup Spotted, which plays in the serendipitous connections space, with a location-sensitive app that lets users view and message the people they’ve crossed paths with — a l...

 Google launched Android Experiments today, the mobile apps counterpart to its Chrome Experiments site.Just like with Chrome Experiments, the idea behind Android experiments is to showcase apps t...

 Box announced today that it was hiring former EMC executive Jeetu Patel to be in charge of its platform business. Patel will have the titlesenior vice president of platform and chief strategy of...

 Following the “pause” in operationsof Zirtual, founder and CEO Maren Donovan published a blog post last night offering a few more details about what went wrong. She also announced th...

 Want to run a stripped-down version of Windows on your Raspberry Pi? Sure you do. Windows 10 IoT Core, a version of Windows for embedded devices, is now available from Microsoft and looks to be ...

 Genee, an artificially intelligent scheduling app, is launching today into public beta so that anyone can haveapersonal assistant. On the heels of Zirtual’s collapse, Genee hopes to take h...

 Makers rule the world. Whether you sling code or craft hardware, the ability to build is of absolute importance in the new economy. That’s why I’m pleased to announce that I’ll...

 3D printing has never been this easy. Meet the Pirate3DBuccaneer printer. It takes minutes to set up and works flawlessly. Yet this isn’t a printer for the serious DIY tinkerer. This is a ...

 If you like your Nexus 5 but it’s starting to feel old, rejoice! It looks like Google is teaming up with not one but two Android OEMs to manufacture the next Nexus phones. Huawei is workin...

 Soothe, which sends massage therapists to clients’ homes, is smoothing its expansion with $10.6 million in new funding. The startup’s new round was led by The Riverside Company and w...

 The wily ATM hackers are at it again with a new form of card data gathering system, a “shimmer.” These super-thin card readers slide right into the card slot and are technically invi...

 The Russian government isn’t too happy with Reddit these days. But it’s not even over criticalcomments made about the government’s handling of Ukraine, it’s about a singl...

 Branch, a startup focused on deep-linking technology, today released a new toolfor developers called Deepviews that will help them deliver previews of their applications before they are installe...

 Hello friends and welcome back to another episode of Bullish, TechCrunch’s first talk show. This week we’re taking a look at digital publications, the spate of recent shutdowns we...

 Cover, the app that helps you find a restaurant, order food, and ultimately split the bill among friends, has today announced a huge redesign to the app. Over the past couple of years, Cover has...

 Lightricks, the startup behind popular selfie app Facetune, will focus on developing its image processing technology after snapping up $10 million. Led by Carmel Ventures, this represents Lightr...

 Mojio, a connected car platformthat is based arounda small, Internet-connected device you plug into your car’s OBD port, is launching an app and services store for its platform today. The ...

 DoubleDutch is hoping tomake measuring the success of your event as easy as skipping rope, and now they’ve got some more cash to make it happen. The company announced Wednesday that they h...

 Alibaba’s investment in its mobile business is starting to bear fruit, but the e-commerce giant still reported disappointing second-quarter results. Read More ...

 Meet Senth In1 — a pair of AR glasses, based on Android 4.3, being developed by a Beijing-based startup, specifically for cyclists. Read More ...

 Tencent’s second-quarter earnings result was a mixed bag. On one hand, sales at its core smartphone games business slowed down. On the other hand, the Chinese Internet giant’s online...

 The many faces of emoji just gained a few more — thanks to a web tool put together by 17-year-old developer Giacomo Randazzo which randomly remixes standard yellow-faced emoticons to stir ...

 Uber’s worldwide expansion plans have hit yet another legal bump. Five Uber drivers were arrested in Hong Kong yesterday, allegedly for operating without a hire car permit and driving with...

 Uber expects its business in India to overtake its U.S. operations as it prepares to expand into more rural parts of the country to tap the huge growth potential on offer. Read More ...

 If there’s one thing that is as diverse and multi-faceted as culture in “Asia” — a term that really exists on paper to help people label this part of the world — it...

 A year ago this past Sunday,police in Ferguson, Missouri,shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed, black 18-year-old. Over thelast couple of days, people haven takento Twitter using the hashtag...

 Driving a car will be illegal by 2030. Our economy will be severely impacted as millions of truck drivers, cabbies and delivery people are put out of work. In this era of endless innovation, man...

 Disrupt SF is coming up fast, and we still have some student tickets available for the show at the deeply discounted price of $300 a piece. Previously, these tickets were only available to those...

 Earlier this year,Looking Glass successfully raised $252,000 on Kickstarter for its 3D LED cube, dubbed the L3D Cube. Now the startup actually is shipping cubes — or rather, kits for assem...

 In today’s episode of Cribs, we visit Patreon, a subscription-based funding platform for artists. Patreon is all about creative. Giant murals deck the walls alongside the productions of wr...

 Apple suffered a 5 percent drop in its share price Tuesday as Wall Street reacted strongly to news from China that the government is further devaluing the yuan. The currency devaluation is likel...

 As mobiledevicescontinue to explore and colonize the technology landscape, their conquests areleading us to a new era, beyond search and apps.Looking to claimthe territory previously held byURLs...

 At the Disrupt NY hackathon this year the winning hack was a live-streaming app called Witness whose team’s pitch was a desire to be the panic button for the mobile age. But what about sti...

 There were inklings of hints that this was the frattiest startup of all time. For starters, the subject line of the email pitch was “Not Porn” and it was about an app called Drunk Mo...

 Last week, I visited payments company Square and sat down with its Hardware Lead, Jesse Dorogusker, about much more than hardware. Dorogusker, a former director of engineering at Apple, discusse...

 It has been difficult to attract investors to the digital startup space in Latin America. This is because of a variety of reasons, including the lack of a track record of established VC firms in...

 A few points, dear reader, to get ourselves acclimated: Windows 10 landed in the market at the beginning of this month to moderately strong reviews Microsoft is hellbent on attracting a user bas...

 Google, the largest subsidiary corporation of Alphabet, wants movie studios to use its cloud to render their special effects.Last August, Google acquired Zync, a visual effects rendering service...

 Social data company Gnip, acquired by Twitter last year, has become an indispensable tool for all types of companies. Data, especially social data, is necessary to make decisions on things like ...

 First it was glitter and dicks. Then it was on-demand everything. Then it was breasts. Startups, please: stop.2015 has been the year of the awful idea. It began early on this year with a number ...

 3D model repository Sketchfab just added a nifty little feature that should appeal to 3D animators. You can now upload animated models to Sketchfab, and the website will endlessly loop the anima...

 InboxVudu, the system that helps you prioritize important emails, is today launching an iOS app and an Apple Watch app. The service uses machine learning to recognize phrases and sentences that ...

 Our sister site Engadget has a fun interview with a programmer who is currently porting live action video game Night Trap to the browser using HTML5. Why? Because Night Trap, one of the first vi...

 Markhor founder Waqas Ali spent the first half of his life without ever using the Internet. He grew up in a small village in Pakistan, and recalls usingGoogle for the first time in 2007 afterhe ...

 UK-based animation tech and post-production effects studio iKinema has been demoing a natural language interface for controlling animations which CEO Alexandre Pechev reckons could prove its wor...

 A new servicecalled Makerbase wants to make it easier for anyone to discover who built some of the most popular websites and apps people use every day. The idea, which is described as an “...

 DigitalOcean has made a name for itself as a hosting service that focuses on simplicity. Now, the company is making it easier to install complex applications on its service with the help of Bitn...

 Facebook’s making a killing with its native, in-feed, auto-play video ads, and now it’s going to let other developers earn money off them too. Today Facebook announced that its openi...

 As a health spa owner in Mexico City, Carlos Gomez Andonaegui often fretted about the cost of water. Mexico’s capital city, with more than 20 million people in the metropolitan region, sit...

 Symantec announced today that it had sold its Veritas division to TheCarlyle Group, a Washington, DC-based private equity firm for $8 billion in cash. The move comes after Symantec, mostly known...

 There’s nothing worse than a clogged inbox, and though it might not appear so, ecommerce brands don’t want to be the object of your resentment from over-emailing. Bizzy, a YC-backed ...

 Besides messaging, snapping photos, and checking the weather, news reading has become one of the top activities done on mobile phones. It’s so popular, in fact, that Apple is introducingit...

 Mobile market latecomer Canonical claims “latent demand” for its tardy but alternative smartphone OS has encouraged its OEM partner, BQ, to open up availability of its handsets to bu...

 Over the past six years,FindTheBest has been rolling out search and comparison shopping tools (18 in all)to cover everything fromcompanies to schools to gadgets to real estate. At this point,fou...

 Think about how frustrated you were the last time you waited for your cable guy to show up, or how annoyed you gotwhen you settled into the back of a cab, only to have the driver tell you he wou...

 Over the past 12 years, oral history project StoryCorps has collected interviews with over 100,000 people. Most of these recordings are stored at the Library of Congress, creating what StoryCorp...

 A new 3D interactive system created by researchers at the University of Montreal allows designers and builders to “draw” in scenes in real time. By projecting images on a thin materi...

 Liquidmetal, as you’ll recall, is a bulk metallic glass – BMG – that can be cast into shapes and then hardens into a metal. It’s popular in watchmaking and was recently t...

 Livspace, an interior design and home furnishings e-commerce startup in India, has closed $8 million in fresh funding to expand its nine-month-old service. Read More ...

 Germany’s StyleLounge, which operates a metasearch engine for clothing and lifestyle products, has raised a 2.3 million Series A round of funding. Read More ...

 Robotics is the latest area of interest in India for Tiger Global, after the New York-based hedge fund led a $30 million investment in GreyOrange, a company that automates e-commerce and logisti...

  Read More ...

 After a slow start to 2015, smartphone shipments to India recovered in the second quarter. According to IDC, 26.5 million devices were shipped to India during that time period, up 44 percent fro...

 “We are Americans of Iranian descent. Like all Americans, we’re proud of our great country, and wevigorously defend the U.S. ideals of freedom and opportunity,” reads the openi...

 DataGravity announced version 2.0 of its storage appliance today, one that focuses on data security, particularly knowing what files you have and who’s been accessing them.When DataGravity...

 “Finally.” “Moonshots.” “Sundar.” “Speed.” “Brilliant.” “YES!” These are all things that I’ve heard from insiders to...

 Perfume subscription platform Scentbird was once just for the ladies. But participation in Y Combinator influenced the startup to create a men’s cologne service, Scentbird Men. Scentb...

 Bumble is on somewhat of a hot streak. The dating app, which has women initiate all of the conversations, originally launched nine months ago. After reaching 1,000,000 unique conversations in ea...

 Tired of making (or watching) the same old PowerPoint presentations? An Australian startup called Zeetings gives you new tools to interact with your audience and track their engagement.“De...

 Google was too big for its own good. Housing everything from its search engine to robots to life-extension technologies in one corporate hierarchy made for a lot of managers. Smart people often ...

 They’re coming, and we won’t be able to stop them. But will they be friends or foes? What are we talking about? Internet of Things (IoT) devices. And, as with most things, the answer...

 Software company Adobe will be expanding its maternity and paternity leave programs foremployees. Starting November 1, birthmothers will be able to take up to six months of paid leave. Primary c...

 Google just announced a big restructuring of the company, sending shares up about 6% in extended trading.After the announcement, shares of Google rose 5%, but have since risen even further. As p...

 So Google is now part of Alphabet, a new holding company that will manage Google and all of its other products. Why is the new company called Alphabet? Google/Alphabet CEO Larry Page says itR...

 If you just read the media reports, Twitter is a sad, ship-jumping mess. The reality of the situation is that while the company might seem like a soap opera partof the time, its uniqueness cause...

 Google just rocked the world with some light news on a Monday. It has restructured the company and everything will now report up to “Alphabet Inc.” a new corporate name. That include...

 Following the bell today, Rackspace reported its second-quarter financial performance. The company mostly missed street expectations, with lower-than-expected revenue, and earnings-per-share tha...

 A testament to the strength of Second Measure (YC S15) and their data analysis product is the fact that, after backing the company, Y Combinator was so impressed that they became paid users of t...

 The latest Silicon Valley reality series Startup U begins tomorrow night on ABC Family and we got a sneak peek at what the show is about. Startup U features 10 student entrepreneurs as they comp...

 Watch collectors are weird. Sometimes they plan meetups where they get together with their entire watch collections and fondle each others’ timepieces, breathless with excitement. In short...

 Supply chain leaks have indicated that Apple is working on an iPhone 6s, and details of the new device have been surfacing one at a time for the past few weeks. Unbox Therapy has obtained the re...

 As Silicon Valley buckles under the pressure of housing the technology industry itcreated, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed company called Teleport has been quietly building a set of tools to distr...

 Snapchat is courting teenagers around the world who want to save their data plans with a new travel mode. When enabled, Snaps, Stories, and Discovery content will only load if users tap them, ra...

 Google today announced that it will soon support the Khronos Group’sVulkan graphics API on Android. The goal of Vulkan is very similar to that of Apple’s Metal API for iOS and OS X. ...

 Scoot, the Zipcar for scooters, recently updated its line of vehicles to carry bigger people and more cargo.The new Scoot Cargo vehicle can carry up to 390 pounds, including both rider and whate...

 Hacker Samy Kamkar has created a clever system for capturing and playing back the radio signals that can open your garage door and car. It costs $30 and could spell the end of the laughably inse...

 Meet NomadCast, a recent addition to the live streaming app space. While Meerkat, Periscope and YouNow have been focused on the social aspect of live streaming, NomadCast varies in many ways. No...

 Internet hyperbole (and financial analysis) have rendered HTC, a once high-flying mobile brand, essentially valueless. In short, the company is trading below cash on hand which means if you boug...

 What if I told you that 50 years from now, the car industry’s revenue model will see a significant shift from outright purchase to a subscription-type model? You wouldn’t think it wa...

 Tuesdays are special. Besides the fact that my favorite bar has $1 oysters that night, TechCrunch Radio also airs every Tuesday evening at 6pm ET / 3pm PT. John Biggs and I discuss the latest in...

 While the market has known for long seconds that Windows RT is over, it has not been clear where users of operating system would end up in the Windows 10 era. Microsoft’s Gabriel Aul noted...

 By now, it’s clear that we will see “Uber for [x]” companies until there is indeed an Uber for everything. Here is the latest one: LockedOut — an Uber for locksmiths.The...

 Danish startup CloudCutout is applying machine learning techniques to the quotidian yet pernickety process of isolating an image from a background. Their initial target market is school photogra...

 Palo Alto’s Branch Metrics, which just raised $15 millionearlier this year, is beefing up its talent bench through acquiring education startup ClassOwl. Three employees from ClassOwl, whic...

 James Park is on a roll. Best known as the co-founder and CEO of Fitbit, his company went public on June 18 — and things couldn’t have gone more smoothly. Fitbit is now worth more th...

 Until now, ‘let’s meet’ apps like Tinder have skirted the border between dating and simple sexual hookups. Others, like Grindr, have been far more blatant. But noone (at least ...

 Zirtual is hitting the pause button.The personal assistant startup sent an email to customers saying that it’s “pausing all operations,” starting today: “Due to a combina...

 Bounce Exchange, a startup that helps websites strategicallyadvertiseby analyzinguser behavior, has pulled in $6.45 million in new funding. 500Friends founder and angel investor Justin Yoshimura...

 While many CISOs and corporate executives are familiar with Israeli cyber talent owing to Check Point, Imperva, CyberArk and other notable security success stories, the sheer scope of Israeli st...

 For the past couple of years, Sydney-based Canva has been working to make graphic design more accessible through its online platform offering over a million photographs, graphics and fonts that ...

 The U.K.-based startup founders and investors who penned an open letter backing the Conservatives at the General Election in May are now confronted with the prospect of a Tory government looking...

 If you haven’t yet signed up to win the chance to buy two tickets to Disrupt London for the price of one, what are you waiting for? You have just two days left to get your name on the dist...

 Xiaomi, the company that topped China’s smartphone market in the last quarter, has begun manufacturing devices in India in another move to localize its brand in the South Asia country. Rea...

 Alibaba may be using the internet to let merchants reach Chinese consumers, but the e-commerce giant still retains an interest in brick and mortar retail. How much of an interest, you ask? Enoug...

 Daum Kakao, the $3 billion dollar internet company that owns messaging app Kakao Talk and recently bought Path, has turned to youth after hiring a new CEO to push its business forward. Read More...

 Since taking over YC, Altman has not only increased the number of startups in each batch, but he has also ventured into hardware and biotech, started a growth fund (according to SEC filings) and...

 I don’t know what kind of a situation one needs to be in to need a pack of condoms delivered in under an hour when there’s likely a fully-stocked convenience store within a 15 minute...

 Rubicon Global, a company helping businesses save money on trash and recycling, is expanding into the healthcare industry.Rubicon connects businesses with local garbage haulers through an online...

 The payments industry, facing the risk of increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks and various types of credit card fraud, has begun incorporating various types of biometric technology to enhanc...

 “We’re deleting everything in a week because we got acquired/ran out of money”. This is a familiar scene when a startup shuts down. It’s why I’ve wondered if users ...

 When you’re a struggling team eating away at your meager savings and trying to get your startup profitable, venture capital funding seems like the holy grail. Raising money from investors ...

 Hardware is hot — and poised to get hotter. Venture capital investment in connected device hardware startups reached approximately $1.48 billion in 2014, more than triple the amount of two...

 There is hardly a day that passes without a new major initiative, announcement or bold proclamation by the Gulf economies of United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia t...

 What do the following data-breach headlines from the past year have in common? The Sony Pictures hack: Everything we know so far; Anonymous hackers release emails ordering bear cubs be killed; H...

 We live in a cyberpunk novel. Every major nation-state clandestinely develops (and/or purchases) carefully targeted malware, and constantly probes—or penetrates—other nations’ ...

 Happy 20th Birthday, Yahoo! What did you get, what did you get? I bet there’ll be parties galore. Gifts, prizes. Presents! – A BILLBOARD! A Billboard? – THE Billboard. If you&#...

 On the heels of U.S. President Barack Obama hosting the first-ever White House demo day, which placed an emphasis on diversity, Visa hasannounced the winners of its The Everywhere Initiative. An...

 We recently had the opportunity to participate in two important conferences focused on the future: one on the on-demand economy (On Demand Economy 2015) and the other on mobile communications (R...

 Happy Saturday! Today, UK-based mobile retailer Carphone Warehouse shared with its customers that it had been the subject of a “sophisticated” cyber attack, potentially laying bare t...

 The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Borthwick, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, August 7, 2015. Thanks to Twitter and a mid-debate nap, the shape of the 2016 race b...

 YC-backed Plate IQ is using smartphone tech to tackle a recurring paper-based pain-point for small and medium-sized restaurants — namely the stack of invoices they get from food suppliers ...

 ZenHub, a service that helps engineering teams manage their GitHub projects through Trello-like drag-and-drop task boards, was previously only available for regular GitHub accounts. Starting now...

 Take a look at the last decade’s fastest-growing companies. You’ll notice they have one thing in common: They’re all platforms.YouTube was not the first video-hosting site, but...

 C1X is announcing that it has raised $5.1 million in Series A funding. Founder and CEO Mukundu Kumaran spent seven years as an engineering director at Yahoo. He said that during that time, he sa...

 Perhaps to counterconcerns over iPhone sales and China, Apple this week released numbers related to the App Store’s growth that demonstrate the very real impact China is having on its app ...

 Greetings from the gaudy hellscape of Las Vegas, and that overcrowded maelstrom of surly hackers known as DEF CON! What follows is a brief rundown of the talks here (and its big corporate sister...

 Hello friends and welcome back to another episode of CrunchWeek, TechCrunch’s recurring roundup of the biggest tech stories of the week. This week our humble band delved into recent earnin...

 Tired of earnings and financials and share price changes and non-GAAP operating margins and future cash positions? Too bad.It’s earnings season in the markets, and that means that the tech...

 I’m not a betting man — but if someone were to say “Quick! When will Apple announce the next iPhone?!”, I’d say September. It’s… just what they do.Sure ...

 Gillmor Gang – John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. LIVE recording session today at 1:30pm PT.Our LIVE CHATROOM hereGillmor Gang on Facebook HEREOur sister show &...

 An NPD survey is suggesting that the Apple Watch has pushed watch sales to the lowest point since 2008. NPD has found that watchmakers sold $375 million worth of watches in July, down 11% from l...

 “The way I like to think about this project is that we’re trying to put a humans brain inside of the robot”Don’t worry: it’s less techno-horror-movie-esque than it ...

 Language is a distinctly human trait. Or is it? A new wave of consumer-focused startups are now developing artificial intelligence programs that can mimic, adapt and interpret the complex semant...

 Last night, Fox News hosted one of the most ridiculous, deeply entertaining GOP Presidential debates I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing a drinking game to.In the midst of the Moscow Mul...

 It’s earnings season, and HTC is having a rough few years quarter. Meanwhile, OnePlus released the OnePlus 2, and the Samsung Galaxy Note 5 seems to have leaked all over the place. Plus, t...

 Browser maker Opera today announced that it has acquired Bemobi — a subscription-based mobile-app-discovery service with a focus on the Latin American market. Opera expects the acquisition...

 Verizon announced a brand new line-up of monthly plans for new customers. Following T-Mobile’s model, plans are now a bit cheaper and easier to understand. But you should expect to pay mor...

 This week Apple.com got a significant redesign, a Time magazine cover featuring Palmer Luckey went viral, Netflix announced a huge perk for its employees, and we found out what it’s like t...

 Kids are mean. Just ask any robot. Robotics engineers have discovered a tendency for little kids – kindergartners and grade schoolers – to be abusive towards robots when they’r...

 As Twitter marches closer to selecting its next CEO, outspoken early investor in the company Chris Sacca has made his personal choice known. Via Twitter of course: Twitter should name @jack as f...

 More than 200,000 music lovers are about to don their spirit hoodies and flower crowns for San Francisco’s popular Outside Lands music festival this weekend. That means lots of traffic,con...

 You don’t just wake up an expert on how to write a crappy headline, someone has to coach you. Thanks to Panz, you are now reading this gem. Coaching is a big business though and there̵...

 The Internetogencia was all in a tizzy this week as it commented on a cover photo from Time magazine extolling the simple joys of VR. The cover, if you haven’t seen it, features the dishev...

 While a waterproof, buoyant speaker seems like a viable option for boaters, fishers, and generally wet sport enthusiasts, most of them are powered by Bluetooth, meaning that a very delicate and ...

 For the first time, Apple this year allowed the public to participate in beta testing the forthcoming version of its new mobile operating system, iOS 9. And now, the company has pushed out the l...

 A new update to the Google Maps iOS application promises to make it easier to navigate when it’s dark outside, potentially reducing the risk associated with using the app while behind the ...

 A new update to the Google Maps iOS application promises to make it easier to navigate when it’s dark outside, potentially reducing the risk associated with using the app while behind the ...

 Security researchers have identified a critical vulnerability in devices using ZigBee, a wireless standard used for connectivity in multiple Internet of Things and smart home devices — rai...

 When financing a growing company,venture debt can be a great supplement to venture capital. Much has been written to help founders think through venture capital, but venture debtremains a bit of...

 Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has launched an English-language version of TaoProtect, one of its counterfeit reporting system. Used on Tmall and Taobao (Alibaba’s top B2C and B2B platfo...

 Lemonade Lab, which develops sensors for athletes, has scored $5.8 million led by a Foxconn subsidiary. The Boston- and Tokyo-based startup will form a strategic partnership with FIH Mobile, whi...

 It feels like every other day: Another company raises a massive round of funding. We tend to assume that a company that’s raising money must be doing well. However, the truth is that ventu...

 A redesign of Apple.com that went live today removed the standalone ‘Store’ tab, and the ‘store.apple.com’ domain entirely. This is an enormous change for one of the bigg...

 iOS 9 finally kills off an endless source of frustration: getting stuck on Wi-Fi networks that are just strong enough to connect to but too weak to actually use. Read More ...

 Mobile SDKs are, for most publishers, a necessary evil. Whether you’re trying to integrate analytics, cross-promotion, tracking, monetization or payments, your first step is most often to ...

 It’s a truism that all software has bugs and security holes. It’s another that license agreements invariably make software vendors immune to liability for damage or losses caused by ...

 New Relic reported its first quarter, fiscal 2016 performance today, including better than expected revenue, and lower than expected per-share loss. While the latter clause is correct, it’...

 NVIDIA shares were up nearly 9 percent in after-hours trading following its announcement of a beat in FY 2016 Q2 earnings Thursday. The computer component manufacturer managed to exceed street e...

 The TechCrunch Meetup + Pitch-off in NYC is kicking off in less than two weeks, and you know better than most that a party isn’t really a party unless you’re there. But let’s n...

 If you followed the Google Glass saga, you remember that everything started out pretty hunky dory. There was an exciting demo that included people jumping out of a plane. Then there were develop...

 A preliminary CNBC report is suggesting that the Russian government is responsible for a “sophisticated cyber intrusion” of an unclassified Joint Staff email server. The server, whic...

 Zynga today beat analyst expectations for revenue and earnings, but its user numbers continued to decline, sending the stock down about 1 percent in extended trading.Zynga’s daily active u...

 Arista Networks, a networking firm, announced its second-quarter financial performance today, beating market expectations. The firm earned an adjusted $0.54 per share, on revenue of $195.6 milli...

 Tindie, the marketplace for makers to fund and sell their hardware creations, is being acquired by maker blog Hackaday.Headquartered in San Francisco, Tindie has previously raised $1.7 million i...

 Tilt’s already expanded to the United Kingdom, its second international country, this year and plans to expand to five more countries in the next five months or so. That’s a challeng...

 It looks like Wattpad, a site where authors can share their writing and interact with readers, was hacked a couple of months ago.The company has been sending out emails to some users alerting th...

 When it rains, it pours. After it was announced that cars from bothChrysler and GMhad majorsecurity vulnerabilities last week, two security researchers announced that they had figured out a way ...

 When it rains, it pours.After it was announced last week that cars from bothChrysler and GMhad majorsecurity vulnerabilities, two security researchers announced that they had figured out a way t...

 Stop calling Uber, Airbnb and Munchery just apps. These apps are the front end of a full-stack revolution powered by cloud, mobile, drones, robots and AI. These apps started as simple solutions ...

 You knew it was going to happen. Apple acquires Beats. Announces Apple Music. Launches Beats 1 radio station (and yes…it’s WORLDWIDE). And then… BREAKING: Exclusive stream of @...

 Do you believe in perpetual motion? The Flat Earth Theory? The sauroids who run our governments? Have I got something for you. The Wind Energy Stored In Gravity project allows you to store wind ...

 Hello dear friends, and welcome back to another episode of TCBTC, TechCrunch’s bitcoin podcast. Akin to the proverbial ancient turtle, we are still here. This time around, John Biggs came ...

 Reddit’s traffic may be climbing amid its recent controversy and turmoil, but the company’s fate is now more questionable than before. And that means it’s time for competitors ...

 At its Build developer conference earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it would soon release tools that would make it easierfor iOS and Android developers to take their existing code and ...

 #ILookLikeAnEngineer has taken the Internetby storm over the last few days. Now, there’s an IndieGoGo campaignthat has already surpassed its goal of raising$3,500 to put up a billboard in ...

 Healthy food delivery startup Sprig just became the latest on-demand startup to decide to classify its workers as employees instead of independent contractors. That means Sprig will soon offer i...

 Rebagg, an online resell marketplace for designer handbags, has closed on $4 million in seed from General Catalyst,Metamorphic Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Founder Collective, Big Sur Ventures-N...

 IBM announced a huge deal today, agreeing to pay a billion dollars for Merge Healthcare, a medical imaging company it plans to fold into the Watson Health unit. Merge’s technology is in us...

 Tesla is coming off of a rough earnings day, but that didn’t stop the company from showing off some awesome stuff. Today, the company tweeted out a demo of something its founder and CEO El...

 Microsoft Outlook is now a fully-featured Apple Watch app. An updated versionof the iOS application released today added the new smartwatch functionality, which includes the ability to quickly g...

 Femsplain bills itself as a “community-driven publisher,” and it’s looking to build that community with a new initiative called Femsplain Beta. The feminist site was launched l...

 Yesterday on Tesla’s earnings call, Adam Jonas, an analyst from Morgan Stanley, asked Elon Musk about the company’s future plans to either sell cars to Uber (prompted byTravis Kalani...

 “We’re in a unique, extremely unsexy industry,” explained James Steinberg, who founded Shotput with fellow Northeastern University graduate Praful Mathur around 18 months ago. ...

 Dinner Lab, a membership-based club that gives youaccess to private dinner parties in unique locations throughout your city, announced it is has raised a $7 million Series A led by James River C...

 Box announced a major update to its metadata feature today, a move that is part of a broaderstrategy to attract and keep larger customers.The update includesthree major pieces: first of all it p...

 Clutter, the on-demand storage service based out of Los Angeles, has today announced that it has expanded its offering to cover all of the San Francisco Bay Area. The company also announced that...

 The Golden State Warriors were the hometown favorite here in Silicon Valley during their championship run, so naturally we’re ecstatic to announce that NBA Finals MVP Andre Iguodala will b...

 Philip Kaplan’s startup, the DistroKid, has had it’s first major success story. The hip hop group Jack & Jack have hit #12 on the Billboard Top 200, a first for an indie group. I...

 HBO’s over-the-top streaming service may not be making money just yet, but it is rapidly expanding its footprint. Starting today, the service will support Google’s Chromecast for str...

 A startup working to bring offline brick-and-mortar consignment shops into the e-commerce age,Snobswap, has raised over a million in seed funding to expand what it describes as its “luxury...

 It’s been generally accepted since the days of the 9600 baud modem that all Internet porn should be free. However, with the rise high quality video and new streaming systems, we can change...

 Today in Washington D.C., a coalition of lenders, credit marketplaces, brokers, non-profits and others (including Fundera and Funding Circle) have introduced the “Small Business Borrowers&...

 NTN BuzzTime, the service that puts trivia games and entertainment in the palm of restaurant diners and bar patrons hands, has today announced the ability to pay their bill through the BuzzTime ...

 OpenStack company Mirantis and CoreOStoday announced that they have teamed up to integration Mirantis’ OpenStack distribution with CoreOS’s Tectoniccontainer platform. Together, the ...

 500px, the online photo-sharing community which recently raised another $13 million to challenge Flickr and Getty, is today rolling out a significant change to its mobile application. Begin...

 Q: What do you get if you cross seasoned psychological cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) techniques with modern app design? A: Moodnotes: aka the lovechild of London-based digital product studi...

 In preparation for tonight’sfirst Republican presidential candidate debate, Flipboard is launching its first ever destination site, 2016 Election Central, to help users of the popular news...

 This New York city-based startup is aggregating local news sources, from small blogs to established newspapers, geolocating relevant news stories to a hyper local location — such as a part...

 U.K. web users now see their smartphone as the most important device for getting online, overtaking the previous most popular device, the laptop, according to a study of Brits’ digital hab...

 Poor HTC. The Taiwanese firm just can’t seem to catch a break right now. Preliminary Q2 results in July predicted its business would return to the red, and, now those loses are confirmed w...

 Chinese internet giant Tencent is getting its tentacles into India’s healthcare space after it lead a $90 million Series C round for medical search startup Practo. The startup raised $60 m...

 Apple has gone public with the first figures for its debut music streaming service — Apple Music — after senior VP Eddie Cue told USA Today that it had garnered over 11 million users...

 Snapdeal, one of India’s largest e-commerce companies, will spend $100 million over the next three years on its Bengaluru-based research and development center. Called the Multimedia Resea...

 Less than two months after SoftBank’s Pepper robot went on sale in Japan, another intelligent humanoid is poised to make its way into Asia. That’s because Boston-based Jibo just clos...

 Obscured in the valuation dust of the current unicorn stampede is a key question: What actually makes a great company great? What do the future Facebooks, Googles and Apples have in common ̵...

 With game developers’ main objective being to create a really good game with an optimal monetization mechanism to maximize revenue, there are quite a few aspects to planning and implementi...

 SavingGlobal launched in early 2014 to enable German savers to access the best fixed deposit rates in Europe, not just from banks in their home country. However, the plan was always to offer the...

 “This update includes non–security-related changes to enhance the functionality of Windows 10 through new features and improvements.” — Someone at Microsoft. Microsoft dr...

 When the cost of a shared ride approaches that of a one-way bus fare in San Francisco and a tourist can book an apartment in Chicago at half the price of a tax-generating hotel room, local gover...

 $NFLX close: $123.71. Up 2.11 percent. A new record high. Year to date: Up 153.5 percent.$TWTR close: $28.47. Down 2.97 percent. A new record low. Year to date: Down 20.55 percent.:):( Read More...

Yesterday, President Barack Obama invited 30 companies over to the White House (on his birthday, no less) to participate in the first-ever White House Demo Day. The purpose of the event was to acceler...

 Following the bell, enterprise healthcare management company Castlight Healthreported its second-quarter financial performance, including revenue of $18.5 million, and a per-share lossof $0.19. ...

 Watching people play video games. Check. Watching people play with apps. Check. Watching people do earnings. Check. Watching people draw things? Check. Now, anyways. Today, a company called Sywo...

 So says Jennifer Granick, who gave the keynote address at the (somewhat infamous) Black Hat security conference today. Once, techno-utopians could say things like “The Internet treats cens...

 Update: Tesla’s stock price hasbounced back, now down only about 3 percent after hours. Today after the markets closed, Tesla reported secondquarter financial results, including non-GAAP r...

 Here at TechCrunch we’re eagerly awaiting the day that 3D photographs are just as mainstream as traditional ones. We even have an ongoing collection of some TC writers modeled in 3D. Howev...

 Reddit CEO Steve Huffman introduced an updated set of user policies Wednesday, which included details for how Reddit would be “quarantining” certain communitiesand banning ones which...

 Update: The company is currently down around 9percent in after-hours trading. GoDaddy reported its second quarter financial performance today, including revenue of $394.5 millionand negative ear...

 UPDATE: Fitbit shares slid dramatically (around 11 percent) later in after-hours trading despite beating expectations. Fitbit reportedits first earnings Wednesdaysincegoing public earlier this s...

 Gifting a child money for future education expenses is nothing new. However, giving cash is almost alwaysawkward, plus the giver misses out on the chance to show off a physical gift. Just launch...

 Pluto TV, an L.A.-based video streaming startup targeting cord cutters, has just made a significant new hire: the company is bringing on Ken Parks, previously the Chief Content Officer at Spotif...

 Bucket, a service that transforms unstructured text based on travel recommendations into a page of cards with information from places like Yelp and Frommer’s, is launchinginto an open beta...

 Earlier this year, Google Slides — the company’s PowerPoint competitor — gained the ability tocast presentations to any screen with Chromecast or AirPlay. Today it’s expa...

 Earlier today, Samsung announced that it would now provide security patches for its Android devices “about once per month.” In addition to Samsung, Google also today announced a simi...

 You use YouTube, everyone uses YouTube, so you know the “301+” number that this headline refers to. Before a video goes bananas with views, it gets paused at “301+” for s...

 Tintri, a company that develops storage solutions for virtual applications, announced a $125 million round today.The company also indicated the next logical step is probably going to be an IPO i...

 Long time fitness app maker Runtastic has been acquired by sportswear brand adidas Group. The news was announced today in a blog post. The deal values Runtastic at 220 million ($240M). The trans...

 On the heels of Netflix’s institution of ‘unlimited’ paid maternity and paternity leave for its employees, Microsoft this morning announced that it is bolsteringits own parenta...

 Organic food delivery startup Good Eggsjust announcedthat it will be closing its operations in Los Angeles, New York City and New Orleans — every city where it has a presence, except for S...

 During the 2015 Special Olympics World Games in Los Angeles last week, a fifth grader named Ari stopped by a booth set up by Google. The booth had information about its “Impact Challenge&#...

 During the 2015 Special Olympics World Games in Los Angeles last week, a fifth grader named Ari stopped by a booth set up by Google. The booth had information about its “Impact Challenge&#...

 Before Periscope and Meerkat jumpstarted the mobile livestreaming craze, Facebook was already quietly working on its own way to let public figures broadcast live videos to their fans. Today, Fac...

 Enza, a youth innovation and leadership incubator, recently held a free, five-day residential program at Stanford University for 26 youth of color to brainstorm technology solutions that address...

 MicroHealth, a mobile health startup in Y Combinator’s current class, is launching today to help patients take control of their chronic illnesses. The companywas started by Spanish brother...

 MicroHealth, a mobile health startup in Y Combinator’s current class, is launching today to help patients take control of their chronic illnesses.The company was started by Spanish brother...

 Gig economy or not, it looks like part-time or flexible jobs are becoming a more structural part of the labor market.But software hasn’t necessary improved to help contractor-based busines...

 Gig economy or not, it looks like part-time or flexible jobs are becoming a more structural part of the labor market. But software hasn’t necessarily improved to help contractor-based busi...

 Microsoft announced this morning the general availability of its “digital storytelling” app called Sway, the latest addition to the Microsoft Office suite. The app, which was first i...

 While this news isn’t exactly exciting for me just yet, being in San Francisco, Google has announced its next expansion city for Fiber…San Antonio. If you’re keeping score, her...

 SoloPro, a service that unbundles real estate services and gives buyers a 3 percent rebate when they buy a home through the service, today announced that it has received a strategic investment f...

 A business publicly debating customer problems on their Facebook Page’s wall is a recipe for a PR disaster. So today Facebook is giving Pages more options for privately messaging people wh...

 We have entered a golden age for fintech. LendingClub and OnDeck recently exited through massive IPOs, and global investments in the fintech space hit $3 billion last year. This outpouring of in...

 Red Hat today launched its Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7into general availability. The distribution combines Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server, the latest OpenStack release (“Kilo...

 Your GoPro is great until you have to edit all those hours of footage to find the cool moments. Graava does that automatically. Starting pre-orders today for $249 (eventually $399), the Graava a...

 It’s Black Hat season, meaning that we are getting a new batch of zero-day exploits showing how insecure our gadgets are. Xeno Kovah and Trammell Hudson found a serious zero-day vulnerabil...

 Yachting has an image problem. When you think of a big old sailboats you mostly imagine rich leathery men in boat shoes who smoke big cigars and try to hit rare pink dolphins in the head with wi...

 Curiosity about the limits of machine learning led former trader, UCL academic and startup founder, Dr Tristan Fletcher, to apply techniques more typically found in normal asset class trading to...

 Dish Networks finally offered some insight into the traction of its over-the-top streaming TV service, Sling TV, in its second quarter earnings. The company reported for the first time that Slin...

 Affirm has completed a talent acquisition of LendLayer, a startup that provideslending foraccelerated learning programs like Hackbright Academy. LendLayer partnered with a number of accelerated ...

 WeWork, the NYC tech (and real estate) darling valued north of $5 billion, has today announced its first acquisition. The company will be acquiring Case, a building information modeling and cons...

 I’m not a big fan of the “X accepts bitcoin” type of post but this one is near and dear to my heart – and actually interesting. LOT Polish airlines, the official Polish a...

 Target, the second largest general merchandise retailer in the U.S., announced this morning that it will starttesting beacon technology in 50 of its stores nationwide. With beacon technology, th...

 Smartwatch, schmartwatch – you gotta get you a Garmin! The new Forerunner 25 is a low-cost workout watch that comes in multiple jolly colors and can register your heart rate, speed, distan...

 Welcome back to Bullish, where we try to explore that fine line between what is bullish, and what is bullshit. This time around we have Amy Widdowson Mains in the studio to dig into public relat...

 DJI has just announced a new camera drone, the DJU Phantom 3 Standard, an oddly-named quadcopter that features a built-in HD video camera, 25 minutes of flight time on one charge, and a special ...

Editor’s note:Gen Teare(@geneteare), a past female founder,heads up the CrunchBase Venture Program and CrunchBase’s data work. Ned Desmond(@neddesmond) is the COO of TechCrunch and CrunchB...

 Work management solution Workfront (previously known as AtTask) today announced that it has raised a $33 million Series E funding round led by growth equity firm JMI Equity, which also previousl...

 Tinder is tiptoeing into the friendzone, and the work place. After years of saying “We want to overcome all the issues of meeting new people”, not just dating them, today Tinder will...

 Mobile analytics startup Amplitudehas raised $9M in Series A funding. When we wrote about Amplitude last year, we noted that it’strying to undercut competitors like Mixpanel with lower pri...

 Fastly, a content delivery service (CDN) service that focuses on helping companies deliver dynamic content to their users faster, today announced that it has raised a $75 million Series D round ...

 Last March Samsung announced Samsung Pay — a mobile payment offering which it hopes will go head to head with Apple Pay. The service has still not rolled out yet but Samsung is expanding i...

 Leanplum, a service that helps developers and marketers engage with mobile users through personalized messages, dynamic UI optimization and A/B testing services, today announced that it has rais...

 With its revenue dropping this past quarter following a growth slump, Japan-based messaging firm Line is going back to what it knows best with a new $20 million joint venture to create mobile ga...

 Disrupt London 2015 is just around the corner, and it’s never too soon to start thinking about snagging your tickets to the show. With this year’s Disrupt, we’re releasing a fe...

 Every get the feeling someone’s watching you? Of course you do; you use the Internet… So what’s the answer to pervasive tracking technologies? Well, one answer — at least...

 China already has some of the most stringent Internet restrictions in the world, but censorship is poised to become even more extreme. Sites and social networks will no longer just be surveilled...

 India’s e-commerce market is the fastest growing in Asia and expected to hit $6 billion this year. The country’s underdeveloped logistics networks needs to improve quickly, however, ...

 GE announced today that it was expanding its Predix Internet of Things platform to provideInfrastructure as a Service (IaaS).The IaaS market is dominated by Amazon Web Services with many others ...

 It’s a tale as old as time. Internet video creator/vlogger garners support after accusing $260 billion social media giant of using unethical practices and earns a seemingly official reply ...

 The Electronic Frontier Foundation released what it called a “stronger” Do Not Track setting yesterday. But what does that actually mean for your day-to-day privacy on the web? To un...

 Open-source software has been a growing phenomenon for more than two decades, but in recent years it has risen in importance in a whole new way: as a key to rapid innovation for startups and cor...

 During most acquisitions, the acquirer mistakenly tries to find a middle ground. Indecisive leaders and consulting firms steer towards the middle to appease the many stakeholders in a company. R...

 Whenever I try to take a photo througha plane or hotel window, chances arethere are plenty of reflections that show up on the final image and ruin it. Now, however, Google and MIT researchers ha...

 Urban construction anddevelopment is about as far as you canget from an easily scalable business. Designs from architects are usually bespoke or one-off.Land-use politics are unpredictable. Indi...

 A few hours after hitting its all-time stock price high today, Netflix has announced a new program for all employees. In a blog post, Netflix outlined its unlimited maternity and paternity leave...

 In addition to the multitude of sick new gameplay footage we saw today from Gamescom, Microsoft revealed, confirmed and offered updates on some major new features that will be coming to the Xbox...

 Briefly, my friends, Zendesk reported its second quarter financial results today, beating market expectations. The company also guided its third quarter revenue above street goals. Shares of the...

 Today following the cessation of trading, Etsy reported its second-quarter financial performance, including revenue of $61.4 million, and earnings per share of negative $0.07. The street had exp...

 On a day the NASDAQ was down about 0.2 percent, Netflix hit a new all-time high during intra-day trading, hitting $122.78 and eventually closing at $121.00per share, up 7.5percent on the day. Th...

 If you’ve ever run a 10K road race, you know that race organizers spend a lot of effort to have volunteers at every milepost telling runners what their time is. If you’re like me, yo...

 One of the greatest things to come out of Major League Baseball might not be a particular team, player or record. It could be the Advanced Media group, which is a powerhouse in online streaming....

 Though it’s not quite an accelerator (of anything really), the White House has decided to hold its very first White House Demo Day, wherein more than 90 entrepreneurs from over 30 differen...

 The new2016 Audi TT virtual cockpitboasts high-definition, crystal-clear digital graphics, Google Earth imagery and navigation, haptic feedback, Google-like search, voice command operation and &...

 Gagan Biyani, CEO Of healthy food delivery startup Sprig, will be joining us this year at Disrupt SF. In case you don’t remember, Biyani is a TechCrunch alum, having covered mobile apps fo...

 Much has already been said about the new mullet watch by Nico Gerard. The watch, called the Pinnacle, costs $9,200 and is essentially a metal band with two watches attached to it. On one side yo...

 A fair amount of folks reported yesterday that Apple was testing its own MVNO (mobile virtual network operator), to become, in essence, a mobile carrier while borrowing components from other car...

 Bright, a solar panel installation and distribution startup, pulled in $4 million in seed money to build out itssolar software and financing team. The startup launched out of the last batch of Y...

 People in the tech world like to talk about doing great things— but what does that actually mean for your career? If you’re serious about making a positive impact on the world, shoul...

 Square announced a powerful addition to their board today, former Brown University President, Ruth Simmons. Before her 11-year post at Brown, she was the President of Smith College, establishing...

 You probably remember flipping through Highlights magazine as a child, while in the waiting room of your doctor’s office, perhaps. But now, this longest-running children’s magazine o...

 You probably remember flipping through Highlights magazine as a child, perhaps while in the waiting room of your doctor’s office. But now, this longest-running children’s magazine of...

 The 27-inch, 5K retina iMac is a beautiful desktop computer, but it’s a bit too expensive for many people. This is about to change as the latest beta of OS X El Capitan tells us more about...

 The pitch for TapHeaven might sound a little familiar — co-founder and CEO Chris Hoyt said his technology delivers truly automated ad-buying. What makes TapHeaven more than just another ad...

 Fresh off of Apple’s WWDC announcement earlier this summer that they would be partnering with loyalty rewards program Belly as one of their“mobility partners,” Belly announced ...

 Genius, gone from rap song explanation site to annotator of the entire internet, has today launched a revamped version of the website, the iOS app, and for the first time ever, an Android app.Th...

Does YouTube look different to you today? If you’re noticing that the YouTube player on the desktop seems to have a sleeker look-and-feel, then you’ve probably spotted theupdate YouTube ha...

 On-demand grocery delivery serviceInstacarthas made its first acquisition since raising hundreds of millions in venture funding for its growing business. The company is “acqui-hiring”...

 Software is eating the world, and it is continuing its monstrous diet in politics. The traditional shoe leather approach of political campaigning has been replaced by rooms of engineers, AWS ins...

 Apparently, telecom operators are sitting on a huge amount of unique customer data that could provide much-needed revenue by being packaged up and sold to mobile advertisers and content provider...

 Two months ago, Kobalt — a startup whose technology tracks and collects music royalties from streaming music providers — acquired and revamped and royalty co...

 Pickingo is the latest hyperlocal delivery startup in India to get funding. The company, which transports items between merchants and customers in six cities, has raised $1.3 million led by Reha...

 Panorama Education, a startup that surveys students, parents and teachers to collect actionable data, has raised $12 million in new funding to help school districts make better decisions.Spark C...

 Alibaba is continuing its international push after hiring former Goldman Sachs vice president Michael Evans as its new president in charge of global business. Read More ...

 A team of European security researchers has published a paper analyzing how the battery life of mobile devices could be used to track web browsing habits of Firefox users on Linux, using the HTM...

 GIF keyboard maker Riffsy has raised a $10 million Series A to make sure you never have to communicate using only boring sentences and emojis again. The round was led by Menlo Ventures with part...

 Tencent has made a bid to buy all outstanding shares of eLong, one of China’s biggest online travel agencies (OTA). Read More ...

 When OneLogin Platform Engineer Isis Wenger agreed to participate in the company’s recruiting campaign, she felt pretty apathetic about it. She also didn’t anticipate the backlash th...

 When OneLogin Platform Engineer Isis Wenger agreed to participate in the company’s recruiting campaign, she felt pretty apathetic about it. She also didn’t anticipate the backlash th...

 User experience and user-interface design is an emerging field in the technology industry, even more so in the legal world of patents. (Sometimes this field is known by the shorthand UX/UI.) It ...

 If history is written by the victors, government surveillance agencies willhave an awfully long list of sources to cite. Domestic digital surveillance has oftenseemed to be a threat endured most...

 Conversations around diversity in tech often focus on the “pipeline” and getting more people from underrepresented groups through the door. But that’s just a first step. The ne...

 Entrepreneurs are giving the healthcare industry a much-needed injection of innovation. Enthusiasm for new ideas and solutions in healthcare is clear from the 200 percent growth in funding for d...

 Any press is good press, apparently, as Reddit hit a new 8 billion page view record in July admist community upheaval over new policies and leadership. Reddit grew from 175 million unique visito...

 Right before Tracy Lawrence went into fundraising mode for her catering startup Chewse last year, she cut off her hair. She didn’t know it at the time, but later upon reflection, she thoug...

 And now for an update in the continuing saga of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), a controversial piece of legislation currently in the Senate that, to some, represents an import...

 When I ran through years and years of homepage designs by Twitter the other day, it was like hopping into a DeLorean and heading back in time. It was really interesting seeing what the company h...

 Shares of Twitter, a popular social media company, fell sharply today, dipping nearly 6 percent by midday trading. The company’s equity fell in value below the $30 mark, setting newlows. A...

 If you’re a startup, you’ve heard of TechCrunch’s Startup Alley and the Battlefield. It’s a big part of our TechCrunch Disrupt conference. Hundreds of startups from all o...

 Security platform Zscaler today announced that it has raised a $100 million Series B funding round led by late stage investor TPG. The company, which offers a wide range of web, mobile and cloud...

 At first, everyone thought they were an April Fool’s joke. But Amazon Dash buttons are real, and just this past week, they became available to allAmazon Prime members for a mere $5 apiece....

 Venture-backed food replacement drink makerSoylent– yes, named after the movie where people unknowingly were sustained by eatingother people – is out today with its newest product. T...

 It’s a bit of an emotional rollercoaster for the Frontback community right now. On July 23rd, the company announced that it would shut down on August 15th after two years. But something hi...

 Inside a recent SEC filing, Microsoft detailed the figures behind its massive goodwill writedown that trashed its earnings last quarter. The writedown was an admission that the company’s e...

 Bohemian Guitars first won our hearts with their unique oilcan git-fiddles, an instrument at once primitive and surprisingly advanced. I played with them about two years ago and now they’r...

 Sony announced two mid-range smartphones today focusing on what Sony does best — smartphone cameras. As a reminder, Sony is one of the leading providers of smartphone cameras, supplying th...

 Amazon quietly rolled out a series of changes to its “Amazon Household” program and the ability for Prime members to share their shipping benefits over the weekend. The changes are d...

 Back in May, Eden launched out of the Y Combinator accelerator to provide users with on-demand tech help, whether it’s fixing a cracked iPhone screen, solving WiFi issues, installing a pri...

 Microsoft announced this morning the acquisition of Austin, Texas-basedIncent Games, the makers of a “sales gamification” platform called FantasySalesTeam. As the name implies, the c...

 After launching in Istanbul just over a year ago, Meal Box, a healthy mealdelivery startup, is lookingto cornerthe take-out market in the world’s fifth-largest city. Backed by $3.6 million...

 Every two years, betaworks brings in brand new entrepreneurs and helps them bake up a new batch of products and services. In 2013, those companies included Giphy, Dots, and Poncho, and now the s...

 WizRocket, which helps companies increase user engagement by fine-tuning mobile, web, and e-mail notifications, has raised $8 million in new funding from Sequoia Capital and returning investor A...

 Xiaomi regained the crown as China’s top smartphone in Q2 2015, according to reports from multiple analyst firms. Read More ...

 BoardVitals is essentially a repository for hard questions. Aimed at doctors to be, the service wants to change the way medicine is taught and is beginning with the medical boards, test taken by...

 SoftBank is back investing in India after it lead a $100 million round for OYO Rooms, a two-year-old startup that runs an online marketplace for affordable hotels in the country. Read More ...

 The former head of bitcoin exchange Mt.Gox, Mark Karpeles, screwed a lot of early adopters. It is unclear at this point how much Karpeles allegedly lost or took, but the Japanese police are clai...

 Snapdeal, one of India’s biggest e-commerce companies, has scooped up $500 million in funding from Alibaba, Foxconn, and SoftBank, according to Re/code. Read More ...

 Nokia has announced that it has sold its HERE mapping business to a consortium of automobile makers for $3.07 billion, ending months of speculation over its future. Read More ...

 If you wereanywhere near the internet in late July,you probably readthe news: Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, two security researchers who specialize in hacking cars, figured out how to remote...

 On July 16, the U.S. Treasury Department finally made a move that many fintech professionals have expected – and some dreaded – for years. They issued a Request for Information (RFI)...

 If you are following the battle of the short messaging systems, you might think it is a one-dimensional contest between the systems that maintain your chat history for all time – like Twit...

 The K-Y-A in KYA Anlytics stands for “Know Your Audience,” and founder and CEO Jeff Weisbein said that’s exactly what he’s trying to help online publishers do. Weisbein h...

 Capitalizing on the falling cost of launch services and the miniaturization of satellites, a new breed of startups are gearing up for the space race under the moniker of NewSpace.At a recent con...

 Manhattan, 2040: Alice wants to open an antiques store. Chelsea seems like a good location. She has to find 150 square meters to move the items that she has collected over the years, and to go o...

 It’s still early days in the bacteria becomes our food production process. However, several Silicon Valley scientists are creating lab-grown edibles of the truly bizarre or mixing up anima...

 “We’re watching you.” This was the warning that the Chicago Police Department gave to more than 400 people on its “Heat List.” The list, an attempt to identify the ...

 Startups start with talent, and the talent, as we all know, seems to get younger every year. But it wouldn’t happen if children themselves were not introduced to the word of technology and...

 TechCrunch interviews Eileen Burbidge, Partner at London VC firm Passion Capital, where we discuss her early days working at Skype and Apple, the types of startups she invests in, her close ties...

 “The minute a major Silicon Valley VC sets up a branch in Mexico, you will be out of business,” a Mexican founder told me over dinner at last year’s Mexico VC Day in San Franci...

 The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Saturday, August 1, 2015. The Gang talks cars, the politics of streaming, back catalogues, disco...

 From something as simple as a door sensor at a store to the new age of “smart” sensors in a rapidly emerging wearables market, the application of sensors has already permeated many p...

 Gillmor Gang – Frank Radice, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. LIVE recording session today at 10amPT. LIVE chat Center chatroom during LIVE broadcast HEREGillmor Gang on Facebo...

 It’s no secret that the growth of publicly available data, or open data, is more prevalent than ever. From government databases, such as those aggregated by Data.gov, to data made availabl...

 About a year ago, Michael Lopp joined Pinterest as the company’s head of engineering — filling in the leadership of the engineering sidenext to co-founder Evan Sharp and CEO Ben Silb...

 Thursday was, I think, a historic day–though whether it becomes a memorable milestone like the launch of the Altair 8800, or an obscure footnote la CP/M, remains to be seen. Thursday was ...

 On the heels of Homejoy’s failure, the fundamental “on-demand marketplace” model has come into question by investors, the media and even consumers. That questioning is very rel...

 Founders are often puzzled by how VCs derive valuations for competitive Series A rounds. A competitive Series A round is an equity round where a company generally raises greater than $5 million ...

 Yahoo bought Polyvore in what we’ve heard could be a $60 million deal today. Both Polyvore and Yahoo were mum on those details, but Polyvore co-founder Jess Lee did tell TechCrunch her com...

 The World Bank says that farmers need to produce 50% more food to feed the 9 billion people who will inhabit the earth by 2050. While farmers are facing higher demand, they have fewer resources ...

 500 Startups has unveiled its fourteenth batch of companies going through its accelerator. While Y Combinator is starting to roll out its own class in an upcoming Demo Day, a new one from 500 St...

 It’s time for CrunchWeek again!What a week it was.The Twitter soap opera continues with earnings, no new CEO, hashtags and more. Uber keeps raising money until we lose count. Ouya gets put...

 The FDA is currently considering clinical trials for a drug that would delay aging. The idea of extending human longevity is a controversial one, with some arguing for immortality and others arg...

 Yahoo just announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire style-focused community Polyvore. In a blog post about the deal, Yahoo’s senior vice president of publisher products Simon ...

 We’ve been promised a flying car for as long as I can remember. From The Jetsons to Back To The Future, we’ve been sold this dream for years and years. Owning something that starts o...

 Well, that was embarrassing. Following months of piss-poor communication and a chaotic planning process, Boston’s bid to be the U.S. entry for the 2024 Olympics finally died this week like...

 Given the massive influx of capital that we are currently enduring in Silicon Valley, TechCrunch has decided to take another crack at thelexicon of the moment to help everyone understand just wh...

 August is nearly upon us, which means news is slowing. But that hasn’t stopped car companies from racing away with the news, including Tesla’s introduction of Ludicrous Mode (which w...

 Launching out of the Summer 2015 Y Combinator batch, Locent is an e-commerce platform powered entirely by text messages. One of the biggest challenges for online retailers is shepherding custome...

 Asana, the team productivity software that’s raised $38.2 million from high-profile investors like Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz, just got called out on Twitter for its lack of div...

 Partner programs can be a big source of revenue — for example, channel sales account for 80 percent of Cisco’s revenue. Now a startup called GrowSumo is working to make those program...

 Uber just closed a new round of funding that will value the company at more than $50 billion,according to the Wall Street Journal. The newspapersays that Uber has raised close to $1 billion in t...

 As part of Y Combinator’s push into computational biology and bioinformatics, the early-stage firm is backing a team that used to work on the Human Genome Project and is now experimenting ...

 Kim Dotcom revealed in an interview on Slashdot that he is no longer involved with Mega — he isn’t working for the company anymore, but he also doesn’t own any shares of Mega. ...

 If you’re a heavy Twitter user, you probably don’t see the homepage much…no, not your timeline, the Twitter.com that shows up when you’re logged out. If other people didn...

 Dropbox has launched on the Roku, with an app that allows you to view the photos and videos you have stored in your account directly on your TV by way of Roku’s streaming media player. The...

 Meet MyTape, a brand new social app for iOS centered around video. On MyTape, you follow people, shoot videos and watch stuff around you. It’s a sort of mash-up between Periscope and Front...

 This week’s tech headlines saw the launch of Windows 10, Amazon’s new Product Hunt competitor, and Truecaller’s entrance into the unicorn club. These are the stories to catch y...

 Susan Kare, an early Apple designer behind some of the company’s early typefaces and icons, has joinedPinterest. She’ll be part of Pinterest’s creative team as a product design...

 Should Apple be concerned that a number of popular app makers like Facebook, Google and Snapchat have yet to embrace its Apple Watch platform with apps of their own? That’s a question rais...

 Google said “non.” In a blog post, Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer explained why Google wouldn’t comply with the French data protection watchdog demands. The CNIL wanted...

 Honestly, does anyone even say ‘pwned’ anymore? Am I exposing myself even more by putting it into the headline? Ugh, this is not off to a good start. Read More ...

 In rural West Africa,150 million peopleare currentlyliving without electricity. Oolu, a Y Combinator company launching today, aims to reduce this number by delivering affordable solar energy to ...

 Saida, an app that helps people get approved for short-term loans based on their activity on their phones, launched out of Y Combinator today. Saida can see how a person, for example, uses their...

 We’re continuing to announce speakers for our TechCrunch Disrupt London conference on December 7-8, 2015. The conference will feature an amazing slate of global startups, investors, influe...

 Amazon is expanding its Prime Music servicetoday with the launch of a new collection of exclusive acoustical recordings from a number of artists, both established and up-and-coming. At launch, t...

 When it comes to regulating bitcoin companies, it’s still mostly a work in progress. Some governments want to restrict bitcoin quite a lot, while others are adopting a more favorable stanc...

 In many countries, when it comes to regulating bitcoin companies, it’s still mostly a work in progress. Some governments want to restrict bitcoin quite a lot, while others are adopting a m...

 Klarismo, which takes existing MRIs and other kinds of body scans to build a 3D model of a person, has raised $2.1 million and launched out of Y Combinator. Klarismo is an online service where u...

 Nvidia is issuing a voluntary recall for its 8-inch Shield tablets after determining that they may, in fact, combust. The company has learned that the battery in the device has the potential to ...

 Rumor has it that Apple should soon release a new version of its set-top box as well as a new streaming service for TV content. According to a new report by Buzzfeed, Apple was supposed to annou...

 Sleeping with a cellphone in your room is, according to scientists who aren’t real, akin to sleeping with a radioactivity-emitting sleeplessness machine. That’s why artist and design...

 A bug discovered by security researchers Eric Taylor and Blake Welsh can change a standard customer feedback system called Aptean SupportSoft into a method for hackers to grab passwords, credit ...

 Not content with raising $1 billion to fund a major expansion in China, Uber has announced that it is putting aside another billion dollars in resources to grow its business in India. Read More ...

 HTC is planning to release its extremely well-received virtual reality headset Vive to consumers later this year, possibly in November. In the meantime, the Taiwanese company is busy building ou...

 Samsung and MasterCard, which have been working together to bring Samsung Pay to consumers and merchants around the world, announced today that they will extend their partnership to launch the m...

 35 million people run into a Facebook email and password login roadblock on iOS each day, and over half of them bounce. That’s why Facebook confirms to me that it’s testing a new too...

 About a week ago, the Google Photos team shared this mystical and magical video about a waffle wafel. What could it mean? What is this all about?Why a waffle??!?!?! Read More ...

 Designed for pet-loving households, DogSync (a recent winner of our patent-pending TC Radio pitch-off) is a task manager that helps families communicate and sync tasks like feeding, walking or l...

 The app revolution is dead. In fact, it died years ago. It had been a good run, but a revolution is no longer a revolution when the model is the status quo. With new apps created every day, the ...