Articles by Techcrunch from May 2016

 VetTechTrek is a nonprofitfounded last year with the goal of helpingmilitary veterans network with the technology industry. Over thelast 12 months they have worked toward this goal by hosting mu...

 Imagine that you are lead strategist for the Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump campaign (take your pick). Your job is to maximize voter turnout in November. You hypothesize that more people would ...

 We’re just a few short months away from Disrupt SF 2016. Soon thousands of entrepreneurs, innovators and investors will flock to the beautiful Pier 48 for the best startup show in the Bay ...

 Companies behind popular messaging apps have a year to move all the data they have on Iranian users onto servers in Iran, according to Reuters. This raises concerns about privacy. The Iranian go...

 It’s time for a little friendly competition among startups. TechCrunch is coming to Austin and Seattle in two weeks, and we’re bringing the TC pitch-off with us. Ten companies will h...

 Bitcoin is back! Or at least, there are positive signs indicating that bitcoin might not be as dead as everybody thought. Bitcoins are now trading at $547.40 on Bitfinex (the largest USD/bitcoin...

 TechCrunch is pleased to bring you Microsoft Accelerator’s Machine Learning Demo Day this Thursday, June 2 from the Showbox SoDo in Seattle. The Microsoft Accelerator is an immersive 3 to ...

 Google was caught by surprise. Last week, nearly a hundred employees of France’s equivalent of the IRS (Direction gnrale des finances) raided Google’s office in Paris for a tax nonco...

 Google was caught by surprise. Last week, nearly 100 of France’s equivalent of the IRS (Direction gnrale des Finances) raided Google’s office in Paris for a tax non-compliance invest...

 Branded content was already becoming more attractive to many marketers and publishers trying to navigate the shoals of the online media ecosystem. Now, thanks to Facebook, it’s set to real...

 French startup Nestor just raised $1 million (900,000) from business angels through Anaxago, and TheFamily. The startup competes in the incredibly fierce market of food delivery startups in Pari...

 When Google bought bebop Technologies last fall for $348 million, it got more than a stealthy startup. It also landed Diane Greene as executive vice president of Google Cloud Enterprise and that...

 Today, the big data sector amounts to more than 7.5% of total venture investments. So where are we at in the world of big data and is the recent obsession with AI still fundamentally related to ...

 In partnership with TechCrunch, The Europas Conference & Awards, which I founded, has come up with a new kind of tech conference. Think of it as a relaxed, summer prelude to the heat of a Di...

 In partnership with TechCrunch, The Europas Conference & Awards, which I founded, has come up with a new kind of tech conference. Think of it as a relaxed, summer prelude to the heat of a Di...

 In the popular media, we talk a lot about robots stealing jobs. But when we stop speculating and actually look at the real world of work, the impact of advanced robotics is far more nuanced and ...

 “Enjoy your com-FORT-able stay,” says a robot front-desk clerk at Japan’s Robot Hotel. Do you thank the robot for its awkward salutation? Or maybe you hesitate for a moment bef...

 The fundamentally transparent nature of blockchain technology – with its unalterable public ledger – will force politicians to be more honest about themselves and their intentions. B...

 The fundamentally transparent nature of blockchain technology — with its unalterable public ledger — will force politicians to be more honest about themselves and their intentions. B...

 It may slip our notice, but technological innovation is often reducible to an innovation in the marketing and conceptualization of technology. While there are undoubtedly many technological brea...

 This week on the Technotopia podcast I interviewed Jeffrey Martin, the creator of 360Cities and the maker of the Sphericam. Martin is a skilled 360-degree camera operator and has created amazing...

 Livestreams start boring because broadcasters don’t want to begin the real action until more people have tuned in. That can take a few minutes, even with streams being rapidly distributed ...

 Chatbots have been in the news a lot this year. First there was Tay, Microsoft’s racist love child, who just couldn’t keep herself under control. Then came Facebook with its messenge...

 It’s been almost 10 years since Apple unveiled the iPhone. Since that day, the smartphone has been the overwhelming driver of innovation in the technology industry. Many components have ma...

 Welcome to the land technology forgot. High-end leases negotiated and signed via fax. Millions of dollars in apartment inventory tracked on whiteboards with dry-erase markers. Client histories r...

 Silicon Valley has traditionally been the startup Garden of Eden, but it’s no longer the only game in town. Utah — specifically Salt Lake City and its ecosystem — has become a ...

 The Gillmor Gang — Dan Farber, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, May 27, 2016. Too muchTrump, TV, Twitter, and Gang thinks apps have jumped t...

 I’m writing this from a slightly saddened perspective, revisiting my favorite SNES RPGs and realizing something: I’ve been spoiled by modern UX design. The sentiment is pretty univer...

 Director Joe Dante made some of the most best-lovedmovies of the ’80s, including Gremlins and Explorers, so I was eager to ask him about how movieshaveevolved. This weekend, Dante will rec...

 It’s heeeere! The Internet of Things, I mean. I just spent several days at the Connected Conference in Paris, which focused on IoT hardware. They built a whole home full of connected devic...

Amazon Alexa can now be used in a web browser to test it out. Facebook starts selling offsite ads. Apple pay wants to expand into more countries in both Asia and Europe. Nick Denton from Gawker challe...

 Who could imagine being wowed by a garbage can? Not much floors us anymore in our age of technological whiz-bang, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the lowly garbage can. Embedded with sm...

 It’s been a long journey for the VAIO brand: sold off from Sony in 2014 to investment firm Japan Industrial Partners, the deal saw all of its then-new products disappear. Read More ...

 Musical.ly is expanding beyond music videos with the launch of livel.ly, its live stream platform. Users will be able to broadcast through the livel.ly app, and the streams will be viewable on m...

 Musical.ly is expanding beyond music videos with the launch of live.ly, its live stream platform. Users will be able to broadcast through the live.ly app, and the streams will be viewable on mus...

 This week, Google successfullydefended itself against thethe$9 billion fair use court case against Oracle, Snapchat’s financials were leaked, Twilio revealed its IPO filing and more. These...

 Comixology recently launched Comixology Unlimited, a subscription plan that offers unlimited access to thousands of digital comics for just $5.99 per month.Given the “all you can read̶...

 The UE Roll 2 is fun. How do I know it’s fun? Look at all of the press images on the side of the box. It’s gone skiing, bike riding, mountain climbing and rolling around in the mud w...

 San Francisco’s fashion staple seems to be ripped jeans and a hoodie. But just between the edgy All Saints and Paris designer St. Laurent on San Francisco’s Maiden Lane is a rare, hi...

 The Omen X by HP VR PC is nothing if not compelling. The company showed off a picture of the concept earlier today and let slip a smattering of details around the backpack PC but not much else. ...

 The Omen X by HP VR PC is nothing if not compelling. The company showed off a picture of the concept earlier today and let slip a smattering of details around the backpack PC but not much else. ...

 It’s been a good week for SpaceX. Earlier this week we learned that the company won a lucrative contract with the National Reconnaissance Office, the shadowy government organization that r...

 European Union officials announced today that, starting in 2020, any research that owes its existence in some way to public funding must be freely accessible and reusable. Recommendations were a...

 Well, this story keeps getting more and more interesting. According to a newly published account in the New York Post, Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay, is involved inan effort to...

 Gillmor Gang – Dan Farber, Keith Teare, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. LIVE recording session today, May 27 2016, starting at 1pmPT/4pmET.Our live chat stream during the sho...

 It’s 2016. There isn’t a wall high enough to keep out the fastest-growing threat to our national security: Cyberterrorism. It follows that our vulnerable corporate networks constitut...

 Amazon has put Alexa, the voice-powered AI software found in the Echo, Dot, and Tap, right inside the browser with the launch of Echoism.io.After logging in with an Amazon account, anyone can st...

 Amazon has put Alexa, the voice-powered AI software found in the Echo, Dot and Tap, right inside the browser with the launch of Echosim.io. After logging in with an Amazon account, anyone can st...

 A major study conducted by the National Toxicology Program has found a slight, but significant, positive correlation between radio-frequency radiation exposure (like that given off by phones) an...

 If you didn’t already know the jury’s decision in Oracle’s long-running lawsuit against Google, you wouldn’t have been able to guess it from looking at either companyR...

 Applications for the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF are now open. We’re looking for new, yet-to-launch startups to debut on the Disrupt Stage. For those of you who don’t yet know,...

 A San Francisco startup whose technology can turn any video game into a tournament played for cash prizes, Skillz, has a new Chief Product Officer, ex-Electronic Arts’ mobile vice presiden...

 One of the challenges with clothes shopping online is that it doesn’t mirror the real-world experience where you can try on items for fit. And even though a number of today’s retaile...

 Google launched an updated version of its Google app for iOS today. Typically, these are minor updates, but today’s version brings a couple of interesting new features to the app. The most...

 Gina Bianchini on the startup life. Read More ...

 While we put the figurative closed sign on Disrupt NY just a few weeks ago, it’s never too early to start thinking about what’s next. Disrupt SF is still a few months away, but today...

 If you have albums and shoeboxes stuffed withold photos, a startup called Photomyne wants to help you scan those photos, in order tobring them online where they can be saved and shared. Now the ...

 A number of companies seem to have a firm grasp on the headset bit, and while the controller aspect is certainly in flux, we’ve seen a handful ofcompelling solutions on that front. But wha...

 Althea, a Korea-based company that exports and sells cosmetics and beauty products to Southeast Asia, has closed a $3.5 million Series A round for expansion. Read More ...

 Creema is latest handmade marketplace in Asia to raise new funding. The Japanese startup announced this week (link via Google Translate) that it has received 1.1 billion yen (about $10 million) ...

 News delivery startup Blendle, which is applying a marketplace model to journalism offering pay-per-article reads from a range of different publishers, has launched iOS and Android apps in the U...

 This much-talked about Instagram photo wasn’t the only product of President Obama’s recent visit to Vietnam. The Southeast Asian country also cut access to Facebook while the head of...

 Just when you thought Finnish mobile OS maker Jolla had given up on making its own hardware, given its recent financing troubles which led to it having to shutter a planned tablet, it gets back ...

 Apple Pay may only be available in a handful of countries right now, but the iPhone maker is working hard to extend the footprint of its digital payment services into new parts of the world. Rea...

 Facebook’s advertising network is already a colossal business — it helped the social network bring in $5.38 billion in revenue during its most recent quarter alone — but it is ...

 Intel has acquired computer vision and machine learning startup Itseez to develop better navigation for self-driving cars. The value of the deal was undisclosed. Read More ...

 Quora’s been at the Q&A game for 7 years now but still is only starting to monetize. It’s growing, but momentum could take a hit tonight as long-time head of business and communi...

Snapchat raises 1.8 billion dollars, Microsoft and Facebook team up to build a trans-atlantic cable, Peter Thiel is trying to cripple Gawker, Reddit launches their own photo uploader, and Treat is an ...

Snapchat raises 1.8 billion dollars, Microsoft and Facebook team up to build a trans-atlantic cable, Peter Thiel is trying to cripple Gawker, Reddit launches their own photo uploader, and Treat is an ...

 If you want to print something a few inches tall, extruded plastic is a good medium. But when you need something at the nanometer scale, DNA is a better bet — but who has the time to desig...

 What makes Tesla unique? How about everything. Mention patents to most people and their eyes glaze over. Worse, they think of patent “trolls” that some say are harming American busin...

 Tech investor, billionaire and Donald Trump-backer Peter Thiel has been locked in a legal battle by proxy with GawkerMedia that amounts to a First Amendment test whichcould potentially put Gawke...

 Force touch may be a feature exclusive to the latest iPhones, but something like it is now possible on pretty much any phone out there, thanks to research from engineers at the University of Mic...

 Twilio, the cloud communications platform, has revealed its IPO filing, signifying that it could enter the public markets as early as next month. If the company ends up going through with its pl...

 Twilio, the cloud communications platform, has revealed its IPO filing, signifying that it could enter the public markets as early as next month. If the company ends up going through with its pl...

 KitSplit aims to help creative professionals rent the equipment they need, whether it’s basic video gear or something a little more high-tech, say a 360-degree camera or an Oculus Rift. Th...

 Whistle while you tweet with the new partnership between Twitter and Spotify. Now you can listen to 30-second previews of songs in your timeline and Moments thanks to Twitter’s audio cards...

 TechCrunch is looking for a Startup Battlefield Manager! TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield is the world’s preeminent startup competition and is at the very heart of Disrupt. At each e...

 Some days it’s hard to get excited about Bluetooth speakers. That’s not a statement of judgment, really, it’s just that the space has been flooded with a lot of like-minded dev...

 Software developers can breathe a massive sigh of relief — a jury found today that Google’s implementation of 37 Java APIs in Android qualified as fair use. However, Oracle attorneys...

 The omnichannel customer experience is nothing new, especially in the consumer and retail industries. Many companies and brands are using data and automation technologies to engage seamlessly wi...

 Minecraft, a game that skyrocketed to unprecedented levels of popularity among all ages because of its open-ended gameplay, infinite worlds, and limitless possibilities for creation and collabor...

 Your pet gets sick and you don’t know what to do. Google has a thousand conflicting answers and it could be a week until you can get an appointment with a veterinarian. But Treat can let y...

 Need a place to crash last-minute but don’t want to pay for a pricey, cookie-cutter hotel? Overnight can hook you up with a local to stay with right away. Request a room and Overnight aver...

 If you’ve every tried to crop a photo (and in the age of Instagram, who hasn’t?) or simply adjust the horizon line, you knowhow hard it can be to find just the right crop that allows...

 Live streaming platform and gamer community Twitch is today launching a new feature that it hopes will help spread its content further afield. The company has now debuted Clips, a feature that l...

 The new iOS and Android app Wyper brings the swipe left-swipe right matchmaking magic of Tinder to car shopping. When I spoke with creator Aaron Rosenthal, the app had only been out of beta and ...

 Here is some news you don’t read every day: Microsoft and Facebook today announced that they are teaming up to build a subsea cable across the Atlantic that will connect Virginia Beach, Vi...

 The American Civil Liberties Union wants to help Microsoft challenge government gag orders that prevent it from telling its customers when it receives warrants for their information. Microsoft s...

 Microsoft is playing catch up when it comes to console sales. But it looks like the company doesn’t want to give up on dedicated gaming consoles. According to multiple reports, Microsoft i...

 Walgreens (yes, that Walgreens — the one that also owns Duane Reade and is trying to buyRite Aid for $17.2 billion) has long offered a number of tools for developers who want to plug into ...

 GitHub, the online repository startup, has released its first-ever diversity and inclusion report, revealing that it’s no different from the rest of tech companies in Silicon Valley and be...

 We get it, you’re a busy person, and life moves at 132 MPH. But you still want to keep your finger on the pulse, if for no other reason to not be completely out of the loop at the office w...

 A new study from Pew Research claims that 62 percent of people get their news from social media, with 18 percent doing so very often. As expected, the top social media news source is Facebook. T...

 Edtech startup Skillshare Inc. has raised a $12 million round of venture funding to grow its marketplace of “bite-sized, self-paced courses for creators,” according to founder and CE...

 It’s safe to say that email is broken. But a startup called Front wants to reinvent email, or at least make it suck less. Front started as a collaborative email service for companies so th...

 We’re currently witnessing rapidly expanding product launches and sky-high elevated expectations from the emerging deployment of the Internet of Things in both personal and commercial doma...

 Managing a large database of contacts can get messy, which is why a number of startups over the years have attempted to tackle this space with a wide variety of apps that attempt to streamline t...

 VR needs content if it’s to be more than a flash in the early adopter pan. But it’s pretty clear that in the short term at least it’s not going to have a whole lot of compellin...

 French startup Netatmo just introduced a new developer platform called Netatmo Connect so that developers can build software and hardware integrations with Netatmo products. Netatmo sells weathe...

 Originally announced at CES in January, the minuscule HopperGo is a 64GB USB drive with a built in wireless access point. The little device connects to your Dish Hopper 3 or Hopper 2 – ess...

 Nintendo’s first smartphone application – thesocial game called Miitomo, which allows avatars to interact in a virtual world – may already be in decline, according to a new rep...

 Qualtrics, a Provo, Utah, company whoseonline survey research platforms help 8,500 enterprise customers better understand both their employees and their customers, has made its first acquisition...

 AmpMe, the Canadian app development company responsible for a syncing technology that links mobile devices into a networked speaker system, has raised $8 million in a new round of financing and ...

 Sony continues to impress with the PS4 after the games console passed 40 million sales to date. Read More ...

 While most associateGoDaddywith domains, the companyhas become an integral part of supporting small businesses around the world. Whether this is by providing email hosting, website creation, or ...

 In this episode of Running Through Walls, I caught up with Grand Rounds CEO and co-founder Owen Tripp, one of the first successful technology entrepreneur crossovers to the fight against complex...

 Online abuse remains the big hairy monster in the room for platforms powered by user-generated content. Twitter especially has had some very sizable and public problems with problem users. A UK ...

 Earlier this week, we reported that the messaging app startup Snapchat was raisingmore money. Now we have more updates for you.AnSECfiling is comingthroughtoday withinformation about Snapchat...

 Earlier this week, we reported that the messaging app startup Snapchat was raisingmore money. Now we have more updates for you.AnSECfiling has been madetoday withinformation about Snapchat’...

 Lenovo has admitted that it has failed to build on its acquisition of Motorola. The Chinese firm acquired the phone-maker from Google for $2.91 billion in late 2014 and, in its end-of-year earni...

 ClearTax, a startup that wants to make filing taxes online in India easier, has added $2 million to its total funding just one month after announcing its angel round. Read More ...

 SportsHero is a new app that lets sports fans dabble in match predictions and show their skills off against friends and other game-watchers. The app is made by the team behind Singapore-based Tr...

 To be fair, an omen isn’t necessarily a portent of negative things. If it was, we wouldn’t feel obligated to qualify it using words like “bad.” Still, the word carries wi...

We’ve seen a bigrise of apps and bots, and a lot of them have something in common besides being based on artificial intelligence and machine learning: they are written for English-speaking users...

 Earlier today, we speculated that billionaire Peter Thiel may havesecretly financed a lawsuit to put Gawker Media out of business owing to a series of antagonistic stories about him written by G...

Microsoft lays off 1,850 people, Slack hits 3 million monthly users, Boom makes your music sound like its in surround sound, Xiaomi unveils their drone and Pokemon Go launches into Beta all this on Cr...

 Understanding the complex order behind the apparent chaos of a tropical storm or hurricane is no easy task, but it’s worthwhile to try — such storms deal death and destruction global...

 Acceleprise, a San Francisco-based accelerator for enterprise tech and software-as-a-service startups, held a Demo Day for its third cohort of companies today. The accelerator invests $50,000 in...

 The growth of data breaches in recent months and years is in large part because of the new generation of smart malware being developed on a daily basis. Malicious actors are constantly taking ad...

 Back in February, UK mobile carrier Three saidthat it would start to offer opt-in ad blocking technology from Shine on its network, potentially reaching 30 million customers. Now the companyis g...

 Back in February, U.K. mobile carrier Three saidit would start to offer on its networkopt-in ad blocking technology from Shine, potentially reaching 30 million customers. Now the companyis getti...

 Reddit never let you upload images, until now. That could dismantle Reddit’s informal alliance with image sharing community Imgur. That’s where Redditors would typically post their i...

 Critical to this major effort is Marty Weiner. Weiner joined the Reddit team this past summer as the company’s first-ever CTO, and he’s spent the past 10 months building out areas fo...

 The Bay Area fosters a culture of forward thinkers and new ways to solve problems in our world, including in our food system.Ripple Foods is one such startup in Silicon Valley hoping to disrupt ...

 AWS announced today that it was expanding its relationship with Salesforce.com,with Salesforce namingthe cloud giant a preferred cloud provider. The agreement should help Salesforce increaseits ...

 I went into the Nuheara demo not knowing what to expect. Not in the sense of, “How good will these be?” so much as, “I’m not exactly sure what these things do.” Lik...

 Less than a month after their last successful mission, SpaceX is back at it again. Falcon 9 is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 5:40pm EST tomorrow with telecommunications sat...

 Terrapattern is a visual search engine that, from the moment you first use it, you wonder: why didn’t Google come up with this ten years ago? Click on a feature on the map — a baseba...

 Terrapattern is a visual search engine that, from the moment you first use it, you wonder: Why didn’t Google come up with this 10 years ago? Click on a feature on the map — a basebal...

 Elevate, a venture-backed company that uses big data to assess loan applications from people with low credit scores, has been called out as a predatory lender, including in Fortune last year. On...

 Facebook plans to shut down FBX, the ad exchange that allows advertisers to buy retargeted desktop ads using third-party tools like Criteo and AppNexus. The news was first reported in The Wall S...

 There are many abstract notions about what the future of infrastructure will look like, but the truth is that the future is staring companies in the face. The adoption of hybrid cloud models, co...

 As if you didn’t need more proof that your darn kids need to get of the computer and into the back yard, researchers at the University of Helsinki and Department of Psychology have found t...

 The Nexus Player may have been the best TV media player no one ever bought. Google and Asus introduced the Nexus Player back in November 2014. It was one of the first Android TV devices, and a m...

 You have about two weeks to apply for the pitch-offs in Austin and Seattle, going down June 14 and June 16, respectively. Ten companies will have exactly 60 seconds each to pitch their wares to ...

 Niantic Labs, the game maker thatwas spun out of Googlelast year following Google’s move to Alphabet, announced today that its new titlePokmon GO is now launching into beta in the U.S. Tho...

 Slack has quite a lot of users that are logged-on to the chat service quite a lot of the time. The enterprisecommunicationapp published a little update on its company blog today announcing that ...

 Today Magic Leap founder/CEO Rony Abovitz made a new announcement—strangely via remote video feed at Twilio’s SIGNAL developer conference. Magic Leap are planning to integrate Twilio...

 According to a Forbes report published last night, billionaire investor Peter Thiel has been quietly funding the casethat Hulk Hogan (whose real name isTerry Bollea) has brought against the onli...

 A hacker who first exposed the existence of Hillary Clinton’s private email server and who found his way into accounts of several American political figures pleaded guilty to identity thef...

 Another development in the slow unraveling of the legal regime governing EU-US data flows: the Irish data protection agency has warned that one of the mechanisms currently being used by thousand...

 Another development in the slow unraveling of the legal regime governing EU-U.S. data flows: the Irish data protection agency has warned that one of the mechanisms currently being used by thousa...

 Foursquare and Uber have today announced a global partnership that would use Foursquare’s location data to let users type in a venue name (instead of address) when setting their destinatio...

 We all have boxes and boxes worth of photographs from the days before digital photography, just begging to be rescued from obscurity. Unfade is a new app from theteam behind Scanbot to help phot...

 A couple of years after bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox imploded, some former Mt. Gox users might finally get their bitcoins back. Tokyo’s court-appointed trustee in the Mt. Gox investigation has...

 Twilio today announced the launch of a new APIthat allows developers to orchestrate the push notifications, text messages and chats they want to send to their users. While Twilio previously offe...

 As Instagram continues to make moves to strengthen its platform with more features to keep users visiting it and staying for longer, Instagram’sdecision to kill off its feeds APIon June 1 ...

 Mobile publishers need to work with at least a few different ad networks — that’s kind of the whole point of ad exchanges like Twitter-owned MoPub. Today the company is releasing a r...

 Bluesmart, the makers of smart luggage with GPS and charging capabilities, has today introduced the latest in its line of luggage with the Black Edition. The Black Edition puts design top of min...

 Alibaba’s accounting methods are under investigation in the U.S.. The Chinese e-commerce giant, which went public in 2014 in the largest NYSE IPO in history, quietly disclosed that the SEC...

 Affectiva, a startup developing “emotion recognition technology” that can read people’s moods from their facial expressions captured in digital videos, raised $14 million in a ...

 Over the years, developershave turned to resources like BuiltWith to help them figure out what technology is under the hood, powering today’s websites – including things like shoppin...

 Boom for iOS is an app that changes your music, presumably for the better. The app is an equalizer that adds depth and bass to regular MP3 files, turning audio played through even the junkiest o...

 Here’s a new startup to keep an eye on — Forward, which plansto use sensors and other technology to rethink the healthcare experience. What exactly does that mean? Well, it’s h...

 The European Union’s executive body has today set out a series of proposals for new rules that would apply to a broad range of online platforms, from the likes of YouTube to Google to eBay...

 Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi officially unveiled its first drone today, ending a week of teasers about it, and the low price of the product might bring some serious competition to the space. ...

 Apple Music, Tidal, and until recently, Spotify, failed at music discovery because they stuck to a blog-style format. But Spotify has cracked the code with a Facebook News Feed-style personalize...

 Demisto, a company founded by four security industry pros, emerged from stealth today with a pretty cool bot-driven security platform and $6 million in Series A. The round was led by Accel with ...

 Just months after finally shipping its product to consumers, smart wireless routing system eero has pulled in a new $50 million in Series B growth funding from Menlo Ventures, as the first inves...

 To grow their peer-to-peer marketplace for construction equipment, Columbia, Missouri-based EquipmentShare has raised $5.5 million in a venture funding round led by Romulus Capital. Earlier, the...

 Dashlane, the New York startupthat provides a platform forusers to manage their passwordsand online identity, has raised $22.5 million in funding and picked up a key strategic investor and partn...

 Dashlane, the New York startupthat provides a platform forusers to manage their passwordsand online identity across multiple sites and apps, has raised a further $22.5 million in funding and pic...

 After months of rumours, TransferWise, the London headquartered money transfer startup and fintech darling, has confirmed that it has raised a further round of funding.Described as ‘top-up...

 ShoCard and SITA, the IT company for the air transport industry, have been working together on an interesting project. They’ve been looking at ways to store your ID details on the blockcha...

 Deliverd, the U.K. startup thatsends you restaurant-prepared dishes that you reheat at home or work, is launching a new service today that will enable it to expand to most of the country. Read M...

 Following last week’s news of Microsoft selling off its feature phone businessfor $350 million, today Microsoft turned its attention to smartphones: the company announcedit would lay off 1...

 The UK government has agreed to an independent review of so called “bulk collection” — aka mass surveillance — powers in proposed new surveillance legislation, one of the...

It was a balmy night in Rio de Janeiro and a pretty J.P. Morgan Private Wealth representative was buying drinks for newly paper-rich entrepreneurs. Nearby at the pool mingled investors who had flown i...

 Samsung Electronics said today that it will partner with SK Telecom to build a LoRaWAN network for the Internet of Things that will cover all of South Korea. The two companies claim that this th...

 Browser maker Opera’s proposed $1.2 billion acquisition by a consortium of Chinese companies just took a major step towards completion after its shareholders voted in favor of the deal. Re...

 UberEATS, the ride-hailing app’s food delivery service, launched today in its first Asian market. Singaporeans can now download the standalone app, and order food from about 100 restaurant...

Twitter is changing its 140-character limit, VW is investing $300 million into Uber Rival Gett, King Bach launches app Bachify, Twilio launches a sim based service and Toyota makes a strategic investm...

 An experimental solar cell created by MIT researchers could massively increase the amount of power generated by a given area of panels, while simultaneously reducing the amount of waste heat. Ev...

 AR/VR is the new hotness. VCs invested $1.7 billion in the 12 months leading to March 2016, $1.2 billion of that in the first quarter of this year alone. There are four AR/VR unicorns already (M...

 India has successfully completed their first smallstep toward joiningthe other players in the market of reusable spacecraft. On Monday, the Indian Space Research Organization (India’s vers...

 E Ink, maker of the ePaper displays found in many e-readers (maddening to have three different e prefixes in one sentence, but it’s unavoidable), announced a brand new type of reflective d...

 On Dynamic Signal’s early pivot and lessons learned from 25 rounds of venture funding. Read More ...

 Apple is preparing an SDK that would allow developers much greater access to Siri — and the improved assistant will power a stationary hub device like Amazon’s Echo. A report from Th...

 Chilling news regarding climate change continues to arrive on a regular basis, even as Antarctica warms dangerously and further troubling global symptoms emerge. It’s a shame global govern...

 Every successful new application built today will be an intelligent application. Read More ...

 Rideshare wars just got even more interesting. Uber has confirmed a strategic investment and auto leasing deal from Toyota.“Toyota is a global leader in the automotive industry and Toyota ...

 ChargePoint announced this month that it had raised $50 million in its latest round of funding, thanks in large part to Linse Capital. That makes a total of $164 million raised from investors li...

 Like everyone else these days, Microsoft sure loves its bots. Now, thecompany has rolled out its own news-finding bot called “Rowe,” who lives inside the latest version of Microsoft&...

 Uber sent an email to LA riders yesterday announcing they are doing a temporary promotion that looks very much like a loyalty program. Each UberBLACK ride taken will give riders 200 points, and ...

 About nine months after taking on the role of head of community management at Reddit, Kristine Fasnacht (u/krispykrackers) has left the company.In a post titled, “Admin released from capti...

 Funky physics and controls make mobile games fun. You tap against gravity in Flappy Bird, fling on a trajectory in Angry Birds, and press to maintain momentum in Tiny Wings. So when two of Faceb...

 Placemeter helps businesses and municipalities measure what’s happening in front of their stores, on their streets and in their parks.In its first iteration, the service, which relies on r...

 Through the power of smart sensors and the magic of the cloud, parched children is on its way to become a thing of the past — at least, if the Gullu team have anything to say in the matter...

 Andrew Bachelor (better known as King Bach on Vine, where he has more than 15 million followers) has just launched Bachify,his own iOS-based photo-editing app. The genesis of the app was an issu...

 Twilio stormed into the telecoms market several years ago with a set of services that turned core communications featuresonce controlled by carriers, like text messages and phones numbers, into ...

 Twilio today announced the launch of its add-ons marketplace. Using these add-ons, developers who use Twilio’s API to power the messaging features of their apps and services can easilycomb...

 Food delivery startup Zesty is rolling out its office catering service beyond San Francisco to locations throughout the Silicon Valley peninsula, and has brought on two food and hospitality exec...

 The risks for businesses associated with storing and processing the personal data of their customers are growing as data volumes continue to increase and regulators sharpen their claws over data...

 Today Twitter redefined its laws of physics. But while it’s posed as a simplification of the 140-character rule, the change will reshape information density, conversation style and self-pr...

 Google’s AdWords is getting a makeover. The search giant announced today that they have made several updates to make its advertising tools more suitable for mobile. With an emphasis on loc...

 Amid the shift of commerce to online stores like Amazon, one huge segment of the industry has been overlooked: dollar stores. Many assumed that’s because with retailprice points that low, ...

 Scoop, a corporate carpooling service that works with companies like Tesla, Twitter and Cisco, has raised a $5.1 million round of funding led by Signia Venture Partners with participation from I...

 While it may seem like we just wrapped up in the Big Apple, TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016 will be here before you can say “how do you do, fellow kids?” We will once again be giving coll...

 Pattern, a year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based startup, wants to become a kind ofexternal brain that lightens the load of managing customer relationships for salespeople. Felicis Ventures, SoftTec...

 The on-demand transportation service continues to heat up, and today the spotlight is shining on a New York startup whose business is based primarily in Europe. Gett, a cab-hailing startupwith o...

 As demonstrated by the overwhelming bipartisan support to overhaul the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, privacy laws passed in the 1980s are difficult to apply to today’s technology....

 We are once again learning the old lesson that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably shouldn’t get a SaaS multiple. Read More ...

 Partially confirming earlier reports, Twitter announced this morning plans that will begin to distance it from its strict adherence to the rule that tweets can only contain 140 characters. The c...

 “This is Pebble Core,” Eric Migicovsky says with a smile. “It’s our first non-watch product. The simplest way to explain it is that it’s a computer that fits on you...

 Sometimes in science the answer is right there in front of your nose the whole time. Like, say, when the issue of limitations in a solar technology can be addressed with, of all things, light. O...

 I spotted an Otterbox case on the train ride in this morning that more or less confirmed my feelings about the company’s products: big, bulky and protective. Swaddling one’s phone in...

 Fresh on the heels of the launch of Tech:NYC, Jersey is getting in on the action with the unveiling of Newark Venture Partners new incubator, NVP Labs. Over the next five years, NVP has plans to...

 SigFig, the developer of tech-enabledfinancial advisory services products, has raised $40 million from the ventureinvestment arms of a slew of big banks. The new round is a testament to the comp...

 Varsity Tutors, the online platform that lets top-of-the-line tutors connect with students who need some brushing up, has today launched a native mobile app.Back in 2012, the company started by ...

 “We believe that IT has nothing to do with math and physics … it is more artistic than scientific,” says Nicolas Sadirac, as he cheerfully slaughters whole herds of sacred cows...

 OtherMachineCo.CEO Danielle Applestone is audibly excited. She has something she really wants to show me during our video chat before she gets down to the proper business of firing up her demo. ...

 Education tech startup Bloomz has raised $2.3 million in seed funding for an app that connects teachers and parents, securely. The company’s app features tools that help teachers push upda...

 This story has been going on for years, but it looks like France’s equivalent of the IRS (Direction gnrale des finances) wants more proofs. According to Le Monde and Le Parisien, Google...

 OnePlus is making another push into VR after it announced plans to run the launch of its next smartphone in virtual reality (again), with a shopping experience to match. The China-based firm jum...

 Menu Next Door just raised $2 million (1.75 million) from Index Ventures, Local Globe, Kima Ventures and TheFamily. The startup is all about home cooking, literally. On Menu Next Door, you can e...

 Cyber security continues to infiltrate our daily news feeds and make headlines on a regular basis. It’s touched our most iconic companies such as Apple and it has risen to the forefront of...

 You gotta hand it to Pepper. Even in the face of worldwide economic woes, Softbank’s plucky little robot has never had an issue holding down a job. The ‘bot’s latest gig isn...

 L.A. has a new venture firm in March Capital Partners, a $240 million fund thathas a few tricks up its sleeve. For starters, though itinvests in both Southern and Northern California, it conside...

 Sony warned that its annual earnings will be lower than expected as it recovers from an earthquake that struck the south of Japan last month. The company had previously delayed its forecast for ...

 There have been many attempts to update keyboards for the digital era and speed up typing by rethinking the antique Qwerty layout. Problem is you’re going up against muscle memory, and res...

 There isn’t a lot of data on the potential of technology in Southeast Asia, which is why many in the industry have been excitedly flipping through a new report released today by Singaporea...

 vArmour — a startup that offers security solutionsspecifically aimed at enterprises that run services and apps across multiple clouds — has raised $41 million in a Series D round of ...

 Woomoo, the startup behind app prototyping tool POP, has been acqui-hired by Priceline. All six of the company’s employees have relocated from Taipei, where Woomoo was based, to Bangkok to...

 Another week, another story about a promising independent self-driving vehicle company. Last week, Otto came out of stealth to offer autonomous technology for trucks, and today MIT spinoff NuTon...

 Terms and conditions suck, as we’ve said before. They are designed to be impenetrably unreadable to convince app users not to bother. The ‘Click here to AGREE’ button might as ...

 While EBay continues to build out its core marketplace for physical goods, it’s also investing to expand its other businesses and brands, too. Today the company announced that it has acqui...

 Rumor has it that Apple is about to update the MacBook Pro with a retina display in the coming months. And according to well-informed analyst Ming-Chi Kuo from KGI Securities and 9to5mac, i...

 Applications are now closed for startups who wantto pitch on stage at the TechCrunch Stockholm Meetup and Pitch-off on June 7. Whether you’re on stage or not, we’d love to see you th...

 Founded by Australian brothers Travis and Shawn Pittman but relocated to Austria of all places, TourRadar, the travel tour booking site, seems to be on a roll. The startup has just closed $6 mil...

 Atlassian is hosting its annual developer conferencenot too far from my favorite absinthe barthis week. During its keynote, the company today announced a number of new products and updates, all ...

 Cray has always been associated with speed and power and its latest computing beast called the Cray Urika-GX systemhas been designed specifically for big data workloads. What’s more, it ru...

 Malaysia-based fintech startup Saving Plus has closed a $3 million Series A round and renamed itself as Jirnexu. Read More ...

 Over the past few years, cyber insurance markets have been growing at between 25-50 percent CAGR each year. According to The Betterley Report 2015, annual policy premiums are approaching $2.75 b...

Today’s StoriesSpotify family plan is now cheaper, $14.99 for up to 6 peopleFacebook Live lets you skip to the good partComparably launches Glassdoor competitor that filters employee reviews by ...

 Charity or opportunism? It’s so hard to tell, sometimes. In RideAustin’s case, it looks to be a bit of both. It’s a non-profit car-for-hire service that’s happy to abide ...

 Utah Senator Todd Weiler has proposed a bill to rid the state of porn by adding Internet filters and anti-porn software on all cell phones and requiring citizens to opt-in before viewing porn on...

 In the midst of a quest to become an international video streaming success, Netflix has been drawing criticism from core, U.S. customers who say its film and TV library — beyond original s...

 Attorneys for Oracle and Google presented their closing arguments today in a lawsuit over Google’s use of Java APIs owned by Oracle in Android. Oracle accused Google of stealing a collecti...

 Snapchat may have firstmade its name in the crowded world of mobile apps with anephemeral messaging service, but the startup and its wildly popularapp arenotdisappearing anywhere soon. TechCrunc...

 Snapchat may have firstmade its name in the crowded world of mobile apps with anephemeral messaging service, but the startup and its wildly popularapp arenotdisappearing anywhere soon. TechCrunc...

 Facebook responded today to official queries regarding its Trending Topics feature, specifically allegations made over the last few weeks that the team responsible for it was deliberately suppre...

 Machine learning is accomplishing Facebook’s mission of connecting the world across language barriers. Facebook is now serving 2 billion text translations per day. Facebook can translate a...

 Machine learning is accomplishing Facebook’s mission of connecting the world across language barriers. Facebook is now serving 2 billion text translations per day. Facebook can translate a...

 Machine learning is accomplishing Facebook’s mission of connecting the world across language barriers. Facebook is now serving 2 billion text translations per day. Facebook can translate a...

 Apple CEO Tim Cook made an uncharacteristic admission today in an interview with Indian news channel NDTV — that iPhones are too expensive. He immediately qualified it, and the context rea...

 I’m pretty excited and happy to announce that today I’m taking over Crunch Report. “I am the captain now.” I edited over 150 episodes of Crunch Report back when Sarah Lan...

 In January, Twitter revealed that several of its key executives were leaving the company. We learned that former product head Kevin Weil landed at Instagram, and now Brian “Skip” Sch...

 Ridesharing platform Lyft heard the people and the people wanted to schedule rides ahead of time. Starting today, Lyft is adding a new feature to let you schedule in advancethat ride to the airp...

 A driverless car was involved in a traffic accident on a California city street earlier this year. No one was hurt in the small fender bender, but the accident does signal we are making incredib...

 We’ve come a long way from the days of pale beige IP webcams with wonky interfaces and limited recording times. Today’s webcams, like the ZModo Pivot, are motion-sensing, low-light s...

 Live mobile video is evolving beyond selfie-stream rants and citizen journalism. Facebook will now allow non-stop, long-form broadcasting as long as the creators don’t mind that they won&#...

 Snapchat just rolled out an update that lets users decorate their Snaps with the 200+ stickers they released aspart of Chat 2.0.The new feature worksexactly like emojis – they even live in...

 Snapchat just rolled out an update that lets users decorate their Snaps with the 200+ stickers they released aspart of Chat 2.0.The new feature worksexactly like emojis — they even live in...

 Amazon has quietly ended its price protectionpolicy on all products except for televisions. The change to the company’s policy comes at a time when ahandful of startups have launchedto hel...

 Amazon has quietly ended its price protectionpolicy on all products except for televisions. The change to the company’s policy comes at a time when ahandful of startups have launchedto hel...

 Penny, a personal finance botwe reviewed last fall, has raised $1.2M in seed funding from Social Capital. As a refresher, the app offers a chat-based interfacethat offersadvice tailored to your ...

 Facebook’s newest feature could fundamentally change how you watch video. Until now, you either sat through a video until it got too boring, waited for the interesting part, or fast-forwar...

 SyndicateRoom today announced a 3.1m ($4.5m) Series A from a number of heavy-hitting angel investors. The round was led by Abcam founder Jonathan Milner, who noted he is excited about the compa...

 Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers,long a leading venture firm, is talking with investors about two new funds that would total roughly $1.3 billion, CNBC reported earlier today and TechCrunch ...

 London-based edtech startup Zzish is on a mission to unlock the potential of apps for learning, by making it easier to first create educational apps and then use them properly in the classroom. ...

 Earlier today at the Oslo Freedom Forum, the Wickr Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to private communication and uncensored information, announced its first investment in a new se...

 On Wednesday, Xiaomi is going to unveil a new product. While details are still thin, it looks like the electronics company is about to announce a drone.Xiaomi is a well-known phone manufacturer....

 We’ve known for some time that Instagram will soon be introducing business profiles, analytics, and features intended to improve the ad-buying experience on the Facebook-owned photo sharin...

 Facebook is continuing to devote resources to fine-tuning how 3D audio impacts viewer perceptions in virtual reality.Today, the social media giant and Oculus parent companyannounced that they ha...

 Comparably, the site that originally launched as a compensation data and culture platform, is officially getting into Glassdoor’s territory with the launch of a company employee reviewsfea...

 When Ivn De Cabo hacked together ‘Steve – The Jumping Dinosaur‘, the super casual game playable from within the iOS Notification Center game, he had no idea what would happen n...

 SeamlessDocs, the startup that helps governments move all their forms online, has today announced the close of a $7 million Series B funding round led by Motorola Solutions. Other participants i...

 It’s hard to compete with PAX. While E3 is still considered as the most important gaming event of the year, video game publishers are slowly but surely spending less time and money for the...

 File it under ‘it seemed great on paper’… but Google’s project Ara modular smartphone concept is — for all intents and purposes — dead. If you want to be a li...

 Google’splan to eliminate passwords in favor of systems that take into account a combination ofsignals – like your typing patterns, your walking patterns, your current location, and ...

 The company behind a device that helps parents enforce theirhome’s internet rules and restrictions, Circle with Disney, launched last winter in partnership with Disney for its included med...

 Kobo, the e-reading serviceowned by Japan’s e-commerce giant Rakuten, has notched up one more key brand among those that turning to the companyto build out their e-books business in a coll...

 Meet Ziro, a robotics kit that lets you build all sorts of vehicles using a few motors, a smartphone, a glove and your imagination. Ziro’s default kit comes with four wireless motors and e...

 Picturea professional sports photographer. What do you see? Someone in a beige vest hidden behindagiant, telescopic camerastationed in the back of an end zone? How about someone standing in a th...

 Spotify is catching up with the competition when it comes to family plans. Like Apple Music and Google Play Music, families can now subscribe to Spotify Premium for $14.99 per month and get six ...

 There’s no question the iBOT was ahead of its time. In fact, it’s a jarring to see photos from more than a decade and half ago with inventor Dean Kamen seated in the motorized wheelc...

 A funny thing happens when the Federal Communications Commission moves to introduce competition into a consumer market. The industry, once so accustomed to acting the monopoly or duopoly in its ...

 China’s Internet giant Tencent has beenexpanding its international reach in areas like games and advertising, and as part of that, the company is picking up its dealmaking in Europe. The W...

 To get an accurate view of how VCs spend their time, we surveyed 100 investors from The Twenty Minute VC to determine the most efficient time allocation. Read More ...

 If swiping left and right for your next adventure is starting to feel a bit last year, the team behind 3nder has a trick up its proverbial wizard’s sleeve. The app — arriving for And...

 Hackajob, the Techstars London alumni, claims to have built a platform to make hiring technical talent more “intelligent and data-driven”. Read More ...

 London-based hairdresser booking app Rock Pamper Scissors has picked up 1.2 million in backing from U.S.-based 500 Startups and European pre-seed and seed investor Seedcamp, alongside various an...

 At a glance Wireless Four-hour battery life New EQ app $200 Pros Compact design Comfortable fit Good sound Cons Mediocre battery Some connectivity issues The search for the perfect pair of Bluet...

 TinyOwl, a India-based restaurant delivery service that has raised more than $27 million from investors including Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners, has reportedly stopped service in all citie...

 A friend who recently started his own business couldn’t obtain a mortgage from three banks. I suggested he try marketplace lending platforms like SoFi to take advantage of the ongoing inno...

 For years, the media industry has speculated, somewhat worriedly, that big tech companies wanted to branch out, to take on the TV companies – to acquire rights to premium content. By and l...

 Companies that focus on diversity will succeed, because hiring women and minorities makes business sense. But it’s not easy. Scientific research is showing that our brains are hardwired to...

 Have you ever tracked all the ways you use data in a single day? How many of your calories, activities, tasks, messages, projects, correspondences, records and more are saved and accessed throug...

 The meteoric rise of e-lending platforms attracted a lot of interest among investors and entrepreneurs. Lending Club and OnDeck have already become public companies, and their competitors, such ...

 UPS recently entered into a partnership with Zipline, a medical drone delivery startup, to begin aerial transport of healthcare supplies in Rwanda. Read More ...

 As we witness what may be the final days of Yahoo as an independent business, consider how just a decade ago it was running neck-and-neck with Google, now one of the world’s largest compan...

 The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, May 20, 2016. Google provides notifications catnip via Firebase, I spend the weekend st...

 In the beginning the Prophet Satoshi brought us Bitcoin. And the cryptogeeks and libertarians looked upon it, and said lo, we smile upon this, for it is good, and decentralized, and solves the B...

 Over the past few weeks, Twilio has had the opportunity to meet with members of Congress and their staff who have taken on the difficult task of balancing security and privacy. We were struck by...

 It’s been almost five years since we heard that “software is eating the world.” The number of SaaS applications has exploded and there is a rising wave of software innovation i...

 In the world of kitchen appliances, everyone wants to be the next Keurig, it seems. First, there were single-cup coffee brewers that followed and claimed to be better than Keurig, from Nespresso...

 I played a lot of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty online when it launched. And by that I mean a lot. I inevitably drifted into watching streams of other players competing in order to improve my g...

 This week’s Technotopia features Haseeb Awan, founder of a YC bitcoins startup who is creating a new way to reduce currency volatility. Haseeb is pretty bearish on the current financial ma...

 In the wake of Prince’s untimely death, more and more stories have been revealed about his secret life of good works: anonymous checks, civil rights activism, charity concerts, etc. But I&...

 Gene editing is going to fundamentally change our lives and how we traditionally think about health throughout the first half of the 21st century. The question isn’t “When will gene ...

 It’s no secret that San Francisco tech loves ping pong. Table tennis has become a must-have for programmers stepping away from their computers to blow off steam. Indeed, it’s most st...

 As a late Friday coda to this week’s news of Nokia’s old feature phone business getting soldonce again, todayNokia quietly confirmedit is layingoff 1,032 employees in its home market...

 Senator Elizabeth Warren has some choice words for Uber, TaskRabbit, Alfred and all the other companies taking part in the “so-called gig economy,” as she put it in a speech Thursday...

 We’re hearing from multiple sources that there’s a new fund coming out of Betaworks, andTwitter is chipping money into it. Twitter is investing at least $10 million in the new fund, ...

 There is no shortage of advice when it comes to which tools software companies should use to run their businesses. We’ve all come across numerous “Top 100 resources for startups̶...

 Ad-targeting startup Metadata announcedit has raised $2 million in seed funding. Co-founder and CEO Gil Allouche said the company’s technology offers an effective way for businesses that s...

 Ajay Agarwal leads the West Coast team forBain Capital Ventures, which he joined 13 years ago. (He’s seen some market zigs and zags, in other words.) Wegrabbed coffee withhim earlier this ...

Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Dan Farber, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. LIVE recording session today, May 20 2016, starting at 1pmPT/4pmET.Our live chat stream during the show bro...

 Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Dan Farber, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. LIVE recording session today, May 20 2016, starting at 1pmPT/4pmET.Our live chat stream during the sh...

 Motorola’s RAZR surely stands as one of the most recognizable phones of yesteryear (although myself I preferred the Samsung Trace) — and while the brand has been desultorily maintain...

 In the wake of the passing of Title III of the JOBS Act, crowdfunding equity platform FlashFunders has relaunched its site with new features. The new features allow users to crowdfund investment...

 Paul Bragiel, theventure capitalist who made an unsuccessful run at qualifying for the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics as lone member of the Colombian cross-country ski team, is forming a new, San Fr...

 It’s Friday, so you can probably spare a few minutes to watch a heartwarming little 360-degree animated film, the latest in Google’s “Spotlight Stories.” This one, entitl...

 It’s been a little while since we’ve heard much aboutProject Ara, but Google wasn’t going to let an I/O go by without shedding a little more light on the much discussed (and fo...

 Every year at I/O, Google’s ATAP division, which is responsible for turning some of the company’s crazier ideas into products, organizes its own small keynote. This year, the company...

 At Google’s I/O conference today, Google’s Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) research unitoffered an update on its interactive textiles project announced last ye...

 At Google’s I/O conference today, Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) research unitoffered an update on its interactive textiles project unveiled last year, Project Jacq...

 This week, announcements from Google’s annual I/O developer conference dominated tech headlines. But Oracle and Google are back in court, Apple unveiled a new redesigned store in SF and we...

 For me, fitness trackers are all about motivation. I used to go for a run every single day, and then quit, and then went to yoga every single day, and then I did nothing every single day. Now, a...

 One of the biggest challenges of a hardware crowdfunding campaign is delivering in a timely fashion. Indiegogo knows that better than most, and is teaming up with Arrow Electronics to help entre...

 Microsoft is further opening up Skype to businesses. On Thursday, the company launched its Skype for Business SDK – tools which allow iOS and Android developers to integrate Skype’s ...

 The NTIA has published best practice privacy guidelines for the use of commercial and non-commercial drones to gather personally identifiable data. The guidance was agreed by all the various sta...

 Purism, proud makers of one of the first truly open laptops, is moving into the world of pro-level tablets. Their latest product, the Librem 11, is a tablet that runs any GNU/Linux version (they...

 I’ve been hearing a lot lately about “The New Normal” for VC-backed technology companies. It’s not just in the popular press headlines. Nearly every conversation I have w...

 Microsoft is bringing Minecraft, the insanely popular game it acquired when it bought Mojang for $2.5 billion, to China. Read More ...

 Let’s face it. Some tech conferences have lost their way. While TechCrunch Disrupt remains a firmly curated, media-driven, event, with hundreds of journalists attending, a couple of other ...

 Let’s face it. Some tech conferences have lost their way. While TechCrunch Disrupt remains a firmly curated, media-driven, event, with hundreds of journalists attending, a couple of other ...

 IMAX, one company that has pushed cinema technology forward, is preparing to toss its hat into the virtual reality ring with a set of new initiatives. Read More ...

 Jungle Ventures, the Singapore-based VC firm that launched a $100 million fund last year, has recruited three new operating partners to its team. Michael Smith comes from streaming service HOOQ,...

 Samsung announced today that it has cemented a deal that will make Alipay, China’s largest online payments platform, available through Samsung Pay. Read More ...

 Interior design and decorating resource Houzz is the overall best Android app of the year, according to Google, which this evening announced the results of thefirst-ever Google Play Awards at it...

 In today’s tech-driven business world, the title “serial entrepreneur” is a coveted badge of honor. It’s easy to understand the appeal of the phrase. It suggests that som...

 After Google’s decision not to provide end-to-end encryption by default in its new chat app, Allo, raised questions about the balance of security and effective artificial intelligence, one...

 Mobile ad company UberMedia is expanding its measurement and attribution business in a big way. You may remember UberMedia as the company that owns social apps like Echofon and UberSocial. While...

 Decentralized chat app FireChat is adding a new feature that could help disseminate critical info like storm warnings, health advisories and so on when the normal communications grid is down. Tr...

 For all their being motion-enabling platforms, wheelchairs are themselves rather static. A frame of steel and aluminum supporting foam-filled leather or plastic, with a handful of settings that ...

 Bummer, dude! That’s what you say when you find out that your whole keg of Heiney is totally skunked but it doesn’t matter because you’ll totally still drink it after you finis...

 Drop the price $20 and add a bit more functionality and you’ve got a compelling product on your hands. The way things stand now though, the Withings Go is more of a curiosity than it is co...

 A wide-scale study of online trackers carried out by researchers at Princeton University has identified a new technique being used to try to strip web users of their privacy, as well as quantify...

 Reddit posts are going to get the chance to live beyondReddit itself, thanks to new embedding capabilities.If you’re an online writer or publisher, that means you can start including live ...

 Oakland, Calif.-based Edynstarted selling a new, smart gardening devicethis week: an Internet-connected water valve that lets users irrigate their gardens or lawns automatically.The Edyn Water V...

 Editor’s note: This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter, a buyer’s guide to the best technology. This is a condensed version of several Wirecutter guides; you can find links...

 As someone who has worked in technology his entire adult life, I can say the following with complete conviction: Somewhere at this moment a young entrepreneur is developing a product, service or...

 ‘Has he threatened you with a gun?’ Is one of the questions a woman will be asked when she’s downloaded the domestic abuse counseling appMy Plan. “This scenario is more c...

 San Francisco-based Tally Technologies Inc. raised $15 million in Series A venture funding, to launch an app that promises to help people maintain good credit while avoiding fees, charges and ot...

 TechCrunch is pleased to bring youAlchemist Accelerator‘s demo day live from PARC, a Xerox Company. Alchemist is one of those rare programs that focuses on enterprise startups. These aren&...

 This week I ended up withan advance copy of Influence Central’s new report called Kids & Tech: The Evolution of Today’s Digital Natives. The report detailsthe way kids are using ...

 Google has been slowly building virtual reality-focusedfunctionality into the YouTube app overthe past year with support for 360-degree video formats, stereoscopic video, 3D audio and general Go...

 Having spent a good deal of time flying UAVslike DJI’s Inspire 1 and Phantom 4, I like to consider myself experienced with drones. So when I came across Horizon Hobby’sVortex 250 Pro...

 The Play Store is coming to Chrome OS, Google announced at its I/O developer conference today — and with that, you will soon be able to install and run virtually any Android app on your Ch...

 It’s been a big month for trucking innovations. In addition to Otto’s autonomous truck announcement, there’s the unveiling of Nikola Motor Company’s electric long-haul ri...

 A Los Altos startup called Afero raised $20.3 million in a new round of venture funding to secure connected devices, from toys and arcade games to medical equipment. The company’s technolo...

 Music blasting into your ear-holes not immersive enough for you? Rhapsody’s new VR app brings you as close to the music as you can get without getting sprayed with spit, sweat and god know...

 It’s easy to imagine that they’ve been happening regularly across the startup industry. The pace of funding in recent years as been feverish, giving investors less time than ever toa...

 Google dashed the rumor-fueled hopes and hype of many yesterday when it failed to bring any real VR hardware onstage and instead spent much of its time detailing the Daydream platform they would...

 What if the apps on your phone knew where you were, what you were doing, what’s nearby, and even what the weather was like outside, and then combined this information to react intelligentl...

 VR developers looking to get started on readying content for Google’s new Daydream VR platform can get started today thanks to an Unreal Enginepreview version (4.1.2) that adds support for...

 Eduardo Saverin — yes, that Eduardo Saverin of Facebook fame — is already a prominent investor in Asia’s tech scene, but his profile and spending is about to increase significa...

 The accessibility software on all of Apple’s platforms empower those with disabilities, myself included, to partake in the experience Apple intends for all users. Put another way, Apple pr...

 SoftBank is starting to ramp things up ahead of the US launch of its friendly and versatile humanoid robot, Pepper. After holding down a factotum of service industry jobs in and around Japan and...

 Sempre Health, one of the companies launching in the latest batch of the Alchemist Accelerator, is looking to lower the cost for prescription medication by rewarding healthy lifestyles. It’...

 When the Supreme Court authorized changes to Rule 41 that would expand the government’s hacking authority, Senator Ron Wyden immediately indicated that he would try to block the ruling. No...

 Alphabet CEO and Google co-founder Larry Page defended his company’s development of the Android platform today during an ongoing legal battle with Oracle. Oracle sued Google in 2010, claim...

 The mobile healthtech industry is exploding. There is an estimated $42 billion annual market for personalized medicine and a mad dash to come up with the “next big thing.” The tech w...

 Ransomware makers TeslaCrypt have shut down after saying sorry for all the damage they caused. This move, which has allowed anti-ransomware researchers to create a fool-proof decryption app, Tes...

 Apple device owners in the same family can share content like music, videos, e-books and apps through iCloud’s Family Sharing. Now, it appears that Android owners will have a similar optio...

 Adobe this morning launched a new suite of apps called Adobe Spark, which allow both web and mobile users to create and share visual content – like posts for social media, graphics, web st...

 PRX, the nonprofit organization that operates a marketplace for public radio programming like This American Life, announced today that it’s spinning out a for-profit company, RadioPublic. ...

 Philip Kaplan’s DistroKid is a system designed to let musicians post their music to streaming services like Spotify and iTunes and then get royalties when their music is played. Thus far K...

 Uber has finally confirmed testing self-driving cars in Pittsburgh, PA, according to a report out of the Pittsburgh Tribune. Though we’ve known about Uber’s autonomous vehicle ambiti...

 The Boosted Board is the best electric skateboard on the market, but its biggest flaw is a troublingly low range of 6 miles per charge. Today, Boosted opened pre-orders of its Gen 2 boards for $...

 SaaS startup Showpad which has built a platform designed to improve other businesses’ sales productivity has closed a $50 million Series C funding round, led by Insight Venture Partners &#...

 It’s a common revenue generation model, but one that seems to have taken some time for other tech platforms reliant on the community to develop. The 10-year-old Twitter and 5-year-old Snap...

 While Google shows off its latest developments at the I/O event in California, there’s been another development in the ongoing legal fallout from the 2014 Right to be Forgotten ruling in E...

 The Nima was the hit of CES 2016. As a tiny gluten tester, it won our Startup Battlefield and made an impression on the tech press. And the company today is announcing it has raised a $9.2 milli...

 ThoughtSpot, which you should think of as a Google for data analysis within a business, has raised $50 million in Series C round of funding, because its technology is pretty damn cool — at...

 India’s smartphone market is heralded as the largest opportunity in mobile right now, but the country’s top players are being disrupted as newcomers, mainly from China, rush into the...

 If you, like Dick Van Dyke, love to laugh loud and long and clear, then Laugh Radio hopes you’ll tune in. This standalone audio app offers a searchable achieve of streaming comedy for fans...

 If you, like Dick Van Dyke, love to laugh loud and long and clear, then Laugh Radio hopes you’ll tune in. This standalone audio app offers a searchable achieve of streaming comedy for fans...

 Apple CEO Tim Cook met with China’s main Internet and telecommunications regulator this week during his visit to Beijing. According to a short statement posted today on the Ministry of Ind...

 Sweden’s Tink, a mobile banking app, has raised $10 million in Series B funding in a round led by Swedish investment firm Creades, and SEB Venture Capital, the venture arm of Swedish bank...

 If you’re wondering which demographic is driving usage of ride hailing apps in the U.S., new research by Pew suggests it’s very much young people who have their foot on the gas here....

 FactorDaily, a newly formed media startup in India, has raised $1 million to kick start its efforts to build a consumer tech publication for, and from, India. Read More ...

 Now that you are giving up on check-ins and sharing your location with your friends, a French startup is coming up with better technology and new use cases to make location cool again. Zenly has...

 Berlin-based eSports startup Dojo Madness is on a mission to help gamers level up. It does this via a mobile app, initially targeting League of Legends, that essentially turns your phone into an...

 Those of us who’ve found ourselves in the unfortunate position of being in charge of an event will welcome with open arms Events.com’s new Event Assistant app. Launching today, the n...

 BeMyEye, one of a number of ‘mobile crowdsourcing’ apps that lets companies pay to have people carry out mobile tasks, such as photographing in-store promotions to ensure that are ac...

 Razer, the billion-dollar firm often labeled the Apple of PC gaming, is finally opening its first concept store in the U.S. this weekend. Read More ...

 Apple CEO Tim Cook is having a busy week traveling to Asia’s two biggest countries. Last week, he was in China where Apple announced a landmark billion dollar investment in Uber rival Didi...

 Troubled bio-tech startup Theranos has told the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that it voided two years of results from the blood tests that it once staked its future on, repor...

 Troubled bio-tech startup Theranos has told the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that it voided two years of results from the blood tests that it once staked its future on, repor...

 Gogoprint is a new company based in Thailand that wants to bring the benefits of the Internet to the printing industry in Southeast Asia. Read More ...

 Tattoo culture has pretty much gone mainstream. Tattooing is the sixth fastest growing market in the retail industry with about 30% of Americans getting them now. Thus Tattoodo started out as a ...

 Orion Health is a New Zealand-founded (now global) provider of technology products developed for the health sector. Orion’s founder and CEO, Ian McCrae, argues that current approaches to p...

 An accelerator called HAX held its eighth Demo Day for hardware startups in San Francisco yesterday. Best known for bringing companies in its portfolio to Shenzhen, China for about 15 weeks to g...

 TheHAX hardware accelerator held its 8th Demo Day in San Francisco yesterday. While all fifteen companies in the latest batch hold promise, and encompass some very wild ambitions, these three st...

 Another year, another Google I/O Keynote slammed with back-to-back announcements. Miss our liveblog earlier? Don’t have time to catch up on every last bit of news? Don’t sweat it: we...

 French startup Shift Technology just raised a $10 million Series A round from Accel, with existing investors Elaia Partners and Iris Capital also participating. Shift Technology uses big data an...

 More evidence of European VC stocking up before a potential LP winter. This time it’s the turn of e.ventures, which has closed a new $150 million early-stage fund toinvest in European star...

 Google announced its new messaging app Allo at its I/O developers conference today, and it looks pretty cool. It’s a feature-rich interface with graphics and doodles, and it works with Goo...

As Google announced at its I/O developer conference today, the company recently started building its own specialized chips toexpedite the machine learning algorithms. These so-called Tensor Processing...

 Many tech companies in Silicon Valley like to blame the lack of diversity on what they call the pipeline. Their argument is that there are simply not enough qualified female and/or underrepresen...

 Like a number of other bits and bobs announced at Google I/O thus far, there are still some important questions left unanswered about the Mi Box, but here’s what we do know about Xiaomi...

 Like a number of other bits and bobs announced at Google I/O thus far, there are still some important questions left unanswered about the Mi Box — but here’s what we do know about Xi...

 Disrupt NY 2016 was full of fascinating panels on everything from dating apps to cybersecurity. Weren’t able to catch every second? The TechCrunch social media team has compiled the best o...

 Tesla — with a significant chunk contributed by Elon Musk — is selling around$2 billion worth of stock in an equity offering in order to accelerate production of the Model 3, accordi...

 As the co-founder of a “142-proof” software development agency in the Silicon Valley catering to pre- and post-money companies, I’ve observed quite a bit of variance when it co...

 What’s worse than asking the Internet at large to name your product? Telling them it has to start with N. Let’s just take a moment to appreciate the stupefying magnitude of Google...

 In seemingly bizarre news out of the porn industry, PornHub is launching a new fitness system (wearable + workout videos) called BangFit. As its name suggests, it helps you bang to get fit. Here...

 After announcing theexpansion of Android Pay in the U.K. earlier today, Google also made a few additional announcements around its mobile payments service atits I/O developer conference today.Pa...

 Google is launching a major update to its Play developer services today that should make life a little bit easier for Android developers. With 65 billion app installs in 2015, Google obviously k...

 The amount of Google Cardboard app downloadshas doubled in just the past four months. Today, onstage at I/O, Google’s head of VR, Clay Bavor, announced that the company had seen downloads ...

 Google is updating its Android Studio developer environment with a whole slew of upgrades under the hood that’ll make it faster. The company unveiled the new tool at its Google I/O develop...

 Mobile apps often provide a better user experience than browser-based web apps, but you first have to find them, download them, and then try not to forget you installed them. Now, Google wants u...

 Google offers a plethora of cloud services that mobile developers can use to power their apps. With Firebase,which it acquired in 2014, it already offered developers a dedicated platform and SDK...

 In what’s become the Google I/O defining moment, the company kicked off the 2012 event with a series of skydivers, bikers, and climbers to debut the hot newness that was Project Glass (hin...

 Google’s Android Wear smartwatch platform launched more than two years ago and it’s nowsupported bymore than a dozen brands and runs on more than 100watch designs. Today, the company...

 How big is the Android app ecosystem? Google gave an update on this today at its Google I/O Developer conference, when VP ofEngineeringDave Burke announced 65 billion installs from Google Play o...

 Highway1 is a rare breed of accelerator that has realized that the people who most need help are the folks who are doing the startups thing with hardware products. Uniquely positioned in the fin...

 Youget to choose the name of Google’s next Android release. Traditionally, every Android release is named after something sweet: Marshmallow, Lollipop, KitKat, Jelly Bean, etc. Previews ar...

 We don’t know if Google will launch its own virtual reality headset at its I/O developer conference this year, but Android N, the next version of the company’s mobile operating syste...

 As expected, Google made Android N, the next version of its mobile operating system, a cornerstone of its I/O keynote today. With Android N, Google moved to a very different release cycle compar...

 Some have criticised Google for falling behind when it comes to social networking and new communications services, but the company is how working hard to catch up. Today, the company announced a...

  Read More ...

 Today at I/O, Google tookthe wraps off its latest foray into the worldof communications: the company announcedAllo, a smart messaging appsupercharged withmachine learning and Google’s new ...

 At its annual I/O developer conference, Google today unveiled a new hardware device and competitor to Amazon Echo, a portable speaker powered by voice assistance technology called Google Home.Th...

 Google today said it was unveiling a virtual assistant tool atits annual Google I/O developer conference in Mountain View called Google Assistant. This appears to be similar to what Google Now c...

 Last May, Lee Hnetinka shut down his on-demand delivery service WunWun, which was a direct a competitor to Postmates, and then sold the company’s assetsto Alfred, a TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2...

 It’s Google I/O Keynote day! It’s the day Google finally shows off just about everything they’ve been working on in secret for the past few months. And we’re there live! ...

 And we’re back for yet another developer conference extravaganza. Google is kicking off its annual I/O developer conference today. The conference starts at 10 a.m. Pacific Time (1 p.m. on ...

 Netflix wants you to know how fast your internet connection is, and has today launched a new website, Fast.com, that will give you that information. Basically, it’s a simplified speed test...

 It’s no secret that Reddit isn’t the best place on the Internet. In fact, its name has become synonymous with hate speech, racism, sexism and other terrible things. So, maybe getting...

 SwiftKey, the smart keyboard app maker acquired by Microsoft for $250 million earlier this year, is now testing its next product, a predictivekeyboard appcalled Swiftmoji. As you may have guesse...

 When people think about rocket ships and space exploration, they often imagine traveling across the Milky Way, landing on mysterious planets and even meeting alien life forms. In reality, humans...

 A LinkedIn hack from back in 2012 is still causing problems for its users. The company announced this morning that another data set from the hack, which contains over 100 million LinkedIn member...

 When it comes to startups trying to scale across Europe one thing is abundantly clear: although the market of over 500 million citizens in the European Union is far greater than the US’s 3...

 Fitbit’s future plans clearly extend well beyond simple fitness tracking, as evidenced by products like the Blaze, which leans much more heavily into smartwatch territory than before. And ...

 Glu Mobile, the maker of games like “Kim Kardashian: Hollywood”, “Deer Hunter”, and “Diner Dash”, is today unveiling another celebrity-branded game. This time...

 It’s Google I/O Keynote day! It’s the day Google finally shows off just about everything they’ve been working on in secret for the past few months. And we’re there live! ...

 An app being made by DeepMind, the Google-owned AI company, working in collaboration with the NHS Royal Free Trust in London and being used to help identify hospital patients who might be at ris...

 And we’re back for yet another developer conference extravaganza. Google is kicking off its annual I/O developer conference today. The conference starts at 10 a.m. Pacific Time (1 p.m. on ...

 Microsoft is selling the feature phone business it acquired from Nokia back in 2013 to a subsidiary of Chinese manufacturer Foxconn for $350 million, it announced today. At the same time former ...

 Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said during the company’s annual shareholder meeting Tuesday that it wants to open more physical bookstores and add additional services to Amazon Prime. Read More ...

 Uber has suspended its motorbike taxi service in Bangkok, the first city where it launched UberMoto just three months ago, following orders from the government.GrabBike, the service operated by ...

 Uber and Grab, the two largest on-demand taxi services in Southeast Asia, have suspended theirmotorbike taxi services in Bangkok following orders from the government.UberMoto launched in Bangkok...

 Ahead of Google’s annualI/Oevent kicking off later today in Mountain View, the company is unveiling its latest developments for Android Pay. The mobile wallet for Android-powered smartphon...

 Google wants the South Korean government to ease laws on map data that have curtailed the number of features Google Maps can offer there. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company talked...

 It’s Google I/O Keynote day! It’s the day Google finally shows off just about everything they’ve been working on in secret for the past few months. And we’re there live! ...

 Apple is increasing its focus on India after announcing plans to open its first developer center in the country. The new ‘iOS App Design and Development Accelerator’ will be located ...

 They also talked a big game. When SoFi raised a whopping $1 billion from Softbank last year, CEO Michael Cagney told Bloomberg: “I’m looking at over $1 trillion of market cap from th...

 To anyone familiar with doing business in Europe, it really is no surprise that the European Data Protection Supervisor and the European Commission — Referred to as the Article 29 Working ...

 Keita Takahashi, creator of the famously bizarre ball-rolling game Katamari Damacy, has a new title, but it’s not for the PS4 or Xbox One — you’ll need a Project Tango compatib...

 Putting body cameras on police seems like a net good for everyone involved, but how to deploy them and what the subtler effects will be are questions that would be better answered sooner than la...

 We’re hearing from multiple sourcesthat Down to Lunch has met with investors about a potential financing round. Down to Lunch became a bit of a darling during its rise thanks to its dead-s...

 Over the past few years EyeSight has been establishing a name for itself by bringing gesture control to a series of computing platforms, from mobile devices to smart eyeglasses. Today’s an...

 Oracle and Google are back in the courtroom again — the same court they started in back in 2010, when Oracle first sued Google over the company’s use of 37 Java APIs in its Android o...

 SocialRank is a startup that helps brands, agencies and celebrities understand their social media followers — not just in aggregate, like most social analytics services, but on an individu...

 Facebook appears to have beenblocked in Vietnam as a part of a government-imposed crackdown on social media, amidpublicprotestsover an environmental disaster attributed to toxic discharges froma...

 One day a year, Google gathers all sides of the industry to show off everything the company has been cooking up for the past twelve months. From all new Android to automated automobiles, it̵...

 Ever felt like you were being watched online? You know, like when you read something about New York, and the next site you visit shows you ads for New York hotels? As it turns out, on my compute...

 Apple rolled out a new version of iTunes this week which introduced an updated design, including modified navigation and the return of the left sidebar. However, under the hood,the new software ...

 Oracle and Google continue to fight it out in a retrial over $9 billion that Oracle claims Google owes it for using its Java code in its popular Android mobile platform. And in the pro...

 Being a freelance animator is a pretty crappy existence, living out of a suitcase, jetting from country to country as the major studios are chasing tax incentives around the world. Launched this...

 Travelers in the Southwest have a new all-electric option: long-distance car sharing in a Tesla with Autopilot. The service is called Tesloop, and it currently serves 15 cities in southern Calif...

 Fresh on the heels of Disrupt NY, we’re packing up and heading to Austin and Seattle for the TC Meetup + Pitch-off. Ten companies will have exactly sixty seconds to pitch to a panel of exp...

 As civilian drones become more affordable, sophisticated and common around the world, a company called Dedrone Inc. has raised $10 million in venture funding for systems that monitor the skies a...

 Uber today announced a new tool that will allow family members and other loved ones to track each others’ trips using its service. Called simply “Trip Tracker,” the addition is...

 In the two years since HP announced it was entering the 3D printing space speculation arose regarding what exactly the PC giant would launch? Home 3D printers for the masses? All-in-one manufact...

 With a still unannounced price and a footprint the size of a washing machine (as The BBC handily points out), the Jet Fusion 3D 4200 is big and (most likely) expensive. But HP is also positionin...

 TechCrunch Include Office Hours are happening on May 24th! Satya Patel, Beth Scheer and Hunter Walk from Homebrew Ventureswill join TechCrunch to provide valuable advice and feedback to startups...

 Xavier Niel’s new project is an ambitious coding university in Silicon Valley called 42. But the trick is that it’s nothing like other universities out there. 42 is free, doesn’...

 Jifiti, the startup attempting to reinvent digital gift-giving, announced this morning that their new chatbot API was approved by Facebook Messenger. It’s a big deal for the Columbus, OH s...

 Media Temple is launching a new enterprise-grade WordPress hosting solutiontoday. That would be interesting by itself, but the twist here is that the company, which is owned by GoDaddy, is hosti...

 T-Mobile is again expanding itsBinge Onprogram, with news this morning that a number of video services, including Google Play Music, NBC, TIDAL, Spotify, Radio Disney and others, will now be mad...

 Twitter has been releasing a variety tools for publishing its content beyond Twitter itself. Now it’s giving publishers an additional incentive — monetization through the companyR...

 Affirm has madeit no secret that its success will hingeon its ability to offer customers a wide range of retail partners where they can frequently use Affirm to pay. While the lending startup or...

 With 17 percent of the GDP, it’s fair to say that Samsung is South Korea, or at least has represented it on the global business stage for the last decade or so. But for the last year or so...

 Google’s Cultural Institute, the company’s initiative to preserve the world’s culture and history by bringing it online, has this morningunveiled a new project aimed at allowin...

 So much for pomp and circumstance. A day ahead of Google I/O’s official kick off, Morotola/Lenovo has spilled the beans about three new versions of the company’s warmly received Moto...

 As more of today’s consumers shop online using their mobile devices, often bypassing Google for e-commerce sites directly – andespecially Amazon – Google has moved to combat th...

 Just swallow a pill and it expands into a balloon in your stomach so you don’t feel hungry. No gastric bypass, no surgery required. Sounds magical, butBoston-based Allurionhas created the ...

 Amazon is giving TV viewers a few more, not-crazy reasons to talk back to their TVs. After bringing the functionalityto various properties, opening it to third-party hardware and letting develop...

 If you’re a basketball fan, you’re more than aware it’s playoff time — and we’re down to the final four teams. You probably also knowthatthe NBA has been running a ...

 If you’re a basketball fan, you’re more than aware it’s playoff time — and we’re down to the final four teams. You probably also knowthatthe NBA has been running a ...

 If you’ve ever grumbled about long lines at the pharmacy, Capsule wants to save you the trouble next time. The New York-based startup is launching today to offer delivery of prescription m...

 More proof, if proof were needed, of the privacy-stripping power of metadata. A multi-year crowdsourced study, conducted by Stanford scientists and published this week, underlines how much infor...

 Microsoft and SAP have been pals for years and years, and today at the SAP Sapphire Now customer conference in Orlando, the two company CEOs, Satya Nadella and Bill McDermott announced they were...

 You saw it coming, right? 3D model repository Sketchfab just added support for all major virtual reality headsets out there. You can now view your pretty 3D models in your VR headset. Read More ...

 While theBBC is planningto takeon Netflix by buildingits own “Britflix” on-demand video streaming service,on the news front, it looks like the UK media giant is cutting back to shore...

 While theBBC is planningto takeon Netflix by buildingits own “Britflix” on-demand video streaming service,on the news front, it looks like the UK media giant is cutting back to shore...

 Intel missed out on the mobile CPU market because that market is a high-volume, low-margin business, and Intel is a high-volume, high-margin company that can’t afford to offer low-margin v...

 French startup Snips is launching its first product today, an iOS app that is supposed to make your life easier by letting you view and search your data more easily. Snips is a personal assistan...

 In three short weeks, the TechCrunch team will be in the beautiful city of Stockhom for a good old TechCrunch Meetup + Pitch-Off — and I couldn’t be more excited about this event. If...

 Microsoft may have built a new web browser that is befitting of today’s Internet, but its decision to develop Edge and deprioritize Internet Explorer might be benefitting its rivals. Read ...

 Self-driving cars are very much a part of the future of tech, with Google, Uber, Apple and plenty of other top names working to develop autonomous vehicles. But what about trucks? That’s w...

 Just like London buses, you wait for a European vacation rental search engine to raise funding and three come along at once. Following Holidu and HomeToGo, the latest to secure investment isHund...

 WeSchool, initially available in English, Spanish and Italian, is aimed at teachers with a product that will go up against established Learning Management Systems (LMS), such as the Moodles of t...

 For years, Twitter users have complained about the fact that link and photo URLs count against each tweet’s 140-character limit. Now that may finally change. According to a report in Bloom...

 Facebook is heaping focus on live video with an entirely dedicated tab for streams, which prioritizes in-the-moment broadcasts, so it’s no surprise to see that Twitter is fighting back in ...

 As the tech world waits to see what VR stuff Google shows off at its I/O conference later this week, today, the company snuck in an update to YouTube for iOS that allows you to view any video in...

 Lucid Sight, Inc., an LA-based VR game studio,announced today that they have closed a $3.5 million Series A round of funding led byRana Capital Partners, B.V. and Salem Partners. This raise brin...

 Today, the International Space Station completed its 100,000th orbit around the Earth since its first module was launched on November 20th, 1998. Tocelebrate that milestone, NASA teamed up with ...

 I’ve long been an activity tracker kind of guy. I strapped them all onto my fleshy wrist: the Fitbits, the Nikes, the Polars. I’ve watched circles fill up on my Apple Watch and IR...

 What does the future of food look like? Former Vice President Al Gore and 40 entrepreneurs and CEOs in the food industry recently convened in London to try to answer just that. Read More ...

 So I know some of y’all were worried about me after I agreed to have my face shaved at Disrupt NY to raise money for the Red Hook Initiative. I just wanted to check in and let you know wha...

 Apple’s interestsin China, its second-largest regional market, expand far beyond their recent $1 billion investment in Didi Chuxing. As the company eyes a larger presence in China, they...

 One limitation of run-of-the-mill 3D printers is that the structure must essentially be built as a series of layers, each one supporting the next. A new device from Harvard’s Wyss Institut...

 As merchants like Walmart move ahead ontheir own mobile payment strategies, a consortium that once counted Walmart — along witha number of other big retailers and brands — behind it,...

 Debra Lee, who has been CEO of Viacom’s Black Entertainment Television (BET) since 2005 and its chairman since 2006, has joined the board of Twitter. She tweeted out the news earlier today...

 The widespread conversations about AI took a new turn in March 2016 when Microsoft launched, then quickly unplugged, Tay, its artificial intelligence chat robot. Within 24 hours, interactions on...

 StarVR was undoubtedly overshadowed by larger names during its debut at E3 last year, but those who did manage to demo the high-end headset seemed to walk away impressed.Among other things, Star...

 Australian physicists, perhaps searching for a way to shorten the work week, have created an AI that can run and even improve a complex physics experiment with little oversight. The research cou...

 “Someone is always leaving everywhere”: that’s the idea behind Roadie, a peer-to-peer package delivery service launched last year by Marc Gorlin. There are something like 250 m...

 Jason Stirman is part of a select group of early Web 2.0 builders in Silicon Valley. He was there at the beginning of Twitter, jumpedwith Ev Williams to Obvious Corp and then Medium and is now w...

 GoButler, the startup that originally offered a virtual assistant that let you request anything on-demand, appears to be pivoting for a second (and maybe final) time. This time the New York-head...

 For all of the talk there is in how virtual reality is going to usher in some dark, utopian age where people are huddled in corners with VR headsets strapped to their faces… That’s j...

 And now, the moment all foodies in New York have been waiting for… David Chang, owner of the wildly popular line of Momofuku restaurants, is today launching Ando, the latest to join the fr...

 Google-owned navigation app Waze is expanding its ride-sharing ambitions with the launch of a pilot program in the San Francisco Bay area which will allow employees of select companies to carpoo...

 500 Startups’ 16th demo day just wrapped up, and the firm is already turning its eyes to its next batch of companies. More than 40 startups are participating in this batch of companies. Fr...

 It seems like every week brings a new activity tracker from Garmin. And hey, like clockwork, the navigation-turned-fitness-wearable manufacturer kicked off the week with a new one– or, rat...

 Google is not giving up on its social ambitions, it seems, despite its failures with Google+. The company announced this morning a new social app called Spaces, which focuses on group sharing. T...

 The Gillmor Gang —Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, Frank Radice, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Saturday, May 14, 2016. The Gang poles down the Big Muddy of what used to be 3 channels and rabbi...

 AT&T announced this morning that it will acquire Quickplay Media, a video streaming platform that powers over-the-top video and “TV Everywhere” services that help its customers s...

 Blockchain, the company behind the world’s most popular bitcoin wallet, has been quietly working on an interesting project called Thunder. The Thunder network is an alternative network of ...

 A new paradigm of economic cooperation is underway — a digital democratization of business. It’s not crowdfunding a product, an artwork, or a new cryptocurrency. It’s crowdfund...

 Instagram is preparing to launch a series of new tools for the businesses and brands using its platform, including business profiles with contact buttons and access to maps and directions, as we...

 No one will be talking about crowdfunding in five years. The term is inherently flawed; it focuses on the wrong side of any investment: the donor/investor. And it’s become too broad to be ...

 The BBC may be looking to build a Netflix-style streaming subscription service for the UK, according to a report this morning out of the Telegraph.The service would be built in conjunction with ...

 We first took a look (or, rather, a listen) at the BoomStick right around CES of this year. The unassuming plug-inpromised a peculiar sort of magic, souping up the sound quality of existing audi...

 Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway holding company today disclosed in a regulatory filing that it owns around 9.81 million shares of Apple — worth around $1.07billion at the end of ...

 GCHQ, the UK spy agency which specializes in garnering intelligence from communications, has officially joined Twitter — posting a “Hello, world” inaugural tweet from its blue ...

 Alibaba Pictures, the film and television subsidiary of Alibaba Group, has raised a 1.7 million RMB (about $260 million) Series A for its online ticketing platform, Taobao Movie. According to a ...

 As you may have noticed we’ve announced our very first formal Meetup + Pitch-off in Tel Aviv, presented by Leumi Tech, with participation from Blonde 2.0. The event will be on June 22, at ...

 The future of mobile messaging is pointing towards serves, but don’t assume that only applies to digital offerings like money transfers and shopping. Japan’s Line, one of the world&#...

 Didi Chuxing, the ride-sharing firm that leads Uber in China, has denied that it plans to go public in the U.S. next year following a report from Bloomberg. Read More ...

 Amazon will soon roll out its own private-label brands of common householditems like coffee, diapers, and other perishablegroceries, according to a reportfrom The Wall Street Journal. Theofferin...

 When you pull the pin on a hand grenade, you have four seconds from the time you release the spoon — the aluminum lever that holds down the fuse trigger — until it explodes. Four sec...

 Who remembers Pokemon Snap? The game was released in 1999for N64 as a rail “shooter”, andlet you take pictures of Pokemon while riding through different courses. But while your path ...

 Although there is still a lot of hype surrounding 3D printing and how it may or may not be the next industrial revolution, the cost of printing continues to drop while the quality of 3D prints c...

 Last year was a massive year for mergers, with industry giants like Dell and Aol finally closing deals that were large enough to make 2015 a record-breaking year. Predictions mostly held that 20...

 Fundraising is a game of competition. VCs compete against other VCs to fund the latest startups. Startups compete with other startups to attain funding from the brand name VCs.So, to be successf...

 Internet accessibility for all people, of all ages and in all places has unleashed unprecedented resources and opportunities. It also unlocked our digital and physical security. The sacrifice of...

 Power now resides with massive centralizing corporations like Google and Facebook and thus the Internet no longer reflects the interests of its users. So, the digital revolution has pretty much ...

 In the ever-shifting landscape of cyberthreats and attacks, having access to timely information and intelligence is vital and can make a big difference in protecting organizations and firms agai...

 Asem Hasna, 22, heard dead silence for five minutes after a shell blew his left leg off in a small town southwest of Damascus in April 2013.A mathematics student turned volunteer paramedic Hasna...

The online game BREAKAWAY culminates with a girl being abducted, forced into a locker and left there after continual bullying and abuse. But the game is not glamorizing gangs, instead it’s tryin...

 Attendees of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year were confronted with a head-spinning volume of smart-home devices. From $5,000 refrigerators that can communicate when you’...

 The doors to TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016 opened May 9 atthe Brooklyn Cruise Terminal. Thethree-day conferencehosted 2,300 attendees andhundreds of thousands more tuning in online. Indeed, Disrupt...

 You don’t have to look hard to see why the startup community in Latin America has long faced a lack of capital and resources to fuel significant growth. Many Latin American entrepreneurs h...

 We’ve seen an increase in drone investments on a huge scale, many new entrants into the field, and more mainstream companies getting into the marketplace. So, no, drones are not a fad, the...

 Gillmor Gang – Doc Searls, frank Radice, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. LIVE recording session begins at 10:00amPT/1pmET today today.Our live chat stream during the show broadcastGillmor ...

 Gillmor Gang – Doc Searls, frank Radice, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. LIVE recording session begins at 10:00amPT/1pmET today today.Our live chat stream during the show broadcastGillmor ...

 With digital ad spending expected to surpass the spend on television advertising next year, the Big Apple overflows with adtech startups. Many of these startups are coming to New York from abroa...

In my on-going Technotopia series I’ve been talking to designers, coders, and journalists. This time I talk to business professor Raj Raghunathan author of If You’re So Smart, Why ArenR...

 We live in a time of great polarization. Politically, in nations across the world, both the left and the far right grow more numerous, and draw further away from the mainstream establishment, ev...

 Legislation allowing ordinary American investors to invest in the shares of startups and small businesses was first introduced in the U.S. Congress in 2011. Despite bipartisan support and the ap...

 “Tell me about your cap table?” I asked the founder of an early-stage startup. He was clearly passionate about his business, and had assembled a top-notch team to help him achieve hi...

 Robots and artificial intelligence have come a long way since a Roomba entered your home to vacuum your floor and Siri gave you advice on the best Italian restaurants in your parents’ neig...

 It’s that time of year again: more than 40 500Startups companies presented and launched in Mountain View this afternoon.Fromacne consultations by dermatologists through your smartphone, to...

 It’s that time of year again: more than 40 500 Startups companies presented and launched in Mountain View this afternoon.Fromacne consultations by dermatologists through your smartphone, t...

 I was cynical at first. I mean, I still have some underlying (if not entirely well-founded) suspicions that Fender’s new line of in-ear monitors is part of a bigger play to expand beyond i...

 Right now, if you get into a crash, it’s usually going to be a driver’s fault — a human driver. Parts can fail and tires can burst, but about 90 percent of all car crashes are ...

 Playboy looked both backwards and forwards duringits first NewFronttoday,where it pitched advertisers on its plans for what CEO Scott Flanders described as “the new, multi-platform Playboy...

 Following a cyber attack on critical infrastructure, emotions run high and the clock starts ticking. Suddenly what appears to be a well-structured incident response plan on paper can turn into a...

 It has been a terrible year for tech IPOs. Until now, only SecureWorks braved the market and it didn’t go well.But Acacia Communications braved the public markets today and outperformed ex...

 It has been a terrible year for tech IPOs. Until now, only SecureWorks braved the market and it didn’t go well.But Acacia Communications braved the public markets today and outperformed ex...

 Here’s the thing: when your eyes are synthesizing information from multiple screens into a three-dimensional virtual space, the word “screenshot” fails to describe what it is d...

 More than 1 million users. Sixteen billion monthly page views. Ninety-nine percent user engagement. If these sound like stats from tech companies, you’re right. Except these tech companies...

 Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona hassigned SB 1350, a law whichprohibits cities and municipalities from banning the listing and use of short-term rentalslikeAirbnb, HomeAway, and others.Signing th...

 Wearables might be set to get a whole lot more useful in future if research being conducted by Carnegie Mellon University’s Future Interfaces Group is indicative of the direction of travel...

 TechCrunch is excited to stream 500 Startups’ demo day live from the Computer History Museum. The demos start at 11:00 AM Pacific and are expected to last four hours. You can watch it live...

 When cable TV subscriptions in the U.S. peaked in 2012 — and 97.6 million Americans paid to watch television delivered via cable — it seemed the traditional media supply chain was st...

 YouTube as a messaging app? Sure, why not! Everyone’s doing it, after all. In case you missed it:YouTubeannounced this week that it’s testing a new feature with a subset of its mobil...

 Disrupt NY 2016 has come to an end, and our video team put together three short videos that summarize each day of the event. Read More ...

 NFL games are coming to YouTube! Wait, don’t get too excited just yet – YouTube and the NFL have onlyannounced a strategic partnership that’s bringing “classic” gam...

 Before you get too excited, the above image is the Vision NEXT 100, the concept car BMW showed off back in March to note that, as it celebrated its 100th anniversary, the company was spending mo...

 Psychologists in Canada have developed a mathematical formula for quantifying the humor of nonsense. Most of us would be forgiven for thinking math and humor are mutually exclusive. One is perce...

 According to multiple rumors and a newly spotted placeholder on the Google Play Developer Console, it seems that Google will be unveiling an Android VR headset at Google I/O next week. Android P...

 According to multiple rumors and a newly spotted placeholder on the Google Play Developer Console, it seems that Google will be unveiling an Android VR headset at Google I/O next week. Android P...

 In a bid to make South Korea’s tech industry more diverse, the government has created an accelerator for startups from around the world. Read More ...

 Apple made the bombshell announcement today that it has invested $1 billion in China’s top ride hailing app. Didi Chuxing (formerly called Didi Kuaidi) is often described in U.S. media as ...

 Our cities face a choice: find creative ways to integrate today’s technology into their DNA or have entire systems get left behind. Urban populations are growing, infrastructure is aging a...

 Accion Systems, the company developing miniature space propulsion systems, has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding led by Shasta Ventures. RRE Ventures, Founder Collective, and Slow Ventures...

 Progressive women’s advocates doing controversial work are often at risk of physical violence and online harassment because of their online presence. To help those advocates navigate socia...

 When Rwanda’s socioeconomic turnaround is discussed, the country’s disciplined approach to economic growth and commitment to avoiding the pitfalls of corruption are usually highlight...

 Researchers from MIT, the University of Sheffield and the Tokyo Institute of Technology joined forces for a project that reads like something out of a William Burroughs novel. Crafted from dried...

 In today’s digital world, everyday functions such as making dinner reservations or hailing a taxi are done at the touch of a button. Similarly, other, more complex and esoteric functions, ...

 Communication in the harsh, uninhabited and undeveloped environment of the Australian Outback is a huge challenge. That’s why Paul Gardner-Stephen, a senior lecturer at Flinders University...

 You know what to do at work today, but do you know why? Goals. Having clear goals is critical to keeping productivity and morale high on any team. Whether it’s a launch date, level of trac...

 NASA has announced that astronomers working with the Kepler space telescope have verified 1,284 new planets – more than doubling the number of previously confirmed planets from Kepler. In ...

 Artificial intelligence. It’s dominating headlines with the promise of self-driving cars and virtual assistants becoming more real every day. But despite all the talk around AI, no one see...

 The team at Disney Research is up to its fun old tricks, this time finding some new uses for off-the-shelf RFID tags. Along with researchers from Carnegie Mellon,Disney’s laboratory wing h...

 After 70 years of rocking musicians with its guitars and amps, Fender today released its first general consumer product: a range of headphones that double as in-ear monitors for performers. They...

 With the dawn of virtual reality, we are in the midst of a massive paradigm shift in how educators will perceive and incorporate video gaming experiences. Video games tend to be simulations of t...

 Walmart is making a notable to change to ShippingPass, its 3-day shipping service, and answer to Amazon Prime launched into beta testing last year. The company says this morning it will move fro...

 Wondering which of the tens of thousands of photos on your phone are worth keeping or sharing may be a thing of the past, thanks to The Roll, a brand new app from EyeEm. The iOS app analyses you...

 Google this morning launched a new application for iOS devices called Gboard that puts the power of Google search directly into your mobile device’s keyboard. This keyboard had been rumore...

 In-home video entertainment is a very big deal. $381 billion globally in 2019 big. About $100 billion in North America big. Triple the revenue of apps and games big. No wonder, then, that it won...

 Virtual reality is expensive. High-end headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive will run you $599 and $799 – and the cameras required to capture the content runs several times that. At $...

 Evaneos, the European travel marketplace, has beefed up its coffers once again. The French startup has raised a further $21 million in funding, money it will use to continue developing the produ...

 The chief operating officer of Theranos, the beleaguered medical diagnostics startup currently under federal investigation for making misleading claims about its blood analysis technology, is st...

 Our world-famous TechCrunch Pitch-Off is coming to Stockholm! We’ll invite a panel of investors to judge 10, 2 minute pitches (no demos). If you want to pitch, make sure to apply here. We ...

 Capital Float, an online lending platform for small businesses in India, announced today that it has closed a $25 million Series B. Read More ...

 Opera is on a roll lately. Over the last few weeks, the company added abuilt-inad blocker and VPN service to its desktop browser, for example. Today, the company is launching a new early release...

 From HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey to Samantha in Spike Jonze’s Her, for decades we have been obsessed with the idea that artificial intelligence powered-computers will one day be able to i...

 It’s actually very tasty. Really. I certainly had my doubts, eating a tortilla that came out of a pod, but 90 or so seconds after Flatev co-founder and CEO put the little Keurig-esque plas...

 Astrobotic Technology, the company that plans to deliver payloads to the moon, hascompleted a $2.5 million seed round led by Space Angels Network. The company was originally spun out of Carnegie...

 The following is an excerpt from The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology by William Mougayar. In it, Mougayar waxes ecstatic about the future ...

 The healthcare industry, with its maddening inefficiencies and an economic model that incentivizes disease care over health care, desperately needs a Silicon Valley-style overhaul. Why is the na...

 Google is moving beyond Cardboard. The company willreportedlybe announcing a standalone Android VR headset at next week’s Google I/O event.Tech journalistPeter Rojashas tweeted thatGooglew...

 The competition has been incredibly fierce, but we now have a winner. At the very beginning, there were 22 startups. We hand-picked all these great companies from the wild world of startup land ...

 Just a day after announcing a $50 million round of funding, Internet performance management company Dyn is revealingthere’s been a change in leadership — co-founder Jeremy Hitchcock ...

 Airbnbis under fire forallowing hostsonits platform to list homes in Israel’s occupied territories. And today the issue became the subject of a protest at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference...

 General Michael Hayden is no stranger to government — or to your data. As the former director of the NSA and the CIA, he oversaw controversial surveillance programs and had authority over ...

 It doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes backpack designs get creative. Typically, backpacks are boring, with little variation in their shape, their materialseven their colors. Read Mor...

 We all saw it coming, but it’s still hard to swallow. Well-designed calendar app and service Sunrise will be removed from the stores in the next few days. The servers will be shutting down...

 One of the latest Snapchat trends (at least in our little techbubble) is venture capitalists using the social media platform as a way to dish out advice to aspiring entrepreneurs. People like Ma...

 TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016’s “wildcard” participant GeoOrbital has a different take on the electric bike. Instead of putting a motor on the bike, they put it in the wheel. This...

 Carmelo Anthony, already a superstar forward for the New York Knicks, is looking ahead to his next act as a venture capital mogul. Coupling his longtime interest in technology with a desire to p...

 Agrilyst, the winner of our Disrupt SF 2015 Battlefield competition, today announcedit has raised a $1 million seed round for its indoor agriculture analytics service.The round was led by Brookl...

 Messenger and WhatsApp may be the 800-pound gorillas in the chat space thanks to Facebook’s significant reach, but Waterloo-based Kik is rapidly building a young, dedicated audience of use...

 Those panoramas trapped on your phone will finally get a better viewing experience, both on News Feed and the Oculus-powered Samsung Gear VR, which Facebook now says has 1 million monthly users ...

 If the idea of wearing spider silk intrigues, the idea of managing a farm full of spiders isn’t all that appealing. A startup called Bolt Threads has developed a means of brewing spider si...

 Following Facebook Moments’ expansion to the E.U. and Canada earlier this week, Google is launching new features on its own photo-sharing service, Google Photos, aimed at making its app bo...

 Pinterest announced this morning it’s addingformer Amazon exec Michelle Wilson to its board of directors. Wilson has a background in global growth and talent acquisition, both of which are...

 Front started out as an app to manage shared email addresses. With Front, you can collaborate, comment, assign and reply to those pesky emails that you receive on your [email protected], [email protected] or contact...

 With Silicon Valley pretty much a trash fire right now it would behoove small cities to look elsewhere when trying to create centers of innovation. While Brooklyn, that gem of an island surround...

 Weaveworks announced a $15 million Series B round today led by GV (the artist formerly known as Google Ventures). Accel, which invested in its earlier $5 million Series A also participated. The ...

 uBeam could be vaporware, according to a blogger claiming to be uBeam’s former VP of Engineering. They accuse the startup of being unable to fulfill promises made about its technology. uBe...

 The (in)famous former Top Gear presenter trio: Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, who last summer signed to Amazon’s Prime video streaming platform to make a new car show this...

 Google announced today that it will no longer allow payday lenders to advertise on its systems because the loans often come with high interest rates and quick repayment requirements that push bo...

 Today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY we hadRobyn Exton of Her, Dawoon Kang of Coffee Meets Bagel and Whitney Wolfe of Bumble discuss the latest trends in the mobile dating space.Two of the apps, Her a...

 Earlier this year, a report in The Information claimed that Google-owned Nest was working on a rival to Amazon’s Echo — a service that would bring together a number of other connecte...

 Google is launching an update to its Translate apps for iOS and Android today.There are three main parts to today’s announcement: offline support for iOS, Tap To Translate on Android, and ...

 Five years have passed since Soledad O’Brien covered race in Silicon Valley as part of her documentary series Black in America. Now she’s ready to take a second look. Today, O’...

 DoorDash CEO Tony Xu says the company is cash flow positive in some of its early markets — but the company still has to invest in its growth.That’s the reason that the company raised...

 Four years after her appearance at Disrupt SF 2012, Jessica Alba took the Disrupt NY stage to discuss The Honest Company’s latest news. Alba started by touching on the company’s earl...

 Former Citigroup CFO Sallie Krawchecklaunched her anticipatednew startup, adigital investment platform for women calledEllevest, this morning from the TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016 conference’...

 Instagram’s new icon is pink. Well, it’s pink and purple and yellow and orange. It’s definitely different. And that’s not all the company has changed today. Instagram thi...

 I can finally tick this one off my European VCs that are raising a new fund list. Cherry Ventures, the Berlin-based VC, has raised a new 150 million early-stage fund, its second fund since comin...

 Europe’s Competition Commission has blocked a proposed merger that would have seen the number of major carriers in the UK mobile market reduced from four to three. Read More ...

 Include is TechCrunch’s diversity program, launched in 2014, aimed at facilitating opportunities for underrepresented groups in tech to take their startups to the next level.The Office Hou...

On this, the final day of Disrupt, we present to you celebrities. Jessica Alba will grace our stage, as will Carmelo Anthony, Soledad O’Brien and the only man to be the director of the NSA and C...

 Soracom, a Tokyo-based startup that provides a communication platform for developers of connected devices, announced today that it has raised a 2.4 billion yen (about $22 million) Series B from ...

 Navigation system turned wearable manufacturer Garmin debuted a new running watch today that packs in a slew of tracking tools. The high-end Forerunner 735XT features built-GPS tracking, along w...

 Timing is everything, right? Just a few days after recovering from a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, orderbird, which claims to be the leading iPad point of sale (POS) solution in German speakin...

 There’s no such thing as a free lunch or free energy, right? Not necessarily. Drayson Technologies, the London startup founded by Lord Paul Drayson, a very successful serial entrepreneur a...

 Naspers, the 101-year-old, internet and entertainment group, is finally planting a flag in the U.S., establishing a Naspers Ventures unit that will operate largely out of San Francisco. The 30,0...

 There is a highly divisive and costly practice that software companies have inflicted on their customers for nearly a decade. This practice brings with it significant emotional duress, time inve...

 WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging service that claims a billion users, has launched desktop clients for Mac and Windows. The release comes about 15 months after WhatsApp released its first ...

 The news comes just days after rival hyperloop builder Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) announced a licensing deal to power its own prototype with magnetic levitation technology. Both...

 Thus far at TC Disrupt NY, we’ve seen a handshake stalemate between IAB’s Randall Rothenberger and AdBlocker’s Till Faida. We’ve seen the Siri founders debut the next-gen...

 There’s an idea that’s been gaining ground in the tech community lately: Everyone should learn to code. But here’s the problem with that idea: Coding is not the new literacy. W...

 We’re here in Red Hook, Brooklyn for TechCrunch Disrupt NY and Jon Shieber’s beard is getting out of control. It’s getting shaved for the Red Hook Initiative.Use this GoFundMe ...

 If you want to 3D print something who do you call? Step forward 3Dprintler, a startup that has made a search engine for locating 3D printing services in your area. The team was chosen as the wil...

 Uber, the world’s biggest unicorn, got its start as a limo service that typically cost more than traditional taxi services. But as Uber looks to add an ever more mainstream audience global...

 Uber, the world’s biggest unicorn, got its start as a limo service that typically cost more than traditional taxi services. But as Uber looks to add an ever more mainstream audience global...

 Credit card reward programs can be confusing, and each can be totally different from the next. So managing all your points and rewards can quickly become a headache. Enter Birch, a service that ...

 PlaceAVote wants you. The soon-to-launch startup brings together politically-minded users to debate the bills currently before Congress. PlaceAVote, which is competing in Battlefield at Disrupt ...

 Launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016 is a new service called Bark, aimed at parents who want to keep their kids safe online. Unlike traditional “parental control” software o...

 Ritualhas developed a beaded oil capsule vitamin for sustained release from what it says are the best ingredients found throughout the world to nourish your body. The company launched today onst...

 “Cujo protects everything on your network,” the company’s CEO, Einaras Gravrock says, describing his product in the simplest terms ahead of its Disrupt NY launch this week. ...

 Mozilla is bringing back its Test Pilot program for Firefox. The idea behind Test Pilot is to allow users — and Mozilla’s engineers — to test experimental browser features long...

 The 2016 Volvo XC90 T6 R-Design has an all-new look and a powerful 2-liter supercharged engine with 316 horsepower. But this is TechCrunch, where we’re all about that tablet-like center co...

 It’s the year, or perhaps the decade, of the drone, and the popular craft are only getting cheaper, better, and easier to control — but why should drones be limited to the air? The S...

 Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel has agreed to back Trump as a California delegate in Cleveland this summer. Thiel’s level of support for the Donald is unclear but Thiel will be one o...

 The world is familiar with bitcoin being used for many things. Online payments, long-distance remittance, even a substitute for gold, but what about credit? Read More ...

 “Citizen Kane does not come in year two of VR.” Esteemed VR filmmaker/documentarian/founder/CEO Chris Milk took to the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in NY to discuss the limitations an...

 Mark Douglas’s daughter was shopping around for an apartment. But theperson showing apartments just assumed that because she was young she didn’t have the buying power to afford an e...

 Searching for a new job sucks. It sucks even more when you apply for a job you’re super pumped about just to find out that the company doesn’t think you’re cut out for it. #Rud...

 Against a backdrop of a New York investment scene that’s been long on promise and press and somewhat lacking in terms of exits, tech icons Fred Wilson, co-founder of Union Square Ventures,...

 What makes historical sites and areas significant aren’t generally just what you see at face value. Where pamphlets and audio tours fall short is in truly conveying the deep history that l...

 As first reported by the Verge, Amazon today announced that it is opening a new development center for its Prime Air drone delivery program in Graz, Austria. This new team will focus on “s...

 Yahoo-owned blogging platform Tumblr quietly launched a new program today called Tumblr Labs that will allow users to opt-in to testing out new and experimental features on the site. Some of the...

 After rolling out to its Fire tablets, Amazon is ready to bring VoiceViewfunctionality to its line of devoted e-readers. The accessibility feature, targeted at visually impaired users, will be h...

 Adi Sideman‘s live streaming app YouNow currently sits at 77th place in the App Store Top Grossing list, but it’s wildly popular amongyouths; Sideman says 70 percent of users are und...

 The weather’s finally starting to look like spring here in New York City, and it’s time to really put those fitness trackers to good use. For those who rely on a Pebble watch to keep...

 The Senate Commerce Committee sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg asking him to answer questions about Facebook’s Trending Topics feature. Trending Topics displays trending news headlines and...

 Google’s Senior Vice President of Ads & Commerce Sridhar Ramaswamy took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY today for a wide-ranging conversation with our own Anthony Ha.Given the curre...

 Customer support powerhouse Zendesk is broadening its ever-expanding number of support channels today, as the company announced a brand new native channel for customer service over the text mess...

 What does the future of the financial services industry look like? The founders of two startups with two very different answers to that question took the stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016 ...

 Slack is pushing to become the identity layer for all enterprise apps. The workplace chat app has already captured the eyes, minds (and wallets) of the tech world with its deceptively simple, zi...

 For better or worse, Twitter is the home to a lot of harebrained ideas, a great example of which is the @TweetXstitch account. It creates framed representations of some of the dumbest, funniest ...

 One of the startups incubated at startup studio Expa is today taking its next step in developing as a standalone company. Kit, a social network where people can share their favorite products ...

 Despite gripes about the usefulness of Facebook chatbots, “tens of thousands” of developers are building them, Messenger’s head of product Stan Chudnovsky revealed onstage at T...

 YouTube star and Beme co-founder Casey Neistat jaunted on stage slightly late and sporting neon yellow shoes at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC this morning to talk about his app and what it’s like...

 Television and Twitch arethe next steps for the sport of professional drone racing, with Mountain Dew coming on board as the titlesponsor. It’s the first time that drone racing will broadc...

 Last week’s App Store issues caused headaches for users who, for several hours during the morning on May 5th, were unable to surface apps using keyword searches. This affected top apps lik...

 The food industry is going through an interesting shift in the U.S. We’re moving away from an era of processed food and microwave meals, to one where people are increasingly concerned abou...

 The food industry is going through an interesting shift in the U.S. We’re moving away from an era of processed food and microwave meals, to one where people are increasingly concerned abou...

 Get ready for a lot more ads on Instagram and elsewhere that feel ever more personalised. Instagram today is turning up the volume on its ad tech play, courtesy of its owner, Facebook. Today the...

 Facebook announced this morning that its private photo-sharing application, Facebook Moments, is now available in all countries worldwide, thanks the launch of a new, modified version in the EU ...

 Since it launched in 2014, Reserve has often been described as a “dining concierge” — which sounds cool but alsomaybea little vague. Basically, the company combines a flexible ...

 In a wide-ranging conversation at Disrupt today, Mike George, Amazon’s Vice President of Echo, Alexa and Appstore discussed the past and future of the company’s surprise hit home app...

 Insensi has been working hard on a brand new device to make it easier to communicate with other family members. The device, Ily, is a modern take on landline phones that is so easy to use that c...

 While many people in the venture communitybemoanthe near-term fate of the industry, Fred Wilson, the co-founder of Union Square Ventures and one of the architects of the resurgence of New York&#...

 Congressional gridlock can usually be blamed on stubborn Representatives and Senators. But a new string of ransomware attacks on the House of Representatives could stall legislation more effecti...

 Talmon Marcothinks he knows what it takes to beat Uber in the on-demand ride sharing business. TheIsraeli entrepreneur, known for co-founding of messenger service, Viber, is launching Juno in Ne...

 Amazonunveiled its own plans to compete in the user-generated video market with the launch of a new service called Amazon Video Directin a surprise announcement this morning. This service, expla...

 Indiegogo wants to step out of Kickstarter’s shadow by embracing commerce beyond crowdfunding. That means helping sell pre-orders and finished products from entrepreneurs who are done rais...

 FileMaker, a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple, makes it easy for those without any programming knowledge as well asexperienced programmers to build line-of-business apps for the iPhone, iPad, Wi...

 There’s a new corporate venture arm in town.Roughly six months after Hewlett-Packard finalized its division into two companies — Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which focuses on servers,...

 Consolidation isafoot in the online classifieds space as two popular startups born in Barcelona are in advanced talks to merge operations in the U.S.. Wallapop and LetGo — which both provi...

 Only 18 percent of undergraduate computer science degrees and 26 percent of computing jobs are held by women. It’s worse at the top of the corporate world — just 5 percent of leaders...

 After more than a decade spent focused on enterprise networking, San Jose-based Ubiquiti is looking to apply its workplace wireless expertise for a home audience. The company, co-founded by ex-A...

 Walgreens, the largest drug retailing chain in the U.S., has launched a partnership with Mental Health America, and a telehealth company MDLIVE, to encourage people to screen themselves for ment...

 The GoFundMe platform seems to be everywhere these days; my social media feeds are never too many posts away from a campaign from the company, raising funding for a cause or a goal. The appeal i...

 Oakland, Calif. startup MegaBots Inc. has raised $2.4 million in seed funding to bring the robot-fighting stuff of manga and anime to a venue near you. According to MegaBots cofounders, Gui Cava...

 Internet performance management company Dynhas raised $50 million in Series B funding. Dyn was founded back in 2001, with its first product being a DNS service called DynDNS. Over time, it’...

 Internet performance management company Dynhas raised $50 million in Series B funding. Dyn was founded back in 2001, with its first product being a DNS service called DynDNS. Over time, it’...

 ICE Contact takes a fresh take on emergency messaging apps. It uses ‘delayed messages’ to tell your friends something’s gone wrong if you don’t return when you planned to...

 Microsoft announced today that it will shut down MSN China, its web portal for China, early next month. Read More ...

 The Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission announced today that they are teaming up for an inquiry into how security updates to smartphones and other mobile devices a...

 Rancher Labs, a container management platform that supports both Kubernetes and Docker Swarm, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series B round. This new funding round was led by n...

 People love their smartphones but hate poor battery life. We love having access to the world’s information at our fingertips but tire of the need to constantly plug in to the world’s...

 Twenty-five years after the introduction of the World Wide Web, the Information Age is coming to an end. Thanks to mobile screens and Internet everywhere, we’re now entering what I call th...

 Last week, Kuang-Chi, a Shenzhen-based technology conglomerate, launched a $300 million Israel fund in Tel Aviv to tap the country’s smart city know-how, according to the company’s f...

 Virtual reality can deliver on its promise to bring new and immersive experiences to the masses, but the current iteration of hardware will need to evolve first. Read More ...

 A company called Laugh.ly wants to make streaming sets from the best comedians as easy as streaming music on Pandora. Though not yet available to the public, Laugh.ly’s iOS application wil...

 A month before Disrupt, Yu Zhou sent us an email titled, “We want to help solve the Flint water problem.” WaterO’s CEO wasn’t claiming to have the catchall solution to th...

 Most businesses live or die on Google search rankings. If you can’t crack the top few results, it’s almost impossible to consistently drive organic traffic to your site. But how does...

 Artveoli is a biotech startup that’s building an air purifying device that aims to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen in indoor environments by harnessing the photosynthetic properties of ...

 OverNest, a startup that was launched just over a year by several technology industry veterans, announced its first product called GitZero today at the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield com...

 We’re heading into summer, but thechillyrelationship between government bodies and private tech businesses is growing frostier by the day. In the latest development, it has emerged that Tw...

 As self-driving cars are not quite ready yet, bike accidents are still a thing, unfortunately. Sometimes, stupid monkey brains can’t see someone riding a bike. Lumenus wants to fix that wi...

 Facebook says it’s against the company’s curation policy to suppress or prioritize specific political views in its Trending topics, and that it has guidelines in place to preserve co...

 Facebook is now strongly refuting claims that it suppressed conservative Trends after issuing a more vague and indirect PR statement earlier today about having neutrality guidelines. Facebook ha...

 Today, Uber and Lyft took theirride hailing services offline in Austin, Texas, leaving drivers scrambling for other means of making income, and riders stranded or seeking another mode of transpo...

 Today, Uber and Lyft took theirride hailing services offline in Austin, Texas, leaving drivers scrambling for other means of making income, and riders stranded or seeking another mode of transpo...

 There’s no shortage of ways to get a satisfactory caffeine fix these days, and some of them are mighty high-tech. Spinn Coffee’s new machine, demonstrated on stage at Disrupt NY toda...

 Halo Neuroscience wants to build a new category of wearable. Not for passively tracking human activity, as so many existing wearables are, but for actively and positively influencing physical ab...

 What if finding a job were as easy as playing a game? Well Scoutible, thinks its smartphone games have what it takes to assess the aptitude and traits required for certain professions. The compa...

 Practically everyone who has ever considered a tattoo knows the old parental refrain of “you’ll have it forever.” It’s a fairly stark warning tinged with the regret of a ...

 Jeet Raut’s mom was told she no longer had breast cancer. But it turned out to be a false diagnosis and she had to undergo further treatment. She’s okay now, but that medical mistake...

 When B.J. Novak, best known for exec producing, writing and starringas Ryan on “The Office,” teamed up withDev Flaherty to create a mobile application that allowed people to create l...

 The gaming community is one of the most vibrant and powerful groups on the Internet. The power of platforms like Twitch to unite gamers interested in watching streams of other people playing vid...

 Foursquare’s business looks a whole lot different than it used to. New CEO Jeff Glueckand co-founder Dennis Crowley know it — and they still have a plan to hit $100 million in revenu...

 The latest update for Periscope adds drone integration, a search function and an ability tosave live streams. It’s a significant update for asocial network that revolvesentirely around sha...

 The tech industry’s diversity problems are exacerbated by its obsession with genius coders and brilliant founders, Carissa Romero, a partner at the diversity consulting startupParadigm,sai...

 You never know what you’re going to get when you sit down with Parrot CEO Henri Seydoux. The executive is every bit as unpredictable as the company he runs – and just like ParrotR...

 If Nearpod CEO Guido Kovalskys has his way, overhead projectors and PowerPointpresentations will never bore students again. Instead, he wants to see cutting-edge technologies and interactive con...

 Today, onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, Siri creator Dag Kittlaus showed off the first public demo of Viv, an AI virtual system that aims to be “the intelligent interface for everything.&...

 Digital rights group Privacy International has filed a judicial review in the UK High Court of an earlier decision by the oversight body of the UK’s security agencies to sanction the use o...

Image management and distribution platform Musikki raised a first round of funding in 2014 to become “the IMDB of music”. It’s now inked a deal on another $1M in funding from Portuga...

 Siri co-founder and CEO Dag Kittlaus has been quietly working on a much-anticipated voice assistant powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning and integrations with third-party service...

 Siri co-founder and CEO Dag Kittlaus has been quietly working on a much-anticipated voice assistant powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning and integrations with third-party service...

 Today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, we had both the founder of AdBlock Plus Till Faida and Interactive Advertising Bureau CEO Randall Rothenberg on our stage — but not at the same time, mostly...

 Today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, we had both the founder of AdBlock Plus Till Faida and Interactive Advertising Bureau CEO Randall Rothenberg on our stage — but not at the same time, mostly...

 Pivotal filed a Form D last week with the SEC indicating that last week’s $253 million round was actually closer to $653 million. Where did the extra money come from? Well, existing invest...

 Ad blocking software’s usage on the web, and now mobile, has forced the media and publishing industry to look to new revenue models. And one of the most notableplayersin ad blocking is Ger...

 Some exciting news from the John McAfee camp today: America’s favorite (and most entertaining) cybersecurity expert has a new gig! MGT Capital Investments, a publicly traded company that o...

 All the energy for venture funds flows from LPs— the money goes from LPs to partners at funds, which in turn invest in startups.But since the number of IPOs and exits has started to dry up...

 The word AI is increasingly bandied about with notable abandon. And, as I like to say, AI is the promise that keeps on promising. So I’m always encouraged when I see a humble but viable us...

 A panel discussion on finding a balance between security and privacy here at Disrupt New York 2016 touched on various aspects of a complex topic, including strategies for securing customer data ...

 HTC is officially struggling once again. The Taiwan-based tech company’s latest financials show its sales dropped a staggering 64 percent over the past year. Read More ...

 theSkimm founders Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin came onstage at Disrupt NYC 2016 today to tell us how to capture one of the most coveted audiences in media – millennials. Part of it is...

 Giphy co-founder and CEO Alex Chung talked about Giphy’s current state at TechCrunch Disrupt NY. Giphy now serves over a billion GIFs a day and has raised around $75 million. And yet, the ...

 PayPal is changing its purchase protection rules to reflect increasing risks associated with crowdfunding. The new language, which will go into effect in June, state that “payments on crow...

 The launchof the Cloud Native Foundation(CNF) last July caused a few stirs becauseit brought together a very wide range of companies, including AT&T, Box, Cisco, CoreOS, Docker, Google, IBM,...

 TechCrunch is pleased to announce the 20 startups selected to participate in the Disrupt NY 2016 Startup Battlefield. Over the next two days, these companies will compete on tech’s biggest...

 MTV gave us a blast from the past last month when it streamed nonstop Prince videos as a memorial tothe musician’s untimely death. But as it turns out, we willstart seeing a lot more music...

 We’ve got a big day ahead of us, so buckle up!Live from Red Hook in Brooklyn, Disrupt NY is unfolding before our very eyes with badass speakers, awesome demoes and, of course, the world-fa...

 Lending Club shares are down more than 25% — shaving off hundreds of millions of dollars off the company’s roughly $2.5 billion market cap — after it announced its CEO would re...

 Following the launch of a built-in VPN service in its web browser last month, Opera this morning debuted a free and unlimited mobile VPN app for iOS devices. Called Opera VPN, the app is designe...

 CoreOS, the company behind the container-centric CoreOS Linux distribution and Tectonic container management service, today announced that it has raised a $28 million Series B round led by GV, t...

 Bango, the U.K.-based mobile payments company that provides tech to enable consumers to charge app store purchases directly to their phone bill, has acquired the U.S.-based carrier billing servi...

 In another sign of the challenges facing food delivery startups in India, HSBC said in a recent report that it believes Zomato’s valuation is $500 million—half of the $1 billion valu...

 If you use your PayPal account to support a crowdfunding campaign, you can’t rely on its Purchase Protection plan anymore. The payment platform has announced that after June 25, payments m...

Over the past few months I’ve been on a mission: I want to prove that the future is not going to suck. While this project was originally going to end up in a book – and it still will ̵...

 Many artists use as material for art the raw data produced by our societies, seeking innovative means of display or transforming it into a work of art. By blurring boundaries between art and inf...

 If anyone wants to text Ryan Leslie and have a one-on-one conversation with a big-dealrapper, here’s his number: 646-887-6978. That’s not a secret. Leslie shares the number publicly ...

 It’s been a long night at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal. But this time, you couldn’t see anyone waiting for a boat. Instead, the Cruise Terminal hosted a very special competition R...

 Every student has a unique learning style, but it’s tough for teachers to figure out if they learn best through lectures, images, reading, self-directed practice, or group projects. By usi...

 Researchers often need to go beyond Google to find the kind of medical journal articles and flat data files necessary for their work. But many journal articles are locked away in databases like ...

 NYU Shanghai students Sean Kelly and Sam Shi wanted to use VR to help increase access to information. Over the weekend at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in New York, the duo initially looked a...

 An interesting hack presented on stage today at TechCrunch Disrupt New York 2016 is a platform for non-traditional banking services. Called e-susu, the app is designed for people who are involve...

 Between Alexa’s built-in functionality and Skills API, you can now use the platform to do almost anything. Simple voice commands let you do things like order a pizza,send someone money on ...

 Can Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa serve as a matchmaker? That’s the idea behind The Blind Date Club, a project from a team of coders presenting today at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY ...

 Twelve hours into last night’s Disrupt NY Hackathon, Andre Smith still wasn’t sure what he was doing. “People ask me about what my ideas are before the Hackathon,” he exp...

 You have a bunch of ingredients in your fridge, and you don’t know what you want to cook. You just bought an Amazon Echo, dying to figure out some new things to do with it. Well, you can d...

 If it’s your birthday, Mother’s Day or some other significant occasion, it’s likely you’ll receive a barrage of text messages, emails and calls. Even if it’s not a ...

 Makers of an app called Eliza want to make it as easy for people to track their psychological well-being as it is to track their physical fitness.The Eliza app asks users to record a voice memo,...

 Too busy to keep up with your friends? There’s a chat bot for that. Read More ...

 According to the research firm IBISWorld, there are currently more than 65,000 event promoters in the U.S., most of who have limited geographic reach. Even including the industry’s largest...

 Coders stayed up all night at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon this weekend in Brooklyn, New York. With just 24 hours to build something meaningful, it was no easy task. But four gentlemen ...

 One of the biggest limitations of mobile VR at the moment is the lack of input. Google Cardboard is gathering some fixesvia sensors from companieslike PMD, but Angel Say wanted to make that solu...

 At the TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016 hackathon, a team of engineers from MasterCard teamed up to create an app that can help travelers visiting a foreign country better understand what food is bein...

 When you find yourself in an emergency situation, it’s hard to know what to do. And even if you do, panic can take over. 911bot, a product built at the Disrupt Hackathon here in New York, ...

 Sad, mad, glad, confused about the presidential race so far? Well, if you are really lost on who to vote for, IBM may have a solution depending on your mood. Watson Elections, one of the surpris...

 The class of 2015 graduated with an average of $35,000 in student loan debt, the most in history. And yet, executives and hiring managers continue to complain about their inability to fill skill...

 Today voters in Austin, TX went to the polls to weigh inon Proposition 1, an attempt to overturn a bill requiring mandatory fingerprint-basedcriminal background checks for new Uber and Lyftdrive...

 Today voters in Austin went to the polls to weigh inon Proposition 1, an attempt to overturn a bill requiring mandatory fingerprint-basedcriminal background checks for new Uber and Lyftdrivers i...

 Artificial Intelligence is starting to turn invisible from the outside in — and vice versa. The exact effects and workings of AI technologies are becoming more challenging to perceive and ...

 Disrupt NY, welcome to Brooklyn. TechCrunch’s big conference has moved out of Manhattan, into Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood. The hackathon that opens the event got started to 12:3...

 In the 1970s, CFOs sat with CEOs and devised ways for upset consumers to not be able to get compensation easily. They put up automated phone systems and arcane and inflexible policies and rejoic...

 In the 1970s, CFOs sat with CEOs and devised ways for upset consumers to not be able to get compensation easily. They put up automated phone systems and arcane and inflexible policies and rejoic...

 You did it. You secured your funding. Good for you. You tirelessly developed, pitched, sold, maybe even danced a little. Not a song and dance, but a display of passion, commitment and promise. Y...

 We’ve all done it. Cornered at a party by some bore talking about his unimaginative app that will “change the world.” All seemingly convincing excuses to leave have already bee...

 Last week Apple released the latest iteration of its “Shot on iPhone” campaign. The newad was developed for Mother’s Day, and features a slideshow of pictures and videos of mom...

 A longtime colleague and friend of mine used to love to say “Let’s just make this easy for them” whenever we discussed an upcoming meeting. I think I winced the first few times...

 While you were out enjoying your Friday night, NVIDIA kicked off the weekend with a surprise unveil at the DreamHack gaming event in Austin, Texas, debuting its latest gaming GPUs. CEO Jen-Hsun ...

 The Gillmor Gang — John Taschek, Dan Farber, Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, May 6, 2016. Size still matters as we move from primaries to the fall camp...

 It’s easy to see a rainbow when it’s in the distance, but more difficult to discern when you are in its midst. Though it’s still early days, we’re now in the midst of the...

 One of the big challenges with crowdfunding is that once the campaign ends, most crowdfunding platforms wash their hands of the process from there on. FwdForce does things differently. It lets a...

 I’ll be honest: I was kind of nervous about this one. In the run-up to this weekend’s release of Captain America: Civil War, I’d seen some fond recollections of the decade-old ...

 Hard to believe that Disrupt NYis just around the corner! TechCrunch has partnered with an amazing array of sponsorswho promise to make your experience at the conference better and better.Offici...

 “But among them was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a steel sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eyehole through which he could look, and welded to tha...

 Want to go party the night away but not sure where to go? Bar Roulette’s brand new iOS app has you covered. Press a button to summon an Uber, and it will take you to a bar picked from the ...

 West Ham United has become the first football team in the U.K. to embrace e-sports after the club signed pro gamer and World Cup runner-up Sean Allen, aka Dragonn. Read More ...

 “For our group it’s become an interesting case study in how quickly a group can mobilize in the face of an outbreak,” Dr. James Collins explains over the phone. The MIT biomedi...

 Today’s mapping applications are focused on helping you navigate to one spot to the next, or discovering the businesses around you. But they tend to be utilitarian in nature, and not what ...

 Gillmor Gang – Dan Farber, John Taschek, Keith Teare, Robert Scoble, and Steve Gillmor. LIVE recording has concluded for today.Our live chat stream during the show broadcastGillmor Gang...

 Gillmor Gang – Dan Farber, John Taschek, Keith Teare, Robert Scoble, and Steve Gillmor. LIVE recording has concluded for today.Our live chat stream during the show broadcastGillmor Gang...

 Many people scoffed in January 2014 when Cisco CEO John Chambers pegged the “Internet of Everything” as a potential $17 trillion market, five to 10 times more impactful on society th...

 Chinese tech giant Lenovo is investing $500 million in startups after it announced a new fund. Read More ...

 In the list of things that we want science to solve I suspect the creation of a wireless 5.1 speaker system that is easy to use and set up ranks up there in between a cure for shingles and the c...

 The first thing you do upon developing a flexible holographic smartphone display? Fire up a game of Angry Birds, naturally. All the rest of that smartphone functionality can wait until you’...

 Musical.ly, the app that makes it easy to create music videos, is in the process of raisingabout$100 million in funding, at around a$500 million post-money valuation, TechCrunch has learned. The...

 TechCrunch is gearing up for the Disrupt NY Hackathon and conference. This week, the battle between Brazilian authorities and WhatsApp continued, Tesla shared details about how effective its bio...

 These days, you can’t swing a bag of cats around without hitting some sort of social influencer. But how do these people make money from their content? RewardStyle, a Dallas-based startup,...

 Taxi app Uber, which continues to battle regulatory clamp downs and legal confrontations in Europe, has appointed a former VP of the European Union’s executive arm, the European Commission...

 Communities of color don’t have the luxury of such complacency. For too long, unwarranted and unconstitutional surveillance has targeted the most vulnerable Americans — people of col...

 The tech geeks are coming to government. Whether they’re in our cities as Code for America volunteers or part of the federal U.S. Digital Service and 18F, programmers, data scientists and ...

 Google today announced that it is bringing some of its Google Cloud Platform and Google Apps tools a little bit closer together. BigQuery, Google’s serverlessanalytics data warehousingserv...

 Hello startup friends! The TechCrunch team had a great idea — the summer is right around the corner, so we’re going to celebrate Nordic startups with a Meetup + Pitch-Off in Stockhol...

 Can two wearables be better than one? Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) will be presenting some new research next week in which they demonstrate a te...

 I used to answer ever message. Not any more. When Messenger buzzes, now I don’t know if it will be a friend or a bot. Every chime forces me to do a little Turing test in my head. Was I exp...

 The TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon kicks off tomorrow, and we’re honored to welcome the hackathon’s stellar judges. Read More ...

 Amy Ogan, an educational technologist at Carnegie Mellon University, calls herselfa“CMU lifer” and for good reason.She nabbedboth herundergraduate degree and Ph.D from the school. Fo...

 Amazon’s gamestreaming serviceTwitch is getting more social. The new “Friends” feature teased in April has now launched into beta, allowing users to search for, add,and view a ...

 Swedish edtech startup DigiExam, which also has offices in the U.S. and U.K., offers software-as-a-service for academic testing and grading. It enables students to take tests digitally and in tu...

 A new mobile application called Earny has launched with the goal of getting you your money back. That is, the app connects with your email and Amazon accounts in order to track your online purch...

 Alibaba has broken the seal on its startup fund for Hong Kong after it backed its first three companies in undisclosed deals. The companies are unsurprisingly in the e-commerce space: Yeechoo is...

 Amid news that Apple Music is getting a makeover come this summer, Apple today launcheda new plan to boost subscribers to its streaming music service and competitor to Spotify, SoundCloud, Tidal...

 SpaceX successfully launched the Japanese communications satellite, JCSAT-14 on their Falcon 9 rocket at 1:22am EST today from Cape Canaveral, Florida. After the launch, the company soft-landed ...

 The eight-year-old, New York-based venture firmff Venture Capital, has raised $53.8 million for its fourth seed-stage venture fund, according to anSEC filingthat shows fundraising began in the f...

 So, I’m sitting aboard a flight to Boston at the moment. I just finished a bout of midterms at Northwestern University that allegedly went well enough for me to make it through undergrad. ...

 “The key was to create an instrument for all children,” explains Skoog co-inventor Dr. Ben Schgler. “That includes kids with disabilities, whether physical or learning disabili...

 In late January, Nature magazine announced that a computer designed by Google’s DeepMind defeated a human master in the ancient Chinese board game, “Go.” This impressive achiev...

 It takes some serious engineering magic to build low-latency group mobile video chat and simultaneous content viewing. That’s why Sean Parker’s recently relaunched video chat room ap...

 SAP announced a broad partnership with Apple today to bring iOS to SAP’s enterprise customer base. The announcement comes almost two years after Apple made a similar deal with IBM. As with...

 You may remember Launcher as the once-banned iOS widget which Apple booted from theApp Store after its approval, then months later allowed back in. The problem Apple had with the app, seemingly,...

 Anything is possible if we all work together — and no one gets left behind. That is the lesson these tiny “VelociRoACH” robots taught me today. Read More ...

 Imagine for a moment that you’re a fly on the wall of a Samsung executive board meeting. It’s pretty easy to imagine why the Family Hub Refrigerator seemed like a great idea. Someone...

 Quizlet, the makers of popular web and mobile study tools, hired a new CEO, Matt Glotzbach, former Vice President of Product Management at YouTube. Glotzbach led the creation of YouTube’s ...

 TrapTap, which has raised over $200,000 on Kickstarter with about a week to go, alerts drivers to speed traps, school zones, speed zones, and red light cameras by blinking red, green, or blue. B...

 eBay announced today that it is acquiring Expertmaker, a Swedish company that specializes in analysis of big data with a machine-learning twist. Read More ...

 Amazon has hired Xerox PARC employee and AI researcher Ashwin Ram to head up R&D for Alexa, the e-commerce behemoth’s AI-driven virtual assistant. Ram first tweeted about his appointme...

 It’s easy to move your money between banks. What’s annoying is movingyour apps.There’s been a recent explosion of fintech products in spaces likestock trading, wealth managemen...

 Via bills itself as an ‘on-demand transit company’ and in some ways is competing with Uber, specifically within the city carpooling space. Today the company announced $100 million in...

 Netflix announced this morning a new way for consumers to control how much data its app uses when they’re accessing the service by way of a mobile device. In the updated version of the iOS...

 Drawbridge, a startup that helps businesses identify when a single person is using multiple devices, has raised $25 million in Series C funding. Every time I writeabout Drawbridge, I’m con...

 AsSpotify continues to grow its consumer subscription business and expandthe services it provides to artists, one of its side bets is making inroads in anotherroute to music streaming riches. Sp...

 Lo and behold! A new wave of technology is preparing to crash down upon the unsuspecting consumer. Chatbots are surging towards our conversations at breakneck speed! Read More ...

 It seems as though every device manufacturer in the world wants to connect its products to the internet, from mattresses and washing machines to toasters and juicers. There’s so much data ...

 While Siri now lives on the phones of hundreds of millionsof Apple users, just a few peopleare responsibleforhelping get the now ubiquitous assistantoff the ground.One of those peopleis Dag Kitt...

 There’s been an explosion of niche, over-the-top video streaming services in recent months, as consumers cut the cord with traditional pay TV in favor of videos they can watch at any time ...

 The team who brought yougifyoutube.comis back. Having been part ofgifs.comfor a while, their new tool still lets you convert many video formats into gifs but adds a host of functions to your gif...

 Satoshi Nakamoto, 2016 edition, might not be Craig Wright after all. Just a couple of days after claiming that he was the creator of bitcoin, the Australian entrepreneur updated his website with...

 Humanyze, a company that helps businesses better understand how their employees spend their days at work, today announced that it has raised a $4 million Series A round led by Romulus Capital. T...

 Apple’s App Store search is experiencing significant issues this morning, which, if allowed to continue for a longer period of time, could end up impacting app developers’ sales. The...

 I’ve seen the same basic marketing mistake play out at some of the best software companies in the world: If your marketing team needs help from engineering to update their website (publish...

 Engagio, the B2B marketing platform built by Marketo founder Jon Miller, is about a year old and performing well. The company has 36 clients and is operating at $675,000 in recurring annual reve...

 If there’s one thing readers love it’s extra reading apps on their iOS and Android devices. A few years ago there were about a dozen – apps for long-form writing, apps for book...

 Deep Space Industries, the asteroid mining company, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Luxembourg Government to co-fund the development and launch of DSI’s first spacecraft....

 Thingthing has built an iOS app focused on amping up user productivity by decreasing the amount of app switching users have to do by loading productivity-focused additional functionality right i...

 Pivotal has a couple of new friends with big wallets. Today it announced that Ford and Microsoft were joining EMC, VMware and GE as investment partners on a massive $253 million Series C investm...

 Azimowas oncein talks to be acquired by WhatsApp and Messenger owner Facebook. And while may not have goneanywhere,today itis announcing fundingfromanother big tech company in possession of amaj...

 FOX’s“Xploration Outer Space”showis teaming up with Arlington, Va.-based ZERO-G Corporation,which operates weightless flights from U.S. airports. The reason they’re colla...

 Periscope added its biggest missing feature today in a move that could make it more palatable to brands and social stars, and help it compete with Facebook Live. You can now permanently save rep...

 Periscope added its biggest missing feature today in a move that could make it more palatable to brands and social stars, and help it compete with Facebook Live. You can now permanently save rep...

 Slack released its second annual transparency report today, revealing that it has received a grand total of one government request for user data. Just one. The number is somewhat remarkable when...

 There has been no shortage of thoughtful articles exploring a bubble in technology. I would argue that the world has already been transformed, and there is no bubble in the purest sense. Instead...

 If you’ve ever wondered who exactly is signing up for all these free learn-at-home coding classes and tutorial websites, Free Code Camp (which is one of them) has kindly surveyed 15,624 us...

 Oculus is bringing a new COO aboard as it perhaps looks to double down on tightening things up logistics-wise. Fitbit COOHans Hartmann will be jumping shipand joiningthe virtual reality company ...

 Fitbit is not having a good day, with the stock crashing more than 11 percent after reporting its first-quarter results.Here’s the rub: its guidance for the second quarter came in light.Ve...

 The best teachers see how each student requires a unique inspiration and learning style. Yet with classroom sizes ballooning and teachers underpaid, there’s no way for students to get the ...

 It’s another victory for the machines: a robotic surgical system outperformed humans and robot-assisted human operators in a soft-tissue procedure, bringing us that much closer to automate...

 Tesla says it is expecting to hit its goal of producing 500,000 cars annually — including the Model S, Model X and Model 3 — two years earlier than expected, meeting that expectation...

 After dedicating tons of energy (and loads of bandwidth) to live streaming sporting events in stereoscopic VR, NextVR is moving to its next major market: live virtual reality concerts. NextVR ha...

 One of my seed portfolio founders called for advice recently. He’d raised a Series A from a Tier 1 VC and was ahead of plan, but his investor suddenly wanted him to cut spending: on SEM, o...

 Farfetch is growing like crazy as the company just secured $110 million. The London-based startup has become a dominant e-commerce player in the fashion space. Farfetch runs a marketplace that c...

 Think of EchoPixel’s tech like InnerSpace but instead of actually minimizing scientists and shooting them into your body to find disease, the medical imaging startup lets doctorspinpoint p...

 Uber announced today that it has assembled an advisory board from around the globe to help guide the company on public policy as it continues to expand into new markets. The board includes membe...

 New York-based Teachable has raised $2 million in a seed round of venture funding to help instructors of anything set up their own, branded storefronts for selling courses and connecting with le...

 New York-based Teachable has raised $2.5 million in a seed round of venture funding to help instructors of anything set up their own branded storefronts for selling courses and connecting with l...

 Sometimes you see an application of technology that’s so innovative and helpful that you can’t believe it exists in this age of narcissistic and short-sighted startups. Spirocall, a ...

 Today, GoPro released some pretty incredible footage of a suborbital rocket launch that climbed to 396,405 feet at speeds as high as Mach 5.5. Check out the very real footage below.The launch in...

 Instagram had confirmed earlier this year that it was developing business profiles – basically, the Instagram equivalent to a Facebook Brand Page. Now, we’re able to see what these p...

 Google is launching Slides Q&A today, a new feature forSlides, itsPowerPoint competitor. With Slides Q&A, presenters can get questions and general feedback from their audience — an...

 Apple has tapped Nest’s former tech chief Yoky Matsuoka to head up health projects at the company, according to Fortune. TheMacArthur genius award winner comes with an impressive resume as...

 Technical recruiting platform Triplebyte, which has raised $3 million in funding, just launched its engineer genome project to foster software-driven, intelligent job-matching. “We figured...

Webinars… who needs ’em? Apparently lots of companies. That’s why Goldman Sachs’ Private Capital Investing Group is investing $25 million in the cash-positive business of the o...

 Concerns have been raised about the scope of a data-sharing agreement between Google-owned DeepMind and the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) after it was revealed the agreement covers ac...

 There were plenty of questions surrounding the actual real world functionality of EHang’s impressive human-sized drone when it made its debut on the CES floor back in January.Was the Chine...

 Apple Music has been much maligned for its confusing interface which reviewers have referred to as cluttered and difficult to navigate, “a confusing mess,”and “so crammed with ...

 With the rise and rise of messaging (I have at least six messaging apps on my phone and counting), tech companies are piling into the space. Many are trying to shoe-horn ‘chat bots’ ...

 For as long as I can remember, technology has been seen as a panacea that will finally make education scalable beyond the one to few model employed in the classroom. As a result there seems to b...

 Rebagg, an online resell market for designer handbags, has raised $8 million in Series A funding to continue the pace of rapid growth.There are a lot of designer clothing and handbag resellers o...

 Every startup that gives employees option grants has to comply with 409A, a section of the U.S. tax code that was established in late 2004 and basically states that a company has to pay tax on s...

 This morning at the Hulu Upfronts in New York, Hulu CEOMike Hopkins confirmed the recentreport from The Wall St. Journalwhich indicated that the company was developing a live television streamin...

 This morning at Hulu’s Upfront presentations in New York, the streaming service announced it has grown its subscriber base 30 percent year-over-year, and will reach 12 million subscribers ...

 Digital content is one of the most consumed “goods” in the online marketplace. However, buyers and sellers still can’t seem to agree on a fair price for these goods. Read More ...

 SigFox, the French startup that is building dedicated cellular networks forInternet of Things objects from connected smokealarms and refrigerators to interactive billboards, traffic systems and ...

 Beginning life as a Kickstarter campaign back in 2014, the team at Roost found a compelling, low-cost backdoor into the world of smart smoke alarms dominated by the team at Nest. Roel Peeters an...

 Club W, a wine club startup based in Los Angeles, is rebranding as Winc. The team has also raised an additional $17.5 million in funding co-led by the Beijing-based Shining Capital and existing ...

 Club W, a wine club startup based in Los Angeles, is rebranding as Winc. The team has also raised an additional $17.5 million in funding co-led by the Beijing-based Shining Capital and existing ...

 VTS, a commercialleasing and asset management platforms for landlords and brokerages, today announced that it has raised a $55 million Series C funding round led by Insight Venture Partners. Pre...

 Choosing this year’s Disrupt NY Startup Battlefield winners will be a tough job. There is an exceptionally strong and unique group of young companies competing in Startup Battlefield next ...

 Amidst the seeming chaos of social media, brands need the ability to discover valuable social media content, the metrics and visualize it. At the same time they need to build and launch campaign...

 Charge is a new mobile internet provider who aims squarely at the generation of people who prefer to tap on their mobile devices rather than talk into them. Next week, the company is launching a...

 I first saw the ROLI Seaboard GRAND backstage at a show during SXSW 2013. Someone had tipped me that somestartup was showing off a strange new piano that let the player bend itskeys likea guitar...

 Passport Inc. raised $8 million in a Series B round of funding to help cities make parking and transportation systems easier for people to use, and harder for them to abuse.MK Capital led the in...

 The problem with most holiday search engines is that accessibility features are either listed in terms too generic to be entirely reliable or useful, or not listed at all. Enter U.K. startup Acc...

 New data has suggested that Ola, the $5 billion valued taxi on-demand service, may be more than twice as large as Uber in India. Read More ...

 Opera looks to be throwing the ad industry a bit of a bone on the ad-blocking front by saying it wants to work with the IAB on a standardization effort around so-called Lean ads, perhaps with a ...

 Opera today announced that its built-in ad blocker, which was previously only available in the experimental developer release channel, is now coming to all of its desktop users. In addition, it ...

 Quantum computing is still very much in the early research stage, but IBM is hoping to accelerate the progress around it by making a quantum computer available to researchers as a cloud service....

 Astronomers are getting closer to finding Earth’s twin in the universe. NASA announced that three planets with sizes and temperatures similar to Earth and Venus have been discovered orbiti...

 Asia-Pacific leads the global digital infrastructure as home to half of the world’s mobile phone subscribers and the largest number of wireless Internet connections. However, the region al...

 If you need (or just want) to get out of the lease on your apartment, a startup called Flip can help you do it — and you might even make money in the process. The company launched back in ...

 Access to WhatsApp has been restored in Brazil, roughly 24 hours after telecom providers began blocking the messaging app in response to a court order. A judge in the Brazilian state of Sergipe ...

 There’s a lot to like about Google’s own self-driving cars, but if you’ve got kids, you’d need a fleet just to get them to the soccer game and back. That, presumably, is ...

 There’s a lot to like about Google’s own self-driving cars, but if you’ve got kids, you’d need a fleet just to get them to the soccer game and back. That, presumably, is ...

 Another day, another confirmation that the shadowy figure called Satoshi Nakamoto is indeed Craig “Verbal” Wright. This time Wright himself claims that he will offer “extraordi...

 With the exponential growth in technology, the world has seen not only profound change in various industries, but also a fundamental shift in the structure to our global society. To unwrap this ...

 Adobe today announced that it plans to acquire Livefyre, the service that’s probably best known for its online commenting system. On top of this service, the company also offers a number o...

 Bowers & Wilkins, an audio gear brand that has been familiar to millions for decades, is being bought out by EVA Automation, a two-year-old company that has never released a product. Yet the...

 The local transit app Moovit announced today that it will soon be integrated with the ride-sharing app Uber in 131 cities in 22 countries. This is kind of the chocolate and peanut butter of urba...

 Prete is a new blowout startup launching today in San Francisco and Los Angeles that wants to hook you up withunlimited hair styling. No cuts, color or anything else, just as many blowouts as yo...

 Google today madeHTTPS connections the default for all of the sites on its Blogspotdomain. Google first enabled HTTPS for Blogspot last September, but at the time, it was an opt-in feature. Star...

 Spotify is one of the more popular music streaming apps, but it’s not necessarily the most beautifully designed (that was long-lost Rdio, unfortunately).Navigating through the various sect...

 Disrupt NY is right around the corner. The event starts on May 9th and we’re delighted to reveal the agenda. The lineup is stellar and for the first time, we will be hosting Disrupt NY in ...

 Despite the headlines today, Uber says it does not have plans to nix surge pricing in the U.S. It did away with surge in Delhi, India, but has now reinstated the feature there as well. An earlie...

 What’s more lucrative than a video ad? Multiple videos in a single ad. To help businesses show different sides of their products in vivid motion, today Instagram is launching video ad caro...

 Designer Fund, a San Franciscooutfit that looks to invest in seed-stagestartups that featuredesigners on their founding teams, has raised $20 million in funding from unnamed individual investors...

 The makers of a virtual nutritionist app, PlateJoy, have partnered with Instacart to offer same-day delivery of the foods that they recommended to users through the PlateJoy app A subscription t...

 Agiant war room of diversity advocates in Silicon Valley has formed under the name Project Include. The effort consists of former Reddit interim CEO Ellen Pao, Pinterest engineer Tracy Chou, Kap...

 Microsoft today announced that it has acquired Solair,an Italy-based IoT service that was founded in 2011 (and not the U.S.-based company that makes retractable awnings). Solair already used Mic...

 Some startups raise a lot of money with much fanfare before they’ve ever shipped a product, butsome grow under the radar, building something that clicks, and then slowly amassing users and...

 While there are a number of mobile apps that serve as a panic button of sorts – alerting friends or family when you feel you’re in danger – last year’s TechCrunch Disrupt...

 This year’s TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon is set to be the best yet. We’re a week away from the main event and are giddy with excitement.Throughout the week, we’ll be releasi...

 A Brazilian judge has denied an injunction against a countrywide ban filed by messaging app WhatsApp, according to local media reports. Read More ...

 Twitter hasannounced a new feature designed to make it easier for users to find interesting and relevant accounts to follow on its service: a new “Connect” tab. Available on both iOS...

 It’s that time again. TechCrunch is headed to Austin and Seattle for the 2016 TC Meetup + Pitch-off. If you were looking to pitch your startup to the TechCrunch team, local VCs and your lo...

 Electricity is ambient. It’s all around us. We turn on lights and plug in devices without even thinking about the complex electrical grid that supplies us with juice at will. It’s be...

 Twilio, the cloud-based communications platform, announced today that it is partnering with Virgil Security to enable developers to build strong encryption into their messaging services. Just li...

 Perhaps you missed the excitement in amongst the deluge of gadget news that is the International Consumer Electronics Show, butback in January Chinese handset maker Huawei introduced this pair o...

 With all of Giphy’s integrations with chat platforms, it was only a matter of time before the betaworks-backed GIF platform launched its own keyboard. World, welcome Giphy Keys into the mi...

 GoPro is going more mobile. Today the company announced two new mobile apps — one creates GoPro-ish videos automatically and the other gives the user more control. Both are free and both a...

 Postmates to date has scored deals with a number of high-profile retailers and restaurants, includingApple,Walgreens, Starbucks, Chipotle, and7-Eleven. Today, it’s expanding its reach agai...

 If you listened carefully to business news last week you could hear the sound of a giant tree falling in a quiet forest. It happened when Rovi bought TiVo for $1.1 billion. It was a merger of co...

 Shenzhen Valley Ventures in Palo Alto, Calif. is launching an incubator for hardware startups in partnership with one of its largest limited partners, Zowee, a factory that works with hardware g...

 Uber wants to be your car, and the billboard. It’sturning its frequently used app into a surface for external commercepromotions in hopes of rewarding users with special deals. If Uber wil...

 In 2013 Lara Setrakian was fed up with the news business. A longtime correspondent for both ABC News and Bloomberg Television, Setrakian had reported in and on the Middle East for years. From th...

 The increase of smartphone ownership in India is fueling the rise of mobile wallets in India. One company leading the charge, MobiKwik, has topped up its own funds with a $50 million Series C ro...

 Coffin Dodgers is named for the slang expression for the geriatric. It’s a racing game where instead of motorbikes, cars or skateboards, you are on a race against death on mobility scooter...

 “There are not a lot of toys targeted at children with special needs,” saysLadislas de Toldi. “Because of their special needs, it’s harder for them to focus and progress....

 By the time the Form 1 began shipping to Kickstarter backers, the market was already flooded with countless 3D printers built around the same basic plastic extruding technology.But Formlabs offe...

 Google’s charitable arm is today announcing several grants and donations aimed at helping the residents of Flint, Michigan respond to their ongoing water crisis. With a total amount of $25...

 It’s May, and students everywhere are making last-minute preparationsfor the prom and eagerly watching the clocks tick down to summer break. But HP’s here to remind you that back-to-...

 Zooz’s series C round more than doubles the total amount invested in the company to $40.5 million, raised in four rounds. The latest round included Fang Fund, iAngels, Kreos Capital and ex...

 Ad blockers are often painted as the enemy of online publishers, but sometimes things are more complicated. AdBlock Plus, for example, just announced that they’re working with startup Flat...

 Alternative mobile OS maker, Jolla, whose Sailfish licensing business aims to compete with Google’s Android platform by offering OEMs the ability to tailor the mobile platform to their nee...

 A 2014 change to housing law in Berlin, aimed at protecting property supply and combating surgingrent rates, came into effect on May 1— banning short term tourist rentals of entire apartme...

 Fashion retailer Asos already has its own corporate venture arm, the aptly-named Asos Ventures. And now the publicly listed U.K. company is getting into to the startup accelerator business with ...

 Uber today expanded its partnership with Alipay, a Chinese payment app owned by Alibaba that boasts 450 million active users. The partnership will allow Chinese travelers to pay their Uber fares...

 WhenCasey Neistat launched his new social networking app Beme last Summer,nothing was really ready yet. The product was underdeveloped, the team understaffed, and users weren’t exactlysure...

 Lead generation has come a long way. The way in which leads were developed during Roman times was through word of mouth. As technology advances, the way in which leads are acquired also changes....

 More changes at publishing platform Medium: Evan Hansen, who’s been overseeingthe company’s editorial strategy, is departing. Hansen joined Medium three years ago. (He was previously...

 A monthly roundup of stories on African tech companies. Read More ...

 What are you planning on doing this summer? Probably not designing a revolutionary new bioreactor in which a thousand “mini-brains” can undergo testing. You’re probably not des...

 A wave of venture investment into new manufacturing startups looks set to transform American manufacturing. While the foundations for these companies may have been laid in cities like Boston, Ne...

 A key tenet of e-commerceis the recommendationengine. If implemented correctly, itcan bea major sales driver for online retailers.However, most sites normally just implement a basic engine that ...

 Now that SoundCloud has inked licensing deals with all the big music rights holders, the startupis wasting no time rolling out subscription servicesand advertising to a wider number of markets t...

 Tesla today shared detailsof how effective its particulate filters are. Spoiler alert: They areso good, not only do they clean up the air inside the car, they make the world outside the car clea...

 If you’ve ever forged a connection with someone because you had the same favorite movie or TV show or book, a new startup called Tastemates has built a social network around that experienc...

 Michael Dell today revealed the new names, and yes we are talking multiple names, for the artist formerly knownas theDell-EMC deal. EMC will be deprecatedfor the main brandingDell Technologies, ...

 Shyp has finished rolling out a new packaging pricing model to all its customers that includes variable shipment pricing based on the packaging that the companyprovides. Shypis still playing aro...

 The online textbook service Chegg today announced that it has acquired Imagine Easy Solutionsfor $42 million. Imagine Easy is the company behind online bibliography and research tools like EasyB...

 While many factors are driving the tipping point in the online distribution of insurance, the thread that ties it all together is simple: changing demographics. Insurance companies cannot expect...

 Efficient growth has always been rewarded by the market, but as cash becomes more constricted, particularly at the late stage, this efficiency will become more and more important. Read More ...

 Smartphone users shoot a lot of video, but turning those videos into something special still takes a lot of work. A newly launched app called Videorama aims to solve that problem by offering a p...

 Less than a month after Uber settled two class-action lawsuits in California and Massachusetts, another one has popped up. This time, thesuit pertains to all current and former Uber drivers in t...

 Connected cars can talk to each other (vehicle-to-vehicle, or V2V), and they’re starting to be able to talk to the city they’re driving around (vehicle-to-infrastructure, or V2I). Th...

 Most fitness trackers are all about numbers. How many steps did you take? How many flights of stairs did you climb? How many projected calories did you burn? But there is one number (an importan...

 WhatsApp, Facebook’s messaging service that recently rolled out end-to-end encryption to its users, will be blockedin Brazil for 72 hours, starting this afternoon.A Brazilian judge ordered...

 Google has acquired Synergyse, a Toronto-based interactive training service for Google Apps for Work that was launchedby a group of former Google employees in 2013.As part of this acquisition, G...

 Productivity app maker EasilyDo is best known for its smart assistant for iPhone that lets you do things like organize your travel plans, track shipments, update your contacts, create personaliz...

 Elvis Costello once famously said that writing about music was like “dancing about architecture” — or maybe it was Martin Mull or Laurie Anderson or Frank Zappa, but that’...

 I dare say that nobody wants to be the target of malicious hackers, and certainly doesn’t want private data out there in the hands of unknown third parties. As individuals, we keep secret ...

 Sling TV may have some new competition. According to a Sunday night report from The WSJ, Hulu is nearing agreements to license channels from its co-owners Walt Disney Co. and 21st Century Fox, i...

 So we probably have our Satoshi. The Economist, GQ, and the BBC have all posted semi-breathless stories on their personal interactions with Craig Steven Wright, an Australian computer scientist ...

 Last week Oracle bought Textura for $663 million, giving the database giant a vertical construction solution in the cloud. Today it bought Opower for $532 million giving it a vertical utilities ...

 The next version of SQL Server, Microsoft’s flagship database product, will launch on June 1, the company announced today. The release follows Microsoft’s usual round of public previ...

 Vimeo, which has been moving over the past several months to further invest in its orginal content and creator community, announced this morning it has acquired VHX, a company providing a platfo...

 It’s safe to say that everyone can get down with food. That’s probably why the tech industry has seen so many startups — some more successful than others — attempting to ...

 The tech community is currently poring scorn on the news that Australian entrepreneur Craig Wright has revealed himself to be Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. They say the story does not add up...

 Grab, Uber’s rival in Southeast Asia, has expanded its C-level team after hiring its first CFO. Linda Hoglund has joined the company from HOOQ, the Singapore-based video streaming company ...

 Android commands more than 80 percent of the mobile OS market share globally, and just less than 60 percent in the U.S. But you wouldn’t know it here in Silicon Valley — almost every...

 The fact that plain passwords are no longer safe to protect our digital identities is no secret. For years, the use of two-factor authentication (2FA) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) as a ...

 This election cycle, the tech elite are almost exclusively backing liberals: Tesla’s Elon Musk donated to Hillary Clinton, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg gave handsomely to the San Franc...

 The future of apps is apps. Read More ...

 London-based SAM Labs just announced that it raised $4.5M from a group of investors led by Imperial Ventures. In addition, the round was padded out with smart money from a number of angels speci...

 Twitter’s stock is cratering this weekfollowing its earnings report on Tuesday, down around 15% and shaving more than a billion dollars off its market cap — again. This isn’t e...

 The day I met Keith Block at the Salesforce World Tour in Boston he was relaxing in a suite at the Heinz Convention Center, a man at ease with his considerable responsibilities as vice chairman,...

 There has been a huge disconnect between private and public company valuations over the last few years. This isn’t the first time I’ve said it. It probably won’t be the last. D...

 After 4 billion years of evolution by one set of rules, our species is about to begin evolving by another. Overlapping and mutually reinforcing revolutions in genetics, information technology, a...

Former Clinton Administration staffer Dan Rosenthal says entrepreneurs need to think about local regulations and policy landscape. Read More ...

 Are you looking to clean out your closet and make money while doing it? You no longer have to haul your used items to a consignment shop. A number of apps have made selling used things easier th...

 From programs that help the visually impaired and safety features in cars that detect large animals to auto-organizing untagged photo collections and extracting business insights from socially s...

 The fascination and rapid development of portable vaporizers for ground, plant-based material is hard to ignore, if you’re not living under a rock. Read More ...

 Prompted by the ongoing refugee crisis affecting much of the western world, new initiatives have emerged to provide solutions to the many challenges facing the beleaguered masses. In a sea of cl...

 While Snapchat Stories may be the feature that brings the company the revenue model it needs to validate its $16 billion valuation, and while the ephemeral messaging feature may be what initiall...

 I’ve spent the last week trying to pretend the new Kindle Oasis is the same as reading a real book. It’s not. I love books. I love Kindle’s e-readers and was hoping this was th...

 The Gillmor Gang — John Taschek, Frank Radice, John Taschek, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, April 29, 2016. Apple dips and Twitter flutters, but the Gang won’t...

 Take Back the Tech! (TBTT) is an expanding group of women active in 16 countries. They are set on reclaiming online space, making the net safer and more representative, as well as a place for wo...

 I hear a lot of horror stories about investors. Many are misunderstandings. Some are just outright false. Then there are those that are true. Sadly, there are a lot of those. This kills companie...

 With yet another push from President Obamato revive initiatives to develop “smart gun” technology, it’s time to once again revisit the issue. The most common question I got in ...

 “How long will it take?” demand managers, clients, and executives. “It takes as long as it takes,” retort irritated engineers. They counter: “Give us an estimate!&#...

 Have you ever wished you could stand on deck as a 160-foot rocket lands an arm’s length away from you, after a short trip into space? Yeah, me too, but perhaps watching it on VR is a the s...

 As instant messaging and voice control takes off, it increasingly seems that apps are not the solution for everything. Read More ...

 Digital media company Issuu has been trying to offer a better way to present content online. Now it’s a promising a better way for teams to work together on creating that content too, with...

 Big, complex things running on tiny things is a common theme this week. Earlier we had a hack that put Counter-Strike on Android Wear, and today some maniac has installed Windows 95 on his Apple...