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CardUp founder and CEO Nicki Ramsay (front, second from right) with her team CardUp, a Singapore-based startup that enables users to make large, recurring payments by credit card even to recipients that don’t accept cards, has raised $2.2 million SGD (about $1.7 million) led by Sequoia India and SeedPlus. This is CardUp’s first institutional investment […]

Tesla has shed some more light on the fatal crash and fire involving a Model X car last week. In a blog post tonight, Tesla said it’s not yet clear what happened in the time leading up to the accident. Tesla also said it does not yet know what caused it. Tesla did note that, […]

If you thought the Oracle v. Google saga was over at last, we have some bad news for you. On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit breathed new life into the case, ruling that Google violated copyright law when it used Oracle’s Java APIs to create the Android mobile operating system. […]

Oscar Health, the startup run by Josh Kushner (yes, brother of Jared), has raised $165 million at a reported valuation of $3.2 billion, CNBC’s Christina Farr reports. The funding comes from Alphabet’s Capital G investment company and Verily life sciences corporation, Founders Fund, and others. Oscar’s goal is to outpace existing industry-leading insurers including UnitedHealth […]

Life360, the app for networking families together via mobile devices, has acquired the developer team behind PathSense, responsible for the creation of a location-based mobile application toolkit, to build out its location based offerings. The San Francisco-based Life360 will see all of PathSense’s employees joining the its staff, while the tech that PathSense developed will […]

Today’s Apple event in Chicago was about more than just showing off new hardware and software in the classroom — the company was reasserting itself as a major player in education. The category has long been a lynchpin in Apple’s strategy — something that Steve Jobs held near and dear. Any ’80s kid will tell […]

Take a break from the dumpster fire that is 2018. This electric Mini will make you smile. Built as a show piece, the car features an electric powertrain in a restored 1959 Mini Cooper. Of course it’s red with a white stripe, and of course, there are rally lights across the grill. This is how […]

Stephen Colbert will get an extra segment on his show tonight, funded by a sponsorship from Google. Variety reports that CBS and Google have struck a deal that will reduce commercial time on Colbert’s Late Show. He’ll fill that extra time with a new segment (it’s not clear where it will fall during the show, […]

Uber, after suspending its self-driving car operations in all markets following a fatal crash, has decided not to reapply for its self-driving car permit in California. Uber’s current permit in California expires March 31. “We proactively suspended our self-driving operations, including in California, immediately following the Tempe incident,” an Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Given this, […]

As companies gather increasing amounts of data, they face a choice over bottlenecks. They can have it in the storage component or the backend compute system. Some companies have attacked the problem by using GPUs to streamline the back end problem or Flash storage to speed up the storage problem. Pure Storage wants to give […]

If this is the future of hybrids, I’m all in. Volkswagen just took the cover off its Atlas Cross Sport SUV, which features a plug-in hybrid drive powertrain that features two electric motors and a V6 engine. Together, they produce 355 horsepower. And it looks great, too. The inside and out of this concept is […]

Apple didn’t livestream this morning’s education event at Lane Tech High School in Chicago, so reading along live was the next best thing. Thankfully, for those who weren’t crammed into the auditorium seating with the rest of us, the whole shebang is now online and viewable through Apple’s site. The event was, as expected, focused […]

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang faced a number of questions regarding Uber’s recent self-driving test vehicle accident, in which an SUV equipped with Uber’s autonomous technology struck and killed 49-year old Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona. Earlier on Tuesday, Reuters broke the news that Nvidia was suspending its own autonomous testing programs around the world. Huang […]

There’s currently a shortage of Nvidia GPUs and Nvidia’s CEO pointed to Etherium distributed ledgers as the cause. Today at Nvidia’s GTC conference he spoke to a group of journalists following his keynote address and addressed the shortage. Huang simply stated that Nvidia is not in the business of cryptocurrency or distributed ledgers. As such, […]

Just a day after General Catalyst, the 18-year-old venture firm, revealed plans in an SEC filing to raise a record $1.375 billion in capital to shower on startups, another firm that we’d said was likely to file any second has done just that. According to a fresh SEC filing, Lightspeed Venture Partners of Menlo Park, […]

The smash dockless scooter rental startup, Bird, is expanding beyond its Southern California nest with a new rollout in San Francisco, San Jose, Calif. and Washington, DC, the company said today. And as his company makes its migration across the country, Bird chief executive Travis VanderZanden is determined not to make the same mistakes that […]

Ahead of Equal Pay Day on April 10, Lyft is committing to conducting yearly equal pay audits to ensure there are no pay discrepancies across race and gender. Last year, Lyft said it found pay discrepancies for less than 1 percent of its employees, and spent about $100,000 to adjust their salaries accordingly. Lyft has […]

Rumors of a new ASIC mining rig from Bitmain have driven Ethereum prices well below their one-week high of $585. An ASIC – or Application-specific integrated circuit – in the cryptocurrency world is a chip that designers create for the specific purpose of mining a single currency. Early Bitcoin ASICs, for example, drove adoption up […]

Today at Nvidia’s GTC conference the company unveiled a wild technology demo and it’s straight out of Black Panther. Simply put, a driver using virtual reality was remotely controlling a car in real life. “He’s not with us,” Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, said pointing the driver on the stage. “He’s looking at this virtual […]

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed a forthcoming generation of the company’s self-driving Drive PX supercomputers for use in vehicles – the successor to the current Drive Pegasus, which will be called the Drive Orin and which will use essentially two Drive Pegasus computers combined into one, much smaller packages. This should ramp up the self-driving […]

Well, at least it’s not another subscription service. Turner today announced the forthcoming launch of its new live sports streaming service, Bleacher Report Live, which is expected to roll out in April. The service, which can also be referred to as B/R Live, takes its name from the popular online destination for sports fans that […]

This has been a long time coming, but during his GTC keynote, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang today announced support for the Google-incubated Kubernetes container orchestration system on Nvidia GPUs. The idea here is to optimize the use of GPUs in hyperscale data centers — the kind of environments where you may use hundreds or thousands […]

Google will be acquiring Tenor, which powers a variety of GIF keyboards on phones and messengers like Facebook Messenger, the companies announced today. Tenor will continue to operate as a separate brand within Google, the company said in a blog post. Tenor has increasingly positioned itself as a search company, using that as a metric […]

Nvidia and Arm today announced a partnership that’s aimed at making it easier for chip makers to incorporate deep learning capabilities into next-generation consumer gadgets, mobile devices, and Internet of Things objects. Mostly, thanks to this partnership, artificial intelligence could be coming to doorbell cams or smart speakers soon. Arm intents to integrate Nvidia’s open-source […]

Nvidia has taken the AutoSIM virtual environment for testing autonomous cars it originally showed off at CES, combined it with its Drive Pegasus AI in-car computer and created a virtual testing and validation loop that can handle billions of virtual driving miles in hyperrealistic environments, with the ability to model edge cases and recreate conditions […]

When it comes to augmented reality technologies, visuals always seems to be a pretty essential part of most people’s definitions, but one startup is offering an interesting take on audio-based AR that also calls on computer vision. Even without integrated displays, glasses are still an important part of the company’s products which are designed with […]

After rocketing to a $250 million valuation in 2015 amid a massive hype cycle for on-demand companies, on-demand startup Shyp is shutting down today. CEO Kevin Gibbon announced that the company would be shutting down in a blog post this afternoon. The company is ending operations immediately after, like many on-demand companies, struggling to find […]

Google today announced that Google Maps is getting support for 39 new languages. The newly supported languages are Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bosnian, Burmese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, Georgian, Hebrew, Icelandic, Indonesian, Kazakh, Khmer, Kyrgyz, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Mongolian, Norwegian, Persian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Uzbek, […]

Apple’s ebook creation tools – first launched in 2012 – have long played an interesting if minor role in the ecosystem. While Amazon has the indie book world sewn up with Kindle Direct Publishing, the desktop-based iBooks Author has always been the multimedia alternative and a favorite for folks creating one-off texts. Although there are […]

With the explosion of streaming services now available, it’s becoming more difficult to figure out not just what movie or TV show to watch next, but where you can actually watch it. Google today is rolling out its solution to this problem with a significant revamp of its Google Play Movies & TV app and […]

Lytro, the light-field imaging startup focused on virtual reality, is shutting down. In a blog post, Lytro said it’s going to begin winding down and will not be taking on any new productions or providing new services. Earlier this month, we heard Google would be acquiring Lytro in an “asset sale.” Word on the street […]

Nvidia is temporarily stopping testing of its autonomous vehicle platform in response to last week’s fatal collision of a self-driving Uber car with a pedestrian. TechCrunch confirmed this with the company, which offered the following statement: Ultimately [autonomous vehicles] will be far safer than human drivers, so this important work needs to continue. We are […]

Most investors don’t like to admit that they’re chasing the latest buzzwords or fads or hot companies, but a new firm called Bedrock Capital says it’s on a mission to do the exact opposite — founders Geoff Lewis and Eric Stromberg told me they’re searching for “narrative violations.” So rather than just writing a check […]

Amid a flurry of educational-related announcements at Apple’s press event this morning, the company also unveiled a new feature in its learn-to-code app Swift Playgrounds, that will help teach a younger generation of iOS developers how to build AR-enabled apps. Apple has been heavily pushing augmented reality and its ARKit for developers, as the technology […]

Surprise! You don’t have to pay $5,000 or more to get a Space Gray Magic Mouse 2, Magic Keyboard or Magic Trackpad 2. You can now buy those devices separately. And because this is Apple, you’ll have to pay more to get the dark items. The Magic Mouse 2 costs $79 in silver and $99 […]

The United States National Transportation Safety Board is conducting an investigation into a fatal car crash involving a Tesla Model X car. On March 23, a Tesla car crashed into a freeway divider, killing the driver, causing a fire and shutting down two lanes of Highway 101 near Mountain View, Calif. It’s not clear if […]

Udacity is hosting its annual Intersect conference this week, and the online learning platform is introducing some new programs and features for students at the event. Those include two new ways for students to practice and hone their practical skills – in both real and virtual worlds. For robotics education, Udacity is teaming up with […]

Udacity is intruding three dedicated new nanodegrees (its own accelerated learning program) in the field of artificial intelligence, which will become part of its new School of AI. AI has been a subject Udacity has taught nearly since its inception, beginning over five years ago, and the field has changed a lot since. It’s seen […]

Braintree, the division of PayPal that provides payment services to e-commerce and other online businesses, is making its latest move to help raise its game against competitors like Stripe. It is launching a new solution called Extend, a set of tools to integrate Braintree payments more closely and easily with other services that online companies […]

Apple is bringing its pencil to the masses. The pencil tool will now work across Apple’s suite of iWork tools — including the popular Pages (document creation) Numbers (its spreadsheet app), and Keynote (for presentations) apps — on the low-cost iPad that Apple first brought to market last year. At an event today in Chicago, Apple announced its latest […]

Apple is holding a press conference right now in Chicago. And the company unveiled a brand new device — well, sort of. Apple is going to sell a brand new 9.7-inch iPad that works with the Apple Pencil. Before today, only (more expensive) iPad Pro models could take advantage of the Pencil. The company said […]

Apple held an education focused event in Chicago today at Lane Technical High School. CEO Tim Cook took the stage and began his announcements with a nod to the student marches that occurred this week in support of gun control. Cook praised Lane Tech High for having more PHDs coming out of it than any […]

Last September, Atlassian launched Stride, it’s take on a Slack-like real-time communications platform for text, audio and video chats, into beta. Six months later, Stride is now generally available to any and all teams that want to give it a try. While Atlassian is a bit cagey about providing exact user numbers, so the numbers […]

LA-based space startup Relativity has raised $35 million in Series B funding, in a new round led by Playground Global, and including existing investors Social Capital, Y Combinator Continuity and Mark Cuban. The funding will help the startup expand its automated, 3D-printing process for manufacturing rockets quickly and with greatly reduced complexity, with the ultimate […]

This morning at Chelsea Piers in NYC, Waymo CEO John Krafcik announced a new model of car powered by Waymo’s self-driving technology. Dubbed the world’s first premium fully self-driving car, Waymo has partnered with Jaguar Landrover to bring the Waymo-outfitted Jaguar iPace to market. These self-driving cars can serve a million trips in a single […]

Mozilla this morning launched a Firefox browser add-on for those users not willing to delete their Facebook account, but also wanting some control over how much of their data Facebook can access. The “Facebook Container,” as the new extension is called, isolates your Facebook identity from the rest of the web. That means Facebook will […]

Huawei just unveiled its brand new flagship phone — the P20. It’s a solid, well-designed Android phone with a shiny design, an iPhone X-like notch and some extravagant features, such as not one, not two but three cameras on the back of the P20 Pro. I’ve played with the phone for a few minutes yesterday, […]

Meet the Huawei P20. It’s a pretty nice phone. I played around with it, and I can confirm that it is, indeed, a solid flagship with some suitably over-the-top features — what’s that you say? Three rear-facing cameras?! But all of this is kind of a moot point if you live here in the States. […]

Late last year, TPCast announced an adapter that cut the HTC Vive cords. The company is back with an enterprise version that delivers 2k content to several HTC Vive units with sub 2ms latency. Unveiled at Nvidia’s GTC 2019 conference in San Jose, California, the product is aimed at VR uses cases where multiple people […]

Marshall makes some of the best sounding and yet affordable headphones on the market and the company today is announcing its first set with active noise cancellation. Called the Marshall Mid ANC, the $269 wireless headphones feature the classic Marshall look but sports Bluetooth aptX wireless tech. Four microphones measure ambient noise and block out […]

MariaDB is best known as a drop-in replacement for the popular MySQL database. But the MariaDB Corporation, which was founded by MySQL founder Monty Widenius and which offers all of its software under an open source license, clearly has its sights set on a bigger market and to expand and better challenge the likes of Oracle, […]

Massachusetts-based Soft Robotics has already shown us some pretty impressive capabilities for its rubbery robotic grippers, but the demos have mostly been straightforward picks off of a conveyor belt. The startup’s latest trick if the much sought-after activity of bin picking. It’s a surprisingly tough task, given the complexity of picking up even several of […]

While pregnant, I imagined I’d spend maternity leave making elegant baby albums with detailed captions each month. That didn’t happen and now I have thousands of baby photos on my phone and no idea how to even begin organizing them. Created for parents who, like me, are overwhelmed by their digital memories, Precious uses artificial intelligence […]

For years, the goal of marketers was to understand the customer so well, they could respond to their every need, while creating content specifically geared to their wishes. Adobe Cloud Platform has long acted as a vehicle to collect and understand customer data inside the Adobe toolset, but today Adobe took that a step further. […]

When it comes to sales software, Salesforce isn’t the only game in town. A number of startups have emerged to target the sales industry, with roughly $3 billion per year getting invested into marketing startups. Now one of the largest players is Intercom. The seven-year-old startup is now announcing a $125 million Series D round led by […]

Dandelion, a clean energy startup that was originally incubated inside Google parent Alphabet, has raised $4.5 million in funding to build out its business — a geothermal heating and cooling system for homes that claims it will drastically reduce its customers’ bills — it claims to cut bills in half (notwithstanding the upfront costs, more […]

Huawei is about to unveil its brand new flagship smartphone — the P20. While many details have already leaked, this is going to be an interesting launch. The conference will begin at 3 PM in Paris, 9 AM in New York, 6 AM in San Francisco. The company chose to unveil its new device at […]

In a bit more than two months, the TechCrunch team is heading to Tel Aviv for a day-long event. And I’m excited to announce a couple of new speakers — Shuly Galili from UpWest Labs and Yahal Zilka from Magma Venture Partners. While both Galili and Zilka are investors, they have two different stories to […]

Uber has been barred from testing its self-driving cars on public roads in Arizona following the accident last week involving one of its testing vehicles that killed a pedestrian crossing the street in its path. Arizona Governor Doug Ducey released a letter sent to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in which he described the accident as […]

Foxconn, best known for manufacturing practically everything in the world, has just announced the purchase of Belkin, the PC peripherals company, for $866 million in cash. That certainly makes it one of the larger consumer electronics acquisitions in recent memory. You probably know Belkin for its various lines of accessories, peripherals, and assorted consumer electronics; […]

Harrison Metal, a 10-year-old, San Francisco-based seed-stage venture fund, has closed its fifth vehicle with $68 million, founder Michael Dearing tweeted out a bit ago. “Ten years ago this month, I started this business,” he’d continued tweeting. ” I was excited-nervous as could be. Worried I didn’t belong in the venture capital world, I figured I’d […]

A self-driving vehicle fatally striking a pedestrian is a tasteless venue for self-promotion, but it’s also an important time to discuss the problems that created the situation. Mobileye CEO and CTO Amnon Shashua seems to do a little of both in this post at parent company Intel’s blog, running the company’s computer vision software on […]

It seems obvious that the way a robot moves would affect how people interact with it, and whether they consider it easy or safe to be near. But what poses and movement types specifically are reassuring or alarming? Disney Research looked into a few of the possibilities of how a robot might approach a simple […]

More automakers will soon offer vehicles through subscription services. Lexus today announced its upcoming UX crossover would be available through one and Bloomberg published a report today stating BMW is about to announce a subscription pilot. These automakers join a growing list of makers offering models through new financing vehicles. Currently, Volvo, Cadillac, Ford, and […]

Dropbox’s surge on the stock market has continued, with the company going up another 7% on its second day on the stock market. The company saw its shares close at $30.45, giving the company about a $13 billion market cap, fully diluted. When it priced its IPO, there was a question as to whether Dropbox […]

Homelessness in Santa Clara County has gotten worse, with the overall homeless population increasing 13 percent to 7,394 in 2017 over the course of two years. That puts Santa Clara’s homelessness crisis in the same ballpark as San Francisco’s, which has a homeless population of 7,499, according to a 2017 homeless census and survey. Santa […]

Snapchat has ephemeral messages, and now Facebook has ephemeral friend requests. The big blue social network feeds off your social graph, and every time you expand it, it has more content to show you. But if you leave a questionable friend request in limbo for too long, you’ll probably never confirm or delete it. So Facebook […]

Smartsheet is the latest company to file to go public, now that the IPO window is open.  The Bellevue, Washington-based company offers enterprise software for communication and collaboration. It describes itself as the “leading cloud-based platform for work execution, enabling teams and organizations to plan, capture, manage, automate, and report on work at scale, resulting in […]

Tracking sea animals is a difficult task for many reasons, not least of which is the robustness necessary for any device to survive longer than a few weeks of water torture. The clunky solutions currently used to watch whales and other creatures might soon have a more lightweight competitor: this flexible, inexpensive “marine skin.” Developed […]

It happened in 2016, and it’s happening like clockwork again in 2018: venture firms are closing new funds with more money than they ever have before, just two years after closing their most recent funds with more money than they’d ever raised before. Last week, you may have caught wind that Khosla Ventures is raising […]

Spotify released financial guidance ahead of its public debut planned for early April. It’s an unconventional move, but the music streaming service isn’t doing a traditional IPO. It’s not raising money and will be doing something called a “direct listing,” with insiders selling shares. This changes up the process and so Spotify decided to announce its […]

HQ Trivia, the TV-style game show in an app, is starting to make money. The company this week is rolling out its first sponsored games, including a $3 million deal which includes sponsored games from Warner Bros., as well as a sponsored game from Nike, arriving today. AdAge was the first to report on HQ […]

London’s transport regulator is asking for public views on a series of new proposals aimed at boosting the safety of private hire vehicles (PHVs), such as cars served via ride-hailing platforms like Uber. Among the measures Transport for London (TfL) is considering are: Enhanced background checks for private hire drivers — with a proposal to […]

As we’re gearing up for May’s big show, the announcements are starting to come fast and furious. In the past two weeks, we’ve revealed that Andy Rubin, Marc Raibert, Melonee Wise, Robert Full and more will be joining us May 11 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. We’ll be unveiling the full schedule for the event […]

Chrome OS has been a pretty ideal place for Google to stake its various plays for the education. The cheap, bare bone Chromebook laptops have been light on complexity and heavy on connectivity. The company hasn’t had much in the way of options when it comes to touch screen devices however. Today, Google announced its […]

Google announced this morning its “mobile-first” index of the web is now starting to roll out, after a year and a half of testing and experimentation. Back in 2016, Google first detailed its plan to change the way its search index operates, explaining how its algorithms would eventually be shifted to use the mobile version […]

Despite its name, the Linux Foundation has long been about more than just Linux. These days, it’s a foundation that provides support to other open source foundations and projects like Cloud Foundry, the Automotive Grade Linux initiative and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Today, the Linux Foundation is adding yet another foundation to its stable: the […]

Geely’s Lynk & Co is one of the more interesting young automotive brands, with an approach to sales and marketing that more closely resembles modern gadget and lifestyle brand go-to-market strategy than traditional automaker sales. The Lynk & Co 01 SUV, designed to sit somewhere between Geely’s line on one end and Volvo’s vehicles on […]

Azure developers and sysadmins have long asked for the ability to get access to a serial console for their virtual machines (VMs). While it’s generally easy enough to log into a VM after it has booted, things get far more complicated if the machine doesn’t boot for some reason. Troubleshooting that can be a nightmare. With […]

Twitter is the latest social service to boot out cryptocurrency advertisers. The company told Reuters it will be launching a new policy this week to prohibit the advertising of token sales/initial coin offerings (ICOs), and crypto wallet services. Ads for cryptocurrency exchanges will also be banned — with some limited exceptions. Twitter confirmed the policy change to us, […]

YouTube TV announced this morning it will become the first-ever presenting sponsor of the 2018 NBA Finals as the result of a multi-year partnership focused on raising consumer awareness of YouTube’s streaming TV service. In addition to becoming the presenting sponsor of the NBA Finals, the deal will also see YouTube TV becoming the presenting […]

Self-driving technology company Aurora has made some key moves on its leadership team and overall company growth: It’s bringing on SpaceX’s now former head of software engineering, Jinnah Hosein, to lead its own software engineering team in a VP role. The autonomous software provider is also opening up two new offices, including one in San […]

Walmart has brought on Tesco veteran, Simon Belsham, to serve as president of its e-commerce business, Jet.com, acquired for $3 billion in 2016 to help the company better combat the Amazon threat. Belsham will be based out of Hoboken and will oversee the full operation of the Jet.com business, including its increasing focus on online […]

Apple’s upcoming slate of original TV shows may finally see the light of day as early as next March, according to a report from The New York Times on Sunday. Citing producers and entertainment exec sources, the article says Apple has been taking advantage of its significant cash stores to fund its TV efforts – and […]

FedEx is the latest major logistics company to lock in an order for Tesla’s forthcoming Semi electric Class 8 trailer trucks. The shipping provider has ordered 20 of the vehicles, according to a press release from FedEx itself, which will go into service in its FedEx Freight department. The FedEx order is dwarfed by rival […]

Elon Musk’s The Boring Company is indeed living up to its namesake and boring tunnels, but its primary source of revenue still seems to be selling stuff branded with its logo. First there was the hat, then the ‘not a flamethrower,’ and now Musk has said that the company will produce and sell large, “lifesize” […]

Owning a Tesla comes with plenty of perks, but there is still one major pain point for most Tesla owners: navigation. Even though these cars feel like they’re from the future, the navigation systems on board look like any old navigation system you might have seen in a car or on a smartphone, with some […]

It’s about making the lives of scientists and researchers easier, Jensen Huang, CEO and co-founder of Nvidia tells TechCrunch. He’s speaking of the keynote address he intends to give at the company’s upcoming GTC conference. Held in San Jose, miles away from the company’s new imposing headquarters, Nvidia is set to host thousands of attendees […]

Microsoft is using the 3D optimization startup it bought last year to give it an in to the “mixed reality” enterprise market. Simplygon has previously had a heavy skew towards gaming services with technology that allowed developers more freedom over the kind of detail they offered end users. True to the name, Simplygon allowed companies […]

Smartphone and VR headset maker HTC has published its consolidated results for Q4 2017 — and it makes for grim reading. The topline figures are: Flat quarterly revenue of NT$15.7 billion (~$540M) with gross margin of -30.8% Quarterly operating loss of NT$9.6 billion (~$330M) with operating margin of -60.8% Quarterly net loss after tax: NT$9.8 […]

Car shoppers in Guangzhou, China now have the ability to buy or try a car using a smartphone app and a car vending machine. The facility came out of a partnership signed two years ago between Ford and Alibaba. Called the Super Test-Drive Center the center houses dozens of Ford vehicles in the multi-story building. Users just […]

Jason Rowley Contributor Jason Rowley is a venture capital and technology reporter for Crunchbase News. More posts by this contributor Here are the top states and cities for startups in the South Where did venture capitalists go to college? The American Midwest has a long history of making stuff. During the 20th century, it was […]

Dear blockchain people: this is your hour. Abandon your transparently greedy get-rich-quick schemes, turn away from your casinos of de-facto modern-day penny stocks, and focus your decentralized attention on what the world needs. Save us, O blockchainers, from the scourge that is Facebook! Decentralize all the things! I’m kidding, of course. For now. Every year, […]

Hey startups! TechCrunch is returning to Tel Aviv on 7 June, 2018 for its inaugural day-long conference at the Tel Aviv Convention Center. This year’s event will be bigger and better than ever — featuring not only TechCrunch’s signature stellar programming focused on mobility, but also a new expo area called Startup Alley, where hundreds […]

Auris Health (née Auris Surgical Robots) has done a pretty good job flying under the radar, in spite of raising a massive amount of capital and listing one of the key people behind the da Vinci surgical robot among its founders. With FDA clearance finally out of the way, however, the Redwood City-based startup medical […]

There is a familiar trope in Hollywood cyberwarfare movies. A lone whiz kid hacker (often with blue, pink, or platinum hair) fights an evil government. Despite combatting dozens of cyber defenders, each of whom appears to be working around the clock and has very little need to use the facilities, the hacker is able to […]

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Denis Pombriant, Doc Searls, Esteban Kolsky, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, March 23, 2018. G3: Face the Music — Mary Hodder, Elisa Camehort Page, Denise Howell, Kristie Wells, and Tina Chase Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, March 22, 2018. @stevegillmor, @dsearls, @ekolsky, @DenisPombriant, @fradice Produced and directed by Tina […]

The Looming Tower, a new series on Hulu, approaches the September 11 terrorist attacks from an unusual angle — instead of focusing on the day itself, it tells the story of the FBI and CIA investigations into Al-Qaeda in the late 1990s. In some ways, the show feels like a police procedural, with Jeff Daniels […]

Snapchat’s parent company has bought a web-based 3D game engine startup out of the UK, Business Insider (paywalled) reports. PlayCanvas is a development tool focused on letting people easily design rich 3D environments. Unlike products from companies like Unity and Epic Games, PlayCanvas’s game engine was entirely browser-based and was optimized to run on low-power […]

Hear that? It’s almost as if thousands of spooks and hackers suddenly cried out at once… The Internet Engineers Task Force has just unanimously approved a security framework that will make encrypted connections on the web faster and more resistant to snooping. It’s called Transport Layer Security version 1.3, and while it’s not a big […]

Alexa can already sing and rap, but now she’s the star of a new music video by the English rap duo Too Many T’s. The London-based rappers this week released an interactive video that lets Alexa sing along by triggering with voice commands, then pausing while she answers. The result is essentially a duet between […]

The first quarter is almost over, and despite Dropbox’s splashy debut on the public market earlier today, it was preceded by just two other U.S. tech companies to IPO in 2018: Cardlytics and Zscaler.  Will Dropbox turn things around? Will the fact that Spotify is readying its debut get the momentum going at long last? It […]

It’s been a bit of a tumultuous week, to put it lightly, but one must always remember that no matter how dire things look on the global stage, there are always makers working obsessively to create something beautiful and useless — like this MIDI-driven, robotic music box. Tinkerer and music box aficionado Mitxela (via Hackaday) […]

Dropbox went public this morning to great fanfare, with the stock shooting up more than 40% in the initial moments of trading as the enterprise-slash-consumer company looked to convince investors that it could be a viable publicly-traded company. And for one that Steve Jobs famously called a feature, and not a company, it certainly was […]

[embedded content] HBO’s Silicon Valley is returning to the air with Season 5 debuting on Sunday. To prep fans, HBO is teasing a virtual reality experience where users will be able to explore Erlich Bachman’s hacker hostel and interact with a ton of easter eggs from the show. You can rip a bong, open up […]

The swipe is where the similarity ends. Raya is less like Tinder and more like a secret society. You need a member’s recommendations or a lot of friends inside to join, and you have to apply with an essay question. It costs a flat $7.99 for everyone, women and celebrities included. You show yourself off […]

The vastness that makes the Amazon rainforest so diverse and fertile also makes it extremely difficult to protect. Rainforest Connection is a project started back in 2014 that used solar powered second-hand phones as listening stations that could alert authorities to sounds of illegal logging. And applying machine learning has supercharged the network’s capabilities. The […]

As Dropbox had its IPO moment this morning, more than 10 years after launching, we can finally put one myth to rest. Dropbox and Box were never targeting the same customers. As Anshu Sharma, founder at Prekari, a stealth startup and former partner at Storm Venture tweeted earlier today: If you are a VC and […]

What does winning the Alexa Skills Challenge earn you from Amazon? Apparently, in addition to the $20,000 Grand Prize, you might also have your skill yanked from the Amazon Skill Store without warning. At least, that’s what seems to have happened to the grand prize winner from the recent Alexa’s kids competition, Pretzel Labs. Its […]

While everyone was looking at Dropbox’s debut, Pivotal Software dropped its IPO filing.  The enterprise cloud computing company is majority-owned by Dell, which came about after its merger with EMC in 2016. VMWare also helped form Pivotal, which was created in April 2013. Here’s how it describes its business: Pivotal looks to “provide a leading cloud-native […]

Rebecca Buckman Contributor Rebecca Buckman is the vice president of marketing and communications at Battery Ventures in Menlo Park, CA. She previously was an editor and writer with The Wall Street Journal and Forbes. If there’s one thing I learned from my time as both a journalist at The Wall Street Journal and Forbes and, now, advising a global […]

It’s no secret that much of the legal industry is build on reusable content. Most law firms have their own customized set of standard documents (like NDAs or Wills), but lawyers or associates still have to customize these documents by hand each time a client needs them drafted. Lawyaw, part of YC’s Winter ’18 class, is building […]