LATEST

 Amazon and Netflix both got some good news in this morning’s Oscar nominations. Mudbound, a Netflix original that tells the story of two families (one black, one white) farming on the Mississippi Delta, got four nominations — including best supporting actress (Mary J. Blige), best adapted screenplay (Dee Rees and Virgil Williams) and best original song (“Mighty River”).… Read More

 DJI hasn’t done a great job keeping its drones under wraps. As with the last couple of devices, the Mavic Air leaked out just ahead of today’s official unveiling. The drone is more or less what we expected, falling somewhere between the Mavic Pro and Spark and rounding out the company’s current line of consumer-focused quadcopters. DJI says it “went back to the… Read More

 Elon Musk’s new Tesla compensation package is the CEO equivalent of putting your money where your mouth is: He’ll only be paid out if he manages to raise the value of Tesla as a company to certain milestones, kind of like Kickstarter project stretch goals on a grand scale. Per the New York Times, Musk’s compensation will start at zero, and will increase based on… Read More

 David Barber, the storied owner of the Blue Hill restaurant, farm, and hospitality consulting mecca (a favorite of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama), has long been an angel investor in startup companies. Individually, he’s backed companies like Sweetgreen, the fast casual farm-to-table restaurant chain, that share Blue Hill’s focus on sustainable products and… Read More

 Twitter COO Anthony Noto has left the company, Twitter announced Tuesday. Noto’s leaving because he accepted a CEO role elsewhere, according to the release. Just last week, the WSJ reported that Noto was mulling the top executive job at finance startup SoFi, and indeed SoFi confirmed today that he’s joining effective March 1. Developing… Read More

 There’s no getting around the fact that Snapchat has a user growth problem, so it’s smart that the company is making it easier for people who like and use Snapchat to share content they find within beyond the app itself. Today, Snap is launching the ability to share some public Stories via links that then display the Story selected on Snapchat.com. Stories eligible for sharing… Read More

 It’s been about a year since Atlassian acquired Trello and the company has stayed true to its word and continues to invest heavily in the product. Today, Trello is launching a new directory for its add-ons — or ‘Power-Ups‘ in Trello lingo — that shows both the continued investment in the service and that’s also indicative of how the Atlassian ecosystem in… Read More

 A startup called Bolt wants to give e-commerce retailers a better shot at competing with Amazon. Operating in stealth for a year, the payments platform has grown to 100 online merchants who are now in various phases of roll out with its end-to-end solution for managing customer checkout, payment processing, and fraud detection. The company was officially founded in 2014, with an initial focus… Read More

 When we heard from Sumo Logic last June, the company was announcing a $75 million Series F. Today, they announced they were acquiring FactorChain, a security startup that has raised $3.6 million. The companies would not disclose the purchase price, but indicated the acquisition closed at the end of Q4 and all 12 FactorChain employees have joined Sumo Logic, including CEO Dave Frampton and CTO… Read More

 Adobe is launching an update to Photoshop CC today that includes a number of new features, including better support for high density monitors and the Microsoft dial for Windows users. But the highlight of the release is the new Select Subject tool that uses Adobe’s Sensei AI platform to make selecting objects as simple as a click. Selecting objects in an image typically takes a bit of… Read More

 Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi was speaking to Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait today at the new outlet’s event #TheYearAhead event, and he shared some more information about Uber’s plans around autonomy, and autonomous ride-hailing service rollout. “True autonomy for every single use case, is some ways away,” Khosrowshahi began, acknowledging that the problem is… Read More

 Apple is finally shipping the HomePod. The device will ship on February 9, seven months after its announcement at WWDC 2017. It will cost $349 and limited at launch to the US, UK and Australian markets. The news come from Apple who is touting HomePod’s Siri integration, saying its voice assistant is able to “send a message, set a timer, play a podcast, check the news, sports,… Read More

 Rainforest QA, an on-demand software QA service, announced a $25 million Series B investment today. Silicon Valley Bank, Bessemer Venture Partners, Sutter Hill Capital, Rincon Ventures and Initialized Capital all participated in the round. Today’s investment brings the total raised to over $42 million, according to the company. The startup, which got its start in the Summer 2012 Y… Read More

Big data systems tend to be large, complex and often hard to troubleshoot. In the world of databases, web and mobile stacks, application performance management services like AppDynamics and New Relic help ops teams keep tabs on their system. In the big data world, Unravel Data is one of the few APM players to focus solely on the complete big data stack from ingestion to analysis. Read More

 As we inch ever closer to GDPR in May, companies doing business in Europe need to start getting a grip on the sensitive private data they have. The trouble is that as companies move their data into data lakes, massive big data stores, it becomes more difficult to find data in a particular category. Clairvoyant, an Arizona company is releasing a tool called Kogni that could help. Chandra… Read More

 There are three exciting developments that I do expect to transpire within the next 12-18 months.The first major rollouts of autonomous fleets; the development of new mapping and LIDAR technology; and, finally, the development of communities dedicated to autonomous driving in cities and private campuses.  Read More

 Element.AI — which last year raised $102 million from the likes of Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia and more to build an incubator-meets-consultancy to work with multiple businesses as they launch new services and systems based on artificial intelligence — is entering the next phase of its growth this week. The Canadian startup — co-founded by Jean-François Gagné, Nicolas… Read More

 Aspect Ventures has finalized its second fund. The team led by Jennifer Fonstad and Theresia Gouw has closed $181 million, up from $150 million it raised at its inception three years ago.  An SEC filing last year alerted us that the team was fundraising, but now it’s officially official. Aspect is also adding Melinda Gates and Cisco to its roster of LPs. The team is “looking… Read More

 Some major product news from veteran anti-tracking search engine DuckDuckGo: Today it’s launched revamped mobile apps and browser extensions that bake in a tracker blocker for third party sites, and include a suite of other privacy features intended to help users keep surfing privately as they navigate around the web. Read More

 Japanese bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchange BitFlyer has expanded into Europe after it landed a payment license to operate across the EU. Data from Coinmarketcap.com shows that BitFlyer is the world’s 14th largest exchange based on volume, with more than $294 million trading in the last 24 hours at the time of writing. Bitcoin is the dominant choice for BitFlyer users, having account… Read More

 SmartHR, a startup helping Japanese employers run HR and staffing smarter — because that’s of course its name — has raised a JPY 1.5 billion ($13.3 million) Series B round led by 500 Startups Japan. The startup is perhaps comparable to the likes of Zenefits and Gusto in the U.S. — it aims to drag Japanese HR departments into today’s digital era. “In Japan… Read More

Netflix is now worth more than $100 billion, Uber Eats acquires Ando and Rupert Murdoch wants Facebook to pay for the news. All this on Crunch Report. Read More

 I was all set to dislike the “flick,” a time unit just recently invented by Facebook (technically the Oculus team), because I thought it was going to be something worthless like “the average time someone looks at a post.” In fact it’s a very clever way of dividing time that theoretically could make video and audio production much more harmonious. Read More

 Oreo was a bit of a lackluster update on first launch, but the mobile operating system is getting some nice new tricks with 8.1’s updates. The new Speed Labels feature is one of the more compelling of the bunch, offering estimated network signals prior to logging on. Starting this week, users with 8.1 installed will see one of four qualifiers next to open Wi-Fi networks: Very Fast, Fast,… Read More

 The PX headphones are Bowers & Wilkins’ first noise-cancelling headphones. While Bowers & Wilkins is more known for its premium work with high-end speakers, its first foray into noise-cancelling headphones is a win. Overall the Bowers & Wilkins PX wireless headphones boast big sound and a sharp design, but they come at a high price compared to similar offerings by competitors. Read More

 Netflix crossed a fun milestone today, crossing the $100 billion mark for its market cap as it once again surprised industry observers with better-than-expected growth in its subscribers. We’ll get to the financial numbers in a minute but, as usual, the big story here is that it continues to wow Wall Street with impressive growth in its subscriber numbers. The company said it added… Read More

 After selling his social virtual reality startup to Microsoft in October, Eric Romo, the co-founder of AltspaceVR is joining the competing social VR team at Facebook as its Product Director where he will be “exploring how VR can help communities connect.” “It wasn’t an easy decision, but I left AltspaceVR with confidence that the team is well-placed to continue… Read More

 A startup that’s operating in stealth mode raises an almost stunning amount of money before it releases a product. Investors write outsize checks to the outfit anyway because of the people involved in it, but before you know it, poof, the company is imploding, and the capital is gone. It’s a story that industry watchers know well at this point. Clinkle — the payments… Read More

 The FCC’s wildly unpopular decision to kill net neutrality has sent legislators, companies and individuals scrambling for ways to keep the Obama era regulations in place. A new bid by Montana Governor Steve Bullock would cut through much of the red tape and force internet service providers to abide by earlier net neutrality rules. Bullock, a second term Democrat, told The New York Times… Read More

 The always outspoken Linus Torvalds, best known for his continuing work on the innermost code of Linux systems, has harsh words to say and accusations to level against Intel. His evaluation of Intel’s latest proposed fix for the Meltdown/Spectre issue: “the patches are COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE.” Read More

 Apple today launched a new dashboard that will allow artists on Apple Music to track fans’ listening and buying habits, and view a variety of analytics about their music, according to Billboard which had the launch exclusive from Apple. The dashboard, called Apple Music for Artists, is currently available only for select beta users ahead of a broader launch planned for later this… Read More

 Brian McClendon, a notable engineering executive at startups and large tech companies, including Google and Uber, has announced his candidacy to run for the open seat of secretary of state of Kansas. He will compete in the Democratic primary scheduled for August 7th. McClendon has been a lifelong engineer, growing up in the state and receiving his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering… Read More

 Ziro is a nifty programmable robotics kit for kids that had a successful Indiegogo campaign last year. And the company behind it, ZeroUI, is still adding new features. By default, Ziro kits come with a smart glove to control your robots. You can use the mobile app to configure gestures based on hand movements. For instance, if you tilt your hand forward, it can make a car go forward. Ziro now… Read More

 Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote a blog post about Google’s investments in France. There are three different pieces of news in this announcement. First, Google is going to expand its office in Paris. If you already know Google’s current office in Paris, that building is going to stick around. The company is going to acquire or rent other buildings around Google’s current office… Read More

 Waymo continues to expand the pool of locations where it’s testing its autonomous vehicle tech, and the latest destination is metro Atlanta. The former Google self-driving car company revealed the news on Twitter, noting that it’s expanding considerably its geographic testing footprint now that it’s got fully driverless test vehicles on the road in Phoenix. Its test cars… Read More

 At first glance, genealogy may seem like a quiet hobby you take up in your retirement, but it’s also a big industry, with the likes of Ancestry, MyHeritage, Helix and others all vying for new users. You’d think that there isn’t much these companies can do to really differentiate themselves from each other, but they all offer a slightly different spin on the core theme of… Read More

 Hulu and YouTube are battling for subscribers for their respective live TV streaming services, according to a CNBC report out this morning, which says that Hulu Live has grown to 450,000 paying subscribers and YouTube TV has just over 300,000. Both are still trailing competitors including Dish’s Sling TV, which has more than 2 million estimated subscribers, and AT&T’s DirecTV… Read More

 Coinbase just announced they’re hiring Tina Bhatnagar as VP of Operations and Technology to lead all operational teams at Coinbase and GDAX. But perhaps most relevant right now is the fact that her responsibilities will include overseeing the fast growing startup’s customer service division. It’s no secret that Coinbase is in need of some help with it comes to support and… Read More

 The consumer investment train keeps rolling through Los Angeles, with organic perfumer Skylar Body becoming the latest brand that investors here are banking on for a big win. The company raised $3 million late last year in a round led by Upfront Ventures with participation from serial entrepreneur-turned-investor Brian Lee and other top tier local investors. Lee, who made his name (and his… Read More

 Predicting cryptocurrency prices is a fool’s game yet this fool is about to try. The drivers of a single cryptocurrency’s value are currently too varied and vague to make assessments based on any one point. News is trending up on Bitcoin? Maybe there’s a hack or an API failure that is driving it down at the same time. Ethereum looking sluggish? Who knows: maybe someone will… Read More

 It probably goes without saying that Microsoft, along with the rest of the tech world, was working on a smartwatch. And while, by some accounts, the category is finally having its moment, the software giant’s efforts didn’t appear to make it to far beyond the prototype stage. New photos posted by a Twitter user and spotted by Windows Central purport to show the company’s… Read More

 Everyone wants to be the Craigslist killer. In November, Facebook expanded its Marketplace section to include partners’ housing rentals alongside secondhand merchandise, and today the number three shopping app letgo is doing the same. The company says that, starting today, its tens of millions of users can now quickly snap a few photos and add a description to list a housing rental or… Read More

 Payroll provider ADP said it is acquiring WorkMarket, a startup that specializes in workforce management software that operates across a wide range of employees and contractors, for an undisclosed sum. The software aims to create a kind of unified interface for managing an extended workforce that can include a variety of workers with different employment status, from contractors and… Read More

 Cargo, a startup that wants to let every rideshare driver open their own convenience store in their car, has just raised $5.5M in a round it’s calling seed preferred financing. Over the summer we covered the company’s $1.75M seed round, at which point they were just getting started. Now they have 2,500 cars on the road in NYC, Chicago, Boston and Minneapolis, with 20,000 driver… Read More

 A demographic and place data firm has ranked Amazon’s HQ2 top 20 picks across a number of factors to predict which city the tech giant will choose for its new headquarters. The firm, Sperling BestPlaces, has had a fairly good track record with its prior picks – 15 of its top 20 picks made Amazon’s short list, including its top 11. This time around, it’s putting… Read More

 Cabify, the Madrid-based startup that competes with the likes of Uber and 99 in Latin America as well as the Iberian peninsula, has closed out another round of funding as competition continues to heat up in the on-demand transportation sector. Cabify’s parent company Maxi Mobility has raised $160 million at a valuation of $1.4 billion, the company confirmed to TechCrunch today. The Series… Read More

 SpaceX is impacted by the ongoing U.S. Government shutdown – which is bad news both for its pending Falcon Heavy test flight, as well as for its other missions, which include imminent ISS resupply and commercial satellite launches. The Verge has confirmed that SpaceX’s dependence on U.S. Air Force support for launch operations at Cape Canaveral has held up any potential launch… Read More

 Gamers worldwide! Nike, PlayStation and Oklahoma Thunder player Paul George have a shoe in the works that may be right up your alley. The PG2, the second generation of Paul George’s signature shoes, is themed around the PlayStation console, complete with tongues that light up. Buttons inside the tongues let the owner turn on and off those lights, shaped in the PlayStation logo and PG logo… Read More

 Rocket Lab is hoping to fill a niche for small payload orbital launches with its house-built Electron rocket and private launch facility – and now it’s one step closer to full commercial operations. The startup managed its second test flight (via Space) for its Electron booster – this time making it all the way to orbit, where it deployed some of its first ever customer… Read More

 GM has opened a new Canadian Technical Centre (CTC) in Markham, Ontario just outside of Toronto, in a brand new building capable of supporting 1,000 employees at its full target capacity, including 700 dedicated engineers. The facility will support work done on GM’s advanced driver assistance features, its fully autonomous vehicle program, and infotainment center design and… Read More

 DJI is supposed to announce a new drone tomorrow but this appears to be it. Called the Mavic Air, the small drone looks to be a combo of foldable Mavic Pro and the affordable Spark. I’m interested. According to DroneDJ, the small drone will have four foldable legs, a 4k camera, 3-way gimbal and a obstacle-avoidance system. But what about the price and range? DJI will likely reveal… Read More

 Say what you will about Chromebooks, there’s little question that Google’s low-cost offerings have reignited edtech. Last May, Microsoft fired its shot across the bow with Windows 10 S — a dumbed-down version of its operating system intended to take on the Chromebook with ultra-cheap hardware. This week at the Bett education show in the U.K., the company’s showing off… Read More

 As food delivery hopefuls like Deliveroo and Amazon get more involved in the making of food themselves, Uber’s food delivery branch Uber Eats has made an acquisition that could see the company also producing more of the product it’s bringing to its customers. Ando — the delivery-only ‘restaurant’ founded by Momofuku chef David Chang — announced today that it… Read More

 There has been so much money poured into insurance startups lately that it’s spawned its own category, “insurtech.” Investors see an opportunity to reduce inefficiencies and make customer-friendly products. They believe that more young people will buy insurance if it’s made more convenient. From autos to rentals to theft, every insurance category is seeing… Read More

 VCs continue to pump money into startups attempting to inject life into the legacy and lucrative insurance industry. The latest ‘insurtech’ company to pick up funding in the U.K. is Anorak Technologies, which is on a self-described mission to “build the world’s smartest independent insurance adviser,” starting with life insurance. Read More

 Facebook has announced it’s expanding a free training program that teaches Internet-skills, media literacy and online safety to Europe. It says its “ambition” is to train 300,000 people across six EU countries by 2020 — specifically in the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Poland. Read More

 As people become more aware of how their data is used — and abused — in our digital world; and regulations (like GDPR in Europe) are leading more organizations to implement better data protection policies, a startup that is hoping to protect that data found in images — by making it impossible for algorithms to read it — has raised a seed round to help it bring its… Read More

 Korea’s Kakao, the internet giant behind the country’s top messaging app, is actively seeking overseas investment opportunities after it raised $1 billion via a placement. Kakao is valued at over $7 billion and its services are used by more than 40 million people. The company, which counts Tencent as an early investor, now appears to be making good on its long-standing plan to… Read More

 ViViDoctor, a healthtech startup out of Brussels that offers teleconsultations with doctors, has raised €400,000 in seed funding as it continues to sell its service into hospitals. The company enables patients to consult with doctors and other specialists online, including via video conference. Read More

 It’s been a while since we heard from Snow, the Snapchat clone app in Asia that Facebook once tried to buy, but today the company behind it has scooped up a $50 million investment from SoftBank and Sequoia China. Snow was started by Naver, the Korean firm behind popular messaging app Line, and it had proven popular in Japan, Korea, China and other markets in Asia thanks to a focus on… Read More

 Grab, Uber’s chief rival across Southeast Asia, is getting into bike-sharing after it announced plans to integrate oBike’s service into its core ride-hailing app. The news isn’t a huge surprise since Grab is an investor in oBike, as we reported back last year, so you’d expect there to be a strategic element to that relationship. This morning’s announcement came as… Read More

 Apple has teamed up with Malala Fund to support girls’ education, becoming Malala Fund’s first Laureate partner. Founded by Yousafzai and her father, Ziauddin, the Malala Fund aims to empower young girls and help them access the quality education they deserve. With the support of Apple, Malala Fund expects to double the number of grants awarded through its Gulmakai Network and… Read More

 Sphero was ready to conquer the world last year. The company quintupled its product release schedule, flying high with the help of a Disney licensing deal that gave the world several Star Wars droids and talking Spider-Man and Lightning McQueen robots. But following a holiday season that failed to live up to expectations, the company recently laid off 45 staff members globally, TechCrunch… Read More

 California is home to two very different innovation worlds. For the readers of TechCrunch, there is the familiar excitement of the startup world, with startups working on longevity and age extension, rockets to Mars, and cars that drive themselves. Hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs, engineers, and product managers are building these futures every day, often on shoestring budgets all in… Read More

 “The consensus is that because blockchain is so niche and it’s mostly early adopters who come from tech and finance, that it’s actually less diverse than those industries that are already struggling to be representative of the population at large,” Raine Revere, co-founder of blockchain education startup Maiden, told me on an episode of the CTRL+T podcast. In… Read More

 With WPP’s over 200,000 employees and a $75 billion media book, Sir Martin Sorrell has a uniquely privileged insight into the future of the online advertising industry. And he believes that 2018 might be the year that a third company joins what he calls the Facebook/Google “duopoly” in online advertising and search. Read More

 By now many have heard of Amazon’s most audacious attempt to shake up the retail world, the cashless, cashierless Go store. Walk in, grab what you want, and walk out. I got a chance to do just that recently, as well as pick the brain of one of its chief architects. My intention going in was to try to shoplift something and catch these complacent Amazon types napping. But it became clear… Read More

 “Everything’s a battle,” Cindy Gallop sighs, although ti’s clear she relishes those battles. What she means is that the entire Internet has long been divided into two separate, walled fiefdoms: one labelled “pornography,” the other marked with those three dread words “no adult content.” The territory between those two worlds, which she is trying… Read More

 When Google Arts & Culture’s new selfie-matching feature went viral earlier this week, many people of color found that their results were limited or skewed toward subservient and exoticized figures. In other words, it pretty much captured the experience of exploring most American or European art museums as a minority. Read More

 Good news! The great Raw Water Story of 2017 is finally over. Google tells me that searches went up ten-fold over the raw water craze, but thankfully, humans seem to have filtered out any more stories or follow ups. Silicon Valley can rest easy. But wait! There is another crisis brewing, and it isn’t the animal fecal matter in your algae water. Over the past few days, we’ve seen… Read More

 Storied Sequoia investor Mike Moritz threw fire into the tech Twitter gumbo with his observations of hard-working Chinese workers and slothful Silicon Valley engineers. Moritz, a billionaire, clearly needs page views to fund his retirement. The major money quote about Silicon Valley is this: “In recent months, there have been complaints about the political sensibilities of speakers… Read More

 There aren’t a lot of venture funds that are led by a single general partner who happens to be a woman. Sonja Hoel Perkins is one. The longtime Menlo Ventures managing director founded her own venture firm two years ago. Cindy Padnos, who spent four years with Outlook Ventures as a director before founding her own firm, Illuminate Ventures, nine years ago, is another. Now Silicon Valley… Read More

 After nearly a year, venture capitalists nabbed their first U.S. acquisition for more than a billion dollars. And it wasn’t a tech startup. Nor was it a company on the list of known unicorns. And it had nothing to do with blockchain. Read More

 Today’s nationwide Women’s March attendees will advocate for voter registration through every conceivable social network, so one of its planning organizations has allied with a new app that lets you combine posts from across apps. Crunchet will help the Women’s March Alliance and Chicago march create collages of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, Spotify, and… Read More

 Within a matter of months, the General Data Protection Regulation will apply across the EU and business processing citizens’ data will need to be sure they’re compliant. We explain the major changes incoming and take a look at some possible impacts… Read More

 Blockchain has become the latest buzzword in the technology industry, but many people are still in the dark about just what exactly it means. Thanks to Raine Revere, we have a bit of a better grasp on what the blockchain entails as well as some of its implications. As Revere so eloquently put it, “blockchain is a technology that allows for peer to peer transactions,” she explained… Read More

 Desperate for an opportunity to jump aboard in the next big thing, cryptocurrency owners are losing money by investing blindly in fake Telegram ICO websites. Chat app Telegram’s upcoming ICO promises to break records with a target raise of $1.2 billion, which may be extended to $2 billion according to new reports. The public sale component isn’t scheduled to launch until March,… Read More

 TechCrunch is holding an informal meetup during the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Grab a free ticket here. The event precedes our TechCrunch Meetup the week after in Zug, Switzerland, the so-called Crypto Valley. You can grab a ticket here. The Davos meetup will be co-hosted by Samantha Stein, TechCrunch’s Director of Special Projects & Startup… Read More

Google inks a patent deal with Tencent, Tile lays off 30 people and Apple hires the tech team from Silicon Valley Data Science (SVDS). All this on Crunch Report. Read More

 Few events have jolted the urban planning crowd quite like Amazon’s process for selecting the company’s new second headquarters (dubbed HQ2). The company put up a massive carrot of 50,000 jobs and $5 billion in investment, and then proceeded to demand proposals from cities across North America (lovingly written up by Clickhole). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Amazon received 238… Read More

 If you’re looking for a way to close out your week that’s entertaining, edifying, and looks like you’re doing real work, check out Chimeria:Grayscale, a game where you act as an HR person dealing with everyday office problems via email. Okay, maybe it doesn’t sound that exciting, but there’s more to it than that. Read More

 Google CEO Sundar Pichai says he still believes that it was appropriate to fire James Damore. “I don’t regret it,” said Pichai, in an interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher and MSNBC’s Ari Melber. “It was the right decision,” YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, echoed on stage. It’s been almost six months since the company dismissed the engineer, who… Read More

 Things aren’t going well down at the ol’ nano-factory. They’re having trouble getting all those tiny workers to synchronize and move quickly together. But leave it to the Germans to get things running smoothly! All it took was a careful application of that newfangled technology “electricity.” Tiny nano-scale machines formed from DNA could be the future of… Read More

 “When people view VR, it’s an over-sensory experience like “What the fuck?!” will.i.am says, wildly spinning his around as you can see in the GIF below. That was the Black Eyed Peas’ frontman’s inspiration for creating a 90-minute VR comic book that moves at your pace and lets emotion sink in instead of battering you with visuals. Today, “Masters Of… Read More

 On the heels of hitting a 1.5 million subscriber milestone and bringing on a new marketing chief, the subscription service for watching movies in theaters, MoviePass, today announced it’s going to start buying movies, too. The company says it will begin to invest in films so it can share in their success beyond the box office, including on other platforms like streaming, DVD, and… Read More

 Facebook is gearing up to prioritize news content by publishers a group of Facebook users have deemed trustworthy. Facebook Head of News Feed Adam Mosseri said the company surveyed “a diverse and representative sample” of U.S.-based people about their familiarity and trust in various sources of news, he wrote in a blog post. That data, Mosseri said, will serve to inform News… Read More

 Wolves in the Walls, directed by Pete Billington and premiering today at Sundance, is the unique product of a tight scrappy team of pioneering creatives with most of them sharing a common element of their past, they were laid off from Facebook last year when the company’s VR original content arm Oculus Story Studio was shut down. The team is back, under the name Fable Studio, a new… Read More

 Yahoo Finance today launched a new app called Tanda that allows small groups of either five or nine people to save money together for short-term goals. The app uses the concept of a “money pool” – that is, everyone participating in one Tanda’s collaborative savings circles will pay a fixed amount to the group’s savings pot every month. And every month, one member… Read More

 Michael Moritz is a legendary for many of the investments he has led throughout his long career with the venture firm Sequoia Capital. Among his biggest hits: Paypal, Zappos and Google. Moritz stepped away from managing the firm some time ago (now partner Roelof Botha is its primary steward) but continues to invest in startups and sit on boards. He’s a director at Instacart, Klarna,… Read More

 Education used to be simple: there was a blackboard, a teacher and desks in a classroom. Today, a student can practice English online, upload homework through a portal and learn chemistry through 3D immersion — such is the rise of educational technologies. And nowhere is the advent of edtech climbing more quickly than in Asia. Read More

 Tesla is bringing its newest production vehicle to its showrooms in some East Coast locations for the first time, so that potential (and many actual) customers will be able to check it out in person. The carmaker will have Model 3 demo units on display at showrooms in New York, Boston and Miami starting this week, CNBC reports. The Model 3 will be on display in Manhattan’s Meatpacking… Read More

 Apple has made a quiet but interesting move in its longer-term strategy around courting more business from enterprises. The company has hired the tech team — at least 18 people, including at least two co-founders, one of whom is the CEO — from Silicon Valley Data Science (SVDS), a startup based out of Mountain View that provides business transformation consulting to enterprises… Read More

 Amazon’s slow push into mobile is getting a lot more real this morning with the addition of voice integration into its Android app for Alexa. Up to now, the app has been little more than a way to mange settings for the Echo and other smart home devices built around its smart assistant. The addition of voice commands means users can speak directly to their handset the way they would an… Read More

 Spotify says advertisements that recently appeared to paying subscribers of its music streaming service were loaded by mistake. Over the past few days, a number of Spotify customers complained their music listening experience was interrupted with ads inserted into their playlists. To be clear, the ads being weren’t those from third-parties, but were rather in-house promotions for… Read More

 Private equity and media giants from the U.S. are starting to pay attention to Africa’s burgeoning online media and culture scene. TPG Growth and Evolution Media have acquired a majority stake in the South African multimedia entertainment company, TRACE. Read More

 If you gave your credit card number to OnePlus sometime between mid-November and last week, your card may have been comprised. The smartphone maker confirmed this morning through its online forum that upwards of 40,000 customers may have had their numbers exposed to hackers. OnePlus has sent out emails to users it believes may have been impacted after a malicious code was inserted into the… Read More

 Amazon has already taken on Philip K. Dick with The Man In The High Castle (which is based on his award-winning alternate history novel of the same name). Now it’s using his short stories as the basis for an anthology series called Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams. On the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, TechCrunch’s Jordan Crook, Darrell Etherington and… Read More

 Yesterday Alchemist Accelerator, best known for working with enterprise startups, held its 17th demo day at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California. Twenty-four startups pitched ideas ranging from personalized genomics to hard tech spinouts from Stanford’s Linear Accelerator.  Rather than expound upon all twenty-four I worked with Alchemist to bring you a top… Read More

Cryptomania! This week was rough for HODLers. We took to the halls of CES and then spoke to some folks in the know about the future of crypto, the ever-changing price, and where crypto is headed in 2018. Join me, Jameson Lopp , and Michelle Tsng as we dig into cryptomania. Credits Written by: John Biggs Hosted by: John Biggs Filmed by: Chris Gates Edited by: Chris Gates Read More

 More than 270 French startups flew all the way to Las Vegas for CES 2018. And France’s Secretary of State for Digital Affairs Mounir Mahjoubi came there to support them. I had the opportunity to sit down and interview him about the current state of the tech ecosystem in France and how it can compete at a global level. Mahjoubi joined Emmanuel Macron’s team as the person in charge… Read More

 In 2009, Facebook was just getting popular with moms and grandmas. People were playing Farmville. Twitter was just becoming mainstream. And Foursquare launched on to the scene. Back then, Foursquare was just another social network, letting users check in to locations they visit and potentially receive badges for those check-ins. A lot has changed since 2009, but Foursquare still remains,… Read More

 Highsnobiety has come a long way. What began as a sneaker passion blog in 2005 now attracts upwards of 9 million visitors monthly to its site containing news and analysis of high fashion, streetwear and culture. The site has attracted a highly influential audience of young, educated and affluent, mainly millennial male, readers. These are the hard-to-reach people even social media isn’t… Read More

 If you’re on-board for Amazon’s monthly Prime membership, I’ve got a bit of bad news for you on this cold December morning. The company’s bumping up pricing from $10.99 to $12.99. Not the end of the world, of course, but that comes out to about $156 a year — a $24 increase over the old price. Amazon has confirmed the price increase with TechCrunch and laid all of… Read More

 Apple announced this morning it’s bringing its “Everyone Can Code” program to 70 more colleges and universities across Europe. The program, which Apple designed to help students learn how to build apps, launched in May 2017 but was initially limited to the U.S. before expanding to other markets, including Australia, and select institutions in Europe last November. The… Read More

 The classic problem of how teachers should devote resources to their students, such as helping students that are struggling in specific areas, is one that’s still ever-present — but it needs a deceptively-simple approach to making that more manageable, even if it’s just a colored progress bar if Clever CEO Tyler Bosmeny gets his way. That’s why Clever, a portal for… Read More

 Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was a corker. Our co-host Matthew Lynley is back, Katie and myself were on hand, and our guest, Shruti Gandhi from Array Ventures, was brilliant. And the news gods were kind, as there was quite a lot to get through. First, we looked into the… Read More

 Meet Ring Capital, a brand new VC firm based in Paris. The firm just raised a new $170 million fund (€140 million) and might still be raising another $10 million or so for this fund. Many new VC firms tend to focus on seed rounds at first. Ring Capital thinks there’s a Series A and Series B gap in France. That’s why Ring Capital plans to invest around €5 to €10 million ($6 to… Read More

 Apple continues to get into hot water over a power management feature that throttles performance on older iPhones to avoid unexpected battery shutdowns. Read More

 Google has yet more news from China after the U.S. search firm announced a patent cross-licensing agreement with Chinese tech giant Tencent. The terms were not disclosed, but Google said the tie-in with Tencent, which is valued at over $500 billion, covers “a broad range of products and technologies” and is “long-term.” The two firms pledged to work together on… Read More

 The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has serious concerns about the securities industry’s plans to create exchange traded funds around cryptocurrency. In a strongly worded letter to the heads of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association and the Investment Company Institute, the director of the division of investment management, Dalia Blass said that there were… Read More

The 20 finalist cities for Amazon’s second HQ are announced, HuffPost drops its free contributor platform and Uber’s SoftBank deal officially closes. All this on Crunch Report. Read More

 There are a number of startups looking to disrupt traditional banking. We’ve covered Chime, Zero and Jiko, just to name a few. Another one of those is Varo Money and they’ve raised $45 million led by private equity giant, Warburg Pincus and The Rise Fund, a global impact fund that’s part of another private equity firm, TPG. (That’s the one U2’s Bono is involved… Read More

 Tile, one of the best known item-tracking gadgets out there, has laid off some 30 people and reportedly froze the potential hires of another 10, TechCrunch has learned. This comes less than a year after the company raised a $25 million B round last May. The layoffs are reportedly due to disappointing sales over the holidays. Read More

 Rokid, a Chinese startup that makes an AI voice assistant and smart devices, just raised a Series B extension round led by Temasek Holdings, with participation from Credit Suisse, IDG Capital and CDIB Capital. The size of the round was not released, but a source familiar with the deal told TechCrunch that it is $100 million. Read More

 Apple has updated the look of its web-based App Store, 9to5Mac first reported. It definitely has the feel of the iOS 11 App Store, which Apple completely redesigned and launched last September. But, unlike iOS 11, there’s no focus on app discovery. The functionality is about the same as before, but what it comes down to is the clean design that feels simpler — perhaps due to the… Read More

 Diversity is good for business — not just from the ethical standpoint, but from the perspective of a company’s bottom-line, according to McKinsey & Company. As a follow-up to its “Why Diversity Matters” study in 2015, McKinsey analyzed over 1,000 companies across 12 countries, looking at their respective profits and value creation. Companies in the top quartile… Read More

 I’ve heard tell of people predicting the weather through achy joints. CES isn’t all that different. You get a sixth sense about the show once you’ve been to a few. A few weeks before the show starts you get a slight throb in your bones, telling you whether this CES will be a memorable one. All signs ahead of this year’s show pointed to a lackluster offering. Read More

 Snap Inc. has laid off at least two dozen people across several divisions within the company, according to the Information, which first reported the news. Snap has since confirmed these layoffs, which largely affect those on the content teams in the New York and London offices. Over a dozen of the 24 or so employees laid off today were part of the content team. Snap tells TechCrunch that… Read More

 Peer-to-peer car sharing platform Turo is expanding to Germany officially starting today, after acquiring Daimler’s Croove in-house product forpvoding essentially the same service last September. Turo also received a significant strategic investment from Daimler at the same time as it acquired the automaker’s cars sharing experiment, and it now operates peer-to-peer rental services… Read More

 Facebook Stories might feel redundant because 300 million people use its other Snapchat clones on Instagram and WhatsApp. But Facebook is convinced that the narrative, ephemeral, camera-first format is the future of sharing… and advertising. So Facebook is doubling down on Stories by testing the ability to create them from desktop, and a much more prominent placement for viewing. Read More

 The FDA approval process can be like navigating a minefield for health startups hoping to get through regulations and begin selling to the American public. YC company Enzyme.io hopes to help these small businesses by automating the process for them. Biomedical engineer Jared Seehafer came up with the idea through his own experience consulting with health companies. Read More

 Here’s a surprise: after 22 quarters of consecutive year-over-year revenue declines, IBM today reported that its revenue increased from Q4 2016 to Q4 2017. The company reported revenue of $22.5 billion for the last quarter, up from $21.77 billion a year ago. Earnings per share came in at $5.18. Analysts expected revenue of about $22.06 billion and earnings per share of $5.17.… Read More

 This year’s CES happened in the shadow of the Spectre and Meltdown disclosures, and virtually every conversation at the show turned to this topic at some point. Because this was CES, we had the ability to talk to quite a few people who are close to this issue, including ARM CEO Simon Segars, who stopped by to talk about security and these recent disclosures and their mitigations. Read More

 The FCC’s yearly report of broadband deployment keeps some crucial definitions in place that some feared would be changed or eliminated to ease the responsibilities of internet service providers. The threat of a lowered speed standard and the merging of mobile and fixed broadband services will not be carried out, it seems. Read More

 Though searching through Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page last year might have led you to think he spends all his free time cozying up to a plate of grits with random families in Louisiana, it turns out he enjoyed a lot of billionaire simple pleasures in 2017 as well. Namely, the Facebook CEO bought a $150 million ultra-luxury super yacht in Monaco this past September, the Hürriyet… Read More

 Amazon may have recently greenlit another season of its comedic superhero series The Tick, but it’s also cleaning house of other original programming that, presumably, hasn’t been doing as well. According to reports from Variety and Deadline – the latter confirmed by an “Amazon insider” – the company is now cancelling three other comedies,… Read More

 Learning braille is a skill that, like most, is best learned at an early age by those who need it. But toddlers with vision impairment often have few or no options to do so, leaving them behind their peers academically and socially. Becdot is a toy created by the parents facing that challenge that teaches kids braille in a fun, simple way, and is both robust and affordable. Read More