At the end of last November, Google announced that Diane Bryant, who at the time was on a leave of absence from her position as the head of Intel’s data center group, would become Google Cloud’s new COO. This was a major coup for Google, but it wasn’t meant to last. After only seven months
Month: July 2018
Health insurance startup Alan has launched a new product in France called Alan Map. It’s a dead simple way to find GPs, dentists, ophthalmologists and more around you. You first type your address and the name of a doctor or the type of doctor you’re looking for. There’s a big map front and center with
Planck Re, a startup that wants to simplify insurance underwriting with artificial intelligence, announced today that it has raised a $12 million Series A. The funding was led by Arbor Ventures, with participation from Viola FinTech and Eight Roads. Co-founder and CEO Elad Tsur tells TechCrunch that the capital will be used to expand Planck
People have long wondered if one of Amazon’s goals in video and advertising — two key areas in Amazon’s media strategy — ultimately would be to bring the two together, with Amazon-powered ads running in video streams also served by Amazon. A job ad in the U.K. appears to indicate that the company might be
HTC is gone. The company of today is not the company that helped start the smartphone revolution. That’s a shame, too. In the early years of the smartphone, HTC released some of the best devices available. Here’s a look back at ten of the company’s most iconic devices.
Light, the company behind the wild L16 camera, is building a smartphone equipped with multiple cameras. According to The Washington Post, the company is prototyping a smartphone with five to nine cameras that’s capable of capturing a 64 megapixel shot. The entire package is not much thicker than an iPhone X, the Post reports. The
When we last met UDOO, the team was building a powerful Raspberry Pi-based DIY board with a bunch of impressive features, including more ports and a better processor. Now the team behind the first units has released the UDOO BOLT, a DIY board that can run “AAA games” thanks to a built-in AMD Ryzen Embedded
MeetFrank, aka a ‘secret’ recruitment app that uses machine learning plus a chatbot wrapper to take the strain out of passive job hunting and talent-to-vacancy matching, has closed a €1 million (~$1.1M) seed funding round to fuel market expansion in Europe. Hummingbird VC, Karma VC, and Change Ventures are the investors. The Estonian startup was
All charges against former Vungle CEO Zain Jaffer, including a sexual abuse of a child, have been dropped. According to a statement from Jaffer’s representatives, San Mateo County Judge Stephanie Garratt dismissed the charges today. Jaffer was arrested last October and charged with several serious offenses, including a lewd act on one of his children,
Some Samsung users are complaining that their smartphones randomly sent photos and scheduled texts to contacts. According to posts on Reddit and Samsung’s official support boards first spotted by Gizmodo, the devices affected include the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy Note 8. Their owners say that Samsung Messages, the default texting app for Galaxy devices, pushed
Dell, which went private in one of the the largest leveraged buyouts in tech circa 2013, announced today that it will once again be going public through a relatively complex mechanism that will once again bring the company back onto the public markets with founder Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners largely in control. Dell’s
Homage, a Singapore-based startup that helps connect caregivers and organizations with patients and their families, has raised $4.15 million as it begins to eye overseas expansions. The company was started in 2016 by Gillian Tee, a Singaporean who spent time working in the U.S., healthcare industry exec Lily Phang and former banker Tong Duong. Tee’s
An alphabet soup of federal agencies are now poring over Facebook’s disclosures and the company’s statements about its response to the improper use of its user information by the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission have joined the Justice Department in examining
Facebook, the world’s largest social network with 2.2 billion users, is all about capitalizing on scale, and so today it announced that it would be sunsetting three apps in its stable that simply weren’t keeping up. After failing to gain traction, Hello, Moves and tbh will all be depreciated in the coming weeks, the company
Welcome to Bag Week 2018. Every year your faithful friends at TechCrunch spend an entire week looking at bags. Why? Because bags — often ignored but full of our important electronics — are the outward representations of our techie styles, and we put far too little thought into where we keep our most prized possessions.
This is a comeback story. Or at least the first chapter to one. Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer and serial entrepreneur who was at the center of a trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, is back. And he is connected to an autonomous trucking company that is still in stealth mode, TechCrunch has
If you block someone on Facebook, you probably want them to… you know, stay blocked. At least until you say otherwise. Facebook has just disclosed that around 800,000 users were impacted by a bug that silently unblocked “some” people they had blocked. The bug was live from May 29 until June 5, the company says.
Norway-based company Opera Ltd has filed for an initial public offering in the U.S. According to its F-1 document, the company plans to raise up to $115 million. In 2017, Opera generated $128.9 million in operating revenue, which led to a net income of $6.1 million. While many people are already familiar with the web
Following the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal and the more recent discovery of a Facebook app that had been leaking data on 120 million users, Facebook is today announcing a number of API changes aimed at better protecting user information. The changes will impact multiple developer-facing APIs, including those used to create social experiences on
After years of teasing, Original Stitch has officially launched their Bodygram service and will be rolling it out this summer. The system can scan your body based on front and side photos and will create custom shirts with your own precise measurements. “Bodygram gives you full body measurements as accurate as taken by professional tailors
Or Arbel doesn’t like spending too much time on design. His startup Yo only let you send your friends the word “Yo” after all. That messaging app made waves with its minimalism, but quickly petered out. Now Arbel is back with a new company called Anima that could let app designers build more complex products
Instagram is turning the Time Well Spent philosophy into features to help users avoid endless scrolling and distraction by notifications. Today, Instagram is rolling out its “You’re All Caught – You’ve seen all new posts from the past 2 days” warning in the feed which TechCrunch broke the news about in May. Past that notice
Right now, the cable that comes with a new iPhone does not plug into a new MacBook Pro without a dongle. #donglelife is for real. If this leak is correct, though, that wrong might soon be righted. Photos have surfaced showing what is an engineering prototype of an Apple 18 W USB-C charger, which is
Folks riding the OnePlus bandwagon will be pleased to learn that the phone maker today introduced a red version of the OnePlus 6. The company is calling the phone the OnePlus 6 Red, and the new model follows on the success of the OnePlus 5T Lava Red. [embedded content] Here’s what OnePlus CEO Pete Lau
1. Accedo2. Acer3. Airtel4. Alcatel/TCL5. Alibaba**6. Amazon*7. Apple*8. AT&T9. Blackberry10. Dell11. DNP12. Docomo13. Garmin14. Gemalto*15. HP/Palm16. HTC17. Huawei18. INQ19. Kodak20. LG21. MediaTek/ Mstar22. Microsoft23. Miyowa /Hape Esia24. Motorola/Lenovo25. Mozilla**26. Myriad*27. Nexian28. Nokia*29. Nuance30. O231. Opentech ENG32. Opera Software**33. OPPO34. Orange35. Pantech36. PocketNet37. Qualcomm38. Samsung*39. Sony40. Sprint41. T-Mobile42. TIM43. Tobii*44. U2topia*45. Verisign46. Verizon47. Virgin Mobile48. Vodafone*49.
Oden Technologies, the Industrial IoT startup that provides manufacturing data analytics, has closed $10 million in Series A funding. The round is led by European venture capital firm Atomico, which appears to be revving up its “Industry 4.0” investment strategy following a recent investment in CloudNC. A number of existing investors also participated including EQT
Perhaps rightly, there has long been a perception that Google-owned Deepmind has been the most aggressive in hoovering up a lot of the U.K.’s best talent in artificial intelligence, but now Facebook appears to be turning its eye to the country. TechCrunch understands that the social network behemoth is acquiring London-based Bloomsbury AI, a startup
Lasers! Everybody loves them, everybody wants them. But outside a few niche applications they have failed to live up to the destructive potential that Saturday morning cartoons taught us all to expect. In defiance of this failure, a company in China claims to have produced a “laser AK-47” that can burn targets in a fraction
If you’re a UX designer you won’t need this article to tell you about dark pattern design. But perhaps you chose to tap here out of a desire to reaffirm what you already know — to feel good about your professional expertise. Or was it that your conscience pricked you? Go on, you can be
Meet OpenPhone, a startup in the current Y Combinator batch. The company has been working on an app to make it easier to get and use a business phone number. You don’t need a second phone, you don’t need to get an expensive solution designed for big teams. “Both my cofounder and I grew up