Back at Google I/O, Google announced two new features for Google Assistant: custom routines and schedules — both focusing on automating things you do regularly, but in different ways. The first lets you trigger multiple commands with a single custom phrase — like saying “Hey Google, I’m awake” to unsilence your phone, turn on the
Month: July 2018
A multi-year NASA contest to design a 3D-printable Mars habitat using on-planet materials has just hit another milestone — and a handful of teams have taken home some cold hard cash. This more laid-back phase had contestants designing their proposed habitat using architectural tools, with the five winners set to build scale models next year.
Prepare for the invasion of the unskippables. If the Stories social media slideshow format is the future of mobile TV, it’s going to end up with commercials. Users won’t love them. And done wrong they could pester people away from spending so much time watching what friends do day-to-day. But there’s no way Facebook and
More bad news for subscription movie ticket service MoviePass, which acknowledged yesterday that there was an unidentified issue preventing people from using their MoviePass credit cards to get tickets. A regulatory filing from parent company Helios & Matheson offers more insight about what happened. The filing (first spotted by Business Insider) announces a “demand note”
Opera is now a public company. The Norway-based company priced its initial public offering at $12 a share — the company initially expected to price its share in the $10 to $12 price range. Trading opened at $14.34 per share, up 19.5 percent. The company raised over $115 million with this IPO. Opera Ltd. filed
Twitter has no intention of easing up on its fight against spam users and other factors that jeopardize the “health” of its service, despite the approach costing it three million in ‘lost’ monthly active users. Investor panic sent Twitter’s stock price down by nearly 20 percent in early trading today following its latest financial report.
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This was one hell of a week. Happily, we had our own Connie Loizos, Matthew Lynley, and Alex Wilhelm on hand, along with Initialized Capital’s Alexis Ohanian to pick over the mix. First up we had zero
After weeks of speculation around how it plans to handle conspiracy website Infowars, its creator Alex Jones and others that spread false information, Facebook finally gave us an answer: inconsistently. The company hit Jones with a 30-day ban after it removed four videos that he shared on the Infowars Facebook Page. The move is Facebook’s
Days after defending its decision to give a voice to conspiracy theory peddler Alex Jones and his Infowars site, Facebook has removed four of his videos for violating its community standards. But one of the four had already been allowed to slip through the firm’s review system. A source within Facebook told TechCrunch that one
WeWork’s China business is getting a fresh injection of capital after it raised $500 million. The company entered China two years ago and today it covers Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu with nearly 40 locations. It claims 20,000 members, and it is also active in Hong Kong, which technically falls under ‘Greater China.’ The new capital
Salto is a jumping robot that is all heart (and legs). A project originally launched in 2017 this tiny robot thrusts itself up and down and back and forth like a crazed grasshopper, jumping with absolute precision and loads of speed. Created by the UC Berkeley’s Biomimetic Millisystems Lab, this little robot uses rotor-based thrusters
Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on TechNode, an editorial partner of TechCrunch based in China. From Alibaba to JD, China is not short of e-commerce powerhouses. Although the country’s e-commerce market is highly consolidated, it’s not impossible for startup teams to crack this market as long as they are solving the right problems for
Nintendo has just announced the latest in its Labo series of whimsical cardboard accessories for the Switch gaming console, and this one looks like a must-have. Called the Vehicle Kit for obvious reasons, the flat-pack, assemble-it-yourself add-ons include a steering wheel, gas pedal, “keys” that activate different vehicles, all of which work inside a cool-looking
With today’s announcement from Atlassian that it was selling to Slack the IP assets of its two enterprise communications tools, HipChat and Stride, it closes the book on one of the earliest competitors in the modern enterprise chat space. It also was a clear signal that Slack is not afraid to take on its giant
Amazon’s web services AWS continue to be the highlight of the company’s balance sheet, once again showing the kind of growth Amazon is looking for in a new business for the second quarter — especially one that has dramatically better margins than its core retail business. Despite now running a grocery chain, the company’s AWS
HipChat, the workplace chat app that held the throne before Slack was Slack, is being discontinued. Also being discontinued is Atlassian’s own would-be HipChat replacement, Stride. News of the discontinuation comes first not from Atlassian, but instead from a somewhat surprising source: Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. In a series of tweets, Butterfield says that Slack
Last May, Google launched a new events feature designed to help web searchers more easily find things to do nearby, while also challenging Facebook’s dominance in the local events space. Today, Google is updating event search with personalized event suggestions, and well as a new design that puts more event information directly in the search
Virgin Galactic is celebrating the third successful supersonic test flight of VSS Unity, the passenger spacecraft it intends to make available for space tourism in the near future. This flight took the craft higher and faster than ever, stressing the system and providing useful data for the rocket plane’s engineers. Virgin’s two-part flight system uses
Makula Dunbar Contributor More posts by this contributor The best Amazon Prime Day deals you can still grab Summer road trip tech essentials and extras Editor’s note: This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter’s independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and TechCrunch may earn affiliate commissions. One of the
Jeffrey Katzenberg’s new mobile video startup NewTV, which snagged Meg Whitman as CEO in January, has now closed on $1 billion in funding, according to a report out today in CNN. Investors in the round include Disney, 21st Century Fox, Warner Bros, Entertainment One and other media companies, with a combined $200 million investment, while
When Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion smackeroos in June, it sent some shock waves through the developer community as it is a key code repository. Google certainly took notice, but the two companies continue to work closely together. Today at Google Next, they announced an expansion of their partnership around Google’s new CI/CD tool,
The UK parliament has provided another telling glimpse behind the curtain of Facebook’s unregulated ad platform by publishing data on scores of pro-Brexit adverts which it distributed to UK voters during the 2016 referendum on European Union membership. The ads were run on behalf of several vote leave campaigns who paid a third company to
IGTV didn’t get the benefit of being splayed out atop Instagram like Stories did. Instead, the long-form video hub is a bit more distant, located in a standalone app as well as behind a static orange button on the main app’s homescreen. That means users can go right on tapping and scrolling through Instagram without
Facebook had a rough day yesterday when its stock plunged after a poor earnings report. What better way to pick yourself up and dust yourself off than to buy a little something for yourself. Today the company announced it has acquired Redkix, a startup that provides tools to communicate more effectively by combining email with
SuperAwesome, the “kidtech” startup valued now at over $100 million, is today launching its own alternative to YouTube’s embedded video player. The technology is aimed at kids publishers – not consumers directly – and is part of the company’s larger platform of kid-safe technology. This includes tools for social engagement, parental controls, advertising, authentication, and
Amazon today announced Alexa Cast to allow for better music control on Alexa devices. Users will be able to more easily transition from listening to through the Amazon Music app to listening to Amazon Music on an Alexa device. This is a much-needed function for Amazon’s core services. Before Alexa Cast, it can be messy
TechCrunch is coming back to Berlin to talk with the best and brightest people in tech from Europe and the rest of the world. In addition to fireside chats and panels, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield Europe to win the coveted cup. Grab your ticket to Disrupt Berlin before August 1st as
Snapchat is arriving very late to the game of courting influencers. Now it hopes to boost ad spend by connecting businesses with its top independent creators, but it won’t take a cut of deals it helps arrange. Today Snap Inc launches its “Snapchat Storytellers” pilot program that will introduce brands to five of the app’s
WeWork rivals are in the money this year. India’s biggest rival to the U.S. co-working giant, a Mumbai-headquartered startup called Awfis, announced that it has raised $20 million in new capital for expansion. The news comes just after Hong Kong-based Campfire pulled in $18 million. Awfis raised its new funds, which are a Series C
Spotify is racing to sign up users before Apple Music can, even at the expense of its finances. Spotify’s second quarter as a public company saw mixed performance compared to estimates as it reached 83 million paid subscribers, up 40 percent year-over-year and up 8 million from its 75 million count last quarter. Spotify now
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