The Wikimedia Foundation has sounded a stark warning against a copyright reform proposal in Europe that’s due to be voted on by the European Parliament next week. (With the mild irony that it’s done so with a blog post on the commercial Medium platform.) In the post, also emailed to TechCrunch, María Sefidari Huici, chair
Month: September 2018
Auterion, a startup that offers a drone operating system built on top of the popular P4X open source software, has landed $10 million in seed funding. Backing the round is Lakestar, Mosaic Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, and Tectonic Ventures. The young Swiss company says the injection of cash will be used to work closely with the
Move over stickers and games: Japanese messaging app firm Line has announced it’s raising around 148.1 billion yen ($1.33BN) through convertible bonds to fund aggressive expansion into the financial services business, Reuters reports. Line said it plans to spend most of the money on promoting its Line Pay service and for other new financial services
Berlin based Internet of Things (IoT) startup relayr, whose middleware platform is geared towards helping industrial companies unlock data insights from their existing machinery and production line kit by linking Internet connected sensors and edge devices to platform controls, has been acquired by insurance group Munich Re in a deal which values the company at
Atlassian today announced the first beta of a new edition of its flagship Jira project and issue tracking tool that is meant to help ops teams handle incidents faster and more efficiently. Jira Ops integrates with tools like OpsGenie, PagerDuty, xMatters, Statuspage, Slack and others. Many teams already use these tools when their services go
Tresorit, the Swiss-Hungarian company that provides end-to-end encrypted “file sync and sharing” for businesses, has closed €11.5 million in Series B financing. The round is led by European growth capital investor 3TS Capital Partners, alongside PortfoLion, a Central European venture capital. A number of existing investors also participated, such as Andreas Kemi, an early investor
Tencent-backed Maoyan Weiying, China’s largest online movie ticketing service, has filed for a public offering on the Hong Kong stock exchange. The company, which submitted a prospectus under the name Entertainment Plus, didn’t say when the IPO will be or valuation details, but reports earlier this year said Maoyan aims to raise up to $1
French startup Shine is raising a $9.3 million (€8 million) Series A round. The company is building an alternative to traditional bank accounts for freelancers working in France. XAnge is leading today’s round with existing investor Daphni also participating, as well as business angels Gilles Samoun and Ed Zimmerman. The company previously raised $3.3 million
Meituan-Dianping is reportedly aiming for a $55 billion valuation in its upcoming initial public offering in Hong Kong, but the company’s net losses and increasing competition from Alibaba are already raising questions about whether that is too ambitious, despite the company’s market leadership in China. Meituan-Dianping, which bills itself as a “one-stop super app” that
Some topics are so politically charged that even to attempt a discussion online is to invite toxicity and rigid disagreement among participants. But a new study finds that exposure to the views of others, minus their political affiliation, could help us overcome our own biases. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, led by sociologist Damon
Just about a month after the merger of the short-form video apps Musical.ly and TikTok, the app is introducing a new social feature, allowing users to post their reactions to the videos that they watch. Instead of text comments, these reactions will take the form of videos that are essentially superimposed on top of existing
The VoCore2 is a Wi-Fi capable computer with a 580 MHz CPU and 128 RAM that supports video, USB, and Ethernet. And it plays Doom. That’s right: this is a computer you can easily swallow and allow your biome flora to play a hard core FPS while you slowly digest the package. The product started
As cryptocurrencies emerge from the speculative bloodletting of the past months, believers in the promise of distributed ledger technologies for business and consumer applications are casting about for what comes next. On our stage at Disrupt San Francisco we’ll be welcoming some of the leading thinkers in how distributed ledgers can create an entirely new
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. Headphones keep us connected to our favorite music, podcasts, and audiobooks. They make sure we don’t drop an important phone call. As our devices ditch the headphone jack
Swiss startup Avrios reckons business mobility is going to get a whole lot more interesting as companies adopt more tailored mobility solutions, rather than sticking with the traditional one car per person model. And at the same time as businesses are seeking to accelerate their progressive cred by moving away from combustion cars to greener
Just over a year after Skype introduced a colorful, Snapchat-inspired makeover which included its own version of “stories,” the company says it’s now going to refocus on simplicity – and it’s ditching stories along the way. The redesign had been met with a lot of backlash. Skype had clearly wanted to appeal to a more
The UK’s leading broadcasters and ISPs have called for the government to introduce independent regulatory oversight of social media content. The group of media and broadband operators in the tightly regulated industries spans both the state-funded and commercial sector — with the letter to the Sunday Telegraph being inked with signatures from the leaders of
UK founded startup Funding Circle, a p2p lending platform which focuses on the underserved small business market, has announced a “potential intention” to float on the London Stock Exchange. In a press release today, announcing the publication of a Registration Document for a possible future IPO, Funding Circle says that should it proceed with floating
Countingup, the U.K. fintech that provides a business bank account that combines bookkeeping, has raised £2.3 million in seed funding. Leading the round is Forward Partners, with participation from previous backer Frontline Ventures, and JamJar Investments. Founded last year by Tim Fouracre, who previously founded cloud accounting software Clear Books, Countingup wants to simplify the
Microsoft has quietly ended its Surface Plus financing program about a year after it launched. In a message on its site, the company said it stopped taking new enrollments on August 31 “after much thought and consideration.” The change does not affect existing customers, however, who will still be covered by their current financing plans.
Few would equate human life with battery life, but for many migrants escaping war or famine, a single percentage point of battery can mean getting the right information at the right time – or not surviving at all. Smartphones today have become an integral part of a forced migrant’s journey. From navigating mountains in Central
Starry wants to change the way the home internet is delivered. Founded in 2014, the Boston-based startup takes an innovative approach to the space by beaming broadband speed internet through the air, using millimeter waves. The company’s novel technique has drummed up great interest during its four years of existence, offering the potential to circumvent
Labor Day is a holiday that just doesn’t fit Silicon Valley. It’s purported purpose is to celebrate working men and women and their — our — progress toward better working conditions and fairer workplaces. Yet, few regions in recent times have supposedly done more to “destroy” quality working conditions than the Valley, from the entire
Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, there has been burgeoning awareness of the hate speech on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. While activists have pressured these companies to improve their content moderation, few groups (outside of the German government) have outright sued the platforms for their actions. That’s because of a
At TechCrunch Disrupt 2018, Uber’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Bo Young Lee will be joining us to talk about the ride-sharing company’s efforts to put detoxify its corporate culture and promote a more inclusive environment for employees. Lee was hired as the company’s first chief diversity and inclusion officer this past January, after leaving
Yes I am very late to this. But I am also very annoyed so I am adding my voice to the now sustained chorus of complaints about Apple’s redesigned Mac keyboard: How very much it sucks. Truly, madly, deeply. This is the keyboard that Apple “completely redesigned” in 2015, in its quest for size zero
Ask any 25-year old engineer what Labor Day means to him or her, and you might get an answer like: it’s the surprise three-day weekend after a summer of vacationing. Or it’s the day everyone barbecues at Dolores Park. Or it’s the annual Tahoe trip where everyone gets to relive college. Or simply, it’s the