If your Instagram followers aren’t aware that you’ve voted, did you really even vote? In 2018, the act of voting is great social media fodder. People want their friends to know they’ve registered to vote, or that they’ve just mailed in their absentee ballot or even that they’ve bought some sort of “look, I voted”
Month: October 2018
Last year, Amazon announced a new initiative, Alexa for Business, designed to introduce its voice assistant technology and Echo devices into a corporate setting. Today, it’s giving the platform a big upgrade by opening it up to device makers who are building their own solutions that have Alexa built in. The change came about based
Chinese AI company Mobvoi has consistently been one of the best also-rans in the smartwatch game, which remains dominated by Apple. Today, it launched a sequel to its 2016 TicWatch, which was a viral hit raising over $2 million on Kickstarter, and it unveiled a cheaper take on Apple’s AirPods. The new TicWatch C2 was outed at a
Italy’s Autorità garante della concorrenza e del mercato, roughly equivalent to this America’s FTC, has fined Apple and Samsung a total of $15 million for the companies’ practice of forcing updates on consumers that may slow or break their devices. The amount may be a drop in the bucket, but it’s a signal that governments
Larry Ellison gave his Oracle Openworld keynote on Monday and of course he took several shots sat AWS. In his view, his company’s cloud products were cheaper, better and faster than AWS, but then what would you expect him to say? He rolled out a slide with all the facts and figures in case you
Facebook will let friends learn about you by streaming clips of your favorite songs from your profile in a throwback to MySpace Music. You’ll be able to choose tracks to add to a revamped Music section of your profile that now actually plays songs instead of just showing what artists you Like, and you can
[embedded content] Researchers at the University of Maryland A. James Clark School of Engineering have been working on the so-called Robo Raven for years. The ongoing project resulted in the first flying drone with independent wing movement, a feature that made these U of M UAV’s closer to birds than ever before. Now Lena Johnson,
In a speech discussing ethics and the Internet, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has tasked the technology industry and its coder army with paying continuous attention to the world their software is consuming as they go about connecting humanity through technology. Coding must mean consciously grappling with ethical choices in
For obvious reasons, Facebook’s looking to up political advertising transparency ahead of the midterms. Back in May, the social network introduced Ad Archive, a searchable database of political ads in the U.S. It’s following up the feature with a new Ad Archive Report, a weekly snapshot of political spending. The survey offerings a breakdown of
TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin is right around the corner, and I’m excited to announce that we invited Threads founder Sophie Hill to talk about her innovative vision of luxury shopping. Threads is like nothing out there. It isn’t an e-commerce website with warehouses and and suppliers. It isn’t a marketplace website for second-hand luxury goods. It
At Disrupt SF, CEO Brynn Putnam demoed and launched Mirror, a smart gadget that sits on your wall and offers virtual fitness classes. The $1500 device can be paired with a monthly subscription to let the user browse fitness classes, mark their progress, and follow along with other Mirror users. The idea here is that
RevenueCat, a startup that helps developers manage their in-app subscriptions, has raised $1.5 million in new funding. The company was part of the most recent batch at Y Combinator, and CEO Jacob Eiting said growth has been “a rocket ship” for the past few months. As of this week, RevenueCat is working with 100 live
For Dash Radio founder Scott Keeney, streaming music and radio are two very different things. On the streaming side, Apple and Spotify dominate, and “there’s not going to be room for much else.” But when it comes to radio, he argued, “It’s the wild, wild west.” Keeney, a.k.a. DJ Skee, was already one of the
A patent filed by Apple Inc. shows a new method to print 3D models using triangular tessellation. The patent office approved the method, which breaks smooth surfaces into little triangles that approximate the shape of the original model, on October 23, 2018. The unique aspect of the patent involves the infill and surface. The infill
Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has joined the chorus of voices warning that data itself is being weaponized again people and societies — arguing that the trade in digital data has exploded into a “data industrial complex”. Cook did not namecheck the adtech elephants in the room: Google, Facebook and other background data brokers that profit
Neat, a Hong Kong-based startup that gives startups and SMEs access to credit cards and banking services has pulled in $3 million in fresh funding. The new round is led by China-based VC Linear Capital with participation from Hong Kong’s Sagamore investments and existing backers Dymon Asia Ventures and Portag3 Ventures . Neat previously landed a $2 million
With their loud noises and hard plastic flanges, breast pumps are the bane of many a new mother’s existence. Founded in 2013, Naya Health is one of the most notable tech startups working on a better pump. But the company’s support site is now shutdown and it’s stopped updating its social media accounts. In a
Some Amazon Alexa users are currently having problems reaching the voice assistant. Instead of reacting to commands, Alexa simply says “sorry, something went wrong.” Amazon hasn’t commented publicly yet on the issue. Based on tweets and Down Detector, users began having trouble reaching Alexa around 7AM PST. While some had their connection issues resolved quickly,
Teamable, a provider of hiring software that leverages employees’ social networks, has brought in $5 million from new investor Foundation Capital and existing backers True Ventures and SaaStr Fund. The startup also announced its acquisition of Simppler‘s referral recommendation engine and matchmaking recruiting software. Teamable’s co-founder and chief executive officer Laura Bilazarian declined to disclose the
A few weeks after Circle announced the launch of USD Coin (or USDC for short), Coinbase also announced that customers can now buy, sell, send and receive USDC on Coinbase. A USDC is a token that is worth exactly 1 USD. Its value is going to stay stable against USD, hence the name stablecoin. Unlike
We already knew that the electronic scooter space in Europe was heating up, with Berlin’s Tier announcing today it has raised €25 million in a round led by Northzone, and rumours circulating that Delivery Hero founder Lukasz Gadowski has ventured into the space — all within the context of U.S. companies Bird and Lime recently
Repairing a phone is harder than it needs to be. With phone manufacturers spending the last decade chasing device slimness and building devices meant to last however long a phone contract lasts, user repairability just doesn’t seem to be something they care much about. Need a repair part? Good luck on eBay, friendo! In what
If Facebook Messenger’s redesign succeeds, you won’t really notice it even happened. I hardly did over the past week of testing. There’s just a subtle sense that the claustrophobia has lifted. Perhaps that’s why Facebook decided to throw a big breakfast press event with 30 reporters today at its new downtown San Francisco office, complete
The office might not seem like an area in desperate need of disruption, but Envoy — a Silicon Valley company used to sign in over 100,000 visitors at offices across the world each day; and a TechCrunch SF office neighbor! — has raised $43 million to do just that. The company started life five years
Futrli, a cloud-based business decision-making platform aimed at small businesses, has raised a £4m Series A from e.ventures, Notion Capital and firstminute Capital. Bootstrapped to date, Futrli claims to have over 40,000 businesses and 1,100 accountants in 130 countries using it. The four-year-old business led by CEO and founder Hannah Dawson says it uses AI/ML
Berlin-based startup GoEuro just raised a new $150 million funding round from Kinnevik and Temasek, with Hillhouse Capital also participating. According to Crunchbase, the company has raised nearly $300 million to date. Chances are you’ve used some sort of flight aggregator before to compare prices and find the best deal. But if you live in
There’s a war brewing to become the cloud pharmacy for men’s health. Roman, which launched last year offering erectile dysfunctional medication and recently added a ‘quit smoking’ kit, is taking on $97 million-funded Hims for the hair loss market. Today, Roman launched four new products it hopes to cross-sell to users through a unified telemedicine
Streaming service SoundCloud is making it easier for its users to share music from its service directly to Instagram . The company announced this morning a new feature that allows users to share tracks to Instagram Stories. However, there’s a big caveat here – the tracks are shared as a link that appears within Stories
Artificial intelligence touches just about every aspect of the tech world these days, aiming to provide new ways of making old processes work better. Now, a startup that has built an AI platform that tackles the ever-present, but never-perfect, business of customer service has quietly raised a large round of funding as it gears up
Oracle is a traditional tech company that has been struggling to gain traction in the cloud, but it could see blockchain as a way to differentiate itself. At Oracle OpenWorld today it announced the Oracle Blockchain Applications Cloud, a series of four applications designed for transactions-based processing scenarios using Internet of Things as a data
- « Previous Page
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- …
- 13
- Next Page »