French startup Ledger unveiled a new hardware wallet at CES this week. While the device isn’t going to ship until March, the company let me play with a prototype version of the device. The Ledger Nano X feels just like using the Nano S, but on mobile. When the company’s previous hardware wallet first came
Month: January 2019
AWS launched DocumentDB today, a new database offering that is compatible with the MongoDB API. The company describes DocumentDB as a “fast, scalable, and highly available document database that is designed to be compatible with your existing MongoDB applications and tools.” In effect, it’s a hosted drop-in replacement for MongoDB that doesn’t use any MongoDB
“There’s an implosion of early-stage VC funding, and no one’s talking about it,” was the headline of a viral article posted on this site in late 2017. Venture capitalists are deploying more capital than ever, the author explained, yet the number of deals for early-stage startups has taken a nosedive. Roughly one year later, little
Handheld retro gaming machines come and go, but few go so simply and effectively to the point as My Arcade’s Retro Champ. You stick in your NES cartridge, hit the power button and, assuming you blew on it beforehand, it powers up. This one sets itself apart with a big ol’ screen, Famicom compatibility and
The Shield TV, Nvidia’s Android TV streaming box, is still getting regular updates, but the Shield Tablet, which launched in 2014, was last refreshed in 2015 and officially discontinued last year, wasn’t quite the same success. As Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during a small press gathering at CES in Las Vegas today, the company
Instagram is swaying the balance towards simplicity but away from originality. It’s adding the ability to publish feed posts to different accounts you control at the same time by toggling them on within the composer screen. An Instagram spokesperson confirms this option is becoming available to all iOS users, telling TechCrunch “We are rolling out
Twitter says it’s going to make it easier for publishers to better understand what sort of content is resonating with its readers on the social network. The company this morning at CES briefly discussed a concept for a new publisher dashboard offering insights and analytics that can better inform their content strategy. The company clarified
A new drone from the NIMBUS group at the University of Nebraska can fall out of a plane, parachute down, fly to a certain place, dig a hole, hide sensors inside it, and then fly away like some crazy wasp. Robots are weird. The goal of the project is to allow drones to place sensors
This light makes the smarthome even more accessible. Installed as any other ceiling downlight,the June AI downlight features Amazon Alexa through an integrated JBL speakers. There’s a light in there too. The idea is great: make the smarthome invisible. Instead of having an Amazon Echo sitting on a table, this device sits in a person’s
Conventional wisdom would suggest that in 2019, the public cloud dominates and enterprise data centers are becoming an anachronism of a bygone era, but new data from Synergy Research finds that the enterprise data center market had a growth spurt last year. In fact, Synergy reported that overall spending in enterprise infrastructure, which includes elements
At CES, the Chinese tech giant Baidu today announced OpenEdge, its open source edge computing platform. At its core, OpenEdge is the local package component of Baidu’s existing Intelligent Edge (BIE) commercial offering and obviously plays well with that service’s components for managing edge nodes and apps. Since this is obviously a developer announcement, I’m
Most of the time, commercial and personal drones are not allowed to fly over groups of people. For safety, obviously. Indemnis’ drone parachute changes that. The company’s product was just certified to allow operators to legally fly drones over small groups of people. This is the first time such a device received the certification. Indemnis
We will be holding a small event during CES in Las Vegas and we want to see you! We’re looking to meet some cool hardware and crypto startups, so the good folks at Work In Progress have opened up their space to us and 200 of you all to hold a meetup and pitch-off. We’ll
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here: 1. Facebook is the new crapware Well Facebook, you did it again. Fresh off its latest privacy scandal, the troubled social media
Square today announced the launch of its in-app payments SDK that allows developers to build Square-powered payments right into their mobile apps. While Square remains best known for its offline payments solutions that grace virtually ever independent coffee shop and quirky corner store, the company has long offered APIs for taking online payments on the
Collaboration tools tend to be geared towards workers who are sitting at a desk for much of the day, but there are plenty of shift workers, also known as first line workers, who rarely use a computer, but still need to communicate with one another and management. Microsoft released several new features today aimed at
Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Elections, has been fined £15,000 in a UK court after pleading guilty to failing to comply with an enforcement notice issued by the national data protection watchdog, the Guardian reports. While the fine itself is a small and rather symbolic one, given the disgraced political analytics firm went into administration last
Last year, four of the largest U.S. cell carriers were caught selling and sending real-time location data of their customers to shady companies that sold it on to big spenders, who would use the data to track anyone “within seconds” for whatever reason they wanted. At first, a little-known company LocationSmart was obtaining (and leaking)
Well, that didn’t take long. We’re less than 10 days into 2019 and already Vietnam is aiming threats at Facebook for violating its draconian cybersecurity law, which came into force on January 1. The U.S. social network stands accused of allowing users in Vietnam to post “slanderous content, anti-government sentiment and libel and defamation of
Welcome to 2019 where we learn Facebook is the new crapware. Sorry #DeleteFacebook, you never stood a chance. Yesterday Bloomberg reported that the scandal-beset social media behemoth has inked an unknown number of agreements with Android smartphone makers, mobile carriers and OSes around the world to not only pre-load Facebook’s eponymous app on hardware but render
An intriguing new startup is out from under the radar in Southeast Asia after BasisAI, a Singapore-based company, revealed itself this week. The startup disclosed a seed investment from two prestigious investors in the region and some impressive credentials to back it up. Started by twin brothers Linus and Silvanus Lee and Liu Feng-Yuan — all Singapore
Baidu made several big announcements about Apollo, its open-source autonomous vehicle technology platform, today at CES. The first is the launch of Apollo Enterprise for vehicles that will be put into mass production. The company claims that Apollo is already used by 130 partners around the world. One of its newest partners, Chinese electric vehicle
People have been talking about foldable smartphones for years, but it’s finally happening. Chinese company Royole was showing off the FlexPai at CES in Las Vegas, and we got to play with it for a few minutes. It’s hard to say if it’s a phone or a tablet as you can basically use it as
Bowery Valuation, a New York-based company that we told you about last year, has raised $12 million in Series A funding for its tech-enabled real estate appraisal platform. The 3.5-year-old company raised the capital from Corigin Ventures, Camber Creek, Navitas Capital, Fika Ventures and Builders. Bowery caught our attention initially because, like a lot of
Facebook has confirmed it has removed the pages and profiles of a far right political activist in the UK after concerns were raised in parliament about aggressive intimidation of politicians and journalists trying to go about their business in and around Westminster. PayPal has also closed an account that was being used to solicit donations
Early last year, LinkedIn co-founder and prolific venture capital investor Reid Hoffman called Chris Urmson “the Henry Ford of autonomous vehicles (AV).” The vote of confidence and big check from Hoffman, coupled with a team of deeply knowledgable AV entrepreneurs, has catapulted his company, Aurora Innovation, squarely into “unicorn” territory. Aurora, the developer of a full-stack
We will be holding a small event during CES in Las Vegas and we want to see you! We’re looking to meet some cool hardware and crypto startups, so the good folks at Work In Progress have opened up their space to us and 200 of you all to hold a meetup and pitch-off. We’ll
Managed By Q, the office management platform that launched back in 2013, has today revealed that it raised an additional $25 million as a part of its Series C, led by existing investors RRE and Google Ventures, with participation from new investors DivCo West, Oxford Properties and others. The fresh capital brings the total round
Rather than just focus on Facebook’s problems like his 2018 challenge, this year Mark Zuckerberg wants to give transparency to his deliberations and invite the views of others. Today he announced his 2019 challenge will be “to host a series of public discussions about the future of technology in society — the opportunities, the challenges,
While IBM is getting sued by the city of Los Angeles, accusing it of covertly mining user data in the Weather Channel app in the US, it’s testing the waters for another hyperlocal weather feature that — coincidentally — relies on data that it picks up from sensors on app users’ smartphones, among other devices,