Europe

European regulators have given the green light to Apple’s December 2017 acquisition of music and image recognition discovery firm Shazam. Apple Music is the second largest music streaming service in Europe, after Spotify . While Shazam offers what has been described as “a leading music recognition app” in the region (and globally). TechCrunch broke the

Berlin-based location marketing startup Uberall has raised a further $25 million in funding — adding to a $25 million Series B raised earlier this year — and acquired competitor Navads. Terms of the acquisition remain undisclosed, with Uberall claiming that the deal makes it the second biggest location marketing platform behind U.S. rival Yext. Navads

Perhaps the one downside to building a venture capital firm filled with operational experience is that you can’t always keep an operator out of the action for too long. Or so it seems, if the latest VC move at London-based Atomico is anything to go by. Atomico Partner Yann de Vries — who led investments

The European Union is set to move ahead with a plan to enforce pan-European quotas on streaming services like Amazon Prime Video and Netflix to support production of locally produced film and video content. Roberto Viola, the European Commission’s directorate general of communication, networks, content and technology told Variety that the new rules are on

Indie app maker MacPaw updated its Mac cleaning software with a new major version called CleanMyMac X (which is different from MacKeeper). It’s hard to believe, but CleanMyMac currently has 5 million users. CleanMyMac X helps you remove unneeded files and get an overview of what is slowing down your computer. Most people don’t need

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

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

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

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

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

Communications workflow company Mynewsdesk is acquiring French startup Mention for an undisclosed sum. Norwegian business media group NHST currently owns Mynewsdesk. Mention lets you monitor keywords around the web. It’s a good way to hear what customers are saying about your brand on their blog, on Twitter, on Facebook or anywhere public. You can also

A new London-based travel-industry startup is slowly coming out of stealth mode, but although it’s releasing it’s funding round, it’s keeping the actual product close to its chest. For now. Y Combinator -backed travel startup Duffel says it is working on “a new way to book travel online, aiming at the booking experience “end to

UK payday loans firm Wonga, whose investors include high profile European VC firms Accel and Balderton, appears to be teetering on the brink of collapse as it’s stopped taking new loans. A spokeswoman for the company confirmed to TechCrunch it is not accepting new loan applications. She sent us the below statement which has been

If you’re a rider on Deliveroo, you can now follow courses on OpenClassrooms and get certificates of achievement for free. You get a free Premium Solo account, which is worth €20 per month ($23.44). You’ll find courses in French, English and Spanish on many technical and non-technical topics. For instance, you can learn a programming

Last month Google rolled out a Maps’ “match” feature which purported to predict how much you’d like a particular place, like a restaurant or bar. The feature uses the data it has on you, such as the backlog of places it knows you’ve visited, and what it can assess as your dining preferences. Look up

Since blockchain technology appeared, there has been a persistent problem in its development: how to make it scale to billions of users. Bitcoin was famously never really designed for this, and today other platforms like Ethereum are also struggling. If you could crack this problem, the thinking goes, you’d end up with the hottest property

Natural Cycles, a Swedish startup which touts its body temperature-based algorithmic method for tracking individual fertility as an effective alternative to hormonal birth control, has been wrapped by the UK advertising regulator which today upheld three complaints that an advert the company ran last year via Facebook’s platform was misleading. The regulator has banned Natural

Planday, the workforce collaboration platform for shift workers, has raised €35 million in new funding. The Series C round is led by SEB Private Equity, with participation from previous backers, including Creandum and Idinvest. The Danish startup plans to use the additional investment to further develop the cloud-based software and to expand into new markets

French cloud hosting company OVH just announced a new CEO. Michel Paulin is now heading the company. Founder Octave Klaba remains Chairman of the Board and plans to focus on the big picture. Paulin recently worked at telecom company SFR. If you look further in the past, he also was a key member at Neuf

French startup Blade, the company behind Shadow, is updating its physical box that lets you connect to your cloud computer instance. Shadow Ghost is a tiny device that provides all the ports and wireless technologies that you need to plug to a TV or a monitor and start playing. Shadow has been building a cloud

The vast majority of environmental experts say that avoiding meat and dairy is the single most important, and most impactful action, you can take to reduce your personal impact on Earth. Why? Because of the sheer amount of carbon pumped into the atmosphere from the process of meat production. Many would agree it’s also pretty

After Adyen’s huge debut on the public markets in June that saw the stock go up 92 percent on its first day of trading, the company today published its first earnings as a publicly listed business. The figures underscore to how Adyen — which provides services to merchants and others to power both online and

Fintech startup Revolut is launching a new premium card. As the name suggests, subscribing to Revolut Metal gives you a metal card as well as additional perks compared to Revolut Premium. In addition to the new card and existing premium benefits, you can claim cashback on all spending in the currency of your choice. It

A study of circumstances and demographics attendant on attacks against refugees and immigrants in Germany has shown that Facebook use appears to be deeply linked with the frequency of violent acts. Far from being mere trolling or isolated expressions of controversial political opinions, spikes in anti-refugee posts were predictive of violent crimes against those groups.

What do you get when you connect a bunch of filmmakers with a bunch of programmers? Something like Flowbox. Flowbox, which began life as a unique object-oriented programming language for visual effects, has grown into something truly powerful in the moviemaking industry. Run by Mikołaj Valencia​, Michał Urbańczyk​, Paweł Pietraszko, and Mat Bujalski, this Polish

Karma, the Stockholm-based startup that offers a marketplace to let local restaurants and grocery offer unsold food at a discount, has raised $12 million in Series A funding. Swedish investment firm Kinnevik led the round, with participation from U.S. venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners, appliance manufacturer Electrolux, and previous backer VC firm e.ventures. It

After raising $35 million to develop driverless car technology and a strategy to build a fleet of shared vehicles, UK startup FiveAI is announcing its first on-street trial: a service aimed at commuters in the London outer boroughs of Bromley and Croydon. Projected to begin in late 2019, it will kick off first with a

If you want to test out a feature on a large, well-known, global, platform, there’s a very simple solution: Test it in Australia. At a population of 24 million and with a predominantly Western culture, it’s a large enough test bed and small enough market, so ideal for testing new features before (maybe) rolling them

As tech’s social giants wrestle with antisocial demons that appear to be both an emergent property of their platform power, and a consequence of specific leadership and values failures (evident as they publicly fail to enforce even the standards they claim to have), there are still people dreaming of a better way. Of social networking

There are many, many tech startups tackling the problem of diabetes. You only have to look at the TechCrunch tag to find some of the latest, and even the Apple Watch is getting in on the act. But literally ‘reversing’ Type 2 diabetes remains a tough nut to crack. That’s not prevented UK startup OurPath