MarketingMuses

ZTE will postpone the release of its quarterly earnings report after the United States government banned American companies from selling goods to the Chinese telecom and smartphone maker. In a filing with the Hong Kong stock exchange, ZTE said that its earnings report, originally set to be released on Thursday, is now delayed to an […]

After a report by Reveal suggested that Tesla was underreporting workplace injuries at its Fremont plant, Tesla responded with a blog post calling the report “completely false” and pinning it all up as a “calculated disinformation campaign.” Now California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (otherwise known as Cal/OSHA) is looking into things at the […]

Getting to space is already tough, but getting there on short notice and then doing it again a couple weeks later? That’s a big ask. Nevertheless, DARPA is asking it as part of its Launch Challenge, announced today at the 34th Space Symposium in Colorado. Teams must take a payload to space with only days […]

iZettle, the startup out of Sweden that has been referred to as the Square of Europe, is today making a move that underscores its bigger strategy to build on its traction with small businesses in mobile payments, to expand into an ever-wider range of financial services to fill out its $950 million valuation. The company […]

SpaceX has successfully deployed NASA’s new exoplanet-hunting telescope into high Earth orbit. From there, it will get a gravity assist from the moon and enter a wide orbit, beginning its mission. Meanwhile, back on the surface, the Falcon 9’s first stage landed successfully on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You. This is […]

In the ongoing race to build the best and smartest applications that tap into the advances of artificial intelligence, a startup out of London has raised a large round of funding to double down on solving persistent problems in areas like healthcare and energy. BenevolventAI announced today that it has raised $115 million to continue […]

Jeff Bezos is understandably all sorts of self-congratulatory in the annual shareholder letter Amazon released today. The note is full of all smanner of large numbers, including, perhaps most notably, 100 million. Amazon has exceeded that number of Prime subscribers globally, 13 years after the service launched as a free shipping offering. It’s no surprise, […]

Girlboss, the juggernaut business and lifestyle brand launched by serial entrepreneur Sophia Amoruso (the founder of Nasty Gal), has launched a fresh redesign of its website as the company looks to evolve beyond publishing. While publishing will remain a central component of the business that Girlboss is building, Amoruso says that the brand encompasses much […]

One of the biggest headaches for freelance writers is the need to send an invoice for their work, then wait (and wait, and wait) for payment. Matt Saincome, founder of the satirical punk-themed news site The Hard Times, knows this, which is why he’s launching a new payment product called Outvoice. Saincome said he started […]

Picture this. You’re driving down the street and Google Maps tells you to turn right at the Burger King, instead of telling you to turn right on [insert street name you’ve never heard of]. Well, Google is starting to do this. I noticed this while I was in a Lyft in Washington D.C., but I […]

As you can probably imagine, launching satellites is a complicated business. To get into the game, companies must often go to the biggest players, like Nasa. It makes puts the opportunity for small companies to participate in the benefits of satellite usage completely out of reach. Until recently. Mini or nano-satellites are proliferating and so […]

A new space imaging startup called EarthNow aims to provide not just pictures of the planet on demand, but real-time video anywhere a client desires. Its ambition is matched only by its pedigree: Bill Gates, Intellectual Ventures, Airbus, SoftBank and OneWeb founder Greg Wyler are all backing the play. Its promise is a constellation of […]

Days after Disney-owned ESPN launched its new streaming service, ESPN+, a three-year old streaming TV service for sports fans, fuboTV, is announcing the close of $75 million in Series D funding. The round included new investor AMC Networks, and existing investors 21st Century Fox, Luminari Capital, Northzone, Sky, and the former Scripps Networks Interactive, which […]

It looks like at least one major news publisher is on-board with Brave, the ad-blocking web browser founded by former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich. Brave Software and Dow Jones Media Group announced today that they will be partnering in a deal that will give bring Dow Jones content (specifically, full access to Barrons.com or a […]

Yesterday brought some interesting news in the cryptocurrency space. In a move that is at once sleazy and ridiculous, PornHub and its tech arm Mindgeek announced a partnership with the creators of VergeCoin (XVG), an anonymized cryptocurrency in the vein of Monero that is currently trading at 7 cents, down from an all-time high of […]

Coverfox, one a handful of companies aiming to digitize insurance in India, has landed fresh funding via a $22 million Series C round that will be used to push into more rural parts of the country. The investment is led by IFC, a sister organization of World Bank, and U.S. insurance firm Transamerica with participation from existing […]

Entrepreneurs know the stress that comes from bootstrapping a tech startup on a shoestring budget — and a frayed one at that. That’s why we’re reminding you that you can still save big bucks on passes to San Francisco Disrupt 2018, which runs from September 5-7. The Super Early Bird price offers up to $1,800 […]

Cybersecurity continues to be a growing focus and problem in the digital world, and now Stripe is launching a new paid product that it hopes will help its customers better battle one of the bigger side-effects of data breaches: online payment fraud. Today, Stripe is announcing Radar for Fraud Teams, an expansion of its free […]

Google’s internal incubator, Area 120, is today releasing its next creation: a learn-to-code mobile app for beginners called Grasshopper. At launch, the app teaches would-be coders how to write JavaScript, via short lessons on their iPhone or Android device. The goal is to get coders proficient in the basics and core concepts, so they can […]

This week Snapchat is rolling out Shoppable AR, a new feature that makes it even easier for advertisers to sell goods through sponsored lenses. The new offering builds on top of the Sponsored Lenses the service rolled out in late-2015, which let advertisers create branded filters, bringing product placements to selfies. Now companies can essentially […]

The first digital media networks have popped up on YouTube TV, with the addition of two new channels from the startup Cheddar. Earlier this month, Digiday had reported how YouTube’s streaming television service, YouTube TV, would soon gain new channels from a variety of digital media publishers, including Cheddar, Tastemade and The Young Turks Network. The […]

YouTube says it’s rolling out more tools to help its creators make money from their videos. The changes are meant to address creators’ complaints over YouTube’s new monetization policies announced earlier this year. Those policies were designed to make the site more advertiser-friendly following a series of controversies over video content from top creators, including […]

Qapital, one of a slew of mobile applications trying to make it easier for users to save money (and spend it more wisely), has raised $30 million in fresh financing as it expands beyond savings to offer investment advisory services. Since its launch in the U.S. in 2015, Qapital has amassed roughly 420,000 users that […]

As the future of technology continues to give us plenty of things we wish it hadn’t, we’re still managing to get some simple pleasures out of the way. Star Wars Holochess can now be played on the iPhone in your pocket in full augmented reality glory. The game may have only occupied a few seconds […]

Cloud Foundry is among the most successful open source project in the enterprise right now. It’s a cloud-agnostic platform-as-a-service offering that helps businesses develop and run their software more efficiently. In many enterprises, it’s now the standard platform for writing new applications. Indeed, half of the Fortune 500 companies now use it in one form […]

Peris Kimeli and Betsy Cheruyot were students at Kenyatta University thinking about launching a business when they applied for their first loans from the mobile lending company, Tala. Hoping to get a clothing business off the ground and make some money to live on while going to school, the two young Kenyans downloaded the Tala […]

At the Cloud Foundry Summit in Boston, the team behind the U.S. government’s cloud.gov application platform announced that it is now a certified Cloud Foundry platform that is guaranteed to be compatible with other certified providers like Huawei, IBM, Pivotal, SAP and — also starting today — Suse. With this, cloud.gov becomes the first government […]

While smaller companies are seeing a lot of new options for distributed office space, or can pick up a couple offices in a WeWork, eventually they get big enough and have to find a bigger office — but that can end up as one of the weirdest and most annoying challenges for an early-stage CEO. […]

My friend Rick is a voiceover artist and works in Ohio – right along the flight path for jets taking off and landing at the Columbus airport. As a result, he said, he had to record late at night when the airport closed, a limitation that he found exasperating. Enter StudioBricks, a cool startup from […]

Amazon is looking to sell its Fire TV Edition smart televisions in a big box store, but thankfully it’s not Whole Foods. Instead, Amazon will be tapping a retailer whose life it has made incredibly difficult over the years, Best Buy, to begin selling smart televisions with its Fire TV capabilities baked in. The displays […]

Voicera wants to be the company that eliminates the need for human note taking once and for all. Their vision is an AI-driven voice recognition system that not only takes notes, but identifies speakers and summarizes key points and action items. Today, the company announced it had acquired a similar startup, Wrappup, an AI-fueled note […]

If you own any Bitcoin, you’re probably in the habit of watching its price fluctuate wildly. What you aren’t doing is using your Bitcoin to buy things. It’s too valuable, not to mention unpredictable. Enter Basis, a year-old, 10-person, Hoboken, N.J.-based cryptocurrency startup at work on a “stable coin” whose elastic supply will ostensibly expand […]

AJ Brustein was out spending time with a member of his merchandising team when a nearby store ran out of stock of some goods — but there was no one on staff responsible for that location. Fortunately, the employee he was with had already showed him how to restock the shelves, and he offered to […]

There’s good news for Google Chrome users, the latest version of the world’s most popular web browser has arrived with a new feature that prevents websites from automatically playing sound. That means that pre-loaded videos, and other content that involves sound, won’t blare out unless you specifically choose to enable it to. Aside from being […]

As fast-growing companies — or, dare I say, ‘scale-ups’ — add new headcount, the pace at which they are able to on-board new hires doesn’t always keep up. In fact, I’m told it is not unheard of for new employees to turn up on day one apparently unexpected, and to be passed from pillar to […]

Ford is launching an on-demand transportation service for non-emergency medical needs. The idea is to better help patients get to their doctor appointments. Ford is initially launching this in partnership with Beaumont Health in Michigan to serve more than 200 facilities. Called GoRide, the fleet has 15 transit vans to accommodate people with varying needs. […]

Funding Societies co-founders Reynold Wijaya and Kelvin Teo. Funding Societies, a peer-to-peer lending platform in Southeast Asia, said today that it has raised a $25 million Series B led by Softbank Ventures Korea, the Japanese tech conglomerate’s early-stage venture capital unit. The round included returning investors Sequoia India, which led the Singapore-based startup’s Series A […]

The Coinbase hiring spree continues. In the last week and a half, the company has picked up a new CTO, a new VP of communications, a global head of inclusion and now a new CFO. In a blog post today, the company announced the addition of Alesia Haas, who joins the team from New York-based […]

All of the procrastinating Pollys and Peters who waited til the last minute to file their taxes can breathe a sigh of relief. Thanks to today’s outage of direct payment systems at the Internal Revenue Service, folks are getting another day to get those taxes in. The IRS is now saying that people can submit […]

As cryptocurrencies continued shaking off their April hangover, the state of New York is trying to figure out what to do with this whole coin thing. On Tuesday, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced something called the Virtual Markets Integrity Initiative, a state-level effort to examine the policies and practices of the major cryptocurrency […]

GoldieBlox, a startup looking to get girls hooked on engineering and other STEM fields, has hired Shawn Dennis as its first president. Dennis was most recently the head of brand and franchise development at DreamWorks Animation and also worked as the chief marketing officer at Mattel’s American Girl. She’s also been on the GoldieBlox board […]

Gené Teare Contributor More posts by this contributor Unicorns gorge as investors dish up bigger rounds, more capital The portion of VC-backed startups founded by women stays stubbornly stagnant In this report, we look at venture and seed investment trends in female-founded startups over the last five quarters. For this time period, we look at […]

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously voted today to approve the ordinance that looks to regulate electric scooters in San Francisco. The ordinance seeks to establish regulation and a permitting process that would enable the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency or Department of Public Works to take action against scooters from companies that don’t […]

Tesla is about to ramp up production of the Model 3 sedan according to an email obtained by Jalopnik. The company shut down the sedan’s production line this week, but this email says the line will soon be running and a third shift will be added allowing the sedan to be built around the clock. […]

Twitter’s brief morning outage was stressful enough — but those who’ve waited until the last possible moment to pay their tax bills have a much more distressing site crash to worry about. The Internal Revenue Service’s Direct pay site is down the day taxes are due. It’s been experiencing issues for a number of hours […]

General Motors is spinning up its electrification plans and today announced the stunning, poorly-named Buick Enspire concept at Auto China 2018. As a concepts go, this one looks great and rather feasible. GM says its powered by Buick’s eMotion powertrain that can produce a maximum output of 410 kW (roughly 550 hp). This should make […]

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and Arrington XRP Capital founder (and TechCrunch founder) Michael Arrington will be joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in September to talk money. Garlinghouse has had a long and storied career in the tech industry, serving as a Senior Vice President at Yahoo!, President of Consumer Applications at AOL, and CEO […]

Christoph Auer-Welsbach Contributor Christoph Auer-Welsbach is an experienced founder, investor and product manager active in the fields of artificial intelligence, blockchain, IoT and web/mobile. He is the co-founder of the global applied AI community City.AI. This year, artificial intelligence will further elevate the enterprise by transforming the way we work, securing digital assets, increasing collaboration […]

Amazon has quietly launched an Android web browser app for emerging markets, where access to mobile data and high-speed connectivity is more limited. The browser has the rather generic name of: “Internet: fast, lite and private” on Google Play, and promises to be “lighter than the competition.” The app first appeared on the Play Store […]

Amazon is developing a series based on William Gibson’s science fiction novel The Peripheral. Variety reports that the series is being considered for a straight-to-series order, with Scott B. Smith writing and executive producing, and Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan (creators of the HBO remake of Westworld) also signed on as executive producers. Amazon seems […]

Justin Kan is qualified to teach you how to pitch, and isn’t shy about it. Having raised about $90 million for a few companies and sold his startup Twitch to Amazon for almost a billion dollars, not being shy is actually part of what Kan teaches. His legal services startup Atrium today officially launches Atrium […]

At the end of last year, Snap introduced Lens Studio, a platform that allows developers to create AR lenses for Snapchat. Today, the company is announcing new features for Lens Studio, including seven brand new templates for the creation of face lenses. Before now, only World Lens creation was available to everyone within Lens Studio, […]

Hardware isn’t easy — especially if you decline to take advantage of the global manufacturing infrastructure, build everything in a flat in London, and use only local labor and materials. But that’s what the creators of successful Kickstarter project Moon did, and they have no regrets. Back in 2016, I got a pitch for the […]

It’s been about 6 years since Boosted first showed up with its electric longboard and its oh-so-orange wheels, but the company is back with the next logical step: a cheaper, shorter board. The company is also revamping its longboards, with two new models on the way in the coming months. The Shortboards First up, the […]

I’ll be helping build a larger meetup focused on pre-ICO companies in New York on April 23 and I’d love to see you there. It will be held at Knotel on April 23 at 7pm and will feature a pitch-off with eight startups – I will write about the best ones – and two panels […]

Startups like Zillow and Trulia have reshaped the real estate market by giving consumers with their 24-hour covetable, clickable window into shoppable home sales — and the other players in the real estate marketplace are struggling to catch up. This deluge of leads coming in to real estate agencies across the country from online sources […]

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory has teamed up with the University of Minnesota to explore the wonders of soft robots. The teams have published a study describing their findings as they look to build invertebrate-inspired robotics able to squeeze into and maneuver around obstacles. “Successful stealthy maneuvering requires high structural flexibility and distributive control to […]

Elon Musk, CEO of multiple companies and part of the PayPal mafia, is worth around $20 billion dollars. He doesn’t need a handout. But that didn’t stopped over 72 people from donating money on GoFundMe to buy the man a new couch. As of publication, over $1000 was raised to gift Musk a better couch, […]

It probably goes without saying that 3D printing is going to be a mainstay for the next generation of spacecrafts. The technology has already made its way onto extra terrestrial objects, and this morning 3D printing bigwig Stratasys confirmed that it’s teaming with Lockheed Martin to create parts for the Orion. The parts, the company […]

According to Parsley Health, the average adult spends 19 minutes with their physician every year. Seventy percent of the time, these short visits result in the prescription of a medication. “According to the CDC, 70% of diseases in our country are chronic and lifestyle-driven,” said Parsley Health founder and CEO Dr. Robin Berzin. “And yet […]

Building conversational interfaces is a hot new area for developers. Chatbots can be a way to reduce friction in websites and apps and to give customers quick answers to commonly asked questions in a conversational framework. Today, Google announced it was making Dialogflow Enterprise Edition generally available. It had previously been in Beta. This technology […]

TechCrunch is poised to break through the huge noise surrounding blockchain with a new event. Zug, the Swiss Canton just outside of Zurich, has come to be known as “Crypto Valley” because it’s become a regulatory haven where startups are increasingly filing their Initial Coin Offerings. It’s also turned into a place where Blockchain startups […]

In November,  we told you about Farmers Business Network, a social network for farmers that invites them to share their data, pool their know-how, and bargain more effectively for better pricing from manufacturing companies. At the time, FBN, as it’s known, had just closed on $110 million in new funding in a round that brought […]

Reports of Twitter being down are coming in from across the global. The homepage and mobile app is currently down. The desktop API still works so users can connect to the service through apps like Tweetdeck and Tweetbot. According to downdetector.com, users are experience an outage across the world. The issue appeared at 9:50 AM EDT. […]

While chatbots might sound like an interesting experiment for restaurants and other small businesses, they probably can’t devote much time or money to building them. So a startup called GuestFriend is planning to make the process as fast and easy as possible. The company has raised $5 million in seed funding from Primary Venture Partners, […]

Huawei is readjusting its approach the the U.S. In an annual meeting in Shenzhen, the company asserted its commitment on existing customers and markets. It’s a shift in focus for a company that has been aggressively targeting new territories, looking to expand its position as the world’s third largest smartphone manufacturer. It’s understandable, of course. […]

Carvana is already an innovative way to shop for a car and it could get better thanks to Car360. The two companies share an interest in improving the car buying experience through enhanced imagery. Car360’s approach is different from Carvana’s as it’s focused on photos shot with a mobile device. This approach could allow Carvana to […]

More details are out this morning about Apple’s plans for Texture, the digital newsstand business it acquired last month. According to a new report from Bloomberg, Apple is planning to launch its own premium news subscription service in an upgraded version of the Apple News app, arriving sometime in the next year. The service will […]

In 2015, the fashion world was abuzz when Natalie Massenet, who founded the highly disruptive e-commerce fashion company Net-a-Porter, suddenly exited the scene weeks before a merger was sealed between NAP, as it is called, and Yoox, an Italy-based discount fashion e-tailer and e-commerce services company. According to an expose written soon afterward, Massenet left […]

Resy launched in the summer of 2014 with a simple premise: If you want a premium reservation at a restaurant on short notice, you should be able to pay for it. Four years and 160 markets later, Resy has changed a lot since then. But today, the company is about to change things up even […]

The mayor of Los Angeles confirmed earlier reports that SpaceX will build its largest rocket, the BFR, at the Port of Los Angeles. The company intends to build a manufacturing facility on an 18-acre site at Berth 240 and use waterways to transport the massive rocket. SpaceX says the BFR is simply too big to […]

When you’re raising venture capital, it helps if you’ve had “exits.” In other words, if your company has been acquired or you’ve taken one public, investors are more inclined to take a bet on anything you do. Boston-based serial entrepreneur David Cancel has sold not just one, but four companies.  And after a few years running […]

For a communications platform like Twilio, getting into wireless always seemed like a logical next move and a year ago, the company did just that with the beta launch of its SIM-based Programmable Wireless service for IoT. Now, a year later, the company is taking this service out of beta and making it generally available. […]

Spinnaker is the new open-source project to watch. It’s a multi-cloud continuous delivery platform that came out of Netflix and that now also has the backing of Google. The typical cycle for these kind of products, which mirrors what we’ve seen with projects like Kubernetes or OpenStack, is that a few companies will back the […]

Node, an AI-driven search tool designed to surface the information that matters most to you, announced today that it was bringing on a couple of AI research heavy hitters. It also announced $5 million in additional funding. For starters, the company hired Louis Mornier, one of the founders of early internet search engine, Alta Vista, and […]

Can Artificial Intelligence replace lawyers? Perhaps sometime in the distant future, but in the meantime AI is already augmenting the work done by legal professionals as startups race to reach that ultimate goal. One burgeoning player in the AI-powered legal tech space is Tel Aviv-based LawGeex, which has developed automated contract review technology to help […]

Ensuring equal pay is an ongoing task, Salesforce has found. In the past year, Salesforce spent $2.7 million to address pay discrepancies across gender worldwide and race in the U.S. Where Salesforce is making progress is in the number of people affected by unequal pay. Last year, Salesforce made pay adjustments (salaries and bonuses) for […]

Harbor helps businesses legally issue cryptocurrency tokens that represent ownership of real-world assets like real estate, fine art, company equity, and investment funds. This “tokenization” might sound boring, but it could be a big business that unlocks trading of illiquid property. Harbor’s intention to become a fundamental bridge between the offline and crypto economies has […]

Lingumi, the London and Cardiff-based edtech startup that teaches English to kids aged between 2 and 6 using an app and a range of physical products, has picked up £1.2 million in seed funding. Leading the round is ADV, with participation from existing backers LocalGlobe, and company builder Entrepreneur First (Lingumi was part of EF’s […]

Kdan Mobile founder and CEO Kenny Su Kdan Mobile, a Taiwanese startup that makes cloud-based software for content creators, announced a $5 million Series A today, raised from investors including W.I. Harper Group, Darwin Venture Management and Accord Ventures. Founded in 2009, the Tainan City startup says its products have been downloaded more 120 million […]

TaskRabbit, the on-demand errand service acquired by IKEA last year, announced today that has taken its website and app offline while investigating a “cybersecurity incident.” The company also said that people who use the same password on TaskRabbit as for other services should change them immediately as a precaution. “We understand how important your personal […]

Whenever a company may be guilty of something, from petty neglect to grand deception, there’s usually a class action lawsuit filed. But until a judge rules that lawsuit legitimate, the threat remains fairly empty. Unfortunately for Facebook, one major suit from 2015 has just been given that critical go-ahead. The case concerns an Illinois law […]

[embedded content] With the debut of his Eminem Augmented app at Coachella last night, hip hop’s not-so-merry prankster took the (somewhat revolutionary) step of embracing the machine that so many musicians have raged against — by building an experience that actually enhances the way that modern fans see live music. Rather than fighting the mobile phone […]

Tesla has paused the production of Model 3, Buzzfeed first reported. However, this seems to be part of Tesla’s planned downtime for Model 3. “Our Model 3 production plan includes periods of planned downtime in both Fremont and Gigafactory 1,” a Tesla spokesperson said back in February and again today to TechCrunch. “These periods are […]

Research into machine learning and the interesting AI models created as a consequence are popular topics these days. But there’s a sort of shadow world of scientists working to undermine these systems — not to show they’re worthless but to shore up their weaknesses. A new paper demonstrates this by showing how vulnerable image recognition […]