MarketingMuses

What if it look like if the majority of newly issued ERC-20 tokens were used for good, instead of scammy ICO evil? One Y Combinator-backed startup that thinks they have an answer to this question. Meet Hexel, a startup that that wants to make it easy for anyone to use Ethereum-based tokens to engage their hyperlocal […]

Ilya Fushman, a former Dropbox executive most recently at Index Ventures, is joining Kleiner Perkins as a general partner and managing member, the firm said today. Fushman is a big pickup for Kleiner Perkins, who also brought on Social+Capital’s Mamoon Hamid in August last year. All these hires give the impression that Kleiner Perkins, with […]

If you can’t get enough new Black Mirror episodes, Netflix confirmed that the series will be coming back with a fifth season. The company shared the news with a cryptic teaser video on Twitter with “Be Right Back” written at the end. The future will be brighter than ever. pic.twitter.com/slVeg3VPd7 — Black Mirror (@blackmirror) March […]

Every major tech company is looking at quantum computers as the next big breakthrough in computing. Teams at Google, Microsoft, Intel, IBM and various startups and academic labs are racing to become the first to achieve quantum supremacy — that is, the point where a quantum computer can run certain algorithms faster than a classical […]

Ahead of GDC later this month, Amazon has confirmed an acquisition that speaks to its ambitions to do more in the area of gaming — and specifically through offering platform tools for the games developer community. The company has acquired UK- and Ireland-based cloud gaming platform GameSparks — a “backend as a service” for game developers […]

Employees of French startup Devialet just learned this morning that they would get a new CEO. Co-founder and (former) CEO Quentin Sannié is going to focus on the long-term vision, while Franck Lebouchard is joining the company to become CEO. While the board of the company elected Lebouchard as CEO on Friday, this change has […]

On the heels of Amazon’s launch of Whole Foods grocery delivery through Amazon Prime Now, Walmart today is rolling out a new option for its grocery pickup and delivery service meant to appeal to busy families: meal kits. The retailer’s affordable alternative to meal kit delivery subscriptions like Blue Apron, is now available at over […]

Seven years after picking up Zagat for $151 million, Google is selling off the perennial restaurant recommendation service. The New York Times is reporting this morning that the technology giant is selling off the company to The Infatuation, a review site founded nine years back by former music execs. The company had been rumored to […]

Apple should definitely avoid throwing stones as its glass houses have been causing some problems of late. The lights inside the new Apple Store in Chicago were attracting birds to fly into the large glass windows. And it seems humans aren’t immune to that crystal clear glass either. Employees at Apple Park have been walking […]

RedDoorz, a budget hotel startup focused on Southeast Asia, has closed $11 million in new funding to expand its presence. The three-year-old startup is a number offers a network of hotels that are grouped together under a single brand. The goal is a happy combination that marries the ubiquity of (typically) unorganized local guesthouse-style rooms […]

Recently launched out of beta, U.K. startup Shape wants to create a more educational trading experience for a new generation of traders, including those who might be concerned with the ethical standards of the sectors or companies they back. The Shape iOS app assumes no or very little prior trading knowledge, and provides easy-to-follow information […]

Waze’s carpooling app for commuters is relaunching with a number of new features designed to make it easier and safer to use. The company says it will now allow people to choose their shared rides, instead of being matched blindly. That means riders will be able to pick drivers based on things like star ratings, mutual […]

A year after announcing a partnership with Caliburger, Miso Robotics’ resident chef has finally graduated Hamburger University. The AI-enabled line cook starts today, joining the the human crew at the fast casual restaurant’s Pasadena location during the lunch shift. The deal has been in the works for some time, with plans to bring the robot […]

Virtru co-founder Will Ackerly developed the company’s underlying encryption technology while he was working as an engineer at the NSA, so it’s fair to say he knows a thing or two about the subject. The company has been delivering encryption products for email and files in transit for several years now, mainly through a partnership […]

Eric Paley Contributor Eric Paley is a managing partner at Founder Collective. More posts by this contributor: The plague of rationalization Learning to embrace conflict as a part of startup culture I’ve written a lot about the benefits of efficient entrepreneurship. I’ve explained my view conceptually, tried to illustrate the mechanics of how excess capital kills promising […]

In the wake of Uber’s entry into the healthcare transportation market, Lyft wants to remind people that’s a space it’s been working at for years, with partnerships across brokers of non-emergency medical transportation that cover nine of the top 10 health care systems in the U.S. It’s adding Allscripts today, and already counts Blue Cross […]

Accounting and financial controls are some of the most important functions of a modern company, but they are also serious cost centers. Hiring a full-time bookkeeper can be prohibitively expensive, and it can be difficult to find financial analysts and part-time CFOs that a company’s leaders can trust. Companies rely on accounting firms to manage […]

Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi could make its debut in the U.S. as soon as this year, according to its CEO. Lei Jun, the serial entrepreneur who leads the phone maker, told the Wall Street Journal that the company — which is being linked with an IPO this year — plans to finally begin selling phones […]

Zen Rooms, a budget hotel network funded by Rocket Internet among others, is facing shutdown if investors are unable to sell the loss-making business. The two-year-old company offers a network of affordable hotels in 50 cities across Southeast Asia that are designed as a happy medium between affordable guesthouses, which are typically not organized and hard […]

Jason Rowley Contributor Jason Rowley is a venture capital and technology reporter for Crunchbase News. More posts by this contributor: 2018 VC investment into crypto startups set to surpass 2017 tally The rise and rise of supergiant rounds Recently, we found that, for 2018, the amount of money being raised by blockchain and blockchain-adjacent companies via traditional VC […]

“Timing”, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel said cryptically when asked what the greatest threat was for Snap Inc. “I think the big risks are always the really big product ideas that we’re investing in that are just hard to get right” he told the Goldman Sachs conference two weeks ago.  The statements got lost amongst flashier […]

 For many in the open source community, code and technology are meant to be free, shared with all of humanity in the pursuit of a better present and future. That is not how governments see it though. In their minds, technology is a strategic asset that provides a competitive advantage against other countries. These assets […]

 As YouTube continues in its efforts to crack down harder on content that violates its terms of usage and promotes offensive and/or misleading content, it’s found itself in the fake news crossfire this weekend. After a video and some advertisers were removed from YouTube channels controlled by Alex Jones, the far-right commentator best known for […]

When Birmingham led the charge in the civil rights movement in the sixties, the city inadvertently created big shoes for itself to later fill. Just how Birmingham was the birthplace of many civil rights actions in the sixties, the city wants to be the birthplace of true diversity and inclusion in the tech industry. [embedded content] […]

 Hey, did you know that TechCrunch sends out a weekly newsletter rounding up the latest startup news? Well, we do! But for as-yet-unidentified technical reasons, it doesn’t seem to have gone out today, so I’m publishing it here. And if you haven’t subscribed yet, what are you waiting for? 1. What does it take to […]

 For months now, much of the media attention on the crypto space has been directed at ebbs and flows in the price of bitcoin on one side, and whiz-bang ICOs on the other. The price of the most valuable cryptocurrency, Bitcoin (specifically the BTC chain), has backpedaled significantly from highs set in December 2017. The […]

The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Frank Radice, Denis Pombriant, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, March 3, 2018. Doc Searls: “Steve was 15 years ahead of his time with Attention. His idea didn’t work until the only way to pay for attention arrived. Cryptocurrency is that way.” @stevegillmor, @fradice, @Dsearls, @DenisPombriant, @kteare […]

Joanna Glasner Contributor Joanna Glasner is a reporter for Crunchbase. More posts by this contributor: Not a minimalist? Startups will gladly store, manage and deliver your items The state of the unicorn Most of us tend to think people trying to open the door when we’re away want to steal stuff. Amazon.com would like to change that […]

 If there is one policy dilemma facing nearly every tech company today, it is what to do about “content moderation,” the almost-Orwellian term for censorship. Charlie Warzel of Buzzfeed pointedly asked the question a little more than a week ago: “How is it that the average untrained human can do something that multibillion-dollar technology companies […]

One of the most common questions I get when helping marketers with their email marketing, is related to certain words being in the subject line of a marketing email. “Don’t use FREE in all caps, don’t use exclamation points, don’t use terms like ‘Offer expires’ or ‘last chance’ if you want your mail delivered!” are […]

 TechCrunch invites you to our annual Crunch By Crunch Fest party in Austin, Texas. RSVP to come meet our writers while enjoying free drinks and musical performances by live electronic pop wizards Autograf, digital RnB drummer Mobley, angelic songwriter MIEARS, and yacht dance DJs Glassio. It’s going down from noon to 4pm, Sunday March 11th. […]

These days, home movies aren’t recorded with handheld video cameras, but rather with our smartphones. Unfortunately, there’s a downside. Our iPhones default to lower quality video so recordings won’t eat up storage space; and while you can adjust that all the way to 4K on newer devices, that would drastically increase your storage consumption. You’d […]

[embedded content] Researchers took part in the Ski Robot Challenge last month and the resulting videos – essentially quick cuts of robots in ski jackets totally whanging off the gates and spinning out in the powder. The Challenge, run by the Korea Institute for Robot Industry Advancement, is sort of a Winter Olympics for wonky […]

The initial hype around bots — applications that run partly or entirely using natural language processing, machine learning, computer vision and other AI tech to help consumers ask and answer questions, buy things and get other stuff done — may have waned a bit, but a startup building the equivalent for the enterprise world, in […]

Amazon Prime Video just added a heaping helping of reality TV to its catalog, including multiple seasons of Hell’s Kitchen, River Monsters, Whale Wars, Miami Ink, Survivorman, Hoarding: Buried Alive and a whole lot of other shows that have ruined the once sterling reputations of networks like TLC, A&E and others (via Variety). These shows […]

It’s become a standard part of my dwindling Amazon shopping trips that I check the reviews and merchants carefully to make sure I’m not buying a poor quality counterfeit of the item in question. But not everyone is as suspicious as me — especially when Amazon sells the counterfeit under the official listing for the […]

More intimate than text but easier to record than video, Facebook hopes voice could get people sharing more on its aging social network. And internationally where users may have to deal with non-native language keyboards, voice lets them speak their mind without a typing barrier. Facebook is now testing Voice Clips as a status update […]

I’ve been messing around with LED-embedded guitars since the original GTar. Designed to help beginners learn and players look like all supersonic freakadelic on stage, they have quickly become commonplace if expensive. Now Fret Zealot has something that can turn your guitar into a laser light show in a few minutes. Designed as an $199 […]

Earlier this morning Samsung’s Galaxy S9’s camera was awarded the highest-yet score from DxOMark, and now its screen gets the best-of-all-time nod from DisplayMate and display wonk Ray Soneira. The margins between the victor and the vanquished, however, are growing thinner every generation. The S9 beats its competitors, chiefly the iPhone X if we’re honest, […]

The growing popularity of smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home will lead to an explosion in voice-based shopping, according to a new market research report from OC&C Strategy Consultants out this week. The firm is bullishly predicting that voice shopping will grow to a whopping $40 billion-plus in 2022, up from $2 billion […]

Amazon’s Alexa smart assistant seems to be down this morning. We’ve been hearing reports over the last hour of either delayed responses or just total loss of connection. While Amazon doesn’t have a status page for its consumer products, Down Detector is reporting a huge spike in Alexa-related complaints over the last hour. For example, Alexa […]

Twitter met or surpassed many of the diversity and inclusion goals it set for itself for 2017, the company announced today. Twitter is now 38.4 percent female, compared to 37 percent in 2016. Regarding underrepresented minorities at Twitter, representation increased from 11 percent in 2016 to 12.5 percent in 2017. While Twitter increased the overall representation […]

For years, Google’s “featured snippets” have offered quick answers to users’ search queries by pulling information from web pages and placing it in a box above the search results. This week, Google began rolling out a new snippet experience for web searchers with multiple answers to the question posed in the search box – something […]

You might hear e-commerce in China and assume ‘Alibaba,’ but another company is making progress to challenge that assumption. JD.com, the nearest e-commerce competitor to Alibaba in China, has reported its first year of profitability as a public company. The Beijing-headquartered company was founded in 1998 and it went public on the Nasdaq nearly four years ago. For […]

Snap, Inc. calls itself a “camera company” so it shouldn’t be all that surprising that it’s working on new versions of its Spectacles hardware (especially since we reported just that last June). But a new report from Cheddar has surprised some with news that Snap is working on a refresh of their hardware´set to launch […]

[embedded content] Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. We had the full crew on hand this week with Matthew Lynley, Katie Roof, and myself, along with Mar Hershenson from Pear Ventures who stepped into the guest chair. It was a damn busy week, with news raining down from the skies. We […]

Toyota has an existing think tank, research organization and long-term development wing courtesy of Toyota Research Institute (TRI), but now it’s expanding TRI with a new sub-company of its own: Toyota Research Institute-Advanced Development (TRI-AD), which I have to assume was so named just so they could have the really cool acronym. The new company […]

Maven has launched its Maven Gig offering in Austin, just ahead of SXSW when there will probably be a fair amount of ride-hailing and on-demand food delivery activity. Maven Gig is the arm of GM’s Maven mobility brand that caters specifically to gig economy workers, with cars available to freelancers who drive only occasionally, and […]

Troy Hunt is turning Have I Been Pwned into an essential pwning monitoring service. The service monitors security breaches and password leaks so that you and your users remain secure. And now, the U.K. and Australian governments are monitoring their own domain names using the service. Most people are familiar with the consumer-facing version of […]

Gaming and entertainment company Rovio continues to have a very hard time of it as it faces the music on the waning popularity of its once-might Angry Birds franchise. Today, the Helsinki-based company reported Q4 and full-year financials that fell short of even analysts’ most conservative estimates as it blamed lower-than-expected interest in its new […]

You know the drill, right? A new flagship comes out and bumps the last big name out of the top spot. We’re still a couple of weeks out from the Samsung Galaxy S9/S9+ release date, but the premium handset just got the DxOMark treatment, and it seems the company’s got another feather to put in […]

Google has added a new instrument to its Chrome Music Lab: Song Maker. As the name implies, Song Maker is all about making songs. It’s essentially an easy to use sequencer that lets you draw melodies in the browser (though it doesn’t feature some of the automation in the Music Lab’s Melody Maker tool). It’s […]

In a growing sign of the increased sophistication of both cyber attacks and defenses, GitHub has revealed that it weathered the largest-known DDoS attack in history this week. DDoS — or distributed denial of service in full — is a cyber attack that aims to bring websites and web-based services down by bombarding them with so […]

TickX, a U.K., Manchester-based startup that has developed a search engine and discovery platform for events and other “attractions” tickets, has raised £3 million in Series A funding. The round is led by BGF Ventures, the early-stage venture arm of BGF, which has been going through a restructuring that saw three partners depart this week. […]

Google researchers know how much people like to trick others into thinking they’re on the moon, or that it’s night instead of day, and other fun shenanigans only possible if you happen to be in a movie studio in front of a green screen. So they did what any good 2018 coder would do: build […]

Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has joined the board of directors for Kareo, a medical health tech startup, Axios reports. This is Kalanick’s first public appointment since his ouster from Uber in June. Kalanick was an angel investor in Kareo, a company that has raised about $125 million in venture funding. The company is geared […]

Garrett Camp, best known for being a co-founder of Uber and founder of the accelerator/venture fund Expa, is launching his own cryptocurrency. The currency is called Eco, and Camp wants it to be a digital global currency that can be used as a payment tool around the world for daily-use transactions. There will be one […]

Users might hate it, but Facebook is now testing a self-serve sponsored messaging tool for small businesses that aren’t sophisticated enough to build bots. TechCrunch first reported Facebook internally building a prototype of the Messenger Broadcast tool back in November that let companies blast a message to anyone who’s already started a conversation with them. […]

Facebook is ending its short-lived (and misguided) experiment with the alternative news feed feature called “Explore”. In a blog post today, Facebook head of news feed, Adam Mosseri wrote: We constantly try out new features, design changes and ranking updates to understand how we can make Facebook better for everyone. Some of these changes—like Reactions, […]

 London-based We Are Colony has been acquired by sports media startup Fantastec. Fantastec was founded just last year by Steve Madincea, a sports marketing veteran who created sponsorship agency Prism and continued to run it after selling to ad giant WPP. Fantastec’s goal is to engage sports fans through technology like video on demand, virtual reality, […]

Jaguar has finally fully revealed the official I-PACE all-electric SUV, a vehicle with just under 240 miles of range and a 0 to 60 mph time of under five seconds. The car can also charge to 80 percent from empty in 40 minutes using special quick charger hardware, and a 15-minute top-up is good for […]

Twitter, which some people use to abuse, harass and manipulate others, is soliciting proposals from the public to help the social network capture, measure and evaluate healthy interactions on the platform. This is part of Twitter’s commitment “to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted earlier […]

As a member of the ABM alliance, Pardot is participating as a sponsor in the Optimizing ABM Impact Conference. Join us on March 8 to learn how to create an account-based marketing strategy that will truly revolutionize your business. Learn the basics of getting started, expand your existing strategy with real-life use cases and examples, […]

Ten years ago, not long after Yahoo had acquired Flickr, its cofounder, Caterina Fake, bounded up and down Sand Hill Road taking meetings with venture firms that were interested in hiring her. She knew most of them. In fact, she already knew a lot of investors at that point. Flickr was created out of a […]

Microsoft Cognitive Services is home to the company’s hosted artificial intelligence algorithms. Today, the company announced advances to several Cognitive Services tools including Microsoft Custom Vision Service, the Face API and Bing Entity Search . Joseph Sirosh, who leads the Microsoft’s cloud AI efforts, defined Microsoft Cognitive Services in a company blog post announcing the enhancements, as “a […]

It’s been an eventful week for Dropbox coming off its announcement last Friday that it was finally going public, but that doesn’t mean the business stops. The company announced plans to partner with Google today to bring native G Suite integration to Dropbox storage. The fact is that more than 50 percent of Dropbox users […]

If you’re running a company with a lot of customers, it can take time to sort through all that feedback. A startup called ScopeAI is working to make that process a lot easier. The startup is announcing that it’s raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Y Combinator (where it was part of the […]

Researchers at the have successfully etched edible circuits onto the surface of food, paving the way for RFID tagged edibles that can help us track food from farm to tummy. The project, which uses something called laser-induced graphene (LIG), is a process that creates a “foam made out of tiny cross-linked graphene flakes” that can […]