MarketingMuses

Cloud storage provider Box started out the day Thursday down over 20% on the stock market. The company reported quarterly earnings after the bell on Wednesday, and while its losses of six cents per share surpassed analyst expectations of negative eight cents, investors were concerned about the outlook. Revenue was $136.7 million, in line with […]

Light is back with a new twist on its anti-smartphone phone. But this time, instead of doing just one thing, the Light Phone 2 does a few, and exists somewhere between the original Light and your overwrought iPhone – though still far closer to the first-generation Light phone overall. The new design features a matte […]

ClassPass is not accustomed to sitting idle. The startup, a subscription marketplace that lets users find and book fitness classes, is today introducing credits. ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman hinted at the change at Disrupt SF last year, explaining that the service has a great market fit with a certain demographic, but doesn’t work as well […]

Motorcycle giant Harley-Davidson is now a stakeholder in Alta Motors, the electric motorcycle and light vehicle EV drivetrain maker based in Brisbane, California. Harley-Davidson and Alta made the investment public today, and also announced that Alta Motors will collaborate with the legendary motorbike maker on building future electric motorcycles as part of the deal. This […]

Bugcrowd and HackerOne both launched in 2012 and both companies are competing in the growing bug bounty market to pay a network of white hat hackers to bang on client software to find vulnerabilities. Today, Bugcrowd announced a $26 million Series C jolt led by Triangle Peak Partners. Bugcrowd is built on the premise that it’s better to […]

Uber’s launching a new business line called Uber Health on Thursday that will provide a ride-hailing platform available specifically to healthcare providers, letting clinics, hospitals, rehab centers and more easily assign rides for their patients and clients from a centralized dashboard – without requiring that the rider even have the Uber app, or a smartphone. […]

Restaurant delivery service DoorDash is joining the unicorn club with its latest round of funding. The company is announcing that it’s raised $535 million in a Series D round. And while it’s not saying anything about valuation, a source close to DoorDash told us that the new funding values the company at $1.4 billion. DoorDash […]

After acquiring CrowdRise over a year ago to double down on fundraising for non-profits, GoFundMe is today taking the wraps off a new product that will supercharge the service. CrowdRise by GoFundMe is a new version of the site that signifies the next step of development for GoFundMe, as it starts to work with larger organizations […]

Welcome to the future… where startups are willing to customize everything from a diet regimen to a workout plan, or family planning to personal fashion based on an individual’s genetic code. Angling to be the go-to marketplace for these gene-based businesses, Helix, the spin out from genetic testing research and technology giant Illumina, has held a first […]

Microsoft today launched Soundscape, a new iOS app that aims to give people who are blind or visually impaired a greater awareness of their surrounding by using 3D cues. It’s worth stressing that the app isn’t about replacing guide dogs or canes. Instead, it’s all about enriching people’s perception of their surroundings. A guide dog […]

German automaker Daimler has been steadily investing in a stream of new transportation services as it positions itself for the next generation of car ownership and travel. Today, it consolidated its position in one of those business: it paid €70 million ($85 million) to buy the remaining 25 percent of car-sharing company car2Go that it […]

Sure, Apple didn’t have any sort of official presence at this year’s MWC, but this was the week the iPhone X really came into its own. The company’s premium flagship was everywhere in spirit, through the design choices from the competition. For some it was the mere legitimization of the notch — for others, the […]

The SEC is getting up close and personal with companies that have raised ICOs, according to a new report. Citing sources, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the commission has “issued dozens of subpoenas and information requests” to tech companies that have held token sales and a number of advisors associated with them. More […]

Ah, springtime in Paris — the City of Love. Couples strolling hand-in-hand down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. Early-stage tech startups converging on the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles…um, say what? That’s right. Love of technology is in the air, and TechCrunch will host Startup Battlefield Europe at VivaTech on May 24th – 25.  Applications are […]

As part of its goal to use more renewable energy in its datacenters, Microsoft said it has entered an agreement with Singapore-based clean energy firm Sunseap. The value of Microsoft’s investment was not disclosed, but an announcement today said it will create “the single-largest solar energy portfolio in Singapore to date.” During the 20-year agreement, […]

Spotify has finally filed to go public, and in doing so the Swedish company has shed light on another huge music company that has been tipped for IPO — Tencent Music — which is now valued at over $12 billion. Tencent and Spotify announced a share swap in December that saw each side take an […]

If you’re a UFC fan you’ll now have another place to watch fights – Amazon Prime Video. The online retailers just announced that starting with UFC 222 on March 3rd, all pay-per-view UFC fights will be available to buy and watch on Amazon prime. Fights can be preordered and also purchased up to four hours […]

After raising $4.4 million last March, Virtualitics has closed a $7 million Series B round led by Centricus with participation from The VR Fund. The startup is building a sort of “Excel for VR,” that lets people see data in a more immersive and collaborative way. “[B]usiness intelligence platforms need to be 3D and collaborative by […]

The secret to Spotify’s public market debut is actually an acquisition it made in 2014. The Echo Nest was powering music recommendations for Beats Music, Rdio, Vevo, and iHeartRadio too before Spotify pulled it out from under them by buying it for a reported $100 million — 90 percent in Spotify equity. That deal paid off […]

Steve Sloane Contributor Steve Sloane is a principal at Menlo Ventures. More posts by this contributor: Getting to the root of the revenue multiple The rise of APIs Note: This is the second article in a three-part series on valuation thoughts for common sectors of venture capital investment. The first article, which attempts to make sense of […]

A reminder that I’m going to have Paul Vigna and Michael Casey, authors of The Truth Machine, onstage with me next week at Knotel, a co-working and event space in Manhattan. I’ll see you there tonight. RSVPs are closed. It starts at 7pm and will feature a 35-minute talk with two of the top writers […]

A recent Facebook algorithm change seems to have claimed a high-profile casualty: LittleThings, a digital publisher focused on inspirational and how-to content for women, which shut down yesterday. I wrote about the company at the beginning of 2016, when it raised debt funding from City National Bank. At the time, it seemed to be flying […]

Spotify’s “Family Plan,” a variation of which launched in 2014, as well as its “Student Plan” appear to be driving a significant portion of the company’s growth and improving retention, as the company points to it multiple times in its filing for a direct listing on public markets today. But that also comes at a […]

Spotify has finally filed to go public. But unlike most tech offerings, Spotify won’t be raising any money by issuing new shares. Instead they’ll just allow existing shares owned by investors and employees to be traded publicly on the New York Stock Exchange. No IPO means there are no investment banks to underwrite and price […]

Voice assistants may be the hottest thing since sliced bread when it comes to controlling your $60 wifi light bulbs, but Piccolo is launching out of the latest Y Combinator class with a desire to put a camera in every smart home that can translate your physical motions and gestures into commands. The company’s “Vision […]

It’s clear there is a diversity and inclusion problem in tech. What some companies still struggle with, however, is how to fix it. Part of that is because it can be a hard problem to solve if one doesn’t scratch the surface of understanding it. Nearly four years since tech companies who previously sued to […]

Spotify just filed for a direct listing in the U.S., sidestepping the traditional IPO process, and now we’re starting to see some of the true financial guts of the company — and some of the significant risks it faces from challenging services from Apple and Google. Apple, for example, charges apps a percentage of revenue […]

Music streaming service Spotify is going public and they’ve just unveiled their filing. The documents state that it is targeting a $1 billion IPO, but it’s been reported and we’ve heard from sources that the company plans to do a direct listing, meaning it goes public without the fundraising event. The filing is a standard […]

For years, one of the holy grails of web design has been trying to automate turning front-end design into clean back-end code. Early attempts included tools like Dreamweaver and FrontPage. Pagedraw, a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2018 class, has developed a tool to fulfill that vision in a modern context. Typically, a web […]

Awards season might be coming to a close, but there is still one awards show left, and it’s a big one. The Academy Awards airs Sunday, March 4. The awards show will air live on ABC, but Facebook users will also have the ability to tune in to “The Oscars: All Access” via Facebook Watch. […]

Arguably the most frustrating part of renting an apartment, especially in an expensive city like New York, is dealing with the security deposit. One startup wants to make renting easier by getting rid of security deposits, with a solution that is beneficial for both renters and landlords. Here’s how it works: For a monthly fee […]

Enterprise health management startup Collective Health has added another $110 million to the coffers from existing high-profile investors such as Founders Fund and Alphabet’s investment arm GV, bringing the total now raised to a cool $230 million. The structure is partially a follow-on from a previously unannounced C-1 for $30 million and another $80 million in Series […]

Sure wearables have been having a tough go of it lately, but maybe the problem is just a general lack of tiny projectors jammed into the products. It’s an idea a few folks have flirted with in the past, and it’s one the folks at Haier are ready to deliver in the future. The Asu […]

Last year, Amazon announced a program that would reward developers for building popular and well-received Alexa skills, by doling out cash payments for top-performing skills. Initially, the program was only open to game skill developers – as that was a category Amazon wanted to encourage – before expanding in August to a limited set of […]

Triplebyte is a three-year-old, 25-person, San Francisco-based hiring platform that says it makes recruiting and technical screening for tech companies more efficient. It’s hardly alone in making this claim, of course. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a tech recruiting platform that claims to improve on the ways that companies identify and recruit talented […]

According to Bragi, headphones are just the “tip of the iceberg” of what the company’s been working on for the past four years. Last month at CES, the company announced Project Ears, an initiative aimed at enhancing hearing aid capabilities in the smart headphone category. This week at MWC, it’s pulling the curtain back on […]

OpenStack, the open source infrastructure project that aims to give enterprises the equivalent of AWS for the private clouds, today announced the launch of its 17th release, dubbed ‘Queens.’ After all of those releases, you’d think that there isn’t all that much new that the OpenStack community could add to the project, but just as […]

PullString, the voice technology company that began its life as ToyTalk, and counts among its customers brands like Mattel, Activision, and Samsung, is today publicly launching software that allows non-technical creative professionals the ability to design, prototype and publish voice apps for Amazon Alexa. Originally focused on helping companies build voice-enabled toys like Hello Barbie […]

 If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Rodolfo Rosini, a genuine serial entrepreneur and well-liked and well-connected figure in the U.K. startup scene, is giving up startup life to move over to the “dark side” and become a VC. Read More

Porsche is readying its Mission E for launch, with a 2019 target sales date. The all-electric Tesla Model S competitor has a lot of car fans excited, and has been drawing covetous looks since the concept’s unveiling back in 2015. Now that launch is drawing closer, however, we have some new info about the car, […]

It’s one thing to dispatch a drone when an accident happens to get an aerial overview of what’s happening on the ground, but you get far better situational awareness if you can use augmented reality (AR) to add the names of roads, the location of key personnel, cars and other assets to that view. That’s […]

LinkedIn wasn’t built for low-skilled job seekers, so Facebook is barging in. Today Facebook is rolling out job posts to 40 more countries to make itself more meaningful to people’s lives while laying the foundation for a lucrative business. Businesses will be able to post job openings to a Jobs tab on their Page, Facebook […]

Fresh on the heels of settling a contentious and expensive lawsuit with Uber, Alphabet’s self-driving unit Waymo is looking to get out there and educate the public on how its autonomous vehicles work. In a blog post announcing that Waymo self-driving cars have racked up 5 million miles of driving experience on public roads, the […]

Skiers, rejoice! It just got a lot easier to track your mountain treks. Due to an Apple Watch update that combines GPS and altimeter (altitude) measuring, ski apps are now able to quantify performance. If you’re wondering how many calories you’ve burned or how fast you were going, all that data is available and more. […]

Nick Nash is leaving his role as group president of Sea, the Singapore-based games and e-commerce company that went public in the U.S. last year, to start his own startup fund. Sea announced that Nash will exit the company at the end of 2018, giving it plenty of time to transition and find a replacement. […]

Baidu’s iQiyi video division is set to become the latest Chinese tech company to go public in the U.S. after it filed to raise up to $1.5 billion via an IPO on the Nasdaq. The service was started in 2010 by search giant Baidu, which owns a dominant 70 percent of the company. Xiaomi (eight […]

There’s a problem in the UK tech industry and it’s staring us in the face. The tech industry is growing at twice the rate of the wider economy and now contributes around £97bn a year, up 30pc in five years. And yet only 4% of military veterans work in ICT, which is 20% fewer than […]

It sure seemed like Fitbit was all in on the Ionic. The company’s first true smartwatch was the result of multiple acquisitions and CEO James Park was talking up the device as a sort of lifeline for the struggle company. But the product stumbled for both hardware and software reasons, and the company acknowledged during […]

eBay is ramping up its presence in Japan via its latest investment in Asia. The U.S. online retail giant announced today that it has acquired the Japan-based business of pan-Asia e-commerce company Giosis, which is called Qoo10.jp, in an undisclosed deal. eBay originally set up Singapore-based Giosis in 2010 alongside Korea’s Gmarket, and as part of […]

Self-driving car startup Aurora has raised $90 million in a Series A round, with participation from both Greylock Partners and Index Ventures. The new funding adds to its available cash and will make it possible for the young startup to scale more quickly, but Aurora CEO Chris Urmson told me that the most important part […]

 Your trip through the airport or train station may soon become a little more crowded — not with people, but with robots, busily scanning and plotting the space so that one day, even more of their cousins can zip around with your luggage and Shake Shack orders. Here, the mapping company majority-owned by Audi, BMW […]

Amazon has quietly launched its Prime Music service in India today. The retailer brought its Prime service to India some 18 months ago, but at the time it was lacking the free music and video streaming services. Amazon added the Prime Video months later, but it has taken some time for the music service to […]

Kindred Capital, a London-based VC firm that has actually been up and running since 2015, is announcing that it has closed its first seed fund of £80 million, money it has already been deploying in around 20 tech startups throughout Europe over the last two years. Portfolio companies include FiveAI, which is building a software […]

Chinese internet giant Tencent is continuing to put its money in India and in music streaming services after it agreed to lead a $115 million investment in India’s Gaana. Gaana is a music streaming service that was started by Times Media, the company behind the Times of India newspaper and tech incubator Times Internet among […]

 Latin America is emerging as the new battleground for the global tech giants, and some of Silicon Valley and Asia’s biggest investors—from Sequoia Capital to SoftBank—are taking notice. International investment in Latin American startups has more than doubled since 2013, with 25 new investors entering the region in 2017 alone, including SoftBank, Didi Chuxing and… […]

In the beginning, there was TechCrunch. Then there was new TechCrunch. And, if you’ve been reading TechCrunch for the last five years or so, you’re used to seeing new, new TechCrunch. Our last redesign, launched in 2013, was conceived when iOS was still Skeuomorphic and responsive web design was forward thinking. It’s served us well, […]

Square posted a largely successful fourth quarter that showed continuing growth with its Cash app — with users spending around $90 million on its Cash card in December, putting it on at a potentially $1 billion run rate. That would offer another significant avenue for Square to snap up additional customers as it looks to […]

Sonos One users in Canada can now join their peers south of the border in yelling requests at their connected speakers – a free update issued today enables Amazon Alexa on the Sonos One. The One launched with Alexa support in the U.S., but while the speaker has been available to Canadian buyers since late […]

With Nest’s first smart video doorbell right around the corner, Amazon is busy buying up the competition. After acquiring Blink just two months ago, Amazon is now acquiring Ring, makers of the self-titled Ring doorbell (plus a bunch of other ecurity gear, like solar security cameras, floodlight cameras, and a in-home security alarm). Geekwire broke […]

Apple will apparently have every kind of show from anyone with any kind of name working in Hollywood when it launches its updated approach to original video content: The latest original on its slate is a 10-epsiode, half-hour thriller series order that will be executive produced by M. Night Shyamalan, who is also going to […]

Netflix’s original content ramp is showing no signs of slowing own – in fact, if anything, it’s speeding up. Netflix CFO David Wells says that the streaming company wants to have somewhere around 700 original shows and movies on the service in 2018, using that previously revealed budget of around $8 billion earmarked for original […]

BMW wants to bring personal assistants to the car, but it doesn’t want to build its own. Instead, it wants to work with Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others to bring the best features of their platforms to its cars. “We don’t want Alexa to drive our car. That’s not a good fit,” Dieter May, BMW’s […]

The FTC announced today it has settled with PayPal over a complaint about the company’s handling of privacy disclosures in its peer-to-peer payments app Venmo, its lack of disclosure over the speed with which customers could access funds, as well as other issues related to the security and privacy of customer transactions. News that the […]

German robotics firm Magazino, creator of robots meant to work alongside people in warehouses and the like, has raised $24.8 million to continue development and deployment of its TORU and SOTO robots. The bots are made for the kind of repetitive fetching and transport work that is so common in e-commerce distribution and storage facilities. […]

Online learning platform Udacity had a banner year in 2017, according to a rare glimpse at the (still private) company’s financials. It revealed that it had over 8 million students in total on the platform, counting enrolments across both free and paid courses, which is a big bump from the nearly five million it counted […]

Here are four things Google Clips is not: A life-logging camera An action camera A security camera Cheap And two things it is: Deceptively sophisticated Available today After being announced back at the Pixel 2 event in October, Google’s new device is now available via Google Store, Best Buy, B&H and Verizon for $249. The […]

Pinterest today is adding another executive to its upper c-suite with the hire of Francoise Brougher, who was most recently business lead at Square and prior to that VP of SMB global sales and operations at Google, as its first chief operating officer. Both of those previous positions are probably going to be of particular […]

“What’s all the fuss about?” Curiosity over why people are protesting the Snapchat redesign seems to have inspired a new wave of users to try the app. Snapchat downloads in the U.S. went up 41 percent to 76 percent in the week following the redesign’s February 6th rollout compared to the week before, according to […]

If an engineer ends up leaving a company, on their own, or for any other reason, the company work is going to have to quickly work to change all of their keys for their credentials and keys application components. That’s a huge hassle, because often times it’s hard to know where they are stored, who […]

It’s no secret, Apple has been relying on third-party cloud companies for iCloud. And CNBC spotted an interesting tidbit in Apple’s own documents. The company now relies on Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Platform’s storage product to store iCloud data. Back in 2016, CRN reported that Apple signed with Google for cloud storage. But Apple’s […]

When Equifax was broken into late last year — one of the biggest security breaches in recent history — Fletcher Heisler wanted to make sure security engineers got to know exactly what happened right away, and how to fix it. That’s part of the goal of Hunter2, a new online learning platform for security engineers […]

Apple isn’t just a tech company as the company is now hiring doctors and other medical staff to create its own medical clinics. CNBC first spotted Apple’s new subsidiary, AC Wellness. While AC Wellness’ website is still sparse, it doesn’t try to hide its connection with Apple, Inc. On the about page, there’s a big […]

Earlier this month, Amazon began offering one- and two-hour Whole Foods deliveries through its Prime Now service. Now, Walmart fighting back. Its membership warehouse club, Sam’s Club, announced today a partnership with Instacart which allows shoppers to order groceries and other household goods for same-day delivery. The partnership is kicking off with launches in Austin, […]

So-called ’employee engagement software’ is a big business, estimated to be in the region of a $1bn market. Service collect and analyses employee feedback from web and mobile apps used by employees, then use that data to figure out what motivates employees, what problems they have, and how those problems might be fixed. That’s exactly […]

It’s widely known that the technology startup scene is dominated by male founders and investors. But if for some reason you doubt that, consider that in 2017 just 17 percent of companies had a female founder, a number that hasn’t changed in five years, according to Crunchbase. Companies with at least one woman founder raised just […]

Current, the startup behind an app-controlled debit card aimed at tweens and teens, is adding new strategic investor Fifth Third Capital, a direct equity investment subsidiary of Fifth Third Bancorp, to its recent Series A round of funding. The investment wasn’t directly disclosed, but appears to be $5 million as the company says that it brings […]

Current, the startup behind an app-controlled debit card aimed at tweens and teens, is adding new strategic investor Fifth Third Capital, a direct equity investment subsidiary of Fifth Third Bancorp, to its recent Series A round of funding. The investment wasn’t directly disclosed, but we’ve learned it’s $1 million. In October, Current announced it had closed […]

According to a Forbes report, Israeli company Cellebrite is now able to unlock some very recent iPhones. Cellebrite is a well-known company that sells mobile forensics tools to extract data from locked devices. While early versions of iOS weren’t really secure, this has changed quite a lot in recent years. All iOS devices now ship […]

Ford has revealed the test market for its self-driving service it teased but kept under wraps back at CES in January: Miami. Will Smith bids you “bienvenidos,” Ford, via his canonical 1997 opus. But actually, Ford is welcomed by Miami-Dade officials, who are working with the automaker to run this pilot across both downtown Miami […]

California’s Department of Motor Vehicles established new rules announced Monday that will allow tech companies and others working on driverless vehicle systems to begin trialling their cars without a safety driver at the wheel. The new rules go into effect starting April 2. Until now, the DMV has allowed companies approved for autonomous vehicle testing […]

The data analytics service provider Splunk is giving itself a security upgrade with the $350 million cash and stock acquisition of the security automation technology developer, Phantom Cyber. One of the new darlings of the security industry, Phantom Cyber launched just four years ago to automate responses to digital threats. Part of a new breed […]