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The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Denis Pombriant, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Saturday, March 10, 2018. G3: Fear Factory — Mary Hodder, Elisa Camehort Page, Halley Suitt Tucker, Maria Ogneva, and Tina Chase Gillmor. Recorded live Thursday, March 8, 2018. @stevegillmor, @kevinmarks, @kteare, @DenisPombriant, @fradice Produced and directed by Tina […]

Elon Musk, co-founder of Tesla and founder of SpaceX, made a surprise appearance on the Westworld panel at SXSW. After getting cued up by Jonathan Nolan, the co-creator of HBO series Westworld, Musk walked out on stage to people cheering and one person screaming, “Elon, we love you!” During his stage time, he spoke about the excitement of […]

[embedded content] We were pretty skeptical about Everything Sucks!, a Netflix high school comedy set in the 1990s, which seemed to promise nostalgia, nostalgia and more nostalgia. The opening minutes of the premiere seemed to confirm those fears, as obvious ’90s references seemed to pile up one after another. But then the show kept going, […]

Rent the Runway has snagged a $20 million investment from Alibaba CEO Jack Ma and Joe Tsai via Blue Pool Capital, Recode first reported. Blue Pool Capital is a multibillion-dollar fund that invests in public and private equity on behalf people like Ma and Tsai. The round reportedly values Rent the Runway at about $800 […]

GV partner Lo Toney is looking to raise up to $50 million for his new fund, Plexo Capital, Axios first reported. Since 2017, Toney has been incubating Plexo Capital inside GV, formerly known as Google Ventures. The idea with Plexo Capital, which is backed by Alphabet, is to invest as a limited partner in seed funds […]

Those with digital home assistants know this phenomenon all too well. You ask Siri, Google or Alexa to hook it up with the facts, they provide an answer, but then you have a follow-up question. In order to ask that follow-up question, you have to say “Hey, Siri,” “Hey, Google” or “Alexa” all over again. […]

Those with digital home assistants know this phenomenon all too well. You ask Siri, Google or Alexa to hook it up with the facts, they provide an answer, but then you have a follow-up question. In order to ask that follow-up question, you have to say “Hey, Siri,” “Hey, Google” or “Alexa” all over again. […]

It’s a testament to quite how control freaky and hermetically sealed to criticism the tech industry is that Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey went unscripted in front of his own brand livestreaming service this week, inviting users to lob awkward questions at him for the first time ever. It’s also a testament to how much trouble social […]

In a way, Essential is something of a pioneer. Before the iPhone X helped the world reluctantly embrace the screen notch, the company proudly displayed one atop its first flagship. Since then, of course, it’s become a feature, not a bug, with a long list of companies rushing to embrace it on their latest flagship. […]

There are plenty of projects out there attempting to replicate the locomotion of insects, but one thing that computers and logic aren’t so good at is improvising and adapting the way even the smallest, simplest bugs do. This project from Tokyo Tech is a step in that direction, producing gaits on the fly that the […]

The FCC has denied a space startup permission to launch a collection of communications satellites after discovering that it had already launched some — after being told not to. Swarm Technologies, still in stealth mode, appears to have gone ahead with the deployment of four satellites deemed too small to be tracked and therefore unsafe […]

Elon Musk has shifted his pans for The Boring Company: While it will still focus on digging tunnels to provide a network of underground tubes suitable for use by high-speed Hyperloop pods, the plan now is to use that Hyperloop to transport pedestrians and cyclists first, and then only later to work on moving cars […]

Snapchat has temporarily removed its Giphy GIF sticker feature after a user saw an extremely racist GIF as an option. Snapchat confirms to TechCrunch “As soon as w were made aware, we removed the GIF and have disabled Giphy until we can be sure that this won’t happen again. The spokesperson says that all GIFs […]

Facebook’s augmented reality camera is evolving beyond selfies masks and randomly placed 3D objects to using location markers in the real world that trigger AR experiences in a precise location.  Spotted today, Facebook confirms to TechCrunch that its testing the feature in closed beta with promotions for the upcoming Ready Player One and Wrinkle In […]

Urban Airship recently announced new capabilities designed to allow app developers to deliver the right message to their users at exactly the right time. Senior Vice President of Product and Engineering Mike Herrick explained that the company (which started out as a platform for push notifications) has supported in-app messaging for years. However, those messages have […]

We’re hearing from a number of sources that Giphy, the big platform for hosting GIFs that also runs a GIF keyboard, set out to raise huge new financing round — though it’s not clear if it ever crossed the finish line. Sources pegged the round at something as high as around $100 million, but that […]

The high-end audio technology company Bose is getting into the augmented reality game with a new product and a $50 million fund devoted to startups that will develop services for its new platform. While most of the industry is focused on a visually augmented experience, Bose is most concerned with the intersection of sound and vision. […]

Capital One today officially introduced a new way to use its virtual card numbers from a web browser, in order to make shopping online safer. Virtual card numbers, of course, aren’t new – Bank of America and Citi both offer a similar feature that creates a temporary credit card number linked to your real account […]

For its latest addition to Street View, Google has employed a trio very good (and extremely fuzzy) boys — Ako, Asuka and Puuko. In order to capture the snowy streets of Ōdate City, Japan, the company strapped 360 cameras to the backs of the three Akita dogs, which hail from the country’s cold and mountainous […]

Not really the showiest of SXSW announcements, but Google’s got a nice little update for developers looking to differentiate Assistant integration on a product level. Custom Device Actions are way to add specific functions to products. In a blog post, the company gives the specific example of activating a specific color cycle on an Assistant-enabled […]

How can you participate in a Nerf gun fight if you’re missing a hand? The ingenious Hackerloop collective of tinkerers solved that problem by putting together a prosthetic Nerf gun that you can control with your arm muscles. In other words, Nicolas Huchet became Barret Wallace from Final Fantasy VII for a day. And here’s […]

LinkedIn used to have its own business card scanning app, CardMunch, which served a useful purpose in a world where paper cards simply refuse to die. But that app was shut down back in 2014, with LinkedIn suggesting users move to Evernote instead. Today, Microsoft is bringing back business card scanning – but this time, […]

Apple’s Touch ID was a step change in convenience for securing its mobile devices, and now that same level of convenience is available in a padlock. The Tapplock One is now shipping, and features a fingerprint sensor for unlocking, as well as a companion app with a Bluetooth unlock backup. The Tapplock One began its […]

“It feels like investing in Uber when it first launched.” That’s what one investor said of the hot new Santa Monica, Calif.-based startup, Bird — an electric scooter company that’s now in the process of raising as much as $100 million on a $300 million valuation, according to several people with knowledge of the company’s […]

Next Story This eQuoo app games you to into learning useful psychological skills There’s nothing we spend more money on for a worse experience than housing. Keyo wants to fix all of it. The audacious startup envisions a world where a building’s other tenants get $20 to show you an available apartment on your schedule. Where […]

Mental health is one of the behest issues of recent times, with Kendall Jenner, Emma Stone, Lady Gaga and even The Rock opening up about their mental health issues. Even the royal family has got in on the act, setting up the Heads Together charity. And it’s not just a fleeting issue. The World Health […]

Onavo, the data-security app maker Facebook acquired in 2013 in order gain insights into mobile user activity across apps, has quietly launched a new app aimed at Android users called Bolt App Lock. Instead of offering a VPN, Bolt App Lock is a tool that lets you lock down any app you don’t want others […]

Kickstarter’s name has become synonymous with crowdfunding since the site launched back in 2009. As it happily notes, it’s helped 14 million backers pledge $3.1 billion in funding over the years. Of late, though, the service has been exploring alternative funding sources, including the relaunch of Drip, which arrived just as Patreon was getting pushback […]

Filed under moves that are potentially groundbreaking with big implications but with quite small numbers, Facebook has signed an exclusive deal with the MLB to stream 25 afternoon games, according to Bloomberg. The deal is a bit reminiscent of the one Twitter signed for Thursday Night Football back in 2016 to stream games that are outside […]

It’s Mario Time! Beloved gaming character Mario is coming to Google Maps, thanks to a partnership between Google and Nintendo ahead of Mario Day, March 10. (MAR10…get it, Mario?) In addition to the various deals and sales on Nintendo games, the mustachioed plumber will also make an appearance in Google Maps’ navigation, if you opt […]

[embedded content] Straight out of Black Mirror, this video is a mock documentary showing a future where Boston Dynamics SpotMinis roam the Earth in packs (herds?) of thousands. It’s fictional but I suspect plausible if Boston Dynamics only defense against its robots is an engineer with a hockey stick. Boston Dynamics has been steadily advancing […]

Things have not been so rosy for Qualcomm over the past few months, whether you are looking at an ongoing legal dispute between the chipmaker and Apple or Broadcom’s aggressive attempts to acquire the company. Now, Qualcomm is saying its executive chairman, Dr. Paul E. Jacobs, will no longer serve as executive chairman for the […]

If you want to live outside an expensive city like San Francisco or New York, it pays to have specialized knowledge. So suggests a new survey out of Upwork, the freelancing platform created from the 2013 merger of Elance and oDesk that connects businesses and independent contractors. According to feedback from more than 1,005 workforce hiring […]

Just weeks after signing a large licensing deal with leading indy label representative ICE, Facebook has continued its march into the world of music with the news that it has now added Warner Music Group into the mix, the last major label that was not yet working with the social network. Facebook has signed a […]

The storied 911 will not be immune from Porsche’s electrification plans and that could be a good thing. The car company’s CEO recently told Autocar that the hybrid 911 “will be the most powerful 911 we’ve ever had; 700 bhp might be possible.” Count me in (as long as someone buys it for me). Porsche […]

Tiago Maximo’s grandparents were shepherds. They word solid, handmade boots into the fields, trudging through dry grass and mud, over rutted country roads and through barnyards. He brought that tradition – handmade boots for people who appreciate quality – to his business, Urban Shepherd – where sources boots from Portugal to sell to customers in […]

Social planning apps have yet to take the world by storm. A handful of these apps tried and failed years ago, and even Swarm decided to ditch that methodology and focus on location logging. But a new Y Combinator-backed company seems to be picking up traction. And shockingly enough, the winning ingredient seems to be […]

What’s the biggest motivating factor behind automakers embracing autonomous vehicles and self-driving? You might think ‘safety’ or maybe even consumer demand, but in truth the biggest driver might be China and its incentivization programs for automakers. Much like China’s rules for qualifying for subsidies and restrictions on selling vehicles in market have led to automakers […]

[embedded content] Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week we had a corking set of news to get through, so we rounded up the usual gang (Matthew Lynley, Katie Roof, and myself), and brought in Eric Feng from Kleiner Perkins to help us get under […]

Waymo’s autonomous trucking program is coming along – though we haven’t heard much about it since discovering it was a real thing last year, Waymo today announced that it’s launching a pilot program in Atlanta to focus specifically on self-driving trucks and automated logistics. The pilot is being done in partnership with Google, another Alphabet […]

Dropbox is not messing around. Two weeks ago it announced its IPO. Just last week it announced a big partnership with Google and today comes news that it is integrating more deeply with Salesforce. Dropbox and Salesforce have danced a bit in the past as cloud companies tend to do, but today’s announcement is a […]

Nick Halstead’s new startup, InfoSum, is launching its first product today — moving one step closer to his founding vision of a data platform that can help businesses and organizations unlock insights from big data silos without compromising user privacy, data security or data protection law. So a pretty high bar then. If the underlying […]

SoftBank’s Vision Fund invested $300 million into dog walking app Wag earlier this year, and a new deal on the other side of the world is evoking similarities. Mad Paws, an Australia-based startup that offers dog-walking, pet-sitting and other services for the fluffy friend in your life, has pulled in a $5 million investment led […]

Boxed, the site for buying food and household items in bulk, has turned down a $400 million acquisition offer from Kroger, Bloomberg reports. Earlier this year, word on the street was that Boxed was in talks with Kroger to be acquired for about $500 million. At the time, other retailers were rumored to also be […]

This is the best news you’ll hear all day: Super Smash Bros. is coming to the Nintendo Switch this year. Nintendo dropped a new teaser for the game, which is as-yet untitled, during its Nintendo Direct webcast on Thursday. If you’re not familiar with the franchise, you are living a sad, unfulfilling existence. Actually, though, […]

Life has not been pretty for Blue Apron, the meal-kit company that went public last June. Today, Blue Apron’s shares dropped to a record low following Weight Watchers announcing it would launch its own meal kits to be sold in grocery stores. At its lowest, Blue Apron was trading at $2.02 per share. The meal-kit […]

New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival released its Immersive lineup this morning, including 20 virtual reality and augmented reality pieces in the Virtual Arcade, plus five that are part of the Storyscapes competition. The lineup includes some big names from the film world, including Terrence Malick (Together), Laurie Anderson (Chalkroom), Rosario Dawson (BattleScar), Lupita Nyong’o […]

Earlier this month, Twitter began soliciting proposals from the public to help the platform capture, measure and evaluate healthy interactions. Today, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and other members of the team held a public conversation via Periscope about the company’s new initiative to measure healthy interactions on Twitter. As Twitter previously noted, the goal is […]

Arama Kukutai Contributor Arama Kukutai is a co-founder and partner of Finistere Ventures. More posts by this contributor: Driving new revenue sources through a digital ag revolution   Spencer Maughan Contributor Spencer Maughan is a partner at Finistere Ventures. The disruption over the last decade in the retail food value chain gained momentum in 2017 with […]

Samsung’s new Galaxy S9 may not quite live up to the iPhone X when it comes to Samsung’s implementation of a Face ID-style system or its odd take on AR emoji. But that’s not going to matter much to Samsung device owners – not only because the S9 is a good smartphone overall, but because […]

Facebook’s Oculus suffered a prolonged, embarrassing outage yesterday because someone at the company forgot to update a certificate which expired and plunged the company’s network of Oculus Rifts into darkness. For nearly the entire day, users were unable to jump into VR. For gamers it was an annoyance, but with more and more companies looking […]

Uber has hired Assaf Ronen, Amazon’s now-former vice president of voice and natural user interface shopping, Recode first reported. As SVP and head of product at Uber, Ronen will help Uber “lean in on product this year,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi wrote in a memo obtained by Recode. Ronen is set to replace Uber Head […]

You may remember that in December, a pair of new planets was discovered via machine learning, using NASA data and Google Brain ingenuity. If you’re interested in doing the same, the team behind the system has just released the code they used to accomplish this astronomical achievement, which they call AstroNet. The Kepler space telescope […]

If you stand in juuuust the right spot in Disneyland — or if you turn your head at certain times on certain rides — you can get fleeting glimpses into Disney’s upcoming Star Wars Land (or “Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge”, as it’s more officially known) as it’s being built. You can’t see much, of course; […]

Want to know whether the Samsung Galaxy S9 is worth picking up when it arrives March 16? Good news: I’ve got 4,000 words on the matter that you can read over here. For those who don’t have the time to take all of that in, however, we’ve also put together this handy guide to the […]

Over the last couple of years, Google has been slowly (very slowly!) opening up the ability for celebrities, politicians, sports teams, museums and local businesses to post social media-like updates directly to its search result pages. Today, after testing this in a few markets over the course of the last year, Google is also opening […]

Streaming giant Netflix is expecting to get even bigger this year. Netflix, which has 117 million subscribers worldwide and brought in $11 billion in revenue last year, expects to hit $15 billion in revenue this year, USA Today reports. That’s based on a prediction Netflix CEO Reed Hastings made at an event this week. Earlier […]

When Noah Isaacs and John Meadows were best friends, growing up in Berkeley, Ca., they dreamed of remaining friends for life. What they didn’t imagine was living together in New York and starting a company together, yet they have. It’s called Bowery Valuation, and it’s aiming to bring commercial real estate appraisals — currently an […]

Google’s AMP project is not uncontroversial. Users often love it because it makes mobile sites load almost instantly. Publishers often hate it because they feel like they are giving Google too much control in return for better placement on its search pages. Now Google proposes to bring some of the lessons it learned from AMP to the […]

There are tons of services out there from Slack to Jira that are designed to help developers communicate with one another about code issues, but there is a surprising dearth of tools that have been purpose-built to provide communication capabilities right in the IDE where developers work. CodeStream, a member of the Y Combinator Winter […]

Security giant McAfee is acquiring Canadian VPN provider TunnelBear. Terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed. McAfee said that it plans to integrate TunnelBear’s technologies into the company’s own VPN product, Safe Connect. The TunnelBear team will also keep working on TunnelBear products under its own brand. According to the announcement, TunnelBear was a profitable […]

Over the last year or so daily fantasy sports companies like FanDuel and DraftKings have shifted their focus towards building products that are simple enough for even casual sports fans to play. Today FanDuel is announcing their latest product designed for casual sports fans, called Bracket Pick’em. The game is dead simple – users pick five […]

Myst is a strange title: essentially a Hypercard stack so big it had to be loaded on a CD-ROM, it was also one of the most intriguing and visually exciting games to come out in years. It has aged poorly, but Cyan, its developer, may be giving it a fresh coat of paint for the […]

While some don’t care for the hit novel Ready Player One, it’s hard to deny that the book captured the hearts and minds of millions as it climbed the NYT Bestseller’s list in 2011. At the end of this month, a film adaptation of the book, directed by Stephen Spielberg, will be released in theaters. […]

A PhD candidate in Computer Science at Columbia Engineering, Brian A. Smith, created a new system for blind gamers who want to get a little racing in. The system, called racing auditory display or RAD, is truly amazing. It lets the visually impaired play racing games without “seeing” the screen. Instead, the audio output tells […]

Back in 2016 after Snapchat rebranded the company name to Snap Inc to reflect its status as a camera company and more than just Snapchat, an existing publicly-traded business by the name of Snap Interactive filed a trademark infringement lawsuit to bar the change. Snap Interactive’s concern: it was already distributing social network apps and using the […]

Trina Chiasson says a lot of cricket farmers will talk about how figuring out when they are laying their eggs is an art — and she hopes to turn it into a science. She and her co-founder James Ricci started Ovipost, a new startup looking to optimize the right conditions for a cricket grower to […]

A 1.3 Tbps DDoS attack – essentially a massive torrent of data aimed at a single target – nearly took down network provider Akamai on March 1. While the attack itself is notable more interesting is what was hidden inside the attack itself. The attack used a memcached exploit which is a legitimate service on […]

Tesla’s Model 3 is making progress heading out to customers (though not as much as either Tesla or those on the waiting list would like) and as a result, we got a chance to spend some time in one of the new production models that just rolled off the line. The Model 3 is a […]

Disney plans to include Star Wars and Marvel TV shows as part of the lineup in its upcoming streaming service, but details about those shows have been scant until today, when the company announced that Jon Favreau will be writing and producing a live action Star Wars series. While Favreau is best-known for directing films like […]

Blockchain is potentially the most disruptive new technology since the internet itself, and that’s why TechCrunch is proud to announce our first event dedicated entirely to blockchain, crypto and the future of the internet. Building on the hugely successful Disrupt San Francisco 2017 event, which included discussions on blockchain startups, cryptocurrency and ICOs with guests […]

As ecommerce grows here in the United States, there are still some significant hurdles for the Latin American market. Credit card penetration is lower than the U.S. and there isn’t the same infrastructure for shipping, meaning that returns are far more tedious. That’s where Ropeo comes in. Ropeo was founded by Alejandro Casas, Santiago Gomez, […]

Luther Systems, the London based enterprise blockchain technology startup founded in 2016 by a former Stanford PhD and ex-Tesla and Apple engineer, has secured $1.5m seed round back in a round led by Firstminute Capital. The startup says it employs blockchain and smart contracts to solve complex large-scale business inefficiencies across number of industries. The […]

Twitter is taking some steps to combat cryptocurrency scammers on its platform. But these are best classified as ‘baby steps’ at this point. The company does not currently have a specific ad policy relating to cryptocurrency and ICO related ads — which Facebook banned in January. “We allow ads that don’t violate the Twitter Advertising rules,” […]

India’s Prime Venture Partners has refueled its tanks for more angel investing after it announced a new fund of INR 400 crore, or around $60 million. Started by three managing partners — serial entrepreneurs Sanjay Swamy, Shripati Acharya and Amit Somani — in 2011, this fund represents the third (and largest) investment vehicle for the firm. Its previous […]

Atom Tickets, an app that combines online movie ticket booking with social features, said today that it has raised a $60 million Series C led by Fidelity Investments, with participation from returning investors Lionsgate, Disney and Twentieth Century Fox Film. All three studios contributed to Atom Tickets’ $50 million Series B, which was announced two […]

MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the world’s most hallowed educational institutions is turning its attention to Southeast Asia where it hopes to plant the seed of innovation among a new generation of potential entrepreneurs. That’s through MIT’s Global Startup Workshop (GSW), a 20-year-old conference on innovation and technology, which is headed back to Southeast […]