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Another day, another breach. Today, online travel agency Orbitz disclosed that hackers managed to get both credit card data and personal information (though no social security numbers and passwords) from users who made their travel purchases on the site between January 1, 2016 and December 22, 2017. In total, the company says, that’s about 880,000 […]

Salesforce today announced that it intends to buy MuleSoft in a deal valued at a whopping $6.5 billion. That’s not the selling price, but the amount the company has been valued at, with stocks, bonds and cash on hand. The exact price was not available yet, but the company did indicate it was paying 44.89 per […]

YouTube’s video ad creation service aimed at helping small business reach YouTube viewers is now available more broadly across the U.S. The company announced this morning that YouTube Director onsite, as the service is called, is now live in over 170 U.S. cities, up from only 9 previously – Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, […]

Amazon is currently the second biggest company in the world when it comes to market capitalization. The company is currently worth $763.27 billion (NASDAQ:AMZN) while Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) is “only” worth $762.98 billion. Amazon has had an incredible quarter. Stock is up nearly 29 percent since early January. As for Alphabet, its shares have gone up […]

When humanity’s back is against the wall and the robots have us cornered I’d say I’m all for whanging a few with a baseball bat. However, until then, we must be kind to our mechanical brethren and this robotic tortoise will help our kids learn that robot abuse is a bad idea. Researchers at Naver […]

Oracle announced its quarterly earnings last night, detailing that its cloud business grew 32 percent to $1.6 billion in the quarter. That might sound good at first blush, but it’s part of three straight quarters of reduced growth — a fact that had investors jittery over night. It didn’t get better throughout the day today […]

Automaker Toyota has temporarily ceases its public road testing of its fully autonomous ‘Chauffeur’ system in the U.S. after an accident earlier this week saw an Uber self-driving test vehicle strike a pedestrian, which ultimately resulted in her death. Police have stated that initial findings suggest the accident would’ve been extremely difficult to avoid regardless […]

Bandai Namco Entertainment announced the latest entrant in its series of Dragon Ball games this week. Dragon Ball Legends is a player versus player (PvP) mobile game that has players from all over the world battle with each other in real time by using their move cards. From all I’ve seen, it looks like a […]

Apple seems to be ramping up its autonomous vehicle efforts, nearing doubling the number of vehicles in its fleet since January. The company now has 45 autonomous vehicles in California registered with the DMV, according to the Financial Times. This makes Apple’s AV fleet the second largest in the state of California, outsized only by […]

Building technology is all about learning as you go. Amazon knows this, and has today added fingerprint ID to the new Amazon Key app, which enables in-home delivery of goods. The Key app was announced in October, alongside the Cloud Cam, which lets users watch goings on in their homes as delivery professionals come in […]

Today, a bunch of app developers showed off their latest AR apps for Google’s augmented reality platform, but Google didn’t stay too still either. The team at Google released what could be one of its simplest apps ever, it’s called an “experiment,” and with good reason, it’s literally just an app for drawing white lines. […]

You saw this one coming, right? This week at its Think 2018 Conference in Las Vegas, IBM showed off its own take on the growing smart assistant category, aimed firmly at enterprise applications. Naturally, the company’s using the Watson name for the offering, and tacking on “Assistant” for good measure. Unlike Alexa, Siri and Google’s […]

We’re gearing up to bring you the second TC Sessions: Robotics on May 11 at the UC Berkeley campus. We’ve got a great show on-tap, with some of the premier names in the robotics/AI/automation world, from research to startups to big companies. As we noted last week, we’ll be joined by Berkley professor Pieter Abbeel […]

Netlify has a vision of changing the way we develop websites, making it simpler to connect the front-end design to backend services execution. Today, the company announced another step in that vision when it introduced AWS Lambda functions on Netlify. The company aims to reduce much of the complexity associated with web development. You design […]

Google has just confirmed its long-rumored purchase of Manhattan’s Chelsea Market building for $2.4 billion — all in all not a bad price, given that a one-bedroom on the West Side is going for around $2.3 billon these days (granted, that’s a rough estimate from someone who lives in Queens). It’s a prime bit of […]

After previously investing in Mulesoft, it looks like Salesforce may finish off the deal and is in advanced talks to acquire the data management software provider altogether, according to a report from Reuters this morning. Mulesoft works with companies to bring together different sources of data like varying APIs. That’s important for companies that have data […]

Game controller compatibility is a labyrinthine nightmare most of the time: Some controllers work with some platforms some of the time, but it’s very hard to keep track of how and when. 8bitdo’s latest accessory adds some simplicity to the mix, enabling use of Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch controllers with Switch, Windows […]

Lyft has brought on Nilka Thomas to join the company as its new vice president of talent and inclusion. At Lyft, Thomas will be tasked with overseeing recruiting, inclusion, diversity and employee relations. Most importantly, in my eyes, is that Thomas will “Ensure that inclusion and diversity efforts are seamlessly integrated from the earliest candidate […]

According to this report, Ford is pursuing a deal to purchase the abandoned Michigan Central Station. Located just outside downtown Detroit, the massive transit station has set empty for about 30 years and recently became a symbol representing a decaying Detroit. Crain’s is reporting that the deal between Ford and the current owner, the Moroun […]

Rachio, the company that builds WiFi controllers for your garden sprinklers (think Nest Thermostat, but for watering your plants instead of heating your house), is back with a new one. They’ve also raised $10M in a Series B round. So what’s new in this Gen 3 version? A new hardware design, which the company tells […]

Japan wants to formally encourage domestic startups to pursue the growing opportunities in commercial space. The Japanese government has earmarked around $1 billion in public funds to startups working on space solutions. At the same time, the government revealed that it’s working on a legal path towards establishing commercial development on the moon. This is […]

Ford is finally detailing availability of its FordPass SmartLink accessory, an OBD II plug-in device with Verizon 4G LTE on board which can add connected car features to model year 2010 to 2017 Ford vehicles that don’t already have native connectivity built in. The FordPass accessory will be available across the U.S. sometime in the […]

Google-owned Waze is growing the footprint of its Waze Carpool product with a market expansion today to cover all of Washington state. That means Carpool is now available in California, Texas, Isreal and Washington following today’s launch. Waze also recently revamped its Carpool experience, which now includes new options for choosing what rides to tag […]

Another huge financing round is coming in for an AI company today, this time for a startup called Mythic getting a fresh $40 million as it appears massive deals are closing left and right in the sector. Mythic particularly focuses on the inference side of AI operations — basically making the calculation on the spot […]

IBM is hosing its annual THINK conference to packed halls in Las Vegas this week. Given how important its cloud business has become to its bottom line, it’s no surprise that this event features its fair share of cloud news. Among today’s announcements it the launch of the third generation of Power Systems servers in […]

French startup Lydia announces two new things today. First, the company is launching a financial hub with multiple new products. Second, Lydia is announcing a new premium subscription to access those new features. “Today, we’re lucky enough to have you here to announce you the biggest thing we’ve done since Lydia’s launch,” co-founder and CEO […]

Yesterday we reported that Match, the parent company of Tinder, was suing Bumble for patent infringement and misuse of intellectual property. Specifically, Match alleged that Bumble “copied Tinder’s world-changing, card-swipe-based, mutual opt-in premise” for which a patent was filed in 2013 (before Bumble was founded) but just granted a few months ago. Today Bumble has responded to […]

Dahmakan, a vertically-integrated Malaysian meal delivery startup, announced today that it has acquired Polpa to enter Bangkok. Dahmakan was the first Malaysian startup to participate in Y Combinator and recently received a $2.6 million round of funding earmarked for its expansion into new markets. The company, which was launched in 2015 by former Rocket Internet […]

Sacrê merde sur un bardeau! You have only 48 hours left to apply for TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Europe. The Battlefield takes place at VivaTech at the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles on May 24th -25. The deadline — March 22, at 9 a.m. PST — is fast upon us, but you still have time. So, […]

DocuSign is gearing up to go public in the next six months, sources tell TechCrunch. The company, which pioneered the e-signature has been talking about an IPO for a while but has now filed confidentially, we are hearing. Like Dropbox, which is finally going public this week, San Francisco-based DocuSign has been an anticipated IPO […]

German startup N26 just raised a $160 million Series C round led by Tencent and Allianz — some of N26’s existing investors are also participating. The company has attracted 850,000 customers and raised $215 million in total. N26 is building a retail bank from scratch. The company plans to double down on everything it’s been […]

Eight Roads Ventures, the proprietary investment arm of Fidelity International, is officially launching its new European fund today. Targeting scale-ups in Europe and Israel, ‘Eight Roads Ventures Europe’ will have $375 million in capital to deploy, mostly at the Series B and Series C stages but also in scale-ups that although bootstrapped have found market […]

Instagram is launching its Shopping feature for business accounts to eight new countries: Canada, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Australia. The photo sharing app first began testing shoppable photo tags in November 2016 before making Shopping on Instagram available to businesses in the United States last year. Since Instagram doesn’t allow […]

IBM’s Watson Studio is the company’s service for building machine learning workflows and training models, is getting a new addition today with the launch of Deep Learning as a Service (DLaaS). The general idea here, which is similar to that of competing services, is to enabled a wider range of businesses to make user of […]

Apple and IBM may seem like an odd couple, but the two companies have been working closely together for several years now. That has involved IBM sharing its enterprise expertise with Apple and Apple sharing its design sense with IBM. The companies have actually built hundreds of enterprise apps running on iOS devices. Today, they took […]

The chief of police in Tempe, Arizona, where an Uber self-driving car just hit and killed a pedestrian, has told the San Francisco Chronicle that “I suspect preliminarily it appears that the Uber would likely not be at fault in this accident.” Chief Sylvia Moir explained after viewing the car’s own video of the event […]

Today marks the kickoff of Amazon’s annual semi-secret MARS Conference in Palm Springs, which means two things. No, you weren’t invited. The start of several days of pictures featuring Jeff Bezos palling around with his best robot friends. Last year the ‘bot loving billionaire wowed the internet with a fairly menacing shot taken inside 1.5 […]

Facebook’s former VP of ads has weighed in on the ongoing disaster involving his company’s apparent negligence in allowing data on as many as 50 million users to be used for nefarious purposes by Cambridge Analytica. In a post on (what else) Facebook, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth gave variations on the line we’ve come to expect […]

It’s not every day that Oracle’s billionaire founder, chairman and CTO Larry Ellison launches a new business, but such is the case today. That new company? Sensei, a new L.A.-based wellness brand that will focus first on developing hydroponic farms and later . . . well, details are scant, but they’re coming soon, we’re told. […]

It looks like someone found a practical use case for AR that’s not about trying on makeup or catching Pokémon. Ebay today introduced a new AR-powered feature that helps sellers figure out the best box to use for shipping their items to buyers. The technology works with a range of products, the company says, including […]

Color is looking to add a new test to its line of genetic testing, this time focusing on hereditary factors that may affect a person’s chance for being prone to cardiovascular complications like arrhythmia and cardiomyopathy. Called the heart health test, Color’s new test looks to isolate the genes that can be partially responsible for […]

While it sometimes feels like everyone has a podcast nowadays, the truth is that most Americans still don’t listen to podcasts regularly. The Y Combinator-backed team behind The Podcast App is planning to change that. And yes, that’s the app’s real name. Co-founder and CEO Martín Siniawski said that no one else claimed it first. Siniawski argued […]

During CES, the single piece of electronics I spent the most time with, apart from my laptop and camera, was a Mattel Dungeons & Dragons Computer Fantasy Game handheld. This decades-old device held the attention of John Biggs and myself through quite a few drinks as we navigated its arcane interface (eventually slaying the dragon, […]

Earlier today, news broke of a fatal crash involving one of Uber’s self-driving cars in Tempe, Arizona. In response, Uber halted its self-driving car programs where it currently operates, including in Pittsburgh, Toronto, San Francisco and Phoenix. Tempe Mayor Mark Mitchell and others have since released statements about the crash. “The City of Tempe has […]

In a statement, Facebook said that Cambridge Analytica has agreed to comply and give Stroz Friedberg access to their servers and systems. Facebook has also reached out to the whistleblower Christopher Wylie and Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University professor who developed an application which collected data that he then sold to Cambridge Analytica. Kogan has […]

A self-driving vehicle made by Uber has struck and killed a pedestrian. It’s the first such incident and will certainly be scrutinized like no other autonomous vehicle interaction in the past. But on the face of it it’s hard to understand how, short of a total system failure, this could happen when the entire car […]

IBM is hard at work on the problem of ubiquitous computing, and its approach, understandably enough, is to make a computer small enough that you might mistake it for a grain of sand. Eventually these omnipresent tiny computers could help authenticate products, track medications, and more. Look closely at the image above and you’ll see […]

Instagram’s next big Stories feature could let you compliment or trash talk other people’s feed posts, or embed a “see post” button to promote your own. A TechCrunch reader sent us these screenshots of the new feature, which Instagram confirmed to us is appearing to a small subset of users. “We’re always testing ways to […]

British startup Made.com says that “a new tier 1 global institutional investor” has made an important investment commitment in the furniture company. This mysterious investor is willing to lead a new $56 million round (£40 million) with existing investors Partech Ventures, Level Equity and Eight Roads Ventures also participating. It sounds like the funding round […]

Earlier this month, two former Google staffers quietly launched a new app that’s designed to help users overcome technology’s uncanny valley and develop a more healthy relationship with the ubiquitous electronic assistant that “lives” in our pockets. Called Maslo, the new app (and the company behind it), in the words of its founders, to develop […]

HQ Trivia was removed from the App Store following a controversial ending to a $25K game on Sunday night, according to Business Insider. HQ has introduced a new high-stakes version of the game where one winner takes home a larger prize. However, on Sunday night, no one won the $25K. The company posted on its […]

The National Transportation Safety Board is opening an investigation into the fatal accident involving one of Uber’s self-driving cars in Tempe, Arizona. NTSB sending team to investigate Uber crash in Tempe, Arizona. More to come. — NTSB_Newsroom (@NTSB_Newsroom) March 19, 2018 Uber’s self-driving car accident that resulted in a woman’s death raises a number of […]

Over the weekend, Mark Gurman at Bloomberg reported that Apple has apparently built out a microLED display laboratory in California for testing and manufacturing small batches of the next-generation screen technology, presumably for its iPhone and other devices. Apple had previously acquired microLED startup LuxVue in 2014. The news of a secret research lab fits […]

If you’ve ever wondered why your Facebook app looks a little different from your friend’s, you’ve likely learned that Facebook tests features in a very unique, targeted way. Airship wants to let its customers start testing features the same way that companies like Facebook and Dropbox do without all the added complications and resources. The […]

Desktop Metal has had no issues raising interest (or funding) in the manufacturing world. The metal 3D printing company announced today that it’s score another $65 million in backing, bringing its total to $277 million. This latest round was led by Ford, and also includes addition money from previous backer, Future Fund.  Ford’s interest in […]

It’s time to welcome another startup to the clear teeth aligner market. Meet ArchForm, a Y Combinator-backed teeth aligner software startup that lets orthodontists create, design and 3D print aligners within their own offices. The idea is to provide orthodontists with a way to better compete against some direct-to-consumer teeth aligner startups and cut down […]

Some YouTube users on the web have been opted in to a test of a new picture-in-picture mode, which allows you to continue watching a YouTube video in a small window even as you navigate elsewhere on YouTube’s website. A similar feature already exists today on YouTube’s app for both iOS and Android. The site […]

An autonomous Uber test SUV driving in Tempe, Arizona was involved in a fatal collision last night, and the Uber vehicle was in autonomous mode at the time the accident occurred, according to Tempe Police (via Daisuke Wakabayashi). The Uber SUV was driving northbound, and a woman crossed in its path outside of a crosswalk, […]

Netflix recently released the second season of Marvel’s Jessica Jones, which finds the titular private detective dealing with unwanted fame and investigating the mysterious organization that gave her superpowers. Despite successfully confronting her nemesis Kilgrave at the end of season one, Jessica (played by Krysten Ritter) remains as prickly as ever — and just as […]

After maintaining a quiet presence for quite a while, Magic Leap is finally feeling a bit more chatty, at least when it comes to what they’re sharing with developers. As the Game Developers Conference kicks off in San Francisco this week, Magic Leap is opening up their “Creator Portal” to developers sharing their SDK, tutorials, […]

Facebook is eager to displace YouTube and Patreon in order to become the home of online content creators, so it’s testing a bunch of new ways for them to earn money and connect with fans. Facebook’s dedicated Creator app that launched in November on iOS will come to Android soon, and it’s also starting a closed […]

Walmart this morning announced a partnership with home services provider Handy, which will allow customers to purchase in-home installation and assembly assistance in over 2,000 of Walmart’s stores. News of the deal follows IKEA’s recent launch of its own in-home assembly service through TaskRabbit. It will also challenge Amazon’s growing Home Services business, which includes assembly […]

Facebook is challenging Twitch and YouTube for video game live streaming supremacy with the release of its new Games SDK for PC. After testing Live streaming from games like Overwatch from developers like Blizzard, today Live broadcasting from PC games to the News Feed opens to all developers. And Facebook will let them reward fans […]

Pinterest is looking to continue to increase its portfolio of ads, though some can sometimes that can take a little while to see the light of day — and that includes a new-ish tool called Shopping Ads that’s slowly getting opened to more developers. Getting new ad formats is important for a smaller company looking […]

Autonomous vehicles are increasingly becoming the shiny object in Silicon Valley. But the opportunity doesn’t just extend to cars driving around the streets of a major metropolitan area, and Igino Cafiero and Aubrey Donnellan hope to take it somewhere a little less obvious: the middle of an orchard. Cafiero and Donnellan are building an autonomously-driven tractor […]

“Reverse chocolate” — that’s how AesculaTech co-founder and chief science officer Niki Bayat describes the material created by its proprietary technology. Chocolate is solid until heated, when it melts deliciously into liquid. AesculaTech’s material, on the other hand, is a liquid at low temperatures, turns into a gel when heated and then reaches its final, […]

Google announced this morning a new plan to help retailers take on Amazon – and give Google a cut of their sales in the process. The search giant will allow retailers to list their products across Google Search, in its Google Express shopping service, and in the Google Assistant app for smartphones and on smart […]

Online gamers love to talk a big game, but how willing are they to put their money with their mouth is? Players Lounge is a home for gamers looking to make friendly wagers with strangers and friends in head-to-head matches. When we first covered the startup back in 2015, the team was getting people together […]

Volkswagen wants to make sure people are aware of just how versatile their forthcoming MEB platform, which will prove the base for all of its all-electric I.D. vehicles, really is. The MEB-based I.D. R Pikes Pace, a prototype all-electric race car, will take on the famous Pikes Peak hillclimb in June in Colorado to help […]

Building up your credit history or improving your credit score often presents somewhat of a catch-22 situation. You’ll need to take out some form of credit to do so, such as a loan or credit card, but if your score is too low or your history too chequered, you’ll typically be offered a very bad […]

The top widely-available VR headset that money can buy is… gonna take a lot of money to buy. HTC has released pricing info for its Vive Pro headset that the company showed off at CES and it ain’t cheap. The company had previously detailed that they would begin selling the system as a headset-only package […]

Nationwide, 62 percent of the jail population accounts for people who can’t afford bail, according to the Vera Institute of Justice. A lot of these incarcerated individuals are behind bars because they committed crimes at the misdemeanor level or lower. This is a significant statistic from a human rights perspective, as well as an economic […]

Here’s a curious bit of news for your Monday morning: Amazon wants to be the backend for gaming tournaments. They’ve built a new, AWS-powered platform called “GameOn” for third-party developers, allowing them to easily add things like leaderboards and leagues to their games. Fittingly for Amazon, there’s a product fulfillment aspect to the new API […]

Uber might begin selling its autonomous driving systems to outside companies, including major automakers, according to a new report from Japan’s Nikkei. The report claims that Uber has had talks with Toyota regarding supplying the automaker with self-driving tech, and that the two are currently in negotiations around how this would work, with talk of […]

Back in 2016 a startup called SearchInk, launched out of Berlin with the aim of combining machine learning with handwriting recognition. The upshot would be the ability to semantically label handwritten documents. Pretty nifty. It went on to raise €4.2 million in seed funding, but after developing this AI to read hard-written documents, it went […]

VentureFriends, the Athens-based VC that has backed the likes of Homie and Weengs, is announcing its new fund, with a first closing of €45 million. ‘VentureFriends II’ sees the VC firm pick up where its original €20 million fund left off, with a remit to do seed investments in Greek startups and beyond that have […]

Alibaba is increasing its control of Lazada, its e-commerce marketplace in Southeast Asia it acquired control of in 2016, after it injected another $2 billion into the business and replaced its CEO with a long-standing Alibaba executive. Alibaba’s first investment came in April 2016 when it bought 51 percent of Lazada for $1 billion, and […]

Tom Goodwin Contributor More posts by this contributor The battle for consumers gets physical (instead of virtual) In the new age of ubiquitous connectivity the message is the medium Adriana Stan Contributor Adriana Stan is the public relations director of W magazine and a writer on media, culture and technology. She is also the co-founder […]

“I should go on a weekend trip,” you think to yourself. “I’ll go to the mountains!” And then the weekend comes and all the hotels are booked and you’re tired and the mountains are far and hey look, Netflix! Wing It is a Facebook Messenger bot that tries to get you out of that rut. […]

Buying furniture sucks. Getting rid of it later is worse. Aalo, part of the Y Combinator Winter 2018 class, is trying to fix both sides of that equation. They want you to design and build your own furniture… and when you’re done with it, turn it into something else. They’ve built a system of interlocking, […]

There’s no shortage of ideas being backed when it comes to direct-to-consumer e-commerce companies that are cultivating their own brands. We’ve seen everything from slippers to toothbrushes to, perhaps most famously, razor blades. Among the newer frontiers being funded right now: ingredient-conscious perfumes. The New York-based, venture-backed cosmetics company Glossier began marketing a proprietary perfume called […]

The American South may not be the first region that comes to mind when you hear the phrase “hotbed of tech entrepreneurship,” but, slightly misguided perceptions aside, it’s home to a diverse and growing collection of startups. Here, we’re going to take a deep dive into the startup funding data for the region. What is […]

So-called ‘EdTech’ has seen many false dawns over the years. After being lauded as the teaching platforms of the future, most MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course platforms) have not quite lived up to the superlatives made for them, and the sector has had trouble coming up with more innovative ideas for a while. But that […]

Sunny Dhillon Contributor More posts by this contributor Mixed reality arcades are the next big market opportunity — but not for VCs Virtual reality in Japan “$43 million and the only thing you can buy in it is a coffee.” So said Samsung’s Senior Director of Store Development Michael Koch about the company’s flagship Manhattan […]

Sibjeet Mahapatra Contributor Compelling virtual reality shipped to developers and consumers nearly two years ago. The first flagship headsets arrived from Oculus and HTC back in the spring of 2016, offering enough resolution, frame rate, field of view, latency mitigation and position-tracking to produce believable visual immersion. But no one seems to know what to […]

Joanna Glasner Contributor More posts by this contributor What does it take to be a startup that raises huge sums quickly? Not a minimalist? Startups will gladly store, manage and deliver your items It seems like startup news is full of overnight success stories and sudden failures, like the scooter rental company that went from […]

Enthusiasts will talk your ear off about the potential for drones to take over many of our dirtiest, dullest and most dangerous tasks. But most of the jobs we’ve actually seen drones perform are focused on the camera — from wildlife surveying to monitoring cracks on power plant smokestack. Aerones is working on something much […]

When we wrote about gaming startup Kahoot passing significant milestones of 70 million users on 51 million educational quizzes in January, we mentioned that the Oslo, Norway-based startup was closing another round of funding. Now, that has come to pass: Kahoot has announced that it has raised $17 million, at a valuation that sources close to […]

Zuora, which helps businesses handle subscription billing and forecasting, filed for an initial public offering this afternoon following on the heels of Dropbox’s filing earlier this month. Zuora’s IPO may signal that Dropbox going public, and seeing a price range that while under its previous valuation seems relatively reasonable, may open the door for coming […]

It was a big debut for enterprise cloud security company Zscaler, which saw its shares skyrocket 106% on its first day of trading. After pricing at $16, shares opened at $27.50, and closed at $34. This was also well above the original expected price range for its IPO of $10 to $12. The company ultimately raised […]

The FTC has announced that they’ve issued temporary restraining orders and frozen the assets of a team of three defendants who pitched investment advice as the Bitcoin Funding Team and My7Network. The FTC claims that the defendants “promised big rewards for a small payment of bitcoin or Litecoin.” From the report: According to the FTC, […]

[embedded content] Watch out all you well-paid, fat-and-sassy jazz marimba players: Shimon, the marimba playing robot is after your jobs. Shimon is the brainchild of the Robotic Musicianship Group at Georgia Tech and I’ve been following his career for a few years now. In this video, taken at the Ferst Center Presents as part of […]

GrokStyle’s simple concept of “point your camera at a chair (or lamp, or table…) and find others like it for sale” attracted $2 million in funding last year, and the company has been putting that cash to work. And remarkably for a company trying to break into the home furnishing market, it landed furniture goliath […]

Planning a mars mission, a global telecommunications network for inexpensive internet service, and creating an interplanetary hedge against world war three isn’t cheap, so it’s no wonder that SpaceX is closing on $500 million in new cash through a financing round led by Fidelity, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the round. Responding to clamoring […]

Anker is a devie maker that’s rapidly become a go-to brand for affordable, quality accessories include cables, chargers and backup batteries. More recently, it’s started to branch out into additional areas, including projectors through its Nebula brand. The Nebula Capsule is the latest product from that line, a super portable projector with an Android-based OS, […]

It takes a village to grow a startup, so Village Global is offering access to a deep network of top tech execs to lure founders to its seed fund. Today, Village Global announced it’s raised $100 million for that fund that was first unveiled in September. In exchange for equity, portfolio companies get investment plus […]

Developer bootcamps — several-month training programs that are designed to help people get up to speed with the technical skills they need to become a developer — exploded in popularity in the early part of the decade, but there’s been a bit of a shakedown on the space recently. And that could be a product […]

Gusto, formerly ZenPayroll, is the rare startup unicorn that has stayed relatively mum on its product and growth — it’s last press release, for instance, was more than a year ago. The company’s core offering remains payroll for small businesses, and it has been working to expand its customer base across the nation, including have […]

Hoping to capitalize on the popularity of trivia applications like HQ Trivia, dating app maker Zoosk has just released an experimental app that combines trivia with the potential for meeting someone new. The app is a relaunch and complete makeover of Zoosk’s Lively, which first debuted in July 2016 as a dating app that used […]

Tokyoflashis one of my favorite watchmakers. Unabashedly analog, the watches pay homage giant robots and old tech, looking like a cross between something that you could find in the hatch in Lost and a Shinjuku fever dream. Now the company has launched the Radar LED watch, a clever piece that shows the time with sweeping […]

The first big tech IPO of the year has opened with a bang. Zscaler, a security startup that confidentially filed for an IPO last year, started trading this morning as ZS on Nasdaq at a price of $27.50/share. This was a pop of 71.9  percent on its opening price of $16, and speaks to a […]

On the heels of last week’s rollout on Android, Google’s new AI-powered technology, Google Lens, is now arriving on iOS. The feature is available within the Google Photos iOS application, where it can do things like identify objects, buildings, and landmarks, and tell you more information about them, including helpful details like their phone number, […]

A Wrinkle in Time director Ava DuVernay is closing a deal with Warner Brothers to direct a movie based DC’s New Gods comics. The news was first reported in Deadline, and DuVernay seemed to confirm it by subsequently tweeting a tribute to New Gods creator Jack Kirby. While beloved by many comics fans, The New […]

[embedded content] The new trailer for Avengers: Infinity War is here, and it gives us a look at Thanos with a helmet on, and provides some signet into what he hopes to accomplish by invading Earth (kill half the people on it). Also, there are still a ton of characters in this movie, and it […]

Alexa is rolling out an optional “Brief Mode” that lets users configure their Echo devices to use chimes and sounds for confirmations, instead of having Alexa respond with her voice. For example, if you ask Alexa to turn on your lights today, she will respond “okay” as she does so. But with Brief Mode enabled, […]

Apple has a long legacy of providing services to schools and teachers, but the industry has changed in recent years as the Chromebook has completely changed the way classrooms work. The company is no doubt looking to take back some of that mindshare. This morning, it sent out invites for an event, asking attendees to […]