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 YouTube today said it’s launching a change to its service that will offer viewers more transparency around where news broadcasters get their funding. According to a company announcement, YouTube will now add notices below videos that are uploaded by broadcasters who receive some level of government or public funding. “Our goal is to equip users with additional information to help… Read More

 The Matt Hancock app, which launched this week and quickly ran into a storm of criticism for displaying an unfortunately lax attitude to privacy, has caught the attention of the UK’s data watchdog. Awkward. Read More

 Spotify addressed one of the long-standing complaints about its service with the introduction of a new songwriter credits feature, which is initially available on the Spotify desktop app. The streaming service has had a contentious history with songwriters, who have continuously accused the company of not licensing or paying them for the use of their music. This ultimately led to Spotify… Read More

 While Elon Musk is preparing for this week’s launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket, his other company is also preparing for a launch. Tesla has made a deal with Home Depot to sell both the PowerWall and Tesla’s solar panels at 800 Home Depot locations. The retail spaces will be Tesla branded and Tesla employees will be on hand to assist with service and sales. Bloomberg first reported… Read More

 Tesla is going to be working with its first pilot customers for its all-electric Semi truck to build charging stations at their shipping facilities, Reuters reports. We know relatively little about how Tesla will be piloting its truck thus far, but this new info sheds some light on the charging component of the puzzle. Tesla will be working with Anheuser-Busch, Pepsi and UPS at least to build… Read More

 Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week Matthew Lynley and Alex Wilhelm were joined by General Catalyst’s Steve Herrod, who helped us dig through the week’s biggest news. As a group, we looked at Wag’s mega-round, a $300 million infusion from SoftBank’s Vision Fund.… Read More

 If you’ve ever tried to collaborate on a document (or any kind of note, really) with coworkers or anyone else, you’re probably using something along the lines of Dropbox Paper or Google Docs — but they don’t quite have the same team-focused simplicity as, say, Slack, if you ask Christophe Pasquier. That’s where Slite, a new notes tool that’s specifically… Read More

 China has already been one of the fastest-growing luxury retail markets in the world for years. As their spending power increases, consumers are becoming more picky, demanding premium goods at better prices, with better service. Now Le Tote, the fashion rental service backed by Andreessen Horowitz, GV and other investors, is preparing to enter the fray. Read More

 In December, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds partnered with Seoul-based Minkonet to introduce a new 3D replay feature. For those unfamiliar with PUBG, it follows a similar structure to H1Z1 or Fortnite Battle Royale, with a hundred players dropped into a large map with nothing but their own ability to loot gear and ultimately survive. The game is a hit, with a reported 3 million… Read More

 An app about a frog that likes to travel has exposed worrying signs that Apple isn’t doing enough to prevent fake apps from entering its App Store in China, the world’s largest smartphone market and Apple’s single largest country for app revenue. The story centers around ‘Tabi Kaeru’ — or ‘Travel Frog’ — a Japanese app that has become an… Read More

 Science Inc, the Santa Monica, Ca.-based incubator and investment firm, has closed a new venture capital fund with $75 million in commitments, shows a new SEC filing. According to the six-year-old firm, the vehicle is its first official venture fund — with traditional limited partners, including a fund of funds, sovereign wealth funds, foundations, and other institutional investors.… Read More

 Sony is getting a new CEO after it announced that CFO Kenichiro Yoshida will replace Kazuo Hirai as the head of the Japanese firm. The move will happen April 1, with Hirai shifting to the role of Chairman. “I have dedicated myself to transforming the company and enhancing its profitability, and am very proud that now, in the third and final year of our current mid-range corporate plan,… Read More

 Tesla is using its car leases as collateral for a big $546 million loan as it turns to debt markets to raise additional cash to combat the blistering burn rate of its auto and energy business, according to multiple reports. The bonds are pegged to leases of its Model S and X cars, and it marks the first time that Elon’s electric albatross has turned to asset backed securities for new… Read More

 Seems like just yesterday Airbus’ Vahana autonomous electric vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) craft was little more than a painted concept, but now it’s actually flown, during a full-scale prototype test that lasted just under a minute, and during which the Vahana aircraft was fully self-piloted and fling at a height of 16 feet off the ground. The Vahana VTOL, which resembles… Read More

 It has long been believed that the big three in the cloud consisted of AWS, Microsoft and Google, with IBM not doing too badly either. But in its earnings call with analysts today, the company revealed it’s pulling in a billion dollars a quarter in combined cloud revenue. That’s a figure that Google’s Diane Greene says already puts her company on elite footing. Read More

 David Marcus, Facebook’s vice president of Messaging Products, responded to the backlash against Messenger Kids when he spoke at the Upfront Summit in Los Angeles on Thursday. “Families will be better off because it exists,” said Marcus. “I firmly believe that it is a good product.” Read More

 Artificial intelligence has long been a focus for MIT. The school’s been researching the space since the late ’50s. But the university thinks it can do more to elevate the rapidly expanding field. This week, the school announced the launch of the MIT Intelligence Quest, an initiative aimed at leveraging its AI research into something it believes could be game-changing for the category. Read More

 Crypto investors are seeing red this week. Bitcoin plunged to two-month lows on Thursday, dipping below $9,000 for the first time since November. This week has seen coins across the board in the red — a sign that investors are jumping ship to fiat currencies this time instead of swapping into altcoins as we’ve seen in the recent past. Read More

 Factual announced this morning that it’s expanding its Geopulse ad-targeting suite, with new products designed to help advertisers measure whether their campaigns drive in-store visits, and to give them more guidance on overall strategy. You may remember that Factual was founded a decade ago by Gil Elbaz, with the aim of creating an open repository for data. Over time, the company… Read More

 As far as sales figures go, this last quarter wasn’t entirely rosy for Apple. During today’s earnings report, the company posted sales of 77.3 million iPhones, down just under a million from this time last year. Of course, that 78.2 million figure from 2017 represented a new record for the company. But Wall Street still expected another increase, up to 80.2 million phones for… Read More

 Other than its iPhones and computers, Apple sells a bunch of other products, like the AirPods, Apple Watch, Apple TV, Beats products, iPod Touch and, most recently, the HomePod. In Q1 2018, Apple saw $5.5 billion in revenue for these other products, an increase of 36 percent year over year. Read More

 Apple’s dream of becoming a $1 trillion company will have to wait — at least for a little while. But while iPhone sales this year were about flat (down about 1% to be exact), revenue from the iPhone rose 13% year-over-year. That means Apple is finding ways to get more revenue out of the same number of units, so it may indeed be finding demand for higher-priced phones amid the… Read More

 Labo is peak Nintendo. It’s strange, it’s innovative, it’s pretty silly and it’s completely unexpected. As longtime PR rep David Young told us during a quick chat at today’s event, “when people think we’re going to zig, we zag.” Nintendo Labo is Maximum Zag. Read More

 Google parent company Alphabet’s big run over the past few months came to a screeching halt today after it came out with its fourth-quarter results, which fell beneath expectations set by Wall Street for the advertising giant — sending the stock down around 5% and shaving off billions in market cap. While Google owns a massive chunk of the advertising system — and it still… Read More

 Amazon reported quarterly financials after the bell Thursday for its fourth quarter, the all-important holiday season for the e-commerce giant. And its numbers had some people doing a double take, after earnings per share came in at $3.75, more than double the $1.85 that analysts surveyed by Yahoo Finance were estimating.  Net income was $1.9 billion for the quarter. For the full 2017 year,… Read More

Your internet provider calls. Malware associated with the latest botnet has been detected coming from your corporate network. The incident response plans are triggered. The common thought trajectory goes something like: How could this happen? Did someone open a phishing email? Did a hacker breach our firewall? Was a vendor compromised? There goes my weekend. Read More

Your internet provider calls. Malware associated with the latest botnet has been detected coming from your corporate network. The incident response plans are triggered. The common thought trajectory goes something like: How could this happen? Did someone open a phishing email? Did a hacker breach our firewall? Was a vendor compromised? There goes my weekend. Read More

 Snap Inc just launched merchandise store. The goal isn’t to make money yet, but it proves the potential for an in-app commerce platform for other brands. Today the company opened the Snap Store which lives in the Snapchat app’s Discover section and lets you buy Snapchat merchandise liek a $20 Dancing Hot Dog Plushie or a $30 Dog Lens T-Shirt. You can scan the Snap Code below with… Read More

 Not a week goes without another report of bad news in the crypto world: funds get lost, stolen, or compromised with little or no possibility of recovery. This is a problem we don’t really have with typical fiat money — where our funds and banks are insured. And it highlights how broken the current state of affairs is in the industry. Ten years in blockchain have already provided… Read More

 Airbnb CFO Laurence Tosi is leaving the company, Airbnb announced today. This comes shortly after The Information reported there were some tensions brewing between Chesky and Tosi over the future of the company. In a blog post, Airbnb said Tosi “has decided to dedicate his full time and energy to his investment fund, Weston Capital Partners, and dedicate time to the several external… Read More

 If and when your crypto investments go back up feel free to spend about $100,000 on one of these new creations from the watchmakers at MB&F and noted horologist Stepan Sarpaneva. The watch, called the MoonMachine 2, has a “heads-up” time display on the back end of the case where you see the hours and minutes in bold numerals along with a Sarpaneva-style moonphase display that… Read More

 This past week, I’ve had the chance to try out a brand new Tesla Model X P100D, on loan from Tesla for my use during a trip in and around San Francisco. Needless to say, the car got a lot of attention, especially given its all-black exterior and high contrast all-white leather cabin styling. And of course, the P100D’s instant, extreme acceleration was a blast to use first-hand… Read More

 Would you wear a virtual reality headset while riding a bike? The answer is no, hopefully, but what about a stationary bike? One Cambridge-based fitness startup, VirZoom, is hoping virtual reality can be the next key to a new fitness craze. Fitness companies like Peloton have raised massive amounts of cash to build techie fitness empires, and while Peloton (which has raised more than $444M… Read More

 Tamatem, a startup backed by 500 Startups that creates localised versions of popular games so that they resonate better with users in Arabic speaking countries, has picked up $2.5 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Wamda Capital, with participation from Discovery Nusantara Capital, Raed Ventures, Vision Venture Capital, and Seed Equity Venture Partners. Read More

 California’s Department of Motor Vehicles releases an annual report detailing the number of disengagements reported by companies it has licensed to test autonomous vehicles on public roads in the state. This year, the report reveals some interesting details about the progress of some of those companies, including Waymo, GM’s Cruise and Tesla (sort of – you’ll see what… Read More

 Nintendo really out Nintendoed itself with last month’s Labo announcement. The cardboard kit gets some innovative use out of the Switch’s underlying technology, letting kids build robot, fishing rods, pianos and the like, using the console’s Joy-Con controllers as the brains. At a kick off event in New York City today, the gaming giant offered some hands-on insight into… Read More

 Meet Wildmoka, a French startup that wants to streamline video editing during live events. Wildmoka is particularly useful for broadcasting companies that want to share highlights of live TV programs on social networks. The company just raised an $8 million Series A round led by Alven Capital, with existing investor Apicap also participating. Clients tend to use Wildmoka for all sorts of… Read More

 Print service CanvasPop has been making money inking photos onto all sorts of substrates, from canvas to cushions, for years. But the largely boostrapped Canada-based, 2009-founded company has just announced its first VC round — taking in $3.3M. Read More

 Awesomeness, the digital media company acquired by Comcast for $3.8 billion in 2016, is today bringing kid-friendly programming, including original content, to Amazon Prime subscribers with the launch of DreamWorksTV on Amazon Channels. The new subscription service is aimed at kids ages 6 through 12 and will cost $4.99 per month after a 7-day free trial period. Until now, DreamWorksTV has… Read More

 Pokemon Go creator Niantic has acquired the augmented reality startup Escher Reality. Escher Reality builds backend services for cross-platform mobile AR so that users can interact with each other and objects in the environment. The startup was one of the clear standouts from its Y Combinator class and we even highlighted it in our list of favorites. What made it so appealing was that it… Read More

 An all-Tesla stock car-style racing series just got one step closer to reality: The proposed series was approved by the same industry association that manages Formula One and other major international motorsport competitions, The Verge reports. This means more work ahead, however, including securing the requisite amount of teams and funding, as well as dealing with Tesla itself. While Verge… Read More

 YouTube Go, a mobile version of YouTube built for emerging markets with features like offline viewing and nearby sharing, is today expanding to over 130 countries worldwide. This wider rollout will make YouTube Go available to a large number of people who want the ability to watch YouTube videos, even if they don’t have a good connection, or find themselves offline. The list of new… Read More

 By now, just about everyone recognizes the power of the subscription model. Instead of simply selling a widget and recording revenue one time, you can sell a subscription and keep collecting that revenue over time. Up until now, subscription pricing has been fairly static for most companies. You tend to provide a set of tiers that remain fixed over time, but what if you could set different… Read More

 Medumo co-founder Adeel Yang has plenty of first-hand experience dealing with cancellations for procedures and appointments as a physician — but it’s been a problem that’s a deceptively hard to solve. So Yang and his co-founders decided to start Medumo to address the problem they’ve seen so often themselves. The company’s main goal is to reduce procedure… Read More

 If you’ve ever tried to buy a car, there’s a good chance that a lot of your research has shifted online as it’s become easier and easier to figure out exactly the kind of car you want — and less of it is about going to a dealership. At least, that’s what Michia Rohrssen is baking on. He and his co-founders started Prodigy, a company based on extending that same… Read More

 Germany’s national competition regulator has announced it’s looking into market conditions in the online advertising sector, responding to concerns that a lack of transparency could be skewing market conditions. Read More

 Back in 2009 when we didn’t expect too much from AI, Cognition IP co-founder Bryant Lee decided to go to law school after studying computer science — but he still wanted to one day try to bring those two together. Fast forward to 2018, when AI has completely exploded and is pervasive in pretty much every industry, and Lee now has that chance. That’s why he and his… Read More

 Twitter today is launching a new premium product for developers that will provide access to the full Twitter archive – going all the way back to the first tweet from Twitter CEO @Jack (Jack Dorsey) in 2006. Previously, this level of access was only available to enterprise API customers, but it’s now being made available to the wider developer community. Until today,… Read More

 With $18 million in funding from Defy Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Sherpa Capital and others, Owl has launched its always-connected, LTE security camera for your car. Co-founded by Andy Hodge, a former product lead at Apple and executive at Dropcam, and Microsoft HoloLens development lead Nathan Ackerman, Owl is designed to give drivers peace of mind with an always-on… Read More

 As a transportation reporter, I’ve been in a lot of cars using either autonomous or semi-automated Advanced Driver Assistance (ADAS) features, both on public and private roads, and yet I’d never been in an accident during a demonstration drive for any of these features before now. On Tuesday, January 30, myself and two TechCrunch video production staff were riding in a modified… Read More

 It’s been less than a year since Instagram brought advertising to Instagram Stories — a format that its owner Facebook said in November has more than 300 million daily users. Since then, it’s been working to expand those capabilities, like incorporating ad formats that were already established elsewhere. Today, Instagram is announcing plans to bring its Carousel Ads into Stories. Read More

 The YouTube TV app is at last available on Roku devices, starting today. Google had announced earlier that YouTube’s live TV service would be coming to Roku and Apple TV in the first quarter of 2018, following a delay that saw it pushing the launch date back from year-end 2017. Until now, YouTube TV has been fairly limited in its support of living room devices compared with rivals,… Read More

 Twilio has $250,000 in startup Edovo, which creates tablet-based educational content for incarcerated individuals. Twilio has also invested grant money in the International Rescue Committee, MindRight and Caravan Studios. Last year, Twilio awarded over $1.5 million in impact funds and plans to award an additional $1.5 million by the end of this year. Edovo works with facilities to bring in… Read More

 Just about every startup has aspirations to be a platform play. One of the main issues companies typically face on that journey is that just because they build an API doesn’t mean developers are going to adopt it. German API startup CloudRail wants to help. It not only provides a set of tools to simplify implementing your API, but also offers a marketplace and a community of developers… Read More

 AR has gotten quite a bit of hype but there’s a good chance you haven’t even stumbled across an ARKit use case on your iPhone yet. The reason is largely that AR just doesn’t have a ton of practical use cases, I think I just managed to find one though. If you’re in the market for some art in your house or apartment, Art.com will now let you use AR to put digital artwork… Read More

 Relocation, relocation, relocation, as the saying (sort of) goes. On the heels of raising $48 million last year to tap into the growing needs of businesses to handle global workforces (a huge if sometimes controversial area of the job market), Move Guides today announced an acquisition to expand its footprint in the market and the services it offers to customers. The startup is buying up… Read More

 Alibaba has added an additional angle to the announcement of its latest financial report today with news that it is taking a 33 percent stake in Ant Financial, its fintech affiliate that operates Alipay and other financial services. The deal, which both parties said stems from an agreement made in 2014, will see Alibaba pick up newly issued shares in Ant, seemingly paving the way for a… Read More

 Between smart speakers, mobile devices and a growing army of connected home products, voice interfaces are poised to continue growing at a rapid clip. We’re still very much in the early days, but Seattle-based startup Pulse Labs is hoping to be among the first to help build a more tailored experience for apps built on top of Alexa, Google Assistant and the like. Read More

 Uberall, the Berlin-headquartered startup that has developed a cloud-based platform to let small and large businesses get listed and market themselves across multiple location-based services, has picked up $25 million in Series B funding. Read More

 The Telegram messaging apps appear to have breached Apple’s App Store guidelines and are currently unavailable for download on iOS. 9to5Mac spotted the absence yesterday, having been alerted via a Reddit thread. Read More

 While large companies like Facebook and publishers continue to rethink what their role is in disseminating news these days in the wake of the growing influence of ‘fake news’ and the ever-present spread of misleading clickbait, a London-based startup called Factmata has closed a seed round of $1 million in its ambition to build a platform using AI to help fix the problem across… Read More

 Gawker’s posts will be captured and saved by the non-profit Freedom of the Press Foundation, following a report that venture capitalist Peter Thiel wants to buy its remaining assets, including archived content and domain names. Thiel bankrolled the lawsuit that led to Gawker’s bankruptcy and eventual shutdown in 2016. Read More

 In news that will excite every Nintendo fan on the planet, the Japanese gaming giant just announced that it will bring its hugely popular Mario Kart series to mobile. Nintendo teased the upcoming development of ‘Mario Kart Tour’ which it said will be released sometime before March 2019. A long wait, indeed, and for now we have no additional details. But, for most enthusiasts,… Read More

 Elon Musk’s flamethrower, branded and sold via The Boring Company, his new tunnel digging venture, is now all sold out. That means 20,000 buyers have secured pre-orders, and at $500 per, that adds up to $10 million in committed funds heading to The Boring Co’s coffers. Musk started selling these via The Boring Company’s website just a few short days ago, on Saturday, January 27. Read More

 After a slow and steady expansion across the U.S., social platform Nextdoor is now launching its fourth country outside of its home country. Nextdoor is a sort of tiny Facebook for neighborhoods. It’s a good way to connect with your neighbors, exchange tips, buy and sell things and more. “The launch of Nextdoor in France represents a critical step in our continued European expansion. Read More

This is the last episode of Crunch Report; I’m going to miss it : ( but I’m super pumped for what the future holds. All this on Crunch Report. Read More

 For anyone who knows their city well, it’s easy to see that the short-term rental boom spurred by Airbnb’s massive popularity is changing things. Figuring out what exactly is changing and how quickly is trickier. In New York, those changes are have kept Airbnb and city regulators engaged in a multi-year war over what’s really good for the city. A new deep dive into the… Read More

 For anyone who knows their city well, it’s easy to see that the short-term rental boom spurred by Airbnb’s massive popularity is changing things. Figuring out what exactly is changing and how quickly is trickier. In New York, those changes are have kept Airbnb and city regulators engaged in a multi-year war over what’s really good for the city. A new deep dive into the… Read More

 SpaceX flew a mission today that didn’t include a controlled recovery attempt of the Falcon 9 booster involved in the launch. Even still, the first stage survived the return to Earth pretty much intact, and the company will now try to recover it from the Atlantic Ocean to see what kind of shape it’s in. This rocket was meant to test very high retrothrust landing in water so it… Read More

 In the world of mobile apps, numbers come in two sizes: big and bigger. More than one billion people use Facebook’s mobile app every day. But what about the financial side of the mobile business; specifically, venture investment and returns? By looking at the numbers behind two different ends of the startup life cycle, a reasonable understanding of the mobile market today can be had. Read More

 The CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technique is an important concept to know about in these days of biotech advances, but it can be pretty difficult to visualize properly. Is it really like molecular scissors? Where does the DNA go? Is it a big molecule or a small one? Fortunately a group has created a 3D animation of the process that shows it at the molecular level. Read More

 Today was supposed to be the deadline for Equifax’s free credit freeze offering, but the company has decided to extend the service to consumers for another five months. Now, Equifax customers can request a credit freeze through June 30. Still, January 31 is the last day to cash in on free credit monitoring through Equifax’s TrustedID Premier program. Read More

 Life sciences startups in Asia are getting another boost with the $10 million investment in Engine Biosciences — a biotech company that’s applying machine learning to genomics for drug discovery. With its headquarters in both Singapore and San Francisco, the company has managed to attract some impressive investors from both the U.S. and Asia. The round was co-led by Danhua… Read More

 Streaming music service Pandora is laying off about five percent of its employee base and taking “other cost-saving measures” in an attempt to save about $45 million annually. According to Pandora’s 8-K filing, employees were notified today of the plan and the company expects the staff reduction to be complete by the end of Q1 2018. Read More

 Everyone’s trying to build a better light bulb. These days, that means things like adjustable colors and smart home connectivity. Bay Area startup Soraa is skipping all the noise for the moment, instead making color its primary focus. For five years, the company’s been producing products for places like art galleries and hotels, where color balance is a big part of the experience. Read More

 EBay reported its Q4 and full-year earnings after market close today, where it reported sales of $2.6 billion and adjusted earnings per share of $0.59 for the quarter (versus $0.54 a year ago), and $9.6 billion in revenues for the year. While the holiday season, which fell into the quarter that ended December 31, is traditionally a huge time for e-commerce companies, in the case of this… Read More

 Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp sounds smarter and smarter. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on the Q4 2017 earnings call today that WhatsApp now has 1.5 billion users and sees 60 billion messages sent per day. That’s compared to 1.3 billion monthly users and 1 billion daily active users in July. Read More

 One day after announcing strong earnings and the massive strategic acquisition of the leader in yearbook and school photos, Shutterfly is watching its shares soar. It’s quite a turn for a company that just over a year ago was staring at a massive new market competitor in Amazon, whose entry into the personalized photo sharing market caused Shutterfly’s stock to tumble. By… Read More

 SpaceX has launched a Falcon 9 rocket loaded with a geocommunications satellite commissioned by the Government of Luxembourg. The satellite, created by Orbital STK and to be operated by SES, will support humanitarian and military operations for Luxembourg, among other communications functions. The rocket took off from Cape Canaveral on Wednesday, a day after its initial planned launch. The… Read More

 PayPal impressed Wall Street when it reported fourth-quarter earnings after the bell on Wednesday. The global payments giant beat analyst expectations for both sales and profit. PayPal reported $3.71 billion in revenue on a foreign-exchange neutral basis, or 24% growth from the same period last year. Analysts were expecting $3.63 billion in revenue for the quarter. Adjusted earnings per… Read More

 Facebook is putting its short-term money where it’s mouth is, reducing the presence of viral videos in an effort to boost well-being of users of its site. Today in Facebook’s Q4 2017 earnings report CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that “Already last quarter, we made changes to show fewer viral videos to make sure people’s time is well spent. In total, we made changes… Read More

 Microsoft posted a relatively good second quarter this year that continued the ongoing process of its growth into a major cloud entity, in addition to saying it would be taking a significant charge as part of changes to U.S. tax law. In particular, Microsoft said that its Azure revenue grew 98% year-over-year — a long-running theme alongside many other lines that equate to… Read More

 SpaceX’s launch live stream has already started for its GovSat-1 mission, which is launching a satellite from the government of Luxembourg into geostationary transfer orbit. The launch window opens at 4:25 PM EST and will not include a recovery attempt for the Falcon 9 first stage, which has been used once before during a mission in 2017. Read More

 Teased earlier this month at CES, Hulu today has quietly launched its personalized Olympics experience in its Live TV app. The company hasn’t officially announced the new feature, but the option to track your favorite Olympics events pops up when you launch the app today, allowing you to pick from various events like figure skating, ski jumping, snowboard, luge, alpine skiing and many… Read More

 While at CES I try to avoid getting bogged down by dozens of random gadgets, and this time I mostly succeeded — but the mouse reviewer in me was intrigued by Lexip’s new gaming mouse that’s also a sort of floating joystick. It’s a strange but cool idea, and although the learning curve is high, I can see some hardcore gamers and productivity fiends getting a lot of use… Read More

 Virtual reality’s content problem has been so frustrating for users because the medium’s promise has been that it can take users anywhere. As developers continue to build up these worlds, Supermedium is launching out of Y Combinator’s winter batch with a browser that it hopes can show people the promises of virtual reality content that lives across the web. While Oculus… Read More

 Last summer, the news came in dribs and drabs about initial coin offerings, the crowd sales of new cryptocurrencies that give entrepreneurs access to funding. A warning here that some coins sold in ICOs could be considered securities. An alert there that celebrity endorsements of ICOs might be unlawful. Fast forward, and the warnings are starting to come with the kind of velocity that should… Read More

 The competition between Alexa and Google Assistant is fierce. How fierce? Cover all of Las Vegas in Google Assistant ads for CES fierce? Put voice assistance in weird things like a light switch or a fridge fierce? How about “don’t dare utter our competitor’s name in your voice app” fierce? Yep, Amazon has banned Alexa app developers from saying “Google”… Read More

 The competition between Alexa and Google Assistant is fierce. How fierce? Cover all of Las Vegas in Google Assistant ads for CES fierce? Put voice assistance in weird things like a light switch or a fridge fierce? How about “don’t dare utter our competitor’s name in your voice app” fierce? Yep, Amazon has banned Alexa app developers from saying “Google”… Read More

 If you’re more of a Gmail power user (or even semi-power user) and other email services geared toward work, you’ve probably installed plenty of plugins like Rapportive to make your job a little bit easier. And while it’s all fine to try to pull together a suite of plugins to make that a little bit easier, a startup called Polymail is hoping to rope that all into a single hub… Read More

 Actress Maisie Williams, best known for her role as Arya Stark on Game of Thrones, is the latest celeb to venture into tech entrepreneurship, with the launch of a new company aimed at connecting creatives, called Daisie. Available later this summer as a mobile app, Daisie will offer a platform where creators can network, like, share and collaborate on projects within a social networking… Read More

 Ah, the Super Bowl. That magical time of year we gather around the T.V. set and pay just as much attention to the ads that run between plays. Increasingly, though, you can get much of that precious advertising viewing experience out of the way before the big game even starts. After offering a brief online tease for its upcoming ad, Amazon’s gone ahead and posted all 90 seconds of… Read More

 Apple is working hard on the next major versions of its operating systems — macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS. While iOS is the big elephant in the room, the most intriguing new feature could be for macOS. According to reports from Bloomberg and Axios, Apple will let you run iPad apps. Yesterday, Axios first reported that Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering Craig… Read More

Researchers at the National University of Singapore have created a clever self-driving drone called the Smart Water Assessment Network – the SWAN. These swan-shaped robots swim in Singapore’s waters and assess pollution, drinkability, and temperature, allowing researchers to gather data without scaring people with dangerous-looking traditional water drones. NUSwan – New… Read More

The real estate industry was relatively slow to adapt technology, but it’s now quickly catching up. That means that virtually every part of the industry is seeing a lot of startup activity. Juniper Square, which today announced it has raised a $6M Series A round, is tackling the real estate investment side by helping investment managers raise and manage outside capital for their projects. Read More

 A team of ex-Apple engineers and execs is taking on Amazon-owned Twitch and Google’s YouTube Gaming with today’s official launch of a new social broadcasting platform, Caffeine. Backed by $46 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Greylock Partners, Caffeine was co-founded by former Product Design Lead for Apple TV and Chomp co-founder Ben Keighran, along with Senior User… Read More

 Lego bricks (or, if you’re not a pedant, Legos) are highly precise and highly consistent plastic objects. Anywhere you go in the world the Lego is the same. That means that scientists at MIT can use these little sole stabbers to create very precise scientific systems. Their first tests involves creating a microfluid pump and sorter using basic Lego parts. Because they can trust Lego… Read More

 Not every self-driving car has to be able to move passengers from point A to point B. Take, for example, Nuro: The startup just revealed their unique autonomous vehicle platform, which is more of a mobile small logistics platform than a self-driving car. The company, which has been working away in stealth mode in Mountain View until now, has raised a $92 million Series A round led by Banyan… Read More

 Fujifilm announced this week that it’s set to take a majority stake in Xerox. The news comes as the U.S. tech stalwart and photocopying synonym struggles to cope with an eroding demand for office printers and photocopies. The boards of both companies agreed to the deal this week, giving Fujifilm a 50.1-percent stake in the combined companies. The naming conventions on this one are… Read More

 Google is rolling out a few new features to its Google Flights search engine to help travelers tackle some of the more frustrating aspects of air travel – delays and the complexities of the cheaper, Basic Economy fares. With the regard to delays, Google Flights won’t just be pulling in information from the airlines directly, however – it will take advantage of its… Read More

 Trifacta, a big-data business intelligence startup that is building tools to help businesses structure and analyse data that gets generated in their networks through customer interactions and other actions, is today announcing that it has closed out its Series D round at $48 million, with a notable list of strategic and financial investors that includes Google, Ericsson, the Deutsche Börse,… Read More

 Nintendo’s Switch has only been on sale for 10 months but already it has outsold its predecessor, the Wii U, the flop that heralded Nintendo’s first step into hybrid gaming. The Japanese tech giant shifted a little over 13.5 million Wii U consoles across its entire lifecycle, and today Nintendo revealed that the Switch has reached 14.86 million sales to date. Business was so… Read More

 Uber is launching a bike-sharing service next week in partnership with JUMP, a startup that recently received the first and only permit to operate dockless bike-sharing in San Francisco. JUMP’s contract with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency enables it to launch 250 of its dockless, electric bikes in San Francisco. After the first nine months of the program, the SFMTA… Read More

 Google has announced some tweaks to search snippets to try to avoid creating problematic information hierarchies. Read More

 What began as a movement among couture culturati with the success of Rent the Runway has moved into everything from cars (Porsche’s got a subscription service ) to construction equipment and furniture.  Well, the Los Angeles-based startup Joymode has just raised $14 million to be the subscription service for nearly everything else.  Read More

 Asana, the productivity and collaboration service, is getting a major infusion of cash after Generation Investment Management, a London-based firm backed by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, led a $75 million investment. Investment Management was joined in this Series D round by existing backers 8VC, Founders Fund, Y Combinator President Sam Altman who also participated in the round.… Read More

 Fresh from toppling Intel as the planet’s biggest seller of chipsets, Samsung has confirmed that it has begun manufacturing ASIC chips which are used to mine bitcoin, ether and other cryptocurrencies. “Samsung’s foundry business is currently engaged in the manufacturing of cryptocurrency mining chips. However we are unable to disclose further details regarding our… Read More

 Bench, the TechStars-backed bookkeeping service for SMBs, has today announced the close of an $18 million B-1 funding round led by iNovia Capital. Existing investors, including Bain Capital Ventures, Altos Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank, also participated in the round. Bench first launched out of TechStars NYC in 2012. Back then, the company was called 10Sheet, and it aimed to providing… Read More

 SoftBank is partnering up with messaging app Line to help develop its Line Mobile telecom service. Line announced that it has agreed to allow SoftBank to take a 51 percent in the business via an issuance of new shares. The deal is expected to close by March. From the documents, its mobile business is valued at around $15 million (1.7 billion JPY) but a company spokesperson told TechCrunch… Read More

 A new vertical fund from pan-European VC firm Speedinvest is officially outing today. Dubbed “Speedinvest x” and targeting a final closing of €25 million, of which €20.5 million has already been committed, the micro VC fund will target early-stage marketplace startups exclusively. Read More

 Samsung has ended Intel’s 25-year run as the world’s biggest seller of chipsets after it posted its 2017 end of year financials. The Korean tech giant’s chipset division — which has long been its biggest hitter — grossed total revenue of $69 billion in 2017, eclipsing the $62.8 billion Intel reported for last year. That was a record year for Intel — and… Read More

 Spotify is testing an app that sees it move firmly into Pandora’s territory. ‘Stations’ is a new Android-only app that is being piloted by the company in Australia — it was first noticed by app analytics firm Sensor Tower on Tuesday. This app offers a ‘lean-back’ option to listen to music based on genres and managed playlists. In the description, Spotify… Read More

Amazon, JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway are building a healthcare company, Facebook is banning cryptocurrency ads and TrackR lays off 42 people. All this on Crunch Report. Read More

 Line, the messaging app with around 200 million monthly users, is embracing bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to fend off increased competition from Facebook and others. The Japanese company told announced the creation of a new financial services division which will spearhead a move into cryptocurrencies and other services including loans and insurance. Line already operates a payment… Read More

 The only thing growing faster than the global drone population is the population of people thinking “how can I knock these annoying things out of the sky?” DroneShield offers a way to do just that, and now in a much more portable package with the DroneGun Tactical — that is, if you’re an authorized government agent, which I doubt. Read More

 A California appeals court has sided with Allan Candelore, a man suing Tinder over the pricing for its premium service, Tinder Plus. Specifically, Candelore and his lawyers argued that by charging $9.99 per month if a user is under 30, versus $19.99 per month if you’re 30 or older, Tinder is discriminating based on age. Read More

 What should we do about token sales? Two days ago a Lithuanian “company” called Prodeum looked like a promising if silly blockchain startup. Their stated goal? To track every piece of food on the Internet. While I doubt many of us will care about the exact provenance of the orange we just ate, we could see, in some distant future, a need for this sort of tracking. After all, the… Read More

 Red Hat, a company best known for its enterprise Linux products, has been making a big play for Kubernetes and containerization in recent years with its OpenShift Kubernetes product. Today the company decided to expand on that by acquiring CoreOS, a container management startup, for $250 million. Read More

 If you’re like me, and I’m going to assume you are for the purposes of this post, you like the idea of time tracking, but generally it’s a bit too fiddly or complicated. TimeFlip is a super-simple gadget that lets you easily track how much time you spend on different activities just by flipping it around. Read More

 QR code style markers — those lil’ barcode-looking boxes you’ll see on ads from time to time, meant to be scanned with your phone to launch some website or app — have yet to really find their footing in the US. But that’s not going to keep Amazon from taking a stab at it. Amazon is rolling out its own take on the concept and calling them “SmileCodes”.… Read More

 What if you could look down and see your actual arms and legs inside VR, or look at other real-world people or objects as if you weren’t wearing a headset? Imverse’s team spent five years building this incredible technology at universities in Switzerland and Spain. “We were working on this before Oculus was even created” says co-founder Javier Bello Ruiz. Now its… Read More