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Andrew Lohn Contributor Andrew Lohn is an engineer at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation. The security community is still reeling from the discoveries of the Meltdown and Spectre computer vulnerabilities and now it seems that a rash of new hardware vulnerabilities called MasterKey, RyzenFall, Fallout, and Chimera have been found in the past few months […]

Facebook is adding support for in-app purchases to its Instant Games platform, the company announced during a session on gaming at its F8 developer conference this afternoon. The feature will allow game developers to add another form of monetization beyond advertising to their games on select platforms, but not on iOS. Instead, support for in-app […]

Cisco just announced an agreement to acquire Accompany, which uses artificial intelligence to build databases of people and relationships at companies. Founder and CEO Amy Chang has compared the product to a digital chief of staff or personal assistant, giving executives the context they need before conversations and meetings. Cisco plans to incorporate Accompany technology […]

Snapchat’s redesign was a disaster. It cratered ad views and revenue and led Snapchat’s user count to actually shrink in March. That’s why CEO Evan Spiegel just announced a big reversal of the redesign’s worst part. “We learned that combining watching Stories and communicating with friends into the same place made it harder to optimize […]

Apple ended up with a pretty decent report for its second quarter, beating analyst expectations on most of its metrics — but it is making a huge move in terms of returning capital to investors. The company said it is announcing a new $100 billion buyback program and increasing its dividend by 16%. That means […]

Snapchat stumbled in its Q1 2018 earnings report amidst a rocky redesign and sustained competition from Facebook, unable to keep up its comeback from last quarter. Snapchat reached 191 million daily active users, up from 187 million, with its growth rate sinking to 2.13 percent, it’s lowest ever, compared to 5.05 percent in Q4 and […]

On the heels of Facebook announcing its intent to add a dating element to its platform, dating company Match’s stock is suffering. Match is the brand behind dating services like Tinder, Match, OK Cupid and Plenty of Fish. At the time of publication, Match’s stock was trading down about 22 percent. Facebook’s entrance in this […]

Oculus made good on a lot of their promises from last year at today’s F8 keynote, one of the big ones that we heard a lot more about was Oculus Venues, an app the company has developed to house live sporting events, comedy shows and concerts shot in VR. The unified app will feature content […]

Facebook made a small but interesting announcement at the end of its F8 keynote today: you’ll soon be able to post 3d photos to your newsfeed. For now, we know very little about this feature — or even how you’ll capture these photos — but chances are you’ll see them pop up in your friends’ […]

Among all of the other announcements that surfaced today during the F8 keynote, only one of the announcements involved Boggle. Oculus announced a bug update to its social platform, Oculus Rooms which brings a redesigned space with cool new features designed to keep people coming back to the app. This is a big update to […]

We’re rounding the far turn and heading into the home stretch, folks. You have a mere 48 hours left to snag the best pricing available on passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2018, which takes place September 5-7 at Moscone Center West. Right now, you can save up to $1,800, but once the calendar clicks over […]

While Facebook execs had plenty of updates to share at Tuesday’s F8 keynote, there were far less announcements focused on the weird and experimental things that Facebook is trying to leverage AI and VR to do. That was, until the company made its last announcement for something it’s calling “VR memories,” a weird feature which […]

It goes without saying that getting dressed is one of the most critical steps in our daily routine. But long practice has made it second nature, and people suffering from dementia may lose that familiarity, making dressing a difficult and frustrating process. This smart dresser from NYU is meant to help them through the process […]

We’ve already got a star-studded lineup prepped to speak at Disrupt SF, running September 5 to September 7. So far, we’ve announced appearances by Sophia Amoruso, Carbon’s Dr. Joseph DeSimone, Adidas’ Eric Liedtke, Ripple’s Brad Garlinghouse, Michael Arrington, and Drew Houston. But given that today is the last day to purchase early bird tickets, we […]

Instagram is getting a revamped “Explore” section to improve discovery, the company announced this morning during the keynote address at Facebook’s F8 developer conference. The update will better organize its suggestions into topical channels based on your own interests and tastes, so you can more easily find the type of content you’re looking for. Before, […]

The augmented reality platform on Facebook has largely been hampered by the fact that it’s only on Facebook. Well, today the feature lands on Instagram where it will arrive it front of an audience more-devoted to photo-sharing in a platform more suited to AR filters. The filter platform will operate a little differently on Instagram […]

Facebook today announced an update to its Safety Check feature that expands the tool from simply allowing you to mark yourself as safe to sharing a bit more information about what’s happening on the ground. Facebook says it has activated the Safety Check feature, which launched back in 2014, over 1,000 times These new first-person […]

Workplace, the enterprise version of Facebook that competes against the likes of Slack, Microsoft Teams and Hipchat as a platform for employees to communicate and work on things together, says that it today has tens of thousands of organisations using its platform. Now to pick up more, and to bring more of customers into the […]

Facebook today announced that Instagram, its popular photo sharing platform, is getting support for video chats, among a couple of other new features. As Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted in his F8 keynote today, quite a few Instagram users already use the platform’s live video feature to chat with friends. “People use live […]

Facebook is adding a new Groups tab and plugin, announced CEO Mark Zuckerberg during his opening keynote at Facebook’s F8 developer conference this morning. The addition of the new Groups tab on Facebook will make groups a more central part of the Facebook experience, the CEO explained. “In a community, you can meet new people […]

Alongside the launch of the Oculus Go headset today, Oculus announced that it is working on a new element of its in-headset experience that will appeal to users interested in binging TV inside VR. It’s called Oculus TV and the company hopes that it will evolve to become a quick-and-easy way for VR users to […]

Today, at Facebook’s F8 developer conference, the company announced that its cheap and capable Oculus Go virtual reality headset will be going on sale today. The headset costs $199 for the version with 32GB of onboard storage, and $249 for the 64GB variety. We also finally have eyes on the full hardware specs, which only […]

Facebook is invading Tinder’s space with a new set of dating features. It will let people opt in to creating a dating profile on Facebook. It will only be visible to non-friends who also opted into dating. Facebook will match you by a slew of preferences. And since it has more data on you than […]

Onstage at Facebook’s developer conference, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company will be re-opening its app review process following the pause it took in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica crisis. “Now, I know that it hasn’t been easy being a developer these past couple months, that’s probably an understatement. What I can assure you […]

Hard to believe, but TC Sessions: Robotics is just over a week away. We’ve got some of the top minds in the industry on the schedule for the event, including Andy Rubin, Laura Tyson, Marc Raibert, Robert Full, Melonee Wise, Ayanna Howard, Pieter Abbeel and Chris Urmson. As we told you last week, we’ll have […]

Lyft is teaming up with Udacity to find talent for its Level 5 autonomous driving engineering team. The partnership entails a challenge designed to identify the best candidates in Udacity’s self-driving car engineer nanodegree program. Called the Lyft Perception Challenge, the idea is to test problem-solving skills around perception for autonomous vehicles. The competition, which […]

A group of European and international publishers have accused Google of using an incoming update to the European Union’s data protection framework to try to push “draconian” new terms on them in exchange for continued access to its ad network — which many publishers rely on to monetize their content online. Google trailed the terms […]

Toast, the Boston-based technology developer for the restaurant industry, has launched a new handheld point-of-sale device and a kitchen display system to integrate the front and back of any restaurant. Using the devices any waiter can become an expert on menu offerings at the touch of a button. The new device lets waitstaff know when […]

Facebook is hosting its F8 developer conference in San Jose this week. The event comes at an interesting time for the company. In response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it made a couple of sudden changes to how developers can access some data on its platform. We expect Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to […]

We’ve seen a large wave of used-car sales startups launch across developed markets like the U.S. and Europe, disrupting a marketplace that has largely been untouched for years. Now a startup focusing on the used car-sales opportunity specifically in developing economies is ramping up its activities. Frontier Car Group, a Berlin startup that has built […]

Over three years after Google paid $25 million to gain the exclusive rights to the “.app” top-level domain, the company is at last making .app domains available to register starting on May 7, at 9 AM PDT through Google’s Early Access Program. The following day, the domains will go on sale for the general public, […]

Google Cloud is launching the first public beta of Cloud Composer today, a new workflow automation tool for developers that’s based on the Apache Airflow project. Typically, IT teams build their own automated workflow as needed, but the result of that is often a mess of different tools and Bash scripts that don’t always work […]

Last week at a conference in France, Amazon announced a new Alexa feature that makes it possible to use the smart assistant as repistory for small bits of information. That feature is starting to roll out today to users in the U.S. as “Remember This.” The skill goes like this: say, “Alexa, remember Brian’s birthday […]

Lego – or LEGO – is expensive and kids – my kids in particular – want a lot of it. Our basement looks like the returns department of a major toy store, covered from corner to corner with toys and, most notably, and endless minefield of little building blocks. And we enjoy building models and […]

There’s nothing altogether unusual about a holiday-related sale, but Google’s decision to drop its Clips camera by $50 through May 13 does leave one wondering if the company’s had some trouble moving the first-generation product. Announced alongside the new Pixel phones back in October, Clips finally hit the market at the end of February. Google […]

Microsoft announced a series of new features for Outlook across desktop, mobile and web to take a big of the focus off of Gmail’s massive redesign. Some of the features highlight Outlook’s usefulness in the workplace – like new meeting room suggestion capabilities and RSVP tracking. But others, particularly on mobile, are more innovative – […]

Over the next twenty years the autonomous vehicle market is expected to grow into a $700 billion industry as robots take over nearly every aspect of mobility. One of the key arguments for this shift away from manually operated machines is that they offer greater safety thanks to less risk of human error. But as […]

Facebook wants to prove it can earn businesses money, not just build their social media audience. This morning, just before its big F8 conference, a “Facebook Analytics” app for iOS and Android appeared in the app stores. It touts the ability to “stay on top of your growth, engagement, and conversion efforts on the go. […]

Lime, the transportation company now formerly known as LimeBike, has partnered with Segway to launch its next generation of electric scooters. These scooters, which are set to debut mid-month in San Francisco, will supplement Lime’s existing fleet. Lime has also hit three million rides across its fleets of bikes and scooters. For style-conscious consumers, there […]

Ahead of the 2019 launch of Disney’s Netflix competitor, the company’s digital arm will launch a free, over-the-top video app aimed at millennials sometime this summer. The ad-supported app comes from Disney’s editorial brand, Oh My Disney, and will feature Disney social content and other short-form video programming from Oh My Disney as well as […]

Late last year, US airlines united to announce a ban on the use of smart luggage, over battery combustion concerns. The new rules required that bags with built-in electronics have a removable battery, in case they needed to be checked. At the time, Bluesmart CEO Tomi Pierucci called the news “an absolute travesty” in a comment […]

Daily deals and local commerce site Groupon has announced an acquisition to ramp up its operations in discount offers and specifically those tied to loyalty programs. The company has acquired Bristol, UK-based Cloud Savings Company, the owner of Vouchercloud and Giftcloud, in a deal that Groupon said has an enterprise value of $65 million. The […]

ZeroCater may have made its name in bringing restaurant food to offices for lunch (or other meals), but it has now raised a new fresh round of funding for the next perk it hopes to bring to companies: snacks. While ZeroCater continues to expand from city to city with new restaurants as it tries to […]

OfferUp, the mobile marketplace for buying and selling locally, is expanding its sights beyond your neighborhood. Today, the company is announcing an expansion of its service that will now allow sellers to ship their items nationwide to interested buyers, potentially netting them a larger audience than if trying to sell only within their local community. […]

As TechCrunch launches our first day-long event in Tel Aviv, there could be no better person to help us discuss the Israeli technology scene than Yossi Matias. The founder of Google’s research and development center in Israel, Matias has had a long and storied career as a technologist going back decades. He’s a recipient of […]

It’s tough being part of IT Ops these days. Your company could be operating across public and private clouds, and in many cases, an internal datacenter too. Meanwhile your developers are generating more code ever faster. ScienceLogic wants to help with it latest release, ScienceLogic SL1. As company CEO Dave Link sees, we are seeing this […]

CoinMarketCap seemed to appear out of nowhere last year during the rise of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, establishing itself as the de facto source for tracking the rise and fall of valuations. That’s brought incredible amounts of traffic and attention. Alexa ranks it as the world’s 174 most popular website, and it enjoys more traffic than the […]

Paragraf, a Cambridge University graphene spin-out, has closed a £2.9M (~$3.9M) seed round. The funding is led by the university’s commercialization arm, Cambridge Enterprise, with Parkwalk Advisors, Amadeus Capital Partners, IQ Capital Partners and angel investors also participating. Graphene refers to the one atom-thick latticed carbon material that’s been exciting scientists with its potential for more than […]

In 2012, Cisco made one of its biggest-ever acquisitions — and a major step into the Israeli tech world — when it acquired video and security specialist NDS for $5 billion. Now, the company is selling part of that business to one of its previous owners, the private equity firm Permira, as it looks to […]

Kevin McNamara, a former Apple and Pixar employee, is bringing his virtual world creation expertise to the domain of self-driving cars. And he has $2.5 million from Costanoa Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures and others to do so. At Apple, McNamara says he worked on an autonomous systems project, where he explored automatic content generation of simulated […]

Yes, it’s that time of year again! It’s time to grab tickets for The Europas, the annual gathering of Europe’s hottest startups in London, in partnership with TechCrunch. On 3rd July, The Europas will feature an afternoon of awesome networking with its famous Unconference, a series of great speakers leading deep-dive discussion, a fantastic opportunity […]

Mark Twain had it right: There’s no such thing as a new idea. To wit: Facebook is currently testing arrows to let users ‘up’ vote or ‘down’ vote individual comments in some of its international markets. Digg eat your heart out. Reddit roll over. This particular trial of upvoting/downvoting buttons is limited to New Zealand […]

CoreOS, the Linux distribution and container management startup Red Hat acquired for $250 million earlier this year, today announced the Operator Framework, a new open source toolkit for managing Kubernetes clusters. CoreOS first talked about operators in 2016. The general idea here is to encode the best practices for deploying and managing container-based applications as code. […]

When trying to figure out what to do after an extensive career at Google, Motorola, and Flipkart, Punit Soni decided to spend a lot of time sitting in doctors’ offices to figure out what to do next. It was there that Soni said he figured out one of the most annoying pain points for doctors […]

Cleo, the London-based fintech that offers an AI-powered chatbot as a replacement for your banking apps, continues to put together an impressive list of backers. The startup’s early investors already include Entrepreneur First, Skype founder Niklas Zennström, Wonga founder Errol Damelin, and LocalGlobe, the seed VC firm founded by father and son duo Robin and […]

There has long been speculation and evidence of cheating software for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), but action is being taken to stamp it out. The makers of the smash-hit game have confirmed that they have worked with authorities in China who have dished out over $5 million in fines to at least 15 people caught developing hacks that […]

The Menlo Park-based nonprofit research group SRI International has been awarded three contracts by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to wage war on the newest front in fake news. Specifically, DARPA’s Media Forensics program is developing tools capable of identifying when videos and photos have been meaningfully altered from their original state […]

Twitter is hosting its Digital Content NewFronts tonight, where it’s unveiling 30 renewals and new content deals — the company says that’s nearly twice as many as it announced last year. Those include partnerships with the big players in media — starting with NBCUniversal, which will be sharing live video and clips from properties including NBC […]

Larry Harvey, founder of the counterculture festival Burning Man, passed away this weekend. He was 70. Harvey created a movement and contributed to the flowering both of counter-culture and, ultimately, of tech culture. Both he and John Perry Barlow, who also passed in February this year after a long period of ill health, were huge […]

“It is time for me to move on . . . I’m taking some time off to do things I enjoy outside of technology, such as collecting rare air-cooled Porsches, working on my cars and playing ultimate frisbee” WhatsApp co-founder, CEO, and Facebook board member Jan Koum wrote today. The announcement follows The Washington Post’s report […]

TX Zhuo Contributor TX Zhuo is the managing partner of Fika Ventures, focusing on fintech, enterprise software and marketplace opportunities. More posts by this contributor Winning deals as a new venture capital fund Teaching startups the art of the sale Breakthroughs in HR tech are not only giving employers game-changing tools with which to enhance […]

The pond-dwelling Hydra is not a very complex little animal but it does have a complex repertoire of moves that aren’t clear until after extensive human observation. Examining these moves took a long time and scientists were never sure that they had seen all of them. Now, thanks to an algorithm used to catch spam, […]

To paraphrase a saying popularized by countless dorm room stoners: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you use the hype around decentralized crypto economies sell bacon.” The latest example of this age-old adage comes to us from Oscar Meyer and involves their exciting new cryp-faux-currency, Bacoin. The […]

A growing number of U.S. adults no longer view the internet as a largely “good thing” for society, according to a new report from Pew Research Center out today. To be clear, a sizable majority –  70 percent – continue to believe the internet’s development has been mostly good. But that number has dropped by […]

Amazon is famous for its hard-charging work culture, and Charlie Kindel, an Amazon executive who helped shape the rise of Alexa, is ready to hit the pause button after a five-year stint with the company and three years with the team at work on the company’s smart home division. Writing on his personal blog earlier […]

On May 25, the latest installment of the Star Wars theatrical franchise will drop in theaters. Shooting Star Wars: A Solo Story hasn’t been all roses, with Ron Howard stepping in to take over for directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller and reshooting many scenes. But the show must go on! Yesterday, Lucasfilm released a […]

Technotopia is a podcast about the future. It assumes the world won’t fall into a dystopia and therefore is optimistic about our chances for human success. I’m looking for cool people to talk to and I’d like for you to join me. I love guests who are are excited about the future and technology but […]

Facebook’s lawyers are attempting to block a High Court decision in Ireland, where its international business is headquartered, to refer a long-running legal challenge to the bloc’s top court. The social media giant’s lawyers asked the court to stay the referral to the CJEU today, Reuters reports. Facebook is trying to appeal the referral by challenging […]

Payments company Stripe is today taking another step to expand its operations into a wider set of business services, targeting the startups that form its core base of customers. Today, the company is announcing that Atlas, the all-in-one service Stripe started two years ago to help founders incorporate in Delaware, can now be used to […]

Google today announced that Nvidia’s high-powered Tesla V100 GPUs are now available for workloads on both Compute Engine and Kubernetes Engine. For now, this is only a public beta, but for those who need Google’s full support for their GPU workloads, the company also today announced that the slightly less powerful Nvidia P100 GPUs are […]

Halide, the premium iOS camera app from ex-Apple designer Sebastiaan de With and Twitter engineer Ben Sandofsky is today launching one of its biggest upgrades since its arrival last year. The updated app includes a Self-Timer, redesigned photo reviewer, accessibility improvements, and more. But perhaps its best feature is the ability to take better control over your […]

Jake Bright Contributor More posts by this contributor Business solutions firm Africa’s Talking closes $8.6M round led by IFC Uber and Taxify are going head-to-head to digitize Africa’s two-wheeled taxis When it comes to monetizing digital social interactions, Kenya’s Safaricom has its own order. American tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter offered social networks […]

Don’t let procrastination drain your time and productivity — or your wallet. You have exactly three days left to save up to $1,800 on Super Early Bird pricing for Disrupt San Francisco 2018 — the premiere tech conference related to all things startup. Disrupt SF takes place September 5-7 at Moscone Center West, and it’s […]

Here’s an odd juxtaposition for you. According to a new report on voice assistants released today by PwC, younger users are adopting voice technology at a faster rate than their older counterparts, but are somehow using their voice assistants less often. The report found that users 18 through 24 had fewer “heavy” users of voice […]

Since it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed the personal data of millions of Facebook users, one question has lingered in the minds of the public: What other data did Dr. Aleksandr Kogan gain access to? Twitter confirmed to The Telegraph on Saturday that GSR, Kogan’s own commercial enterprise, had purchased one-time API access […]

Fitbit this morning announced plans to utilize Google’s new Cloud Healthcare API, in order to continue its push into the world of serious healthcare devices. It’s a bit of a no-brainer as far as partnerships go. Google announced Cloud for Healthcare, taking a major step into the world of health, which comprised around $3.3 trillion […]

Boom, boom, boom! We’re announcing another big name for our upcoming blockchain event in Zug, Switzerland, on July 6 after Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan joined the line-up. The event — TC: Sessions Blockchain — will be TechCrunch’s first show dedicated to blockchain, it takes place in the world’s “Crypto Valley” and we’ll be joined by a host […]

Baidu has turned to the financial industry to bolster its consumer finance business. The Chinese search giant confirmed that it has sold a majority share in its Financial Services Group (FSG) business to a consortium of private equity firms in a deal worth $1.9 billion. The business is in the consumer finance space and its services include credit and wealth […]

Blue Origin conducted the 8th launch of its New Shepard sub-orbital rocket and crew capsule today out in Texas, and things couldn’t have gone better for the growing space tourism company. The rocket ascended into a cloudless sky, reaching a max velocity of about 2,200 MPH, and delivered its capsule to the edge of space, […]

Larry Harvey normalized the abnormal, expanding the boundaries of what creators could attempt. That’s why there’s a special bond between Silicon Valley and Black Rock City, the desert settlement where Burning Man transpires. Both ditch “what are we supposed to do?” for “what can we do?”. Both encourage risky expression that appears insane to outsiders. […]

Brooks Rainwater Contributor More posts by this contributor Do cities still want a sharing economy? As tech startups surge in cities, inclusive economic growth must be a priority Christopher Hooton Contributor From home- and ride-sharing apps to TV and movie streaming subscriptions to social media platforms – Internet companies have transformed our lives. Today the internet sector […]

Sprint and T-Mobile, after years of going back and forth as to whether they are going to tie up two of the largest telecom providers in the U.S., have announced that the two companies have entered a merger agreement this morning. The merger will be an all-stock transaction, and will now be subject to regulatory […]

Disney’s latest alarmingly star-packed Avengers entry is going to set another box-office record for its opening weekend, eclipsing Star Wars: The Force Awakens, according to Variety. The film is set to bring in around $250 million in its debut domestically, which would put it just ahead of the debut for the first star Wars film in […]

I went to see Arlan Hamilton of Backstage Capital speak this week. Her remarkable story is pretty well known by now — she “built a venture capital fund from the ground up, while homeless,” to quote Backstage’s site. She said several interesting things, but let’s start with this one: as of 2019, she will no […]

I want to live in the Gemini’s universe. It’s one where the promise of on-demand hardware has been fulfilled. Where crowfunding, rapid prototyping, scalable manufacturing all of those good things have improved our lives by giving us the devices we both want and need. It’s the utopian dream of 2011, fully realized. In the Gemini […]

While streaming and bingeing seem increasingly synonymous, Hulu’s biggest hit The Handmaid’s Tale actually feels like an anti-binge. Some of that is just Hulu’s release strategy, where it doesn’t release an entire season at once, but instead comes out of the gate with a handful of new episodes (two this week for the launch of […]

Shahin Farshchi Contributor More posts by this contributor The dos and don’ts of crafting frontier-tech companies Five billion-dollar businesses for the driverless future I entered the world of venture investing a dozen years ago.  Little did I know that I was embarking on a journey to master the art of balancing contradictions: building up experience […]

Rip Pruisken waffled in college (we got that pun safely out of the way for now). He was a student in the Ivy League at Brown University, and had focused on academics for much of his life. His parents were physicists, and “I thought I would study some sort of cookie-cutter path of studying something […]

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Michael Markman, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, April 27, 2018. Apple, Spotify meets Alexa, Is Social Dead, the coming subscription bubble. @stevegillmor, @mickeleh, @DenisPombriant, @fradice, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor Liner Notes Live chat stream The Gillmor Gang on Facebook

Earlier this week Eric Lundgren was sentenced to 15 months in prison for selling what Microsoft claimed was “counterfeit software,” but which was in fact only recovery CDs loaded with data anyone can download for free. The company has now put up a blog post setting “the facts” straight, though it’s something of a limited […]

Apple has long been rumored to be working on a pair of augmented reality glasses, but a report today suggests that they’re looking to compete with Google, Microsoft and Facebook in the virtual reality space as well. CNET reports that Apple has its eye set on the 2020 release of a wireless headset that combines […]

The charming robot at the heart of Disney’s Big Hero 6, Baymax, isn’t exactly realistic, but its puffy bod is an (admittedly aspirational) example of the growing field of soft robotics. And now Disney itself has produced a soft robot arm that seems like it could be a prototype from the movie. Created by Disney […]

It looks like a potential merger deal between T-Mobile and Sprint, two of the major telecom companies in the U.S., is getting closer and now has set valuation terms, according to a report by Bloomberg. The deal could be announced as soon as Sunday, according to a report by CNBC. The proposed tie-up of the […]

It’s hard launching a phone company — something Essential was pretty candid about from the start. Andy Rubin’s latest endeavor got off to something of a slow start, according to outside accounts, but today the well-funded hardware startup is getting ready to add a whole bunch of new markets to its online store. On Twitter […]

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is gearing up to present its proposal for electric scooter permitting. This comes after the SF Board of Supervisors approved an ordinance for the SFMTA to create a permitting process to better regulate the plethora of electric scooters from Bird, Lime and Spin. The SFMTA’s proposal lays out a […]

EcoFlow, a Chinese hardware firm developed by former JDI engineers that sells portable power stations, has pulled in a Series A round of over $4 million ahead of the imminent launch of new products and an international sales expansion. The Shenzhen-based company has taken an interesting route. Founded in 2016, the startup burst on to the […]

Ahead of Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting in June, stockholder Jing Zhao has submitted a proposal to replace the board’s chairman, Elon Musk, with an independent director. Musk, the chief executive officer at Tesla, has been chairman of the board since 2004. “Although the current leadership structure, in which the positions of Chairman and CEO are […]

Fortnite Battle Royale has transcended your average video game to become somewhat of a cultural phenomenon. In fact, the third-person shooter saw a peak 3.4 million concurrent players in March, with the servers buckling under the pressure. Fortnite Battle Royale also holds the record for individual streamer numbers on Twitch with Ninja’s stream featuring Drake. […]

Facebook’s Messenger Kids, the social network’s new chat app for the under-13 crowd, has been designed to give parents more control over their kids’ contact list. Today, the app is gaining a new feature, “sleep mode,” aimed at giving parents the ability to turn the app off at designated times. The idea is that parents […]

It’s almost becoming boring reporting that the Amazon cloud had a monster quarter. It’s not news at this point, because of course they did. Yesterday, it once again blew away analyst expectations with 49 percent revenue growth for the quarter. Oh ya, and that revenue? Well that was $5.44B for the quarter, a ways above […]

Enterprise tech IPOs continue to roar in 2018. Today, not one but two enterprise tech companies, DocuSign and Smartsheet, saw their share prices popped as they made their debuts the public markets today. Smartsheet was first out of the gates. Trading on NASDAQ under the ticker SMAR, the company clocked an opening price of $18.40. […]

Real estate-focused MetaProp NYC has been adding new programs on top of its core accelerator. The latest: The MetaProp Bridge at Columbia University. It’s an international accelerator designed specifically for real estate and property tech-related startups from Europe, the Middle East and Africa that are looking to expand into North America. Participants get access to […]

If you’ve ever painted a room you know that getting every nook and cranny is pretty difficult and Tim Allen help you if you have hardwood or carpet. The tarp alone costs more than the paint. Now, thanks to MIST, your robot can manage the entire job, slapping paint up like a robotic Jackson Pollock. […]

Despite Facebook being under fire for everything pertaining to Cambridge Analytica, the company still hopes to be able to do some good. Today, Facebook is dropping its platform fees pertaining to fundraisers for personal causes. That means Facebook is getting rid of the 4.3 percent platform fee in the u.S. and the 6.2 percent fee […]

The maker of Shadowverse and Granblue Fantasy is teaming up with Nintendo for a new mobile RPG. Called Dragalia Lost, the Japanese-style action RPG will be a free-to-play game though likely loaded with Loot Box-style mechanics that will result in a financial windfall for Nintendo and developer Cygames. The trailer doesn’t reveal many details about […]

The UK government has suffered yet another defeat in the courts over a surveillance regime that critics have dubbed a ‘Snooper’s charter’. Today the UK High Court agreed with digital and civil rights group Liberty’s crowdfunded legal challenge to a portion of the UK’s 2016 Investigatory Powers Act that gives the state the power to […]

Over coming years Ford intends to stop selling most of its cars in North America. This plan would leave just the Mustang and upcoming Focus Active as the only traditional car it sells while crossovers, SUVs and trucks make up the rest of its lineup. The news was abruptly revealed in Ford’s latest quarterly financial […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Today Katie Roof and I were joined by James Hardiman, a partner at Data Collective (DCVC). If you want to tell him how he did, he’s on Twitter here. It was good to have Hardiman on board as […]

With the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, Microsoft is launching a number of new features for its desktop operating system today. Most of those apply to all users, but in addition to all the regular feature updates, the company also today announced a couple of new features and tools specifically designed for its business users […]

Following the steady pace of its semi-annual update cadence, Microsoft today launched the latest version of Windows 10. For the most part, there are no major revelations here since Microsoft’s Windows Insider program now regularly provides early access to all the new features to those who are brave enough to try out pre-release software. But […]

Unlike other browser vendors, Microsoft remains committed to a relatively slow update cycle that sees the company launch major new versions of Edge in sync with the bi-annual Windows 10 updates. It doesn’t look like that’s changing anytime soon, even as the Edge mobile browser is seeing far more regular updates now. Since today is […]

The ongoing trend of consolidation in the world of ridesharing continues apace, with the latest development coming out of Europe. BlaBlaCar, the French carpooling platform, is acquiring Less, a young carpooling platform based in Paris and focusing only on urban rides, paying drivers on a per-kilometer rate to incentivize them. The financial terms are not […]

$4.5 billion-valued ride-sharing startup Go-Jek may be busy in Southeast Asia, where it is aiming to step into the gap following Uber’s exit, but that isn’t stopping it from looking at opportunities elsewhere in the world. Over in Bangladesh, motorbike-taxi hailing service Pathao has announced that it raised a “pre-Series A” investment led by Go-Jek. […]