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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flutter is Google’s open source toolkit for helping developers build iOS and Android apps. It’s not necessarily a household name yet, but it’s also less than a year old and, to some degree, it’s going up against frameworks like Facebook’s popular React Native. Google’s framework, which is heavily focused around the company’s Dart programming language, […]

The Fitbit Ionic was designed to be the future of the struggling wearable maker, but so far the smartwatch has failed to catch the world on fire. As CEO James Park put it during this week’s financials, sales on the device “didn’t turn out the way that we expected it.”  Of course, the wearable has […]

Industrious, the WeWork competitor that launched in 2013, is today announcing the close of an $80 million Series C funding round. The financing was co-led by Riverwood Capital and Fifth Wall Ventures. Industrious thinks of itself as a more premium version of WeWork, offering coworking space and workplace services to some 35 locations across 25 […]

Carnegie Mellon grad Luke Skurman built the first version of Niche in 2002. Originally called College Prowler, it was an online store selling physical college guidebooks. Times changed and the site changed with it, first taking on over a $1 million in investment to ramp up with a new name and then hitting a $6.6 […]

Farwell, cashier jobs. Following the launch of Amazon’s cashless, cashier-free Amazon Go convenience store in Seattle, a startup called AiFi is emerging from stealth today to announce the availability of its own checkout-free solution for retailers. But unlike Amazon Go, AiFi claims its A.I., sensor and camera network-based system can scale from a small mom-and-pop […]

Peanut, the app referred to as “Tinder for moms” because it connects mothers by letting them swipe each other’s profiles, is launching a new community discussion feature. Called Peanut Pages, it’s meant to give mothers a better alternative to Facebook Groups, Quora and other social platforms. Since its launch almost exactly one year ago, Peanut […]

A reminder that I’m going to have Paul Vigna and Michael Casey, authors of The Truth Machine, onstage with me next week at Knotel, a co-working and event space in Manhattan. I’d love for you to come. You can RSVP here and space is limited. It’s happening Tomorrow, February 28, at 7pm and will feature a […]

It was well-known that ex-Index VC Ophelia Brown was ‘doing a fund of her own’ after she departed Robin and Saul Klein’s LocalGlobe in April, the London-based seed investment firm where she was a General Partner. However, it wasn’t until last month that Blossom Capital, as Brown’s new firm is called, broke cover. As reported […]

Alibaba’s 2018 investment spree looks set to continue after it made a push to buy Ele.me, the food delivery startup from China that it has invested in, in full. Bloomberg reported yesterday that Alibaba plans to purchase the roughly-60 percent of Ele.me that it currently doesn’t own from the other investors, which include search giant […]

JD.com, one of China’s largest e-commerce companies, is launching a new Beijing-based accelerator program for artificial intelligence and blockchain startups. Called AI Catapult, its first batch includes six companies: Bankorus, CanYa, Bluezelle, Nuggets, Republic Protocol and Devery. In an announcement, JD.com said startups will work with its operational teams to “test real-world applications of their […]

While the largest deal in the history of technology continues to hit a number of speed bumps, we’re now getting into the phase of very strongly-worded publicly-issued statements between the two companies as we get closer and closer to the annual meeting of stockholders in early March. Broadcom and Qualcomm, the former of which is […]

A federal court has ruled against AT&T in a long-running case that found itself tied up in the net neutrality debate. AT&T had argued that the 2015 FCC order classifying it as a common carrier let it off the hook in a case brought against it by the FTC — which has no authority over […]

Marvel is making its first move into scripted podcasting next month with the premiere of Wolverine: The Long Night, a 10-episode series that’s launching on Stitcher Premium. Ahead of the premiere, I had a chance to speak to director Brendan Baker about some of challenges involved in bringing the famous mutant superhero from comics and […]

Fitbit, which has increasingly had to fend off competition from devices like the Apple Watch and is increasingly making moves in the healthcare space, still hasn’t seemed to nail things down quite yet as it posted weaker-than-expected financial results for its fourth quarter. The quarter was more or less a complete whiff, falling short of […]

Uber will talk about flying taxis, autonomous aerial transport and everything in between, in an industry event designed to bring together stakeholder on the subject in one place. This is the second year in a row that Uber has hosted its ‘Elevate Summit,’ and this year it’s in LA. The event fill feature a ton […]

The clicky-clacky, full keyboard devices that spring to mind when you hear “BlackBerry” might be a thing of the past… but the brand lives on. Famed gadget-unearther Evan Blass dug up a picture of an upcoming BlackBerry device said to be known as “Ghost”. For those finding themselves saying “Wait, they still make BlackBerries?”, the […]

Reports last month that rapper 50 Cent had forgotten about $7 million or so in bitcoin he owned have been given the lie by the man himself, who declares in court documents that he “has never owned, and does not now own, a bitcoin account or any bitcoin,” nor did any of his companies. The […]

YouTube today announced several new features designed to improve the live streaming experience for both creators and viewers. The most notable additions include the ability to play back a live chat after the live stream ends, and the launch of live automatic captions on videos. YouTube began offering automatic captioning back in 2009, and has […]

Huawei didn’t have a new phone to show at MWC this year, so it did what any good smartphone maker would: it put the Mate 10 Pro in an autonomous car and drove it directly at a dog. Of course, the promotional video was a lot more dramatic than what the company was actually demoing […]

Autonomous driving technology startup Pony.ai has become the first company to operate an autonomous ride-hailing service on public roads for public users in China. The company, just over a year-old, recently raised $112 million in a Series A round to help it accelerate its efforts, and its fleet is running a nearly two-mile route in […]

500px, the photo-sharing site that once proposed to take on Flickr and Getty, has been acquired by Visual China Group (VCG), a strategic investor in 500px via previous financings. A publicly-traded image licensing company – and China’s Getty, so to speak – bought Corbis in 2016, and is now the world’s third-largest visual content provider. […]

Amazon has renewed Lore for a second season, bringing on Sean Crouch (from The Exorcist and Numb3rs) as showrunner. Lore is an anthology series focused on the supernatural, adopted from the Lore podcast by Aaron Mahnke. The first season of Lore came out last year, using dramatic scenes, animation, narration and docu-style scenes to root […]

Circle just announced that it is acquiring U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex. According to Fortune, Circle is paying $400 million for the acquisition. Poloniex has been around for years and used to be one of the biggest exchanges out there — there are now many exchanges competing with Poloniex. Circle is an interesting startup because it’s […]

PhishMe, a seven year old startup that helps companies train employees to avoid phishing scams, announced today that it has been purchased by a consortium of private equity firms at a valuation of $400 million. That wording doesn’t give the exact price and a company spokesperson was careful in her response when we requested clarification. […]

When investor and entrepreneur Jalak Jobanputra first visited a blockchain conference five years ago she got goosebumps. The experienced investor had heard of cryptocurrencies but now that they had truly come into maturity she was excited. Now, five years later, she’s building her entire VC practice around blockchain and sees bright days ahead for the […]

The notch is here to stay. Two upcoming phones are reported to sport the awful, disgusting notch at the top of the screen. Huawei and Asus are following Apple and Essential down the notch hole. Neither of these phones are confirmed or officially announced yet. Both the Huawei and Asus models appeared online ahead of […]

Changes are afoot at BGF Ventures, the London-based early-stage venture fund of BGF, as three partners are departing, TechCrunch has learned. Rumours that the VC firm’s future was in flux as parent BGF reviewed its current investment strategy began surfacing in late January, but multiple sources now tell me that BGF Ventures partners Harry Briggs, […]

Automaker Daimler has a new largest shareholder – Geely Automotive chairman Li Shufu. The Geely stake, worth an estimated $9 billion, should give the Chinese automotive giant more leverage when trying to work out cross-company tech arrangements with Daimler and its sub brands including Mercedes-Benz. Daimler is already partnered up with a major automotive concern in […]

Starting a small business can involve a remarkable amount of red tape. Certificate of incorporations, sales tax licenses, publication requirements, annual franchise taxes, the list goes on. Even worse, every state in America has its own unique peculiarities. Failure to follow instructions perfectly can result in fines and possibly expropriation. And all you wanted to […]

According to KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and Apple Insider, Apple could be working on a brand new pair of wireless headphones for later this year. While the company already owns Beats, those over-the-ear headphones could be sold under the Apple brand. It seems like the AirPods are a success, and the company wants to capitalize […]

Wickr, the secure communications service, is bringing new features to its free users. Already available to paying Wickr customers, users of Wickr’s “Me” service will also now be able to enjoy encrypted calling to protect against listening ears. The company is adding end-to-end encrypted calling along with encrypted and ephemeral voice messages and memo. These […]

Anyone who fondly remembers the Altair revolution probably wasn’t there. But that doesn’t stop us nerds from romanticizing one of the coolest proto-computers ever made. Originally sold as a way to interact with the magical 8800 chip back in January 2017, the Altair is one of the first usable home computers although it had no […]

Ford vehicles equipped with the automaker’s SYNC 3 infotainment system will soon have access to a new voice-powered driving assistant behind the wheel – Sygic’s new aptly named “Driving Assistant.” The feature, which works with Sygic’s GPS navigation app, is described as a “voice-controlled co-driver that helps the driver identify nearby rest-stops, restaurants, hotels” and […]

Chinese clothing manufacturer Dayang Group is making a strategic investment in InStitchu, a startup selling custom tailored suits and other menswear. At $2.5 million, the round is relatively small, but InStitchu co-CEO James Wakefield said the real reason for taking the money is to deepen the relationship with Dayang. Apparently the manufacturer was already making […]

Michigan-based startup May Mobility, which is trying to swap out current transportation options for corporate and other clients with self-driving small shuttles, has raised $11.5 million in sed funding from investors including BMW i Ventures and Toyota AI Ventures, along with existing investors. The round comes just about a year into the company’s launch, and […]

Acorns, the financial management service focused on getting low- and middle-income households to invest and save responsibly, has reached 3 million users in the United States. The company has roughly $800 million in assets under management, with accounts coming from primarily low and middle income customers across all fifty states, according to Acorns co-founder and […]

This morning’s Sony press conference was a real whirlwind. The company announced two new phones and the availability of its Xperia Ear Duo, still managed to wrap it all up in about an hour. All said, it was actually kind of refreshing to be in and out so quickly. There was a quick “one more […]

In a fascinating post, Brian Krebs and a group of security researchers have found a method for laundering money through expensive ebooks. It started when author Patrick Reames received an Amazon tax form saying he’d made $24,000 selling his books through Amazon’s CreateSpace, the company’s book-printing arm. His books didn’t sell nearly that many copies, […]

Just like CES has seen an influx of car manufacturers in recent years, MWC, too, is now a showcase for new in-car technology. Like in previous years, BMW once again set up shop in Barcelona this week to show off some of its most recent innovations, all of which bring together some of the current […]

Mozilla called it a day with Firefox OS for mobile handsets back in 2015 and said it would test the waters for an IoT effort using some of the same technology (and it has). But that hasn’t spelled the complete end for the tech on mobile devices. Quietly, a company called KaiOS, built on a fork […]

Sony’s embrace of smart assistants has been rocky, at best. The original Xperia Ear was an interesting exercise in the concept of carrying your AI with you, but the company has since been passed by the likes of Apple’s Siri sporting AirPods and the Google Pixel Buds. The company’s giving it another go, because it […]

Triple, the Stockholm-headquartered marketplace for local travel experiences, has acquired competitor Local Guddy for an undisclosed sum. The deal sees Local Guddy founder Emre Semercioğlu become part of the Triple team as Head of Market Growth, while I understand it was part cash, part stock. The Turkish startup had previously raised a seed round in […]

Long-time collaborators Tencent Holdings and JD.com have each bought minority stakes in Better Life, a Chinese retail conglomerate. According to a filing made on Friday by Better Life, which is traded on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, Tencent paid 886.9 million RMB (about $140 million) for a 6% stake, while JD.com took a 5% stake for […]

Fintech startup Revolut can’t stop and won’t stop growing. The company has had an amazing month of December with a huge increase in the total volume of transactions and signups. Because of that, Revolut broke even in December for the first time ever. The company told me that it wasn’t just a lucky month and […]

While Nokia’s former handset business forges ahead with its new device strategy under licensee HMD, Nokia itself has taken one more step to build out its business with carriers in a new wave of services. To coincide with MWC in Barcelona and a bigger step into the WiFi business, the company today announced that it […]

Jason Rowley Contributor Jason Rowley is a venture capital and technology reporter for Crunchbase News. More posts by this contributor: A peek inside Alphabet’s investing universe Raise softly and deliver a big exit With more money flowing into a shrinking number of deals, the average startup funding round is getting bigger. And it’s not by a small […]

If you were having any doubts about Samsung’s commitment to its DeX, consider them assuaged. The company introduced its smartphone docking hardware with the Galaxy S8 and has talked up a new version for every big phone release since then — and today’s big Galaxy S9 reveal is no different. We were pretty lukewarm on […]

The Samsung Galaxy S8 is a beautiful phone with a critical flaw. The fingerprint sensor is in the wrong damn spot. A phone is only as good as its usability and, to me, the S8 is crippled with its fingerprint sensor located off center. It drives me mad but Samsung finally righted the wrong with […]

Samsung’s AR Emoji taps creepy avatars and Disney characters to compete with Animoji 10 minutes ago by Brian Heater A ‘Black Panther’ moment 33 minutes ago by Henry Pickavet Samsung’s DeX docking station gets revamped, turning a smartphone into a trackpad 53 minutes ago by Brian Heater With the Galaxy S9, Samsung put the fingerprint sensor where it belongs […]

Nokia — in its newest iteration as a licensed brand of HMD — is a long way off from its glory days, the years when it not only set the pace for innovation in the mobile phone market, but also led it as the world’s biggest handset maker. Today, the company took its latest step […]

Alongside HMD’s big bet on reviving the legendary Nokia brand and business through a licensing deal and a new wave of handsets that it is unveiling today at MWC in Barcelona, the company also announced another interesting piece of news: it has entered a new partnership with Google, where HMD/Nokia is now a leading participant […]

Nokia’s 8110 — the distinctive ‘candy bar’ feature phone with a slider opening — was once the phone that everyone wanted but no one could afford, made popular through the Matrix film franchise. Now HMD, the company that has the license to make Nokia phones, is hoping for a hit by bringing it back. Today, […]

ZTE’s one of those workhorse smartphone companies you don’t hear much about, aside from the occasional misguided flirtation with a bizarre form factor, a la the dual-screen Axon M. But the Chinese handset manufacturer still powers away and manages to produce some solid handsets at bargain bin prices. The company hasn’t officially announced pricing on […]

I’ve been CTO of HappyFunCorp since last year, and it has been a deeply edifying experience. Everything people told me was mostly true: I write less code; I go to more meetings, and turn up in more conference calls; I think more strategically, and less tactically; my time is spent in a more fragmented and […]

Apple told Reuters that the company had to comply with Chinese authorities and move iCloud data to Chinese data centers. Not everyone’s data is moving to China. This is only going to apply to residents of mainland China who chose China as their main country when they created their Apple account (not Hong Kong, Macau […]

Bike-sharing startup GoBee Bike is giving up and shutting down in all French cities where it operates. GoBee Bike operates just like Chinese giants Ofo and Mobike. You open the app, you find a bike on the map and you unlock it by scanning a QR code. Once you’re done, you lock it again and […]

If coffee be the food of innovation, pour on. Give me excess of it that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die. And if you wish to pour me coffee, do so from the Rite Press, a clever hack on the traditional French press that adds a few features that even high-end models don’t […]

Can programming be a craft? I was thinking about this as I was reading Matthew Crawford’s excellent book The World Beyond Your Head. Much like Crawford’s earlier work Shop Class as Soulcraft, he argues that craftsmanship is an activity that doesn’t just provide us with satisfaction, but also makes us fundamentally human by enchanting us […]

[embedded content] Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. At long last, after many predictions and even a private filing, Dropbox dropped its S-1 today. The filing marks the public beginning of the end of Dropbox’s life as a private company. Dropbox is going public! […]

According to a number of reports today, the next version of Android would include a “dark mode” – something that’s been a long-time feature request from those who prefer the dark-themed and power saving option that’s already available in apps like YouTube and Twitter. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. News that Android was getting its […]

A big part of the FCC’s mandate is to ensure broadband is rolled out all over the country, and it issues regular reports along those lines — but there’s nothing presenting information visually to get the point across. A new official map of broadband access based on FCC data lets you browse block by block […]

If you’re worried about someone finding out what you’re pointing your browser at, there are plenty of options for keeping it secret, with varying levels of difficulty and effectiveness. Veil takes things further than perhaps any other anonymous browsing method by masking the page you’re viewing not just from would-be attackers, but from your own […]

Monique Maddy Contributor Monique Maddy has spent her career as a technology entrepreneur working in emerging markets, including Africa, Asia and Latin America. She is currently founder and CEO of Ezuza, a mobile payments company located in Mexico. Long gone are the days when Africa was disparagingly regarded as the White Man’s Burden. Today, Africa is […]

It’s official, the Dropbox IPO filing is here. Going public is a huge milestone for Dropbox and has been one of the most anticipated tech IPOs for several years now. We knew that it had already filed confidentially, but the company has now unveiled its filing, meaning the actual IPO is likely very soon, probably […]

[embedded content] You’ll soon be able to trap Ghostbusters ghosts in augmented reality à la Pokémon Go. A short demo of the game Ghostbusters World was showcased at Google’s MWC booth, highlighting functionality made possible by the public release of Google’s ARCore augmented reality platform. Details are pretty slim for a wide release date other […]