iPrice, a service that aggregates Southeast Asia’s e-commerce websites in a single destination, has pulled in new funding led by messaging app Line’s VC arm, Line Ventures. The round is officially undisclosed, but TechCrunch understands from a source close to negotiations that it is worth around $4 million. Existing iPrice backers Cento Ventures (formerly known as […]

Global Founders Capital, the venture capital arm of Rocket Internet, has seen a number of its London investment team leave over the last couple of years, but the most significant departure may have only just happened. According to multiple sources, Daniel Jones, General Partner at GFC, has left the VC firm and is thought to […]

Jason Rowley Contributor Jason Rowley is a venture capital and technology reporter for Crunchbase News. More posts by this contributor What did VCs study in college? Charting the adoption of direct startup investments by family offices Canada will be home to a new venture capital fund that will invest in enterprise cloud startups. Its backer? Salesforce […]

Another week, another paywall. This time, it’s Bloomberg, which announced that it would be adding a comprehensive paywall to its news service and television channel (except TicToc, its media partnership with Twitter). A paywall was hardly a surprise, but what was surprising was the price: the standard subscription is $35 a month (up from $0 […]

Last week at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon in Copenhagen, we saw an open source community coming together, full of vim and vigor and radiating positive energy as it recognized its growing clout in the enterprise world. This project, which came out of Google just a few years ago, has gained acceptance and popularity astonishingly rapidly — […]

We were skeptical about The Rain, a new Danish series from Netflix. Not that the trailer was bad, exactly. It’s just hard to take a show with the tagline “Stay Dry. Stay Alive.” very seriously. But here at the Original Content podcast, we don’t just judge shows by their trailers. No, we actually watched the […]

Machine learning may be the tool de jour for everything from particle physics to recreating the human voice, but it’s not exactly the easiest field to get into. Despite the complexities of video editing and sound design, we have UIs that let even a curious kid dabble in them — why not with machine learning? […]

Joanna Glasner Contributor More posts by this contributor What does it take to be a startup that raises huge sums quickly? Not a minimalist? Startups will gladly store, manage and deliver your items Why has San Francisco’s startup scene generated so many hugely valuable companies over the past decade? That’s the question we asked over […]

The Gillmor Gang — Denis Pombriant, Keith Teare, Esteban Kolsky, Michael Markman, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, May 4, 2018. G3: Trust Me — Mary Hodder, Halley Suitt Tucker, Francine Hardaway, and Tina Chase Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, May 4, 2018. @stevegillmor, @mickeleh, @kteare, @DenisPombriant, @ekolsky Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor […]

Put on your best unsurprised face: Unroll.me, a company that has, for years, used the premise of ‘free’ but not very useful ’email management’ services to gain access to people’s email inboxes in order to data-mine the contents for competitive intelligence — and controversially flog the gleaned commercial insights to the likes of Uber — […]

The National Security Agency revealed a huge increase in the amount of call metadata collected, from about 151 million call records in 2016 to over 530 million last year — despite having fewer targets. But officials say nothing is different about the year but the numbers. A transparency report issued by the Office of the […]

A Waymo self-driving vehicle was involved in a serious accident in Chandler, Arizona earlier this afternoon. Local police have said that there were minor injuries from the incident after a sedan swerved into the Waymo van to avoid another collision, ABC 15 reported. I’ve contacted the Chandler police department for more information. Although Waymo has […]

Night owl? Good news — there’s an historic rocket launch early tomorrow morning that you can catch while the rest of the country is sleeping. NASA’s Insight Mars lander is scheduled for takeoff at 4:05 AM Pacific, weather permitting. You can watch it live at the links below. Insight is launching atop an Atlas V […]

Today is the day Google makes good on a lot of its 2017 I/O VR promises. The company just announced that it will be open-sourcing Seurat, a tool designed to reduce complexity in high-fidelity mobile VR scenes, improving performance considerably. This launch arrives alongside the release of the Mirage Solo, the first headset on the […]

The volume of data particle physicists have to sort through at the Large Hadron Collider is staggering, and it’s about to increase by an order of magnitude. To cope with this torrent of data, CERN is turning to machine learning, offering prizes for AI models that can cut through the clutter and help make the […]

Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel are building a tic-tac-toe game to help patients with their rehabilitation exercises. The game is played on a grid of boxes and includes “embodied” and non-embodied play. Embodied play means a robotic arm will grab and place a marker – in this case a small cup […]

Google Assistant is gaining some new capabilities thanks to a deal with Fandango which should make ordering movie tickets a quick and easy process. Simply tell Google Assistant that you want to buy some movie tickets and you’ll see what’s playing nearby, you can dial in the specificity to find out just what’s playing at […]

Shenzhen-based home robotics company UBTECH announced this week that it has closed a massive $820 million Series C. The round, led by Tencent and a whole slew of other investors, follows a $100 million Series B and $20 million Series C. The bipedal robotics maker certainly isn’t a household name here in the States — […]

There will be no “Vine 2”. Trying to take on the giant social social networks without external funding proved too tall a task for 6-second video app Vine’s co-founder Dom Hofmann. “I’ve made the very difficult decision of postponing the V2 project for an indefinite amount of time. There are several reasons for this, including a […]

In a self-congratulatory statement, Carl Icahn compared the Xerox/Fujifilm story to television dramas like House of Cards and Billions. Certainly the whole thing has its share of twists and turns. Two days after dumping its CEO and board members, the company announced that its leadership is staying put for now. “Xerox and its Board of […]

Timed with the release of the Mirage Solo headset, Lenovo is also releasing the first camera based on Google’s 180 tech. The Lenovo Mirage Camera, which seems to be geared heavily towards YouTube creators packs a pair of fisheye 13MP lenses positioned about eyes-distance apart, allowing for high-quality 3D vision that’s perfect for VR viewing. […]

The Chinese government is reportedly going to bat for ZTE over a seven-year ban that would have broad ranging consequences for the phone maker. According to a new report from Reuters, the subject was broached during a meeting with between senior Chinese and U.S. officials in Beijing this week. The ban imposed by the Department […]

Just ahead of Google’s big developer conference next week, Google I/O, the company has quietly rolled out a new mobile app for its VR180 point-and-shoot cameras, allowing users to set up their device, view and manage clips, and upload photo and video content to Google Photos and YouTube. At CES in January, Google had shown […]

It was another big week for earnings on “Equity,” TechCrunch’s podcast about venture capital and the tech business. But this week, it wasn’t all good news. Spotify stumbled after its first quarterly report since joining the stock market. Tesla shares were down after Elon Musk’s unusual earnings call. Snap hit a record low after failing to gain traction with […]

Sinemia, a MoviePass competitor that launched four years ago in Europe, has introduced some super-duper low-cost plans for seeing movies in theaters. Here’s the breakdown: $4.99 per month: one ticket per month $6.99 per month: two tickets per month $6.99 per month: two tickets per month including 3D, 4D and IMAX $14.99 per month: three […]

Alibaba is forecasting yet more growth for its business after it beat analyst forecasts with its fourth-quarter results. Revenue came in at 61.9 billion RMB ($9.9 billion), an increase of 61 percent year-over-year, which topped a 59.6 billion RMB prediction from analysts polled by S&P Global Market Intelligence. The company’s net income for the quarter did […]

Ever since Google created Kubernetes as an open source container orchestration tool, it has seen it blossom in ways it might never have imagined. As the project gains in popularity, we are seeing many adjunct programs develop. Today, Google announced the release of version 0.1 of the Kubeflow open source tool, which is designed to […]

Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance — the world’s largest crypto exchange — is the newest addition who will join us for TC Sessions: Blockchain, TechCrunch’s first event dedicated to blockchain technology, which takes place July 6 in Zug, Switzerland. The event will bring together the startup/business world and blockchain community to explore the potential of the blockchain, […]

Pandora’s quarterly earnings report was music to investor’s ears. The digital radio platform reported a better-than-expected first quarter report after the bell on Thursday, sending shares up 8% in after-hours trading. Wall Street liked that the company showed a sizable increase in subscriber revenue, posting $104.7 million, a 63% increase from last year. Pandora has […]

Critical infrastructure worries in the U.S. and abroad are far from over. This week, security firm Tenable published research demonstrating a vulnerability affecting two software programs used by global energy management company Schneider Electric. The company’s systems are in place in facilities across North America, Western Europe and Asia. Before publishing its research, Tenable notified […]

In April, Spotify and Hulu teamed up on a discounted bundle of both of their services for $12.99 per month, following a similar deal for students launched last fall. Now, it seems, the streaming service is considering expanding its entertainment bundle offerings to include one with Scribd’s audiobooks service, too. In a consumer survey that […]

A year and change after the car maker pleaded guilty to obstructing investigations and importing cars under false pretenses, Volkswagen’s former CEO Martin Winterkorn has been charged with conspiracy and wire fraud in a U.S. court. All of this stems from a diesel emissions scandal that ultimately found VW paying $4.3 billion in penalties. Winterkorn […]

NPR, WNYC Studios, WBEZ Chicago and This American Life announced today that they’ve acquired Pocket Casts, a podcast app created by Australian developer Shifty Jelly. That might sound like a lot of owners for one app, but the idea is to run Pocket Casts as a joint venture. And while former iHeartRadio executive Owen Grover […]

Yes, it’s that time again — password changing time. On Thursday, Twitter revealed that a bug caused the platform to store user passwords in unmasked form. Normally, sensitive personal data like passwords would be stored in hashed form using a mix of letters and numbers to protect the content of the password itself. In this […]

I/O doesn’t actually kick off until next Tuesday, but Google’s been steadily trickling out news this week. Perhaps it’s priming the pump for next week’s big event, or maybe the company just had more news than it could cram into a couple of keynotes. Whatever the case, today brought some new additions to the wearable […]

A report from the New York City Comptroller’s office asserts that New York residents are paying hundreds of millions in extra rent linked to the effects of Airbnb. Naturally, the company bitterly rejects these findings. The report, which you can read here, is fairly straightforward. It looks at hundreds of neighborhoods and their various demographics […]

Get ready to shop the ‘Gram. Instagram just stealthily added a native payments feature to its app for some users. It lets you register a debit or credit card as part of a profile, set up a security pin, then start buying things without ever leaving Instagram. Not having to leave for a separate website […]

French cloud hosting company Scaleway announced new servers for its cloud offering. While the company’s offering was already quite cheap, Scaleway is going one step further with prices starting at €1.99 per month (around $2.40 per month). For this price, you get an x86 server with 1 core, 1GB of RAM, 25GB of SSD, 100Mbit/s […]

Italian startup Freeda Media is raising a $10 million Series A round led by Alven Capital. U-Start and business angels are also participating in the round. Freeda Media runs the popular Freeda Facebook page. With nearly 1.4 million likes, the page has an impressive reach. 24 million unique users see Freeda content every month in […]

NASA’s latest mission to Mars, Insight, is set to launch early Saturday morning in pursuit of a number of historic firsts in space travel and planetology. The lander’s instruments will probe the surface of the planet and monitor its seismic activity with unprecedented precision, while a pair of diminutive cubesats riding shotgun will test the […]

There’s little that’s more annoying on the web than videos that start playing automatically and with their volume up. Over the course of the last few years, Chrome and other browser vendors have started to combat this, but for the most part, those solutions relied on the user explicitly taking action. Now, following the launch […]

Twitter today announced a new collaboration with Google that will see it moving a portion of infrastructure to Google’s Cloud Platform. The move is another high-profile win for Google in the cloud computing market, following its recent deal with Fitbit. Specifically, Twitter says it’s moving its cold data storage and its flexible compute Hadoop clusters – […]

Could your startup use $100,000? Then drop whatever you’re doing and apply to compete in Startup Battlefield while you still can. Applications are still open to qualifying companies — meaning you haven’t yet launched to the public and have received little to no press coverage. Startup Battlefield takes place at Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September […]

Even as Amazon continues to grow at a staggering rate, it is pumping the brakes on its long-planned hometown expansion. The retail giant threw down the gauntlet this week when it announced that it would stop construction on a new building because of a proposed city tax. The new law is designed to address Seattle’s […]

Last October, Google launched its Advanced Protection Program for users who want to ensure the highest degree of protection for the data they store in services Gmail, Google Calendar and Drive. Users who need that kind of protection can opt into this program, but in return, they have to use security keys for the 2-step […]

Another startup wants to make on-demand car washing work, where others have failed. Washé, a Boca Raton-based service for on-demand washes, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding to continue to grow its business, which involves a mobile app consumers use to connect with Washé’s network of around 1,000 licensed and insured car washing professionals. […]

Amazon today launched in-skill purchasing to all Alexa developers. That means developers have a way to generate revenue from their voice applications on Alexa-powered devices, like Amazon’s Echo speakers. For example, developers could charge for additional packs to go along with their voice-based games, or offer other premium content to expand their free voice app […]

As a hater of all sports I am particularly excited about the imminent replacement of humans with robots in soccer. If this exciting match, the Standard Platform League (SPL) final of the German Open featuring the Nao-Team HTWK vs. Nao Devils, is any indication the future is going to be great. The robots are all […]

Todays news that Goldman Sachs is opening a Bitcoin trading desk is good news for the crypto economy as a whole. But is it a real shift in perception for crypto at big institutions? Not likely, said David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain. “If you look closely at the reports, they […]

As companies turn increasingly to containerization, it creates challenges in terms of monitoring each individual container and the impact on the underlying application. This is particularly difficult because of the ephemeral nature of containers, which can exist for a very short time. Datadog introduced a container map product today that could help by bringing visualization […]

With I/O just a matter of days away, Google’s gone on the offensive with Assistant. In a blog post this morning, the company is talking up its smart home play in a major way, noting an admitted pretty impressive bump in hardware compatibility. By its count, the number of compatible devices recently hit the 5,000 […]

When blockchain first appeared, especially Ethereuem’s innovation of ‘smart contracts’, a number of people posited that it could be used to trade energy between one source and another, such as power supplies or batteries. The idea would be to enable consumers to buy and sell renewable energy directly between one another, in a peer-to-peer (P2P) […]

Almost three years ago Verisart appeared on the scene with an unusual idea. It was going to use the immutability of blockchain to create certification to the fine art market. To literally verify and artwork was what it claimed to be. While the idea seemed a good one, the execution was probably going to be […]

Zola, a fast-growing company that invites newly engaged couples to register their guests, shop from 600 different brands, and create customizable checklists, has itself received something a bit extravagant: $100 million in Series D funding. Earlier investor Comcast Ventures led the round, which also included new investors NBCUniversal and Goldman Sachs Investment Partners. The five-year-old, […]

After committing $2 billion towards expanding operations north of the border in Canada in February, Salesforce is now doubling down on startups in the country. Salesforce Ventures, the company’s investment arm, today announced the Trailblazer Fund, earmarking $100 million to invest in startups out of Canada, with a special focus on those working in enterprise cloud computing. […]

As SoundHound looks to leverage its ten-plus years of experience and data to create a voice recognition tool that companies can bake into any platform, it’s raising another big $100 million round of funding to try to make its Houndify platform a third neutral option compared to Alexa and Google Assistant. While Amazon works to […]

Perennial smartphone struggler HTC has revealed its newest smartphone — the U12/U12+ — will launch on May 23. The big spoiler from the company is that the phone will include… components. That isn’t exactly an informative teaser, but we do actually have a flavor for what HTC will bring to market. Serial leaker Evan Blass, […]

The first-ever TechCrunch conference in Tel Aviv is just slightly more than a month away, and we couldn’t be more excited to bring this day-long intensive event focused on mobility to one of the fastest growing startup ecosystems in the world. TechCrunch Tel Aviv takes place on June 7, 2018, and you have exactly two […]

This year’s TechCrunch event in Tel Aviv is all about mobility and everything around it, from autonomous vehicles, to sensors, drones and security. And that’s including traditional car manufacturers in our agenda was important. I’m happy to announce that Ariella Grinberg from General Motors is going to join us at our event. Ariella Grinberg in Innovation […]

On Tesla’s Q1 2018 earnings call today, Tesla CEO Elon Musk shed some light on the company’s ambitions to launch an autonomous vehicle ridesharing network. The short answer is that, from a technical standpoint, Tesla will be ready by the end of next year, Musk said. It’s not yet clear, however, when Tesla would actually […]

In this episode of Technotopia I talk to Jeff Schmidt of the Columbus Collaboratory. He is well-versed in the future of security and our conversation ranged from the rise of the midwest to the future of cyberattacks. The Columbus Collaboratory, a unique think tank dedicated to building security and system solutions for major clients. It’s […]

Phishing seems like a problem that will be here for the long haul, so I welcome any tools to combat it with open arms. Today Facebook announced one: a service for domain owners or concerned users that watches for sketchy versions of web addresses that might indicate a phishing attempt in the offing. The developer […]

Fitbit scored a small coup on earnings this week, ever so slightly beating revenue expectations for the quarter. The company pulled in $247.9 million, up over Wall Street’s expected $247.3 million. Of course, that’s still a notable drop from this time last year, when the company pulled in $298.9 million. The numbers are down as […]

It’s a time of optimism and transition at Nintendo, where brisk sales of the Switch have bolstered its bottom line and new leadership signals a fresh approach to the market. Shuntaro Furukawa, the new president, told the Nikkei that one of his plans is to pursue mobile gaming with more vigor, aiming to build it […]

Tesla reported its Q1 2018 earnings today, posting adjusted losses of $3.35 per share with revenues on $3.32 billion. This is beat, as analysts expected Tesla to report a loss of $3.48 a share with revenues of $3.22 billion. In September 2017, Tesla stock hit a record high of $389.61 a share. At market close […]

In Spotify’s first ever earnings report, the streaming music came up short, pulling in $1.36 billion revenue That’s compared to $1.4 billion in revenue and an adjusted EPS loss of $0.34. Spotify hit 170 million monthly active users, up 6.9 percent from 159 million in Q4 2017 and upWe finished the quarter with 170 million […]

For the last couple years the hardware upgrades that VR headsets have been getting have been pretty stale, there might be a resolution bump or the addition of eye-tracking or new controllers, but most of the advances have seemed to be on the software side. Facebook is focusing on some more fundamental display issues in […]

Google is launching a major update to its Google Maps API platform for developers today — and it’s also giving it a new name: the Google Maps Platform. This is one of the biggest changes to the platform in recent years and it’ll greatly simplify the Google Maps developer offerings and how Google charges for […]

We’re at the cusp of the visual communication era. Stories creation and consumption is up 842 percent since early 2016, according to consulting firm Block Party. Nearly a billion accounts across Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Messenger now create and watch these vertical, ephemeral slideshows. And yesterday, Facebook chief product officer Chris Cox showed a […]

Massachusetts-based Soft Robotics announced this week that it’s raised $20 million in funding, courtesy of Scale Venture Partners, Calibrate Ventures, Honeywell Ventures and Tekfen Ventures, along with existing investors like robotics giant, ABB. The round follows a $5 million Series A the company closed back in late-2015. The investment interest is pretty clear on this […]

Facebook wants you to look and move like you in VR, even if you’ve got a headset strapped to your face in the real world. That’s why its building a new technology that uses a photo to map someone’s face into VR, and then sensors to detect facial expressions and movements to animate that avatar […]

There’s no shortage of Facebook news this week on account of F8, but this creepy Facebook-adjacent event with a good outcome seems worth noting. An engineer accused of abusing his access to data at the company in Tinder messages has been fired, NBC News reported. The issue arose over the weekend: Jackie Stokes, founder of […]

Go is the go-to game for machine learning researchers. It’s what Google’s DeepMind team famously used to show off its algorithms and Facebook, too, recently announced that it was building a Go bot of its own. As the team announced at the company’s F8 developer conference today, the ELF OpenGo bot has now achieved professional […]

The final 24-hour shot clock is ticking, startup fans. That means you have one last day to get the best pricing on passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2018, which takes place September 5-7 at Moscone Center West. Come May 3, prices increase and your chance to save up to $1,800 disappears. Don’t miss your shot. […]

In the race to continue building more sophisticated AI deep learning models, Facebook has a secret weapon, billions of images on Instagram. In research that the company is presenting today at F8, Facebook details how it took what amounted to billions of public Instagram photos that had been annotated by users with hashtags and has used […]

Though Facebook’s focus on Day 1 of its F8 conference centered on the company’s recent struggles and their relationship with the phrase “taking broader responsibility,” Day 2 shifted most of the pizazz to the technical advances its giant team has made over the past year. Today, the company announced PyTorch 1.0, a new iteration of […]

The Handmaid’s Tale, America’s favorite dystopian drama, will return for a third season. Hulu announced the news this morning on the heels of revealing it has hit 20 million subscribers for its streaming service. The second season of The Handmaid’s Tale is currently airing on Hulu, with the third episode to available today. The series […]

It seems like Hulu and Spotify had the right idea, when they launched a discounted package last month that combined both of their services. Now, the low-cost streaming service Philo is doing the same – but not with Spotify. Instead, Philo and Pandora are teaming up on a combo deal of their own: $16 per […]

TechCrunch is coming to Tel Aviv, Israel to unpack the revolution that is coming in Mobility. So we’re excited to announce that a pioneer of the space, Austin Russell, will be speaking. Austin Russell is an accomplished applied physicist, and founder and CEO of Luminar Technologies, Inc. He founded the company in 2012 with a […]

It’s hard to keep track with what MoviePass is doing these days, but here’s trying. Today, MoviePass has brought back its nearly all-you-can-watch monthly movie subscription, Variety reports. With its original plan, subscribers can watch up to one movie a day, every day. This comes after MoviePass removed this subscription last month in favor for […]

The massage-on-demand service Soothe seems to be rubbing investors the right way with the close of a new $31 million round of funding. The Series C round from late stage and growth capital investment firm, The Riverside Company, caps a busy first quarter for the massage service. It also relocated from Los Angeles to Las […]

SALT Lending has issued $40 million in asset-backed loans that are aimed at investors in cryptocurrencies to give them a bit of liquidity without the need to sell off assets.  The company rolled out its first loans late in 2017 after two years spent developing the technology to make the loans work. SALT Lending relies on […]

Google is betting big on the Assistant ecosystem and it’s now putting its money where its mouth is. As the company announced today, it’s launching a new program that will provide investment capital and other resources to early-stage startups that build applications in the Google Assistant ecosystem. Typically, companies announce these kind of program to […]

While the mid 2010s were filled with massive financing rounds for companies looking to shift business models like Instacart, Uber, and others along those lines, today’s hottest sector is a more technical one: artificial intelligence. That’s required a different approach to building companies. As tools become more and more powerful, and frameworks like TensorFlow become […]

The venture investment arm of massive meat manufacturer Tyson Foods is continuing its push into potential alternative methods of poultry production with a new investment in the Israeli startup Future Meat Technologies. The backer of companies like the plant-based protein-maker Beyond Meat, and cultured-meat company Memphis Meats, Tyson Ventures’ latest investment is also tackling technology development to create mass […]

Lyft is committing $1.5 million to its Relief Rides program. The idea has historically been to better support people during times of crisis, such as natural disasters or other emergency situations. Now, Lyft is expanding its reach to help people who many need rides to job interviews or medical appointments. One of the partners Lyft […]

Kubernetes, the open source container orchestration tool, does a great job of managing a single cluster, but Upbound, a new Seattle-based startup wants to extend this ability to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters across multi-cloud environment. It’s a growing requirement as companies deploy ever-larger numbers of clusters and choose a multi-vendor approach to cloud infrastructure services. […]

Encrypted messaging service Signal received a curious email from Amazon Web Services. The representative at Amazon is saying that Signal is violating the terms of service by using domain fronting to avoid censorship. Signal isn’t necessarily the most popular messaging app. But chances are you’ve been using Signal technologies in the past. The organization behind […]

At Hulu’s Upfronts presentation this morning in New York, the company announced the launch of a new consumer-facing feature that lets you tell Hulu to stop suggesting content you don’t want to watch. The feature was teased previously at CES in January as something that was in the works. The option will appear in the […]

LG has done a really terrible job keeping the G7 ThinQ under wraps. But clearly the company doesn’t mind. Building up the hype cycle is clearly more important to the handset maker than any kind of big reveal. In addition to leaked images from nearly every angle, the company has already issued several official press […]

The Xerox/Fujifilm deal was never a given for any number of reasons. Now the planned takeover has been thrown into even more doubt, as Xerox CEO Jeff Jacobson and six board members are stepping down. The move is considered a huge win for Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason, who have been attempting to kill the […]

Dish’s Sling TV service is expanding its Cloud DVR to a wide variety of new devices. Chrome browser, Chromecast, Xbox One, LG Smart TVs, and more recent models of Samsung Smart TVs (2016 and 2017 models) will all now support Sling TV’s Cloud DVR service. For those of you who don’t know, Sling TV DVR […]

Hulu now has over 20 million U.S. subscribers – that’s up from the 17 million-plus it claimed in January. The news of its subscriber growth is being delivered alongside a series of pitches to advertisers at the company’s Upfronts presentation in New York this morning, where it’s also touting its upcoming original series and detailing […]

Hulu is announcing several new shows this morning at the Digital Content NewFronts, running the gamut from romantic comedy to horror. On the romance front, the streaming service has placed a series order for an update of Four Weddings and a Funeral, which will be written and executive produced by Mindy Kaling and Matt Warburton. […]

DigitalOcean is getting into the container game. While it’s still best known for its affordable virtual private server hosting, the company’s ambition is to become a major player in the cloud computing space. Hosting was just the first part of that plan, and with its Spaces storage services, for example, it signaled its future plans. […]

Misty Robotics has been talking a good game for 10 months now. Back in June, the Colorado-based Sphero spin-off announced its plans to develop a mainstream home robot. At CES in January, it introduced the world to the Misty I, a skeletal robotic development platform. Four months later, it’s back with Misty II. While it […]

Facebook’s attempt to block a series of legal questions relating to a long-running EU privacy case from being referred to Europe’s top court has been throw out by Ireland’s High Court. Earlier this week the company’s lawyers had asked the Irish High Court to stay the referral to the CJEU of a number of key legal […]

Car makers BMW, General Motors, Ford and Renault are the big names behind a new group announced today to explore the potential of the blockchain in the automotive and mobility space. MOBI — the Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative — launches today with over 30 founding members that also include Bosch, Blockchain at Berkeley, Hyperledger, Fetch.ai, IBM and IOTA. The […]

In the world of DevOps, developers ship code and operations deals with all the managing, monitoring and troubleshooting, but Google Cloud has found that it sometimes it makes more sense to put some of these responsibilities back in the hands of the developers. Today, the company announced the Beta release of Stackdriver Kubernetes Monitoring, a […]

Poq, the London-based startup that offers a SaaS to make it easier for retailers to launch and maintain a consumer-facing shopping app, has raised £9.5 million in Series B funding. Leading the round is Smedvig Capital, with participation from previous backers Beringea, and Revolt Ventures. It brings the total amount raised by Poq to £16.5 […]

Thanks to KubeCon in Copenhagen, this week is all about containers — and especially Kubernetes. Given that Kubernetes was born out of Google’s internal container usage, it’s no surprise that Google also has a few announcements at the show. Maybe the most interesting of these is the launch of gVisor, a sandboxed container runtime that […]

Nokia’s unsuccessful foray into digital health hardware and services looks like it is finally coming to an end. Today the company announced that it has entered into exclusive negotiations to sell the division to Eric Carreel, the co-founder and former chairman of Withings, after both Samsung and Google both reportedly also sniffed around. Withings formed the […]

Nature, one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world, has just announce plans to create a Machine Intelligence imprint, and researchers are not happy. The field has been doing fine with open-access journals — why clog it up with the paid-access model everyone has been trying to escape for decades? Over two thousand […]

Oculus says that its new Go headset already boasts support for more than 1,000 titles out of the gate as of today. One of the most interesting of the small subset of those that I’ve taken a look at today has been the latest update for Bigscreen, which brings the previously PC-only VR desktop streaming […]

Beauty-in-a-box brand Birchbox has changed up its ownership structure. The New York-based startup, which has raised almost $90 million in funding from noted venture firms like Accel Partners and First Round Capital, has a new majority owner in hedge fund Viking Global, sources confirm to TechCrunch. First reported by Recode, Birchbox made some changes to its cap table […]

Day 1 of Facebook’s F8 conference was packed with announcements and updates. Here are 10 big takeaways from Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote on Day 1. You can find full coverage and analysis of F8 here.  1. Facebook announces a dating feature  Your next fling could start on Facebook. The company announced a new set of dating […]

Ron Gutman, the cofounder and CEO of HealthTap, a venture-backed medical advice startup, was reportedly elbowed out today by his board of directors. The reason, the board said in a letter to employees, was that it had finally heard too many complaints about Gutman’s behavior inside the company. Recode published the news of his termination […]

The BBC will start running ads in its podcasts, thanks to a partnership with podcast publishing and monetization company Acast. Acast CEO Ross Adams told me that ads will start running later this week, with the BBC including “bumpers” today announcing the imminent ad launch. “Podcasts are one way we’re reinventing BBC radio to engage […]

Have you ever turned off Facebook’s notifications or even deleted the app entirely on your birthday, simply to avoid the non-stop barrage of alerts that someone had posted “Happy Birthday!” to your timeline? A fix may be in the works, as it turns out. An update to how Facebook will handle birthday notifications was given […]

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 […]