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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]