digital marketing

 Snapchat is starting to turn things around, boosting its sluggish user growth rate and beating Wall Street’s expectations for the first time with today’s Q4 2017 earnings report. It added 8.9 million daily active users to reach 187 million with a quarter-over-quarter growth rate of 5.05% percent in Q4, compared to 2.9 percent in Q3. Revenue was $285.7 million, up 72 percent… Read More

 Evan Frank was five years old when he first knew he was going to be an entrepreneur. While attending kindergarten, Frank crafted books and sold them to his teacher at a nickel to a dime a piece. “There was always this desire to build stuff,” he explained to me, and also clearly a desire to make some money on those projects, to boot. Read More

 The actual negotiation of venture rounds remains unnecessarily murky. First-time entrepreneurs are often at a loss for mapping the business values they hold to specific terms during a negotiation. Moreover, many wonder what terms even come up for discussion and why VCs and entrepreneurs may care about a particular term, but barely mention another. Read More

 SpaceX has had a very good first test of its Falcon Heavy rocket, the heavy-lift orbital vehicle that can carry twice the weight of its closest competition in active operation. The massive, three-booster rocket took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida as planned on Tuesday at 1:30 PM EST, lifting off from Kennedy Space Center’s LC-39A. This is a historic moment for SpaceX, since it has… Read More

 Apple, Google, Amazon and Samsung have all been working hard to create their own standard to control all the connected devices around your home. Mozilla just announced that anybody can now create an open gateway to control the internet of things. The organization also confirmed that it is still working on a set of frameworks and open standards so that we don’t end up with an internet… Read More

 Google’s Motion Stills video/gif editing app is getting an augmented reality upgrade, with the app bringing some of the fun from AR Stickers on the Pixel 2 to a bevy of Android devices. Read More

 Roc Nation, the full service entertainment management company created by the music impresario Shawn Carter (better known as Jay Z), is making an investment in financial trading platform Robinhood. The investment, through Roc Nation’s Arrive subsidiary, is the latest instance of a celebrity rapper plowing cash into Robinhood’s free-to-trade investment platform. The company also… Read More

 If you want to read a lot of words about the Apple HomePod, you can do so here and here. Obviously, I’d recommend you do so before plunking down $350 of your hard earned cash on a first generation product, but the long and short of it is actually pretty straight forward. Apple made a very nice speaker — arguably the best on the market in its class. But there are caveats. As is… Read More

 Twitch today announced new metrics related to the growth of its game streaming service, including, most notably, that the number video creator Partners who profit from their Twitch content has climbed to 27,000 over the course of 2017, and the number of Affiliate streamers reached 150,000. Until mid-2017, Twitch had only allowed a smaller subset of its creator community to make money from… Read More

 Meet ProcessOut, a French startup that automatically routes transactions to the best payment provider. This way, big online services can start using multiple payment providers, pay fewer fees and reduce the number of declined transactions. The startup has just raised $1 million from various business angels, such as BlaBlaCar CTO Francis Nappez, former PayPal Director of Global Business… Read More

 Technology reporting has become a function of every single major news beat these days. From politics to crime, business and finance to entertainment, it’s increasingly important that reporters get a good grounding in the technology that’s transforming their beats to avoid basic errors. For John Biggs, an editor-at-large here at TechCrunch, the problem became so acute in the… Read More

 Exclusive content is how creators get patrons to pay them a monthly subscription fee on Patreon, so the startup is equipping them with a Snapchat-like tool to turn their private lives into “behind-the-scenes” footage. Patreon Lens launches today within Patreon’s iOS and Android apps so that creators can share photos and videos that disappear in 24 hours just with those who… Read More

 As a fan of both waffles and robots I present to you the FANUC food and beverage manipulation robot, waffle edition. The robot, as you see below, sorts the waffles by color, stacks them, and then another robot grabs them and puts them into a box. And these bad boys can do some heavy lifting. From the site: We have the largest o­ffering of standard and collaborative robot models with… Read More

 The European Commission has announced a review of Apple’s acquisition of music discovery service Shazam — agreeing to a request made by several countries to weigh competition concerns.  Read More

 In a blog post this morning Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield announced the company is naming long-time employee Allen Shim as the company’s first CFO. “Today, I’m excited to announce another milestone: Allen Shim has been appointed Chief Financial Officer for Slack,” Butterfield wrote in the blog post. He went onto to describe Shim as his right hand man, who has been with… Read More

 Apple’s investment in AR technologies has been ushering in a new wave of apps, from those that let you perform more practical tasks – like visualizing furniture placement in rooms – to those with mass consumer appeal – like AR gaming, including Niantic’s upcoming Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. But AR can also be used to create unique experiences within more… Read More

 Microsoft is targeting its cloud storage rivals including Dropbox, Box, and Google today by offering to essentially buy out customers’ existing contracts if they make the switch to OneDrive for Business. The company says that customers currently paying for one of these competitive solutions, can instead opt to use OneDrive for free for the remainder of their contract’s term. The… Read More

 Houzz, the platform now valued at $4 billion where people plan and help find people to complete home design projects, has made an acquisition to expand how it works with one of its most important groups of customers, interior designers. The company is acquiring IvyMark, which offers a set of business management tools and a community platform for interior designers and home design firms. The… Read More

 Portrait mode-style bokeh camera features have largely been the realm of high-end flagships to this point. That’s due, in part to the fact that many device makers rely on a dual-camera system to create the effect, driving up prices in the process. Samsung is getting ready to change that soon, however, with a plan to bring its version of the tech to mid-range and entry-level handsets.… Read More

 Last week Chinese eCommerce giant Alibaba announced its Q3 earnings. Cloud revenue was $553 million, an impressive 104 percent year-over-year increase. That comes out to a run rate in the range of $2.2 billion, well behind Google which announced it is pulling in a billion dollars a quarter and still buried behind the market leaders all of whom reported around $4 billion+ a quarter. While… Read More

 SimpliSafe, a Boston-based home security company, launched their first security products in 2009 and the devices were a hit. Thanks to their home-security-in-a-box solution the average homeowner could install door sensors, glass-break microphones, and motion detectors without having to run wires or even have a salesperson visit their home. The Lego-like system of removable components was… Read More

 Red Dead Redemption 2 has been delayed more than once, with a current slated release for October 2018. That said, RDR2 fans are likely desperate for even the slightest whiff of the game, which is why an allegedly leaked document from Trusted Reviews couldn’t have come at a better time. The leak, which TechCrunch has not been able to verify, includes information on potential game modes… Read More

 The team at SocialRank has spent the last few years building ways for brands and marketers to get a better sense of who’s following and engaging with them on social media. Until now, they’ve been doing that on an account level — plug in an account and you get a SocialRank report covering things like your most valuable followers. With a new product called SocialRank for… Read More

 Embark’s autonomous trucking solution just demonstrated what it could be capable of in a big way: It make a coast-to-coast trip from L.A. to Jacksonville, Florida, driving 2,400 miles and delivering refrigerators for Electrolux from one end of the U.S. to the other. This follows Embark‘s prior test route, which ran from L.A. to El Paso, and covers more than four times the distance… Read More

 More consolidation is afoot in the busy world of backend developer tools. Today, CloudBees — the company closely associated with support and services for the open source Jenkins continuous integration and delivery engine — has announced that it will acquire CodeShip, another startup in the dev-ops space focusing on continuous integration and delivery. Terms of the deal are not… Read More

 The Apple Watch continues to be a bright spot in amongst the middling world of wearables, according to new numbers from Canalys. The analyst group’s figures put the smartwatch at 18 million shipments for 2017, representing a 54-percent jump over the device’s 2016. Apple’s wearable popped for a couple of reasons, LTE functionality being chief among them. For one thing,… Read More

 In October, InVision made the first dramatic change to its product portfolio since the company’s inception. The team launched InVision Studio, a design tool meant to take on the likes of Adobe PhotoShop and Sketch. Now, however, InVision is taking yet another huge step forward with the announcement of the Studio Platform, letting third-party developers build products and programs for… Read More

 Hundred of startups have tried to kill it, but email is still alive and well. That doesn’t mean it can’t be improved upon, though. Mixmax, a startup that aims to make email more useful for businesses, today announced that it has raised a $10.35 million from Creandum’s Carl Fritjofsson and SaaStr’s Jason Lemkin. Previous investors Michael Dearing, Harrison Metal… Read More

 If you’re in high school in the United States, there’s at least a 50% chance you’re using Quizlet. And there’s an even better chance you’re at least familiar with it. But for the rest of the adult population, times have changed since we were students. Educational apps like Quizlet help you do your homework and prepare for tests. Quizlet builds modern day flash… Read More

 If you’ve ever wanted to share a voice conversation you had with Alexa, you probably pointed your smartphone at your Echo speaker and recorded a shaky mobile video. That solution may work for the occasional tweet, but businesses and developers may want an easier, more professional way to show off their Alexa skills. That’s where Voicegram comes in. Created by the makers of… Read More

 Loris.ai, a spin-out product from the maker of suicide prevention organization Crisis Text Line, has raised $2 million to help companies navigate conversations around harassment and other charged topics. Loris.ai’s seed round was led by Floodgate with participation from LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, Kapor Capital and others. “We started getting calls from companies and even one… Read More

 Last year two venture capital firms, General Catalyst and CRV, launched a program called the Velocity Network to get their startups in front of Fortune 500 executives in New York City. Today they announced that Mayfield has joined as the third VC firm in the network. New York is home to financial, insurance, security, retail, media, and other Fortune 500 companies — the very types of… Read More

 It may seem like there are already enough on-demand fitness classes, but one startup has an idea for something a little different. Mirror is debuting an at-home device that looks like a mirror, but also lets you see the instructor and classmates for fitness routines like barre, yoga, boxing and pilates. I’m told that this is no ordinary mirror or video conferencing system, but that… Read More

 Rubrik, the enterprise startup that provides data backup and recovery services across cloud and on-premise environments, is putting some of the funding that it raised last year at a $1.3 billion valuation to use. Rubrik has acquired NoSQL data backup specialist Datos IO, the company announced today, in what appears to be Rubrik’s first acquisition. The financial terms of the deal are… Read More

 Apple’s HomePod delivers superior sound quality and solid Siri performance but still lags behind competition on breadth of voice commands. Read More

 This speaker is huge. It’s the size of a cooler a person would take camping for a week. It weighs 48 lbs. And for a good reason, too. The Kube speaker from Thomas and Darden is solid and packed with power. The company says it can put out 122 dB of sound. But it’s not a good sound. That’s the rub. This is a massive speaker that gets really loud but doesn’t sound great at… Read More

 Mobile AR had a lot of hype heading into the rollout of ARKit and ARCore this past year, but for the most part mobile AR apps have delivered a pretty heavy thud, failing to deliver on their futuristic promises. 8th Wall believes that this is the result of developers looking to port existing experiences into AR rather than designing for mobile AR’s strengths in the first place. The… Read More

 When Jason Chen first ended up at Salesforce through the acquisition of his last company Stypi, he had the tough task of integrating within Salesforce’s complex infrastructure — and not a lot of documentation to go on. Fortunately, Chen’s company had just been acquired and he was able to get the attention of the higher-ups and find that information, which was actually… Read More

 Tovala, the startup that’s designed a new steam-based oven and accompanying meal kit subscription service, has inked an investment and partnership agreement with the food prep giant Tyson Foods. Through Tyson Ventures, the company’s investment arm, Tovala will get an undisclosed amount of new financing as the two companies pursue collaborations on Tyson-branded Tovala meals.… Read More

 Battery Ventures is a 35-year-old, global investment firm that tends to keep its nose down. Its bench of 10 general partners have mostly been operating quietly in the business for many years if not decades, yet none are household names. Partly, that owes to the fact that Battery prefers to promote from within — often after many years of service. General Partner Neeraj Agrawal, who… Read More

 Hold your horses. Geoblocks for stuff like Netflix and Spotify are still not being vanquished in this round of EU Digital Single Market regulation chess…  Read More

 An issue at Apple appears to be resulting in app developers getting emails of ad spend and install summaries for apps belonging to other developers. The issue — which appears specific right now to developers using Search Ads Basic, pay-per-install ads that appear as promoted apps when people search on the App Store  — was raised on Twitter by a number of those affected,… Read More

 Bitcoin and crypto aren’t the only things on the decline, sales of tablet devices once again dropped in 2017, according to new data. Figures from analyst firm IDC show that overall tablet shipments fell by 6.5 percent to 163.5 million units last year. That’s down from 174.9 million in 2016, when the annual decrease was in double digits. Despite demanding falling overall, Apple… Read More

 There are a handful of companies that have an unbeatable advantage — the fiduciary moat. In finance world, when you hire an advisor who is a fiduciary — he’s legally bound to put your financial interests ahead of his. There are many paths to business success and financial models that go with it. You can make money directly from the end user or you can find an… Read More

 SpaceX is test launching its Falcon Heavy rocket, the first ever launch of the new heavy-lift orbital rocket. The Heavy’s thrust is generated by its 27 Merlin engines, which is three times the number of engines you’d find in the current Falcon 9 rocket. That amounts to over 5 million pounds of thrust, and a total cargo capacity of around 119,000 pounds. That gives it more than… Read More

 Seattle’s election commission says Facebook broke a city law that requires it to disclose who paid for campaign ads. Reuters reports that the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission’s executive director, Wayne Barnett, said Facebook must reveal advertising spending information for last year’s city elections or potentially face fines of up to $5,000 per ad purchase. Read More

 Barcelona-based Badi launched a marketplace for urban room rentals in September 2015 with the goal of making it easier to find flatmates. The startup has now closed a $10M Series A investment, led by Spark Capital, with the aim of ramping up its presence across Europe. Read More

 The crypto crash is reverberating through the Internet while the “rest” of the economy – namely the stock market – enters free fall. Commentary on the very human and thus flawed stock market is still well within the realm of pundits and guys who press funny buttons on TV, whither crypto? First, the die hards are chiming in noting that they are retaining their… Read More

 Today, Intel showed off a pretty awesome-looking pair of smart glasses that look better than pretty much anything we’ve seen to date. It’s unclear what the development future will be for the glasses as the company is reportedly exploring a partial sale of the division and it has already shut down work on its “merged reality” headset program. While there are a lot of… Read More

 The head of Twitter’s AR/VR team announced today via a tweet that he is leaving the social media site after 18 months. Alessandro Sabatelli joined Twitter in June of 2016 after leaving a virtual reality startup he led which created music-focused VR experiences. Sabatelli had previously worked as a designer at Apple. We’ve reached out to Sabatelli for more details on what… Read More

 SpaceX is launching its Falcon Heavy rocket tomorrow, and if it’s successful, it’ll be twice as powerful in terms of cargo capacity as its next closest active rival. That will help give SpaceX an edge in the growing private space race, and open up new opportunities in terms of potential clients, as well as set the stage for traveling to Mars. The launch itself is happening on… Read More

 Last month we characterized 2017 as the year Sub-Saharan Africa’s startup scene found its stride. 2018 looks to be the year of numerous VC investments. Read More

 Nutrigene believes your genes may hold the secret to what you might be missing in your diet. The company will send you tailor-made liquid vitamin supplements based on a lifestyle quiz and your DNA. You fill out an assessment on the startup’s website, choose a recommended package such as essentials, improve performance or optimize gut health and Nutrigene will send you liquid… Read More

 Tomorrow is a huge day for SpaceX: It’s the first-ever flight of the company’s massive, reusable rocket, Falcon Heavy. (It’s also the day, if all goes as planned, that Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster will go to space.) But will it go as planned? This one is just a test flight, so no one — even Musk himself — is truly certain how it’ll go. Read More

 Like many who attended CES 2016, we were taken with the Ehang 184. If nothing else, the passenger drone was a nice break from all of the smartphones and giant TVs. That said, the big quadcopter amounted to little more than a giant paper weight and some goofy composite videos. Earlier today, however, the company showed off some pretty impressive video of the drone carrying actual humans. In… Read More

 Nick Montfort is a professor in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing and the author of a new book, “The Future.” His book explores “future makers” – people who create the future with their work. It’s a fascinating read and he’s a fascinating thinker in the space. Our conversation on Technotopia started with the Norman Bel Geddes, designer of… Read More

 I’ve been struggling with whether or not to download Facebook’s new app aimed at children, Messenger Kids, onto my daughter’s iPad. This weekend, I took the plunge. I sat with her as she typed her first message and sent a selfie. I watched as she discovered GIFs. I wasn’t sure I had done the right thing. No one wants to surrender their kids to online social networks,… Read More

 The passwords of some people using sites monitored by popular analytics provider Mixpanel were mistakenly pulled into its software. Until TechCrunch’s inquiry, Mixpanel had made no public announcement about the embarassing error beyond quietly emailing clients about the problem. Yet some need to update to a fixed Mixpanel SDK to prevent an ongoing privacy breach. It’s unclear… Read More

 Sometime in the last week Bitcoin investors started noticing additional fees on their bank statements. It turns out that VISA and Mastercard both decided (how convenient!) to reclassify the way Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency purchases are processed on their networks. Incidents like this pose several challenges for the cryptocurrency industry short-term, but also show just how scared the… Read More

 This will come as no surprise to those who’ve been following the news of the past couple of weeks, but it appears that Strava’s disabled at least one top feature as it works to get to the bottom of recent privacy concerns over its mapping features. The app’s Segments feature looks to be at least temporarily offline, as first noted by The Verge by way of Reddit. We reached out… Read More

 In a crowded courtroom in San Francisco, the trial that could determine the fate of Uber’s autonomous driving program is finally underway. For the past year, lawyers for Waymo (the self-driving car unit spun out from Alphabet in December 2016) and ride-hailing juggernaut Uber have been sparring in court over evidence and witnesses and proceedings. At the center of the lawsuit is an… Read More

 Snap is waking up to the “Time Well Spent” movement Facebook is already addressing. Snapchat is offering a way to mute specific people without formally blocking them. Meanwhile, the sweeping redesign that’s slowly rolling out comes with ways to jazz up your Snaps with colorful text styles. Read More

 SpaceX is launching its Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time on Tuesday, and preparations are well underway. Now, we also know how the launch would go down in ideal circumstances, thanks to the new animation above detailing the mission’s planned progression. Elon Musk shared the short clip via Twitter, and it’s the first real look we’ve had yet at every step in the process… Read More

 Every day we encounter bugs in mobile apps. They may lock up or perform in a way we didn’t expect, but what if you could report the bug to developers as it happened with all of the contextual information they need to fix the problem? That’s what Buglife a member of the Winter 2018 Y Combinator class is trying to do. The founders, Dan DeCovnick and Dave Schukin, came up with an… Read More

 Bay Area startup Safe Catch Tuna has developed a patented technology to detect mercury levels in a variety of fish and pledges that its own brand of tuna products have the lowest levels of any brand. The company is one of those overnight successes more than a decade in the making. Co-founder Sean Wittenberg started the company in 2004 after his own mom was diagnosed with mercury poisoning. Read More

 Amazon has signed an undisclosed deal with the French tax authorities, Amazon told the AFP. From 2006 to 2010, Amazon operated in France using its subsidiary in Luxembourg. This way, the company could pay less taxes. But French authorities think French sales should be taxed in France. That’s why they were asking for $252 million in unpaid taxes (€203 million). Both Amazon and the… Read More

 Artificial intelligence has become one of the key weapons in the fight against cancer and the many forms and mutations that it takes, and today a startup is coming out of stealth and announcing funding and a significant data deal as it seeks to build an AI system specifically to help understand one aspect of the treatment cycle: cancer pathology. New York-based Paige.AI — an acronym… Read More

 It takes an immense amount of processing power to create and operate the “AI” features we all use so often, from playlist generation to voice recognition. Lightmatter is a startup that is looking to change the way all that computation is done — and not in a small way. The company makes photonic chips that essentially perform calculations at the speed of light, leaving… Read More

 Visual Core was a strange little surprise from Google when it revealed it back in October. The system company waited three weeks until after the Pixel 2’s announcement to talk up the system-on-a-chip that had been lying in wait inside the handset the whole time. Now, as promised, the technology is coming to third-party apps. Read More

 Over the years, we’ve seen folks try and fail at the smart glasses game. Google Glasses never had a chance, and even the Snap Spectacles heyday has come to an end. But that’s not stopping Intel from getting in on the fun. The glasses are called Vaunt, first seen by the Verge, and they are nearly indistinguishable from regular glasses. Instead of some cumbersome headset with a… Read More

 Apple and Cisco announced this morning a new deal with insurer Allianz that will allow businesses with their technology products to receive better terms on their cyber insurance coverage, including lower deductibles – or even no deductibles, in some cases. Allianz said it made the decision to offer these better terms after evaluating the technical foundation of Apple and… Read More

 SpaceX’s historic first Falcon Heavy flight will be immediately followed by a historic first landing attempt, too: The commercial space company headed by Elon Musk confirmed over the weekend that the test launch will also include an attempt to recover the three booster cores used by the rocket to propel it to orbit (via Space.com). The two cores on either side of the rocket will return… Read More

 Lyft is hoping to make its Lyft Line commuter route service even more appealing by expanding commuter benefits, which allows riders to use pre-tax dollars via a benefits card from a number of providers to pay for their ride. This can result in savings of up to 35 percent vs. paying for the service the usual way. Lyft Line currently operates in 18 cities across the U.S., and Lyft says that in… Read More

 “Five second” baby swaddle Sleepea (pronounced “sleepy”) is a sleep sack for your little one promising to be more efficient and effective than the other swaddles on the market. This is the second product to debut from Happiest Baby founder Dr. Harvey Karp, the creator of the Snoo, a $1200 robot bassinet that rocks and vibrates your baby to sleep. The swaddle is more of… Read More

 Continental is the latest top-tier automotive supplier to work with Nvidia, and the latest to announce its intent to build a full-scale, top-to-bottom autonomous driving system. Continental (which might be most familiar from its tire division, but which supplies a range of automotive parts and systems across the industry) will be using Nvidia’s DRIVE autonomous vehicle platform for… Read More

 Alden Ehrenreich seems to basically channel Harrison Ford in a couple of scenes in this brand new short teaser trailer for Solo: A Star Wars Story, which is coming out May 25 in the U.S. He nails the grin, and the instant, ‘just a good dude’ grin that Ford brought to bear on Solo in the original trilogy. As for the rest of it, what we seem to have his a heist movie, although that… Read More

 YouTube on the blockchain is one of the holy grails of the crypto community. The new generation of video artists and their audience seem tailor-made for a blockchain-based distribution and restitution system — one that depends on micro-payments and digitally secured provenance. It’d also be a system that could get creators out from under the yoke of YouTube, Snap, and Facebook… Read More

 Just a week after we reported that Fair.com was acquiring the leasing portfolio of Xchange Leasing from Uber, the flexible car-ownership startup is making two more moves. Today, the company confirmed that it has raised another round of funding led by next47, the VC firm backed by Siemens; and it has made another acquisition, of Los Angeles-based Skurt, a service that lets you rent a car, and… Read More

 Zebra Fuel, a London-based startup that wants to eliminate the inner city gas station by delivering fuel directly to your vehicle, has raised $2.5 million in seed funding. The round is led by Robin and Saul Klein’s LocalGlobe, with participation from Brent Hoberman’s Firstminute Capital, and Alex Chesterman, the Zoopla founder and one of the U.K.’s most active angel investors. Read More

 Ampere, a new chip company run by former Intel president Renee James, came of stealth today with a brand-new highly efficient Arm-based server chip targeted at hyperscale data centers. The company’s first chip is a custom core Armv8-A 64-bit server operating at up to 3.3 GHz with 1TB of memory at a power envelope of 125 watts. Although James was not ready to share pricing, she promised… Read More

 Two years ago, Bloomberg TV journalist Emily Chang set out to write a book about gender discrimination in Silicon Valley. It wasn’t specifically prompted by that now-famous post of former Uber engineer Susan Fowler, wherein Fowler calmly recounted the many ways that Uber’s internal controls were either very messed up or nonexistent. But the national movement that Fowler… Read More

 Infarm, a startup that has developed vertical farming tech for grocery stores, restaurants and local distribution centres to bring fresh and artisan produce much closer to the consumer, has raised $25 million in Series A funding. Read More

 Penta, the German ‘challenger’ bank that offers a digital bank account targeting SMEs, has raised €2.2 million in funding. The seed round is led by Inception Venture Capital, a new London-based VC firm with a heavy fintech focus, and will be used for further hiring, product development and to fuel growth. Read More

 Leshi Internet, one of China’s largest video-streaming services, disclosed that it must pay back 5.62 billion RMB (about $890 million) by the end of this year. Leshi Internet’s (also known as Le.com) heavy debts stem from a financial crisis at its sister company LeEco, both of which were founded by Jia Yueting. Jia resigned as Leshi Internet’s chief executive officer last year.  Read More

 Samsung vice chairman and the company’s heir apparent Jay Y. Lee has left prison after a South Korean high court suspended his bribery sentence. Lee, whose father is Samsung’s chairman, was previously sentenced to five years after being found guilty of bribery, embezzlement, capital flight and perjury charges. His sentence was reduced to 2.5 years today on appeal, and he was… Read More

 Elon Musk is in Florida getting ready for the launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, the first ever flight of the big new space freight beast. He’s making some final inspections of the cargo, it seems, including a new addition to the cherry red Tesla Roadster that’s going to be on board in the cargo area atop the rocket. Said new addition is a dummy wearing one of… Read More

 Where did Cloverfield’s don’t-call-it-Godzilla come from? This Gravity meets Event Horizon flick mashes up the scariest things outside our planet to provide an answer. New Netflix original film  The Cloverfield Paradox is now available after a surprise announcement during the Super Bowl.  Producer J.J. Abrams back for a third-installment that’s tense and eerie, leaving… Read More

 The top line is that Nike is rolling out some membership related updates to its app for iPhone and Android today. The updates will come in the form of new unlocks with partnerships like ClassPass, Apple and Headspace. There will also be a bunch of new unlocks coming for exclusive shoes and clothing. NikePlus Unlocks, the official name for these cards that appear in the Nike+ app Members… Read More

 Stripe will open its first engineering center outside the United States in Dublin, the company told Reuters today. Dublin isn’t a surprising choice. Though the online payment processing provider is based in San Francisco, its founders are Irish and Stripe’s European headquarters are already in the Irish capital, where it has about 100 employees. Reuters says Stripe will hire… Read More

 The Gillmor Gang — Denis Pombriant, Esteban Kolsky, Keith Teare, Gené Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded Saturday, February 3, 2018. G3: BlameThrower — Halley Suitt Tucker, Francine Hardaway, Elisa Camehort Page, Denise Howell, and Tina Chase Gillmor. Recorded Thursday, 2.1.18. @stevegillmor, @ekolsky, @kteare, @DenisPombriant, @geneteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase… Read More

 I know intimately that if we want to achieve tech-life balance, people must start taking responsibility for their choices. No one is forcing consumers to buy an iPhone, use Facebook, stare at Twitch or masturbate to porn. Every one of those actions is a choice we make, and it’s nearly impossible to help someone who doesn’t want help. Read More

 I know intimately that if we want to achieve tech-life balance, people must start taking responsibility for their choices. No one is forcing consumers to buy an iPhone, use Facebook, stare at Twitch or masturbate to porn. Every one of those actions is a choice we make, and it’s nearly impossible to help someone who doesn’t want help. Read More

 The NFL season ends tonight with the New England Patriots losing to facing off against the Philadelphia Eagles in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  The game starts at 6:30pm ET / 3:30pm PT and this year will be aired on NBC, meaning if you have cable or an HD antenna you can just tune into NBC to watch. If you want to watch it on a device like a phone, tablet or smart TV you can download the NBC… Read More

 Today marks the 52nd Super Bowl, and quite a bit has changed since that first big game. Then, it was called the AFL-NFL World Championship Game. In 1967, the cost of a movie ticket was $1.25, and color TV was just starting to become popular. Today, more than fifty years later, we can now stream the big game to our pocket computers and have artificially intelligent assistants sitting around in… Read More

 How do you build reliable software? It is a question that has been at the top of my mind the past few weeks, as I seem to be increasingly confronted by software that just doesn’t work anymore. Bugs, crashes, errors, data leaks: they are so common in our every day lives that they can seem completely unremarkable. The existing tools — unit tests, application performance monitoring,… Read More

 Let’s talk about the side effects of the creeping apotheosis of solar power. I mean, don’t get me wrong, we’re a ways away yet — but we’re definitely heading in that direction. “Renewables are about to become our cheapest form of energy,” Wired UK observes. “We expect $7.4 trillion to be invested in new renewable energy plants by 2040 – 72%… Read More

 Is there a point when investors will turn off the spigots for giant unicorn funding rounds? If so, we haven’t reached that threshold yet. Here, we break down the leading locations for new and existing unicorns, top sectors for investment capital, exits and a few other trends affecting the space. Read More

 On this week’s episode of CTRL+T, it’s all about flamethrowers (yes, the devices that throw flames), startups trying to get inside your mouth and education in the prison system. Later on, I chat with the one and only DeRay Mckesson, who is known for his social justice activism via #BlackLivesMatter protests in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland. He’s also the host… Read More

 Manufacturing giant Foxconn has said it will make a major investment in artificial intelligence-based R&D as it looks for new business growth opportunities in a cooling global smartphone market, Nikkei reports.  Read More

 Big news outlets stupidly sold their soul to Facebook. Desperate for the referral traffic Facebook dangled, they spent the past few years jumping through its hoops only to be cut out of the equation. Instead of developing an owned audience of homepage visitors and newsletter subscribers, they let Facebook brainwash readers into thinking it was their source of information. Now Facebook is… Read More

 In a town full of venture capital firms, Storm Ventures has made its mark with a singular focus on the enterprise. This week, the company announced it has taken on two freshly minted partners, Arun Penmetsa and Paul Willard, to continue the mission. They are doubling the number of partners with this announcement. Penmetsa has been a principal at Storm for the last 3.5 years before being… Read More

 When I began fundraising for CircleUp six years ago, I encountered many investors whose eyes would glaze over when I mentioned “consumer.” These investors would fidget uncomfortably or drop their gaze when I explained that our platform would only provide capital to small CPG companies. I would often hear the skeptical comments, such as, “an energy bar company can’t… Read More

 Reports of the death of Bitcoin in India have been greatly exaggerated. Read More

 Does your iPhone 7 say “No Service” when you’re oh-so-certain the signal is fine? Good news! You might be totally right. Reports and rumors of a “No Service” bug impacting iPhone 7s have been floating around for well over a year now — and as of this afternoon, Apple is acknowledging the issue. The company says it’s determined that “a small… Read More

 New studies from the National Institutes of Health — specifically the National Toxicology Program — find that cell phone radiation is potentially linked with certain forms of cancer, but they’re far from conclusive. The results are complex and the studies have yet to be peer reviewed, but some of the findings are clearly important enough to warrant public discussion. Read More

 Do you like to watch football? How about the biggest game of the year – which happens on February 4 (aka this Sunday)? If yes to either of these, then you’re in luck: I can tell you how to get the most out of the experience via connected smart home tech, gadgets and AV equipment. Set ‘indulge’ mode to MAX. The TV There are plenty of TV options out there for your… Read More

 Altered Carbon, released today by Netflix, is adapted from a science fiction novel by Richard K. Morgan. It tells the story of Takeshi Kovacs, a one-time rebel played by a Joel Kinnaman, who’s forced to take on the role of detective and track down a rich man’s murderer. The twist: The murder victim is also Kovacs’ employer, because the series takes place in a future where… Read More

 The FCC has taken the final steps towards opening up its Connect America Fund 2, which will disburse $2 billion in federal money over ten years support broadband infrastructure in rural areas throughout the country. A date for bidding and the final documentation of the process were finally released today — though a bit of official infighting acted as a reminder that not all is well at… Read More

 Bustle, the everything blog for millennial women, is hustling to close on around $30 million in new funding as it goes on the prowl for new acquisitions. It’s a significant cash infusion for a company that has created a mini, millennial-focused media empire that reaches nearly 80 million unique monthly visitors across its sites. The company, which acquired Elite Daily last year, was… Read More

 Super Bowl Sunday. The day we switch from being annoyed by commercials to being annoyed by all the stuff between the commercials. Football? Bah! We’re here for talking babies and beer frogs. Looking to tap into this, TiVo is flipping its tagging system upside down for a feature they’re calling “GameSkip” — behind the scenes, they’ll be marking the football… Read More

 Here’s a pretty good way to help spark sales in the post-holiday doldrums of early February. This week, Microsoft rolled a handful of new configurations that drop the entry level pricing on a few of its Surface products, in an effort to help drum up some sales during a particularly  slow time of year. The updates were spotted by Windows Central — after all, Microsoft’s… Read More

 Ever since Eraser, everyone wants a railgun. Turns out China is no exception. Some photos posted by Dafeng Cao, a Twitter user who keeps close tabs on Chinese military developments, show a ship-mounted gun that could very well be the country’s very own homegrown electromagnetically propelled mass driver. Read More

 Thirty-nine million Americans now own a smart speaker device, but the voice app ecosystem is still developing. While Alexa today has over 25,000 skills available, a number of companies haven’t yet built a skill for the platform, or offer only a very basic skill that doesn’t work that well. That’s where the startup Storyline comes in. The company is offering an easy to use… Read More

 Remember the iced tea company that changed its name to Long Blockchain and immediately shot up by 500 percent on the stock market? Well, it turns out it may not be getting into the blockchain after all. The company has decided to backoff from its pledge to buy 1,000 bitcoin mining machines — just six weeks after it said it would be doing so. Of course, six weeks ago bitcoin was worth a… Read More

 Die With Me is a (paid) app that can only be used for chatting when your phone (and your interlocutors’ phones) are at 5% or less battery left… Read More