Lightspeed Venture Partners is having quite a year. But to learn a little more about the firm’s earliest days, how exactly it helps startups and whether it thinks the pace of innovation right now can keep up with the amount of capital flooding the market, investor Semil Shah of the seed-stage firm Haystack sat down with Lightspeed co-founders Ravi Mhatre and Barry Eggers. Read More
As competition among them heats up, meal kit startups are expanding their repertoire, including by selling their dinner kits at groceries and adding new products to their catalogs. Today, early meal kit player HelloFresh announced the availability of wines on their site beginning May 17th. Read More
With an eye on providing banking services later this year, online lending startup SoFi is planning to apply for an industrial bank charter in the next month, according to CEO Mike Cagney. If approved, it would become the first company to receive a new industrial loan company (ILC) charter in a decade. Read More
Snapchat won’t say exactly how many Spectacles its sold, but it did admit today that the “Other revenue” category that’s mostly from Spectacles brought in around $4.5 million in revenue in Q4 2016, and over $8.3 million in revenue in Q1 2017. Read More
Twitter fell apart in 2013 when its growth slowed significantly in the face of competition and copying from Facebook, and users found it too hard to find the best content due to its unsorted reverse chronological feed. Its share price fell 18 percent a quarter later as the growth troubles continued. Snapchat fell apart today when its growth slowed significantly in the face of competition… Read More
Tom Insel, the former head of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), has left his position at Google’s life sciences company Verily to found his own mental health startup, Mindstrong. Read More
The launch of Azure IoT Edge was one of Microsoft’s slightly more esoteric but interesting announcements at its Build developer conference in Seattle today. While “the cloud” is all about moving compute and data storage into the data center, there are plenty of situations where you want to avoid the round trip between the device and the data center. Read More
Day 1 of Microsoft’s Build developer conference is wrapping up, and we were there to see all their wonderful new containers, clouds and command lines in person. Here’s everything cool we saw today — be sure to tune in tomorrow, when we expect news in consumer tech, mixed reality and gaming. Read More
Google has acquired the VR game studio behind such popular gaming titles as Job Simulator and Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality. In a blog post, the founding team of the Austin-based Owlchemy Labs detailed that it has been acquired and will be joining the team at Google. Read More
Snap may have had a successful IPO, but that was pretty much wiped out after it reported its first-quarter earnings — where it completely whiffed on what Wall Street was expecting. The stock is down more than 20 percent in extended trading after it reported its first-quarter earnings. In short, it doesn’t look good. Read More
Snap’s growth rate increased just a little in Q1 2017 — a bad start to its first quarterly earnings report since going public. Snap hit 166 million daily active users at a growth rate of 5 percent, compared to the 158 million DAUs it had in Q4. Snap shares fell more than 24 percent in after-hours trading as investors fled, seeing its long-term potential diminished by its growth… Read More
CBS has been promising a bundle of its two flagship streaming services, CBS All Access and Showtime, since last year. And on last week’s earnings call, CEO Leslie Moonves announced a combined package would soon be available. Today, that combined package has arrived. Starting now, consumers can sign up for CBS’s own take on the “skinny” bundle through either the… Read More
Back in October of last year, Tesla unveiled a new project it had been secretly cracking away at behind the scenes: solar roof tiles. Unlike traditional solar panels that sit on top of the roof, these solar tiles would replace your roof outright — and, if all went to plan, they’d look as good as any other roof. Just… maybe a little shinier. But how much will it cost? Read More
Nothing actually appears to happen when the Essentium rep flips the switch to fire up the company’s demo. The change is undetectable standing a foot away from the Stacker industrial 3D printer, but if you lean forward and peek into the small gap between the print head and bed, you’ll spot two small semi-circles that glow purple like a range oven on its highest setting. It’s… Read More
When you hop on a bathroom scale, all you get is one number describing the weight of your entire body. That number doesn’t account for muscle, but rallies you behind the goal of dropping that number lower and lower. ShapeScale utilizes 3D body scans to create a map of where you’re gaining and losing weight/muscle on your body. Read More
Cities are shaping the story of America. The great success we have seen in our nation’s cities is clear — data shapes the narrative.
It tells us that the collective, shared future of our cities is not only defined by the continued growth of the tech and the creative sectors — it’s a future where cities must work assiduously to lift all boats with plans for inclusive… Read More
Google today is updating its app and mobile web experience in the U.S. to help web searchers more easily find things to do – like concerts, art exhibits, lectures, festivals, meetups, sporting events, and more – which are happening nearby, either now or in the future. The company says it’s rolling out this new feature now because it sees millions of daily search queries… Read More
TechCrunch is excited to announce the judges of the next round of Startup Battlefield. These are the experts tasked with picking the finalists and winner of the startup competition held at Disrupt NY. It’s a big task, but these judges are up to the challenge.
This year the competition will feature 19 young companies vying for attention and funding. At stake is the Disrupt Cup and… Read More
