Marvel’s New York-based Netflix superheroes are teaming up at last, for The Defenders, which will be available in full to stream as of August 18. The series brings together Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Daredevil and Iron Fist to combat some kind of evil forces led by Sigourney Weaver (!) and this first trailer makes it look like exactly the right kind of fan service for those who’ve… Read More
Groupon — the once-dominant daily deals business that has more recently tried to shift to other kinds of local commerce — today reported first-quarter earnings that pointed to a company still in transition — or struggling to turn itself around more successfully, depending on how you look at it.
Dragged down by a 5.5 percent decline in its core market of North America… Read More
Decibel Insight, a U.K. startup that has built “digital experience analytics” tech to help large companies understand how individual customers interact with its websites and apps, has raised $9 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Eight Road Ventures, with participation from John Simon, via his Ventureforgood investment entity. Read More
Amazon’s FreeTime service, which includes access to curated kid-friendly content and various parental controls, is now arriving on Android devices with the launch of a new FreeTime Android app. The app offers parents a similar set of parental controls as those found on Amazon’s Fire tablet devices, as well as a handpicked selection of over 40,000 YouTube videos and websites that… Read More
Video medical consultation service, Doctor On Demand is launching an integration with lab testing services providers like Quest Diagnostics to include more of the in-clinic care services that patients expect. “By integrating with labs and upgrading our patient profile and follow-up care services, we’ve taken a major step in advancing the quality and range of services treatable… Read More
As more companies wade into the business of building artificial intelligence systems to help you drive (or do the driving for you), a startup founded by an ex-Apple computer vision specialist is open sourcing a huge dataset that can help them on their road to autonomy.
Mapillary, a Swedish startup backed by Sequoia, Atomico and others that has built a database of 130 million images through… Read More
The Xprize foundation has whittled its latest competition down from 10,000 sign ups to 147 teams in its first-ever “open” competition. Announced in June of last year, the IBM Watson AI Xprize is the first not to identify a specific problem. Rather, teams are asked to define their own issue and address it using artificial intelligence.
“Unlike other prizes that have a very… Read More
Userfeeds is a new startup which has a platform which applies blockchain tokens to news discovery. The idea is to combat so-called “fake news” by providing an economic incentive to rank content well. The Warsaw based company has raised $800k in seed funding from BlueYard Capital, Fred Ehrsamh (the Coinbase co-founder) and Piotr Smolen (Dataventures). The system of content ranking… Read More
Nutonomy, the self-driving car startup that span out of MIT in 2013, has inked a deal that will see it work with Peugeot-maker Groupe PSA to test autonomous vehicles in Singapore. Nutonomy is more than familiar with Singapore: it has a relationship with local Uber rival Grab and the Singapore Economic Development Board was an investor in its recent $16 million fundraising. This new tie-in… Read More
As the web becomes an ever more crowded landscape of things battling for your attention, we’re seeing an increase in marketing spend from companies to help capture it, and that in turn is leading to a rising tide for marketing technology startups building solutions to do just that. Today, Yieldify, a London-based company that builds tools to increase conversions on sites and through… Read More
Tel Aviv, get ready! TC is coming to Israel at the end of June for our second TC Meetup + Pitch-off, and if last year is any indication, it’s going to be off the chain. Israel is one of the world’s fastest-growing and most impressive startup ecosystems, and we simply can’t resist paying a visit. As part of that, ten startups from the area will have the chance to pitch… Read More
Cheetah Mobile, the Chinese firm that specializes in utility apps for smartphones, has enlisted the help of outside investors for its live-streaming service.
Cheetah announced this week that its one-year-old Live.me service has pulled in $60 million from a range of China-based investors that include Matrix Partners China, Evolution Media China, Gobi Partners, IDG Capital and Welight Capital. Read More
Microsoft’s new Surface laptop gets released and it costs $999.00, YouTube gets a new redesign with support for dark mode, Facebook denies allegation of gender bias and a beekeeper builds a deep learning app to save the bees. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Food and beverage startups backed by tech investors are having a rough go of it this season, with Juicero all but melting down and companies like Beyond Meat, Urban Remedy and Soylent recalling products, according to required disclosures on the federal site Foodsafety.gov. Now, Hampton Creek Foods, a packaged goods company backed by the likes of Horizons, Khosla, and AME Cloud Ventures, is… Read More
Looking to make EV car sharing the next perk for real estate developers, Envoy, a new Los Angeles startup has launched its first pilot. Initially, they’re starting with one apartment building and a fleet of two cars in an LA apartment complex. But, what the young startup lacks in reach, it makes up for in gumption. Founded by two real estate developers, Aric Ohana and Ori Sagie, the… Read More
Income inequality and disparity in resource distribution have drawn a lot of attention recently in the United States. Today, we’ll investigate a variation on the theme, exploring the distribution of a specific resource, venture capital funding, across a particular population, in this case, all U.S.-based technology companies founded in or after 2003 with at least one recorded funding round. Read More
At first glance, Windows 10 S makes perfect sense. It’s a lightweight, stripped-down version of Microsoft’s operating system designed to avoid taxing low-cost hardware. That makes it a good fit for schools, with laptops running the software priced as low as $189. But the most remarkable thing about the operating system in its current form may be its reliance on the Windows Store. Read More
InVision is acquiring the TrackDuck startup to further connect and enable the digital product development process from design to delivery. This is InVision’s seventh acquisition in the last 16 months. Terms were undisclosed. TrackDuck was well-placed for an exit, already having a number of popular integrations with the Atlassian Suite. Its only main competitor is UserSnap. TrackDuck… Read More
The head of computer vision at Facebook’s virtual reality subsidiary, Oculus, has been replaced following his arrest related to an underage sex sting operation, TechCrunch has learned. Dov Katz was arrested in late December after allegedly soliciting sex from an undercover officer who he believed, at the time of meeting, was a 15-year-old girl. Read More
Apple just reported earnings for the first quarter of 2017, which were mixed. The company beat on EPS but slightly missed on iPhone sales and overall revenue. However, the company announced they are increasing their capital return program and extending the time frame by four quarters. Read More
