Lystable, a startup that makes a workflow management platform aimed at businesses needing to manage lots of freelancers, has topped up its Series A again — this time with an additional $10 million, which founder and CEO Peter Johnston says will be use to fund a change of business model with a payments focus. Read More
MotorK, an Italian company that offers a number of digital products to the automative industry, has raised $10 million in Series A funding. The round was led by 83North, with participation from Zobito, a Swedish private equity and VC firm. Read More
If you’re an Android device owner and also a driver, you may already be familiar with Drivemode: It’s one of the most popular apps for use in cars on Google Play, with over one million app downloads and active users spread across 180 countries. The app is designed to reduce distractions for drives via an eyes-free interface designed to access smartphone functions like navigation… Read More
AT&T and Verizon are the latest companies to pull advertising from Google’s display network amid concerns that company does not do enough to prevent ads from appearing on YouTube videos promoting terrorism and hate speech. Read More
It’s World Water Day. Time to wake up and take shorter showers. That is, if we’re fortunate enough to have them. Water scarcity and pollution are persistent global problems. According to End Water Poverty, some 663 million people around the world have absolutely no reliable access to clean, safe water year-round. And two-thirds of the world population faces water scarcity for… Read More
The News Lens, an online journalism startup that aims to be the voice of reason in Asia’s raucous media landscape, will focus on creating more original video content after landing a Series B round. The startup hasn’t disclosed the exact amount, but says it is in the range of $2 million to $3 million. Read More
Google Maps launches a location-sharing feature, Coffee Meets Bagel has a new paid membership tier and AI expert Andrew Ng leaves Baidu. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Amazon has postponed its much-anticipated entry into Southeast Asia. The company initially planned to launch local e-commerce services in Singapore during the first quarter of this year, as we reported in November, but two sources with knowledge of the plans told TechCrunch that the schedule has slipped to “later this year”.
Amazon did not respond to multiple requests for… Read More
Republican Senators led by Arizona’s Jeff Flake proposed a resolution earlier this month that would roll back privacy rules adopted by the FCC last year that prevented ISPs from collecting personal data without asking permission first. Today the Senate was alive with oratory as people spoke for and against the proposal. Read More
Apple has finalized a deal to acquire Workflow today — a tool that lets you hook together apps and functions within apps in strings of commands to automate tasks. We’ve been tracking this one for a while but were able to confirm just now that the ink on the deal is drying as we speak.
I haven’t been able to get financial details for the deal, but if I come up with them… Read More
Pickup basketball can be difficult to just stumble upon if you want to play. It also can be difficult to get a game going out of the blue. “We wanted to play and find games and it was hard to find,” Donte Morris said. “We thought that there has got to be an app for this.” When Morris and his brother Dominic couldn’t find an app for it, the brothers created Hoop Maps. Read More
Perhaps you’ve been watching the BBC’s Spy in the Wild, in which meticulously recreated robotic animals cohabitate with their fleshy brethren and record all their secret goings and doings. But haven’t you ever wondered what fruit gets up to during the long trip from its homeland to your local produce department? These robo-fruits are your best bet to find out. Read More
Official platform of hot takes Medium has launched its new business model: paid subscriptions, which the company said it would debut sometime this quarter at Upfront Summit back in early February. Medium started the year with some tough times, including layoffs and a change in direction, so it’s got a lot riding on these subscriptions attracting some… well, subscribers.… Read More
Raising money for a venture fund is almost never easy, but it’s a whole lot harder in certain places that are struggling economically, like Greece. Thankfully for the country, a new seed-stage firm has formed, called Marathon VC. Its mission, broadly: to back Greek tech entrepreneurs, regardless of where they are based. Read More
Formula E announced the nine manufacturers that will race electric cars in seasons five, six, and seven. You may think this is no big whoop, but it is. Here’s why the whoop is big: beginning in season five, each team will race one car per driver for the entire race — like every other racing series on the planet — rather than two. Because battery technology lagged behind… Read More
Facebook is testing an enhanced local search feature that could see the social network creeping in on Google Maps, Foursquare and Yelp territory, TechCrunch learned and Facebook confirmed. Facebook users are now able to surface recommendations of nearby places – like “dinner nearby” or “bars nearby,” for example – by entering a query in… Read More
BMW is combining the best of real and virtual worlds to make the process of creating new car designs as quick and painless as possible. The carmaker has tapped Unreal Engine’s rendering capabilities to generate virtual surfaces and objects overtop 3D-printed prototype vehicle pieces, letting designers and engineers preview how various materials or surfaces will look on a final… Read More
News broke earlier this week that the U.S. would ban laptops and tablets (and any other electronic device larger than a smartphone) from all U.S.-bound flights that take off from 10 airports in the Middle East and Northern Africa. The U.K. then followed suit and instituted its own ban, which targets a slightly different list of airports, which — at least on the face of it —… Read More
Almost everything seems like it’s on demand, delivered with the push of a button. And yet, the U.S. is only the 15th happiest country. What’s more, that level’s been dropping since 2005. So why haven’t we developed happiness on demand? We’ve seen more technological growth in the last 10 years than we saw in the 100 years before that, and it seems we’ve… Read More
