iPhone enthusiasts the world over were given a new slab of glass to lust over yesterday after Apple unveiled a red version of the iPhone 7 in its latest move to support HIV/AIDS charity [Red]. The (PRODUCT)RED Special Edition iPhone 7 is the first time that Apple has supported the charity through its flagship phone, — previous (PRODUCT)RED editions have included Beats headphones and… Read More
Berlin will see Disrupt Europe, our major conference, arrive this December, featuring some of the best known names from the Valley and Europe. Ciarán O’Leary of Blue Yard Capital and Christian Nagel of Earlybird Capital will be among those speaking. Ciarán O’Leary joined Earlybird in 2009 as a Senior Associate and was promoted to Partner in January 2012. He later left in 2016 to… Read More
Companies are increasingly investing in workforce development to retrain their employees, but if you’re in your 50’s, it can be intimidating to learn how to code with a bunch of 20-year-olds.
While most tech coverage is focused on the jobs that are going to be destroyed by automation and artificial intelligence, Michael Jay Walker’s story exemplifies how tech can reinvent… Read More
Hardware that responds to voice commands is already out there and probably in your hand or house right now. Whether it’s a smartphone, smart speaker or wearable, it has to connect to the cloud to deliver answers. Now, a startup called Mythic (formerly known as Isocline) is launching a chip and software that will change all that, putting voice control, computer vision and other kinds of… Read More
The UK startup behind a connected kegel exerciser called Elvie is today announcing a $6 million Series A round led by European VC firm Octopus Ventures. Female focused VC AllBright is also joining the round… Read More
Chinese internet giant Baidu is losing the head of its data and artificial intelligence (AI) research division.
Andrew Ng, the company’s chief scientist, announced his departure today three years after he joined Baidu to oversee its foray into deep learning technology. Ng is recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on AI, and he helped… Read More
Uber may have become the latest in a long line of Western tech firms to have failed in China, but fellow gig economy darling Airbnb is determined to succeed in the Middle Kingdom. Today, the company announced a new brand for its China-based business and the local launch of Trips, its travel services feature. Beyond those launches, the firm pledged to increase its local presence via plans to… Read More
Apple creates a new video editing app called Clips, large electronics are now banned from flights to the U.S. coming from 13 countries and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies starts building full-size passenger pods. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Over 15,000 founders from 7,200 startups applied to this batch of Y Combinator. It chose just over 100 with founders from 22 countries to go through its accelerator program. Today, the second half of those companies launched on stage, and we have breakdowns of all 51 of these businesses. Oh, and the ACLU. The 97-year old legal activism non-profit is far from a startup, but went through YC to… Read More
Gas is the biggest cost for airlines. The easiest way to reduce these costs? Don’t use gas at all. That was the pitch from Wright Electric, a startup building an commercial passenger plane that runs on batteries and can handle flights under 300 miles. These short-haul trips make up 30 percent of all flights and a $26 billion market. Today Wright Electric gave its first preview to the… Read More
Uber held a special press call on Tuesday, hosted by board member Arianna Huffington and staffed with three of its highest ranking female staff. The call was pretty clearly an attempt to counter-message some of the negative press Uber has faced, specifically around its culture and accusations of sexism. Read More
You can hack your IKEA furniture to be more awesome. You can hack video games to make your fellow gamers hate your guts. And with the help of Macchina — now on Kickstarter — you can teach your car a few new tricks, too. What could possibly go wrong? Read More
A New York City startup called The Mednet today launched a platform that gives physicians a knowledge-sharing tool that’s as easy to use as Quora, but provides them with expert answers about the latest research in their field. The site has focused, so far, strictly on cancer. Read More
Uber held a press conference on Tuesday to discuss some of its ongoing issues, including what it’s doing to rectify its workplace cultural problems and the state of its business. The press conference also saw Uber share some details about the business impact of its string of bad news from early in 2017. Read More
Amazon has quietly rolled out the “Send to Kindle” feature to its Kindle for iOS application that allows you to save to the app articles and documents found on the web. That means your Kindle device or app can replace your preferred “read it later” application — like Pocket or Instapaper, for example — apps where regular web readers often store the longer… Read More
Want to watch March Madness in VR? You’re in luck. Six games — including the Final Four national semifinals and National Championship game — will be streamed in VR. The games will be available via the new NCAA March madness Live VR App available on the Oculus Store, which will work with Gear VR devices. Read More
Apple and Samsung have refreshed their flagship tablets for the first time since 2014. Much has changed in the space — mostly for the worse, as overall sales have continued to slip. There’s room for debate as far as precisely how down the overall market is, but there seems to at least be a consensus that early predictions of the tablet space eclipsing PCs missed the mark. Read More
Twitter has revealed it suspended a total of 376,890 accounts between July 1 through December 31 last year for violations related to promotion of terrorism. It says the majority of the suspensions (74 percent) were surfaced via its own “internal, proprietary spam-fighting tools.” Read More
GDAX, the cryptocurrency exchange run by Coinbase, has added margin trading to the platform. Eligible traders can now trade up to 3X leveraged orders on Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin order books. Read More
First drones took to the air. Now they take to the sea! The Gladius is basically a remote-controlled submarine with a 4K camera that can dive to 100 meters. A big, yellow double-barreled monster, the beast is controlled via a phone-connected remote and it is semi-tethered, which means it can roll out about 500 meters with the right gear. Read More
