After the U.S. today instituted a ban on bringing any electronics larger than a smart phone into the passenger cabin of direct flights that leave from 10 airports in the Middle East and North Africa, the U.K. today followed suit with a very similar ban. Read More
It’s been just about a year since Google unexpectedly announced the first preview of Android Nougat. Today, the company is launching the first developer preview of the next version of its mobile operating system, currently code-named Android O (but we’re really hoping it’ll become Android Oreo once it’s released). Read More
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is pretty much a non-stop source of amazing things, and the latest is the PUFFER, or Pop-Up Flat Folding Robot. The design of the robot is inspired by origami, and folding is its specialty. Read More
Alexa voice control and Prime’s subscriber base have suddenly made Amazon a real contender in music alongside Spotify, Apple and YouTube. But what does it really take to come out on top in the crowded space of streaming music? At TechCrunch’s Disrupt NY conference in May, we’ll ask that very question to the most aptly named executive in tech, Amazon’s VP of Music… Read More
Automakers are scrambling to develop cars with advanced driver-assistance systems that are so good they’re “crash-proof,” or fully autonomous vehicles, each safer than the next. But automakers are somewhat limited by the computational resources onboard their vehicles. DeepScale has raised $3 million to help automakers use low-wattage processors to power more accurate perception. Read More
Most hedge funds don’t make money. This hasn’t stopped a growing list of startups from trying their hands at employing machine learning to tip the scales in their favor. But Pit.ai, a new machine learning-powered hedge fund, adopted into the YC W17 class, thinks it can best Numerai, Quantopian and others with its own unique recipe for automating money making. Read More
Twitter officially announced the launch of a new tool for live video aimed at larger media publishers and broadcasters. The Producer API, as it’s called, will allow professional publishers to connect their equipment to Twitter in order to stream live video directly to its network. Read More
Reddit has been trying to make its site more accessible to a wider pool of users, and today the company is planning to show off one of the ways it plans to do that: by making the service a little bit more like Facebook and Twitter. Read More
Rejoice lovers of petite-sized iPhones, for Apple is granting additional storage bounty — announcing today it’s doubling the current storage capacity of the iPhone SE. Read More
Mode Media is coming back from the dead — at least in Asia. The company operated properties like Glam, Tend and Brash, as well as a broader digital advertising business, but it shut down abruptly last fall. Now Mode Media Japan is announcing that it’s put a leadership team in place, including Executive Chairman Samir Arora, CEO Yusuke Akiba and CFO Minako Matsushita. Read More
Google announced a redesign for its iOS and Android search application, as well as its Google.com site on the mobile web, which now includes tappable shortcuts to areas like sports, weather, food and drink, entertainment and other interests. The idea here is to give users a different way to explore Google, instead of requiring the entry of a voice or text search query. Read More
LinkedIn, the social network for the working world that is now owned by Microsoft, is quietly adding more features to fill out some of its bigger ambitions to provide more services to enterprises, tapping into its user base of more than 465 million professionals. The company is adding a new “enterprise” tier to its Sales Navigator product. Read More
On Tuesday, the office of New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman released a summary of the year 2016 in data breaches. Collecting any breach that affected New York state residents, the Attorney General’s office saw those numbers swell by 60 percent overall last year. Read More
Along with the reveal of a new 9.7-inch iPad and new red iPhone, Apple also announced today that its learn-to-code app Swift Playgrounds is now available in five new languages. The additional languages include Simplified Chinese, Japanese, French, German and Latin American Spanish. The app, which has been downloaded more than a million times, offers a combination of programming lessons,… Read More
Apple’s got a brand new iPad. This latest version is really the successor to the Air 2, announced in late 2014, but drops that bit of the name for the sake of simplicity, like the MacBook before it. The new iPad features a 9.7-inch Retina display with improved brightness, coupled with a souped-up processor under the hood. Read More
A Fitbit for cows, USB ports for bionic limbs, and microbatteries were amongst the most promising companies of the 52 that launched at Y Combinator’s winter 2017 Demo Day 1 yesterday. After asking investors their favorites and huddling with the TechCrunch team, here are our picks for the top 7 startups. Click through/scroll to learn about each. You can read our full coverage of all… Read More
According to a report from Google.org, the search giant’s philanthropic arm, 74% of students globally have little or no internet connectivity, 221 million students in schools are being taught in a language that is foreign to them, and 32 million primary school-aged children can’t even reach traditional classrooms because of violent conflict and displacement. Now, Google.org… Read More
Hootsuite, a platform that helps enterprises and brands manage their presence on social media, has made an acquisition to help those customers track their activities on the social platform of the moment, Snapchat. It has acquired a Snapchat analytics solution from Naritiv, a startup based out of Los Angeles that was an early mover in the business of creating Stories and other content for… Read More
Another telco is buying an ad tech firm — today it’s been confirmed that video ad player Teads is being acquired by Dutch telecom Altice, which has some 50 million fixed and mobile subscribers, the majority of whom are in the US and France. Read More
