TechCrunch

 Conversocial, the U.K.-headquartered social customer care platform, has acquired Silicon Valley startup HipMob. Read More

 In the world of Hyperloop, the race is on to see who can produce the first viable commercial system. Hyperloop Transportation technologies announced a key move in its own progress towards that goal on Tuesday: It has begun construction on its first full scale passenger capsule, to be completed and revealed in 2018. The capsule’s not just being built to show that HTT can make it a… Read More

 After a decade of turning products red in a fundraising fight against HIV/AIDS, Apple has finally adopted the hue for its biggest product of all. This Friday, the company will start selling a striking red version of the iPhone, Cupertino’s latest collaboration with the Product(RED) charity. Once again, a portion of each red device sold will go to help fund the group’s work to… Read More

 It won’t arrive in the App Store until next month, but Apple’s already offering up a preview of its new mobile video app. The company is positioning Clips as a halfway mark between iMovie and Memories (the slideshow feature in Camera) in terms of usability, but the Snapchat and Instagram Stories comparisons are going to prove pretty difficult to avoid on this one. Read More

 Beekeeper, the Switzerland and U.S.-based startup that provides a mobile-first communications platform for employers that need a better way to communicate with blue-collar and service-oriented workers, has raised a further $8 million in new funding. Read More

 Deep-linking technology has been making its way progressively into the mobile ecosytem, providing an easy way to take users from one app to a specific point in another one, much as hyperlinks do between web pages. Now one of the earlier movers in this area, a startup appropriately called Deeplink.me, is adding a new feature that paves the way for deep linking, and automatic searching, within… Read More

 Google is pulling display ads from being placed alongside a wider range of content on YouTube and other sites, in the wake of a spike of criticism that its automatic, programmatic advertising seemingly cannot stop mainstream brands from appearing alongside extremist and offensive material. Read More

 After embedding its Alexa voice assistant into its main Amazon app last week, this week Amazon is expanding Alexa’s functionality yet again: today the company announced that it will now let Prime subscribers order from Prime Now, its two-hour delivery service, as well as its newer alcohol delivery service, in cities where these are offered. Impulse buyers beware. Amazon says that… Read More

 After a lot of confusion yesterday, we have now learned from senior administration officials that the U.S. is indeed banning U.S.-bound passengers from carrying any personal electronic devices larger than a smartphone in the passenger cabin. Instead, they will have to put their laptops, tablets, game consoles, cameras and portable DVD players into their checked baggage. This new order does… Read More

 Southeast Asia’s ride-sharing war is spreading to a new frontier after rivals Grab and Uber revealed plans to expand into Myanmar, the country also known as Burma. Singapore-based Grab announced its launch in the country today, its first new market expansion for nearly three years, to take it to seven markets but its U.S. rival wasn’t going to sit in the corner quietly. Digital… Read More

 Databerries is announcing that it has raised $16 million in Series A funding — money that will help the Paris-headquartered company launch in the United States. The startup describes its approach as “real life targeting.” It works with brick-and-mortar retailers to direct their ads at consumers who have been to their store or a competitor’s store… Read More

 ARM tipped its hand today with the announcement of DynamIQ, a new technology it says will lay the groundwork for its next generation of mobile processors. Like other mobile chip makers, the company’s got a lot to contend with when it comes to future-proofing its offerings, and certainly ARM’s making some pretty big claims for what it’s calling its “biggest… Read More

 If music be the food of love then get ready to hit the Old Country Buffet. A wild new startup is about to unleash Populele, an electric Ukulele that will teach you how to play old Uke standards like Ukulele Lady, D’yer Maker, and Tiptoe Through The Tulips. The $149 ukulele has surpassed its goal on Indiegogo and is slated to ship this year. The instrument has a 72-led fretboard that… Read More

 Adobe opened its Digital Marketing Summit in Las Vegas this week with a big splash, announcing a new “Experience Cloud,” which brings all of its digital cloud businesses together onto a single platform. While there is an element of pure marketing at play here, it also makes sense for Adobe to pull its various digital clouds — Creative, Document, Marketing, Analytics and… Read More

 Over the years, Adobe has been looking for ways to improve the measurement and management of ads that appear on the Internet. Today at its big Adobe Summit event in Las Vegas, the company is launching its Advertising Cloud platform to help brands and advertisers optimize spend across a variety of channels. Read More

Jeff Jones, the president of Uber, leaves the company, Y Combinator launches a vertical for AI startups, according to Bloomberg, Apple assembles a team to work on new augmented reality device and SpaceX recovers capsule and sets sights on Mars. All this on Crunch Report. Read More

 Today was Y Combinator’s 24th Demo Day, where the accelerator shows off its fresh companies to investors. International, AI, and hardware products were the emergent themes of the 52 companies that launched. “The international tour seemed to work” says YC President Sam Altman, who helped put on ‘Startup School’ events across the globe to boost the… Read More

 Farmers know how hard it is to predict yield accurately. High-value crops like grapes or almonds prove particularly challenging. Farmers expect, and settle for, twenty to forty percent uncertainty with these crops. Vinsight founder and CEO, Megan Nunes, who grew up in the farming business, found that unacceptable. After almost a decade-long career in the satellite industry, she turned her… Read More

 As any fan of Kitchen Nightmares may know, the restaurant business is not for the faint of heart, nor is it likely to generate fat margins. Now, a startup called PlateIQ has raised $4 million in new funding to help restaurants automate accounts payable, and nail all their other accounting work so they can focus, finally, on the food and front-of-house. Eileses Capital led the round… Read More

 Twitter is about to make it much easier for media publishers to post live video broadcasts with the launch of a live video API tomorrow morning. The API will let companies hook up professional broadcasting and video editing equipment to Twitter with more powerful integrations than Twitter’s existing Periscope Producer feature. The forthcoming API was first reported last week by The… Read More