The wearable industry actually posted some pretty solid numbers over the last quarter, according to a new study released this week by IDC. Carrying the headline “Wearables Aren’t Dead, They’re Just Shifting Focus,” the release notes that, in spite of some stark evidence to the contrary, companies are still shipping product in record numbers.
IDC notes a 16.9 percent… Read More
Millennial consumers care about the sustainability of what they buy more than any other generation that came before them. This point is illustrated in studies from Pew Research, Clemson University and Nielsen, to name a few. Now, a New York-based consumer data company called HowGood has raised $4.2 million in a Series A round of venture funding to help retailers answer every question these… Read More
TechCrunch invites you to our annual SXSW Party. RSVP to come meet our writers while enjoying free drinks and musical performances by violin looping wizard Kishi Bashi and inspirational dance drummer Madame Gandhi. It’s all going down from 1:30pm to 4:30pm, Saturday March 11th. We’re teaming up with Splash to take over one of South By’s top venues, The Mohawk, located just… Read More
After months of hand-wringing, Snap’s IPO has now set the stage for what people will be expecting for the future of its business. Snap’s performance this morning is also setting the stage for what investors and Wall Street will be looking for at tech IPOs moving forward this year. Read More
Campbell, Calif.-based ChargePoint secured a new $82 million funding round, led by automaker Daimler. The new funding will help ChargePoint expand its network of electric vehicle charging stations in Europe, as the company pursues its goal of making charging stations for EVs as readily available and convenient as gas stations. The funding round also includes existing investors BMW i… Read More
Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara has been around the contacts block a few times. He was the guy who founded Goldmine, the grandaddy of contact databases. For the last several years he has been working at Nimble, a startup with the goal of managing contacts info inside Office 365 and G Suite. Today, his company announced a $9 million Series A round.
The round was led by Imagen Capital Partners with… Read More
When Google launched Home at I/O back in May, the software giant was clearly gunning for Amazon Echo. In 2017, however, it’s Amazon that’s begun elbowing in on Google’s territory. At CES, Huawei announced plans to launch Alexa on the US version of its Mate 9 handset. This week at Mobile World Congress, Motorola followed suit, inviting Amazon on stage to help unveil a… Read More
Twitter’s latest live streaming deal will see the network gaining access to 1,500 hours of esports competitions, through new partnerships with ESL and DreamHack. The agreement brings over 15 events from the ESL One, Intel Extreme Masters and DreamHack circuits to Twitter, where they’ll be available for live viewing on the web and mobile devices, through the Twitter app. Esports is… Read More
Amper, a startup that offers AI-powered music composition, is announcing that it has raised $4 million in funding. The round was led by Two Sigma Ventures, with participation from Foundry Group, Kiwi Venture Partners and Advancit Capital. Amper previously raised funding from Brooklyn Bridge Ventures. You might not expect a film composer like Drew Silverstein (who founded the company with… Read More
Last July, with the launch of Tinycards, Duolingo went beyond its core language learning services for the first time in its history. Back then, Tinycards, which uses the popular spaced repetition technique to help its users learn anything from vocabulary to equations and history facts, was only available as an iOS app. Starting today, it will also be available on the web. There are no… Read More
Remember when Emojis were niche? Now, everyone and their mom (literally) uses them. Messaging stickers seem to be in the middle of a similar transition, slowing but surely becoming more regularly used in our messaging conversations having initially made it big in Asia. And GIPHY, the ‘Google of GIFs’ which raised over $120 million last year alone, of course thinks these… Read More
Uber’s overall business may be facing a metric ton of trouble, including sexual harassment allegations and corporate culture issues, a new Waymo lawsuit, and a CEO temper tantrum caught on tape, but it’s still getting new product out the door – including UberEATS Restaurant Manager, which debuted Thursday. Restaurant Manager is basically an analytics platform for the… Read More
Apple is touting the home automation capabilities of iOS and Apple TV on a newly updated website for its HomeKit software and its related Home app. The page now includes a new 45-second video that demonstrates the Home app for iOS 10 in action, showing a woman operating a range of devices from her phone, including the Honeywell Lyric Round thermostat, Kwikset smart lock, and iHome smart plug.… Read More
The tiny Pixel 2.0 is basically an Arduino board wedded to a tiny 1.5″ 128×128 color OLED screen. This means you can stick it inside a wearable and address the screen directly from the Arduino board, an improvement on current “solder the screen to the Arduino and hope it works” world of DIY electronics.
This teeny-weeny board costs $75 on Kickstarter and should ship in June. Read More
As usual Mr. Krebs has some great images of a credit card skimmer found in the wild. This model uses Samsung phone parts and lays right over the Ingenico card scanners you’ve probably seen in stores. The interesting thing is that these scanners also support chip and PIN technology but, as evidenced by the photo, it looks like the retailer disabled it essentially sending the scanner back… Read More
When it comes to implementing a system like Docker’s container platform, it normally takes a very particular set of technical skills. Docker wants to remove some of the complexity involved in running their product set, and to that end released Docker Enterprise Edition today. Think of the enterprise edition as a package of tools designed to work seamlessly across any supported flavor… Read More
Allo, the messaging app Google launched into a crowded market last September, is getting an update today. The update focuses on improved support for emoji and GIFs (because that is, after all, what the world needs), and easier access to the Google Assistant.
As far as we can tell, Allo has been anything but a hit for Google. With Hangouts, the company had a perfectly solid and competitive… Read More
Amazon is looking to improve its renewable energy track record, with a new project that will see it install large solar energy gathering arrays on the rooftops of many of its global fulfillment and sorting facilities. The plan is to start with 15 system installations in the U.S. by the end of this year, with a longer-term plan of putting them on about 50 buildings by 2020. The initial 15… Read More
Klook, a service for finding and booking travel activities, has closed a $30 million Series B funding round led by Sequoia China. Existing backers Matrix Partners and Welight Capital, a firm founded by former Tencent executives, also took part. This new money takes Hong Kong-based Klook to $36.5 million from investors to date. Last October, it closed a $5 million Series A round led by Matrix.… Read More
