TechCrunch

 Another mobile carrier, Telenor, has partnered with Google to roll out a next-gen SMS tech — this time targeting Android users in Europe and Asia. Read More

 Chances are that your current company is collecting a ton of data about your customers every second. It’s a goldmine and it often sits there in a corner, unused. Vize is a business intelligence tool that will let you learn more about your business and take advantage of all your data. The company is currently participating in Y Combinator’s winter batch. “The main use case… Read More

 Baidu is furthering its push into artificial intelligence after it announced the acquisition of Raven Tech, a Chinese startup that developed an AI voice assistant platform. Baidu confirmed it has bought the startup’s tech, product and staff of 60. The deal comes a month after Baidu hired noted AI expert Qi Lu, formerly with Microsoft, as its COO and Group President.… Read More

 Atomico has closed its fourth fund with $765 million, making it one of Europe’s single largest venture capital funds. The firm began raising the fund eleven months ago (we’d flagged it for you after searching the SEC filings). And while it represents a sizable step up from Atomico’s third fund, which closed with $476.6 million in 2013, its pace of fundraising highlights… Read More

Verizon is reportedly getting a $250 million discount on its Yahoo deal, judge rules CRISPR-Cas9 belongs to the Broad Institute and not UC Berkeley, Pixar teaches the art of storytelling on Khan Academy and MakerBot cuts 30% of its workforce. All this on Crunch Report. Read More

 Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey spoke on stage with COO and CFO Anthony Noto at the Goldman Technology Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. The leaders of the social media giant reiterated Twitter’s mission as a real-time information platform and spoke of its latest accomplishments, but also talked about the challenges of growing what is already a widely-used site. “We… Read More

 The decision of who owned the rights to a hotly disputed CRISPR gene editing patent came down in favor of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard today so you’d think the mood would be sour at the University of California, Berkeley, the other contender in the case. But Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna tells TechCrunch this is a positive for her. “I’m actually delighted to know… Read More

 Deep in the Valley this afternoon, 500 Startups’ 19th demo day drew to a close at the Computer History Museum. Business-to-business software, fashion and beauty products made up the largest proportion of companies, but 500 left room for a few outliers. It’s tough for anyone to say who the next Twilio will be, but it just might be hidden somewhere in the 40 companies that… Read More

 Google and Kaggle today announced a new machine learning challenge that asks developers to find the best way to automatically tag videos. The challenge, which comes with a $30,000 prize for the first-place finisher (and $25,000, $20,000, $15,000 and $10,000 for the next four teams), asks developers to classify and tag videos from Google’s updated YouTube-8M V2 data set. This data… Read More

 The front page of reddit is a good place to catch up on the latest internets, or so an increasing number of users think. To broaden the appeal of the site to lurkers and first-time visitors, the company is making some small but significant changes to the front page that gets presented to anyone who isn’t logged in. Read More

 U.K. startup PawSquad is expanding coverage for an on-demand service that brings vets to pets — offering convenience and reduced stress for pet owners willing to stump up a little more than they’d pay for a check-up at a bricks-and-mortar vet. Read More

 Last year, Huawei leapfrogged a couple of fellow Chinese hardware companies to secure its spot as the third-largest smartphone maker worldwide. As the company takes aim at the No. 2 spot, it’s apparently working to differentiate itself even more from the competition by developing more proprietary tech, adding to a list of components that already includes its own in-house chips. According… Read More

 Tesla CEO Elon Musk addressed President Trump’s immigration ban on Muslim majority nations directly via Twitter on Wednesday, saying that the order is “not right” and refers to it as a “Muslim immigration ban” — but he then deleted those tweets almost immediately, referring to them as “earlier drafts.” The specific wording was very strong,… Read More

 It’s no secret that the criminal justice system in the United States is broken. With 2.2 million people behind bars in prisons and jails in the country, the U.S. has the largest prison population in the world. In our first episode of Bullish since taking a break in May, I sat down with Chris Redlitz, a general partner at Transmedia Capital and co-founder of The Last Mile, to talk about… Read More

 There are a few beautiful lines in Wilson Rawls’ Where the Red Fern Grows that came to me when I saw that Nokia – or whatever shambling shell of Nokia remains – is re-releasing the 3110, that old warhorse of a phone that carried so many of us from the turn of the century into the modern age of endless information. “It’s strange indeed how memories can lie dormant in… Read More

 LinkedIn has neglected two big opportunities Facebook is now capitalizing on: helping lower-skilled workers and people who aren’t actively looking for a job. Today Facebook is rolling out a slew of new Jobs features we spotted it testing last year. They could hurt LinkedIn’s growth prospects and divert recruiting ad dollars. Business Pages will now be able to post job openings to… Read More

 Valentine’s Day is over, but if you’re looking for a way to make those fleeting expressions of vestigial patriarchy more permanent, Rare Carat has the service for you. Read More

 Following a high-profile and very heated court hearing over ownership of the patents for gene-editing technology CRISPR-Cas9, judges at the United States Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Virginia, ruled today that the technology belongs to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, not the University of California Berkeley, STAT News first reported. This is a big blow to UC Berkeley,… Read More

 There are many toys on the market today that promise to teach kids programming skills, and a good percentage require the use of a connected tablet or smartphone. At a time when parents are already struggling to keep kids’ screen time to a minimum, father and entrepreneur Nader Hamda wanted to build something different. He also observed a lot of expensive educational toys on the market,… Read More

 If you’re freaking out about Facebook starting to autoplay videos with sound by default, at least it won’t pause or play on top of music you’re already listening to through apps like Spotify. Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch today that sound will not autoplay on Facebook videos if you’re already listening to something on your device. You’ll have to tap the sound… Read More