It’s hard to fathom that the work of Reverend Thomas Bayes is still coming back to drive cutting edge advancements in AI, but that’s exactly what’s happening. DARPA-backed Gamalon is the latest carrier of the Bayesian baton, launching today with a solution to help enterprises better manage their gnarly unstructured data.
The world of enterprise is full of unstructured data. Read More
Apple shows us trailers for its first original shows, YouTuber Pewdiepie gets in trouble over some anti-Semitic remarks in some of his videos, Microsoft wants a digital Geneva Convention and Twitter drops the ball on anti-abuse. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
In a first for in-car convenience features, Jaguar is teaming up with Shell to launch a new payment feature that lets you use Apple Pay or PayPal (with Android Pay coming later on) to easily pay for gas right within their vehicles at the pumps. The feature is coming to the UK first, but will roll out around the world after that. The feature requires installation of the Shell app to make… Read More
Twitter is fighting to disclose how many times the government has secretly accessed its users’ data — and a judge may soon allow the company to do so. Twitter’s fight has been ongoing since 2014, and the company recently saw progress when it was allowed to publish two national security letters. The government uses national security letters (NSLs) to extract user data from… Read More
Making women like your technology starts with listening to the women working on it. That’s not what former VP of marketing at Magic Leap Tannen Campbell says she experienced while on the job. Campbell was brought in by the company to help improve Magic Leap’s appeal to women, but she is now suing the augmented reality startup for sexual discrimination. Read More
Japan’s SoftBank has made another acquisition to widen both its business strategy and its portfolio of investments. Today the company announced it would pay $3.3 billion in cash to acquire the Fortress Investment Group, an asset manager and investor in its own right, with significant holdings in Lyft, ZestFinance, Xapo, Jawbone and other tech companies. This is SoftBank’s… Read More
A startup called Caavo thinks it has a solution to the too-much-TV problem, with a device that brings together all the different streaming boxes and TV services you subscribe to. The company, which has raised $15 million in funding, provides a universal remote with voice control and a unified TV interface so users can search and discover all the TV content available to them. Read More
Yelp is releasing a new feature with the simple, self-explanatory name Questions and Answers.
Well, mostly self-explanatory. This is distinct from Talk, a feature where Yelp users can ask an incredibly broad range of questions (as I write this, the New York page currently includes conversations about the travel time to the airport, when it’s legal to kick out a roommate and The… Read More
VC investment in dating startups declined over the past year, with smaller average rounds and fewer funded companies, according to Crunchbase company profile data. Read More
Since 2001, impact VC firms have raised $13 billion to invest in companies that provide a social or environmental benefit as part of running their for-large-profit business. Indeed, $10 billion of that has been raised since 2010 alone. Impact VCs are VCs first that intend to generate market-beating financial returns because of, not in spite of, an impact-oriented investment thesis. Read More
For $2 billion, Caltrain electrification would wire the line between San Francisco and San Jose and buy new high-performance electric trains, reducing local travel time by twenty minutes, and yet, the Republican Party is threatening to cancel the project. Read More
PayPal has agreed to buy bill payment management company TIO Networks for $233 million in cash. The deal will allow PayPal to gain access to a market of customers who pay their utility and cable bills at kiosks in locations like Rite Aid.
This will help the company reach the “underserved” chunk of North Americans who are living paycheck-to-paycheck, some who even lack bank… Read More
Many things that used to be true primarily of the public market now happen within the world of private company investing, including the participation of mutual fund investors.
Now, you can add equity research reports to that list.
Goodwater Capital — a two-year-old, consumer-tech-focused venture firm is today taking the wraps off a detailed snapshot of pre-IPO Snap, parent of the… Read More
Open Whisper Systems, creator of encrypted communication platform Signal, released an update today as an open beta to enable encrypted video calling. The app previously offered fully end-to-end encrypted chat and voice calling, but the addition of video will make it even easier to convey information without compromising security. The update also promises to improve the existing, somewhat… Read More
Startup life is tough and hectic. You’re busy. We get it. That’s why we extended the Startup Battlefield Applications for TechCrunch Disrupt New York. You now have until February 28th at 12pm PT to get your startup application in. Apply now! Why apply? Well, the numbers are in and they speak for themselves. As of January 2017, the TechCrunch Startup Battlefield companies have… Read More
In the first of a new series focusing on city eco-systems, TechCrunch Editor-at-large Mike Butcher gets under the skin of one of Europe’s hottest startup cities. Being thrown into the fire of an economic recession made for a much more dynamic culture that many observers had typically come to expect from a southern European country. When the country had to turn to the European Union for… Read More
Linode has been in the virtual private server (VPS) game for longer than most, but in recent years, companies like DigitalOcean and Vultr have taken quite a bit of mindshare from the company. Now it looks like Linode is ready to fight back. The company today announced the launch of a new $5/month plan that offers twice the memory (1 GB) of DigitalOcean‘s and AWS Lightsail‘s… Read More
At CODE Media today, Facebook VP of partnerships Dan Rose said combatting fake news is “something that’s really important to us,” but acknowledged that the company is “just getting started” and “there’s a lot of work we can do.” Read More
A drone recently crashed into a Boeing 737 as it approached a landing strip in Mozambique. The damage to the aircraft was extensive. Over the last year, drone crashes have been reported at a nuclear facility, the Empire State Building and one crashed through a window into an office building. For some, the war of the machines has begun — and you don’t need deep pockets to play. Read More
There’s nothing quite like the atmosphere of a college hackathon. Amidst the free t-shirts and apps to help you find parties on campus always lie a few hidden gems for those with the patience to hunt. ThirdEye, one of those gems forged out of PennApps, UPenn’s hackathon, is being acquired today by TheBlindGuide for an undisclosed sum. Started by three current Penn… Read More
