It was only a year ago that many in the Venture Capital industry were predicting that “winter was coming” and to be fair the author of this post was chief amongst them. Yet as we enter February 2017 the VC funding markets are booming, Snap, Inc has filed for its IPO, AppDynamics was just purchased for $3.7 billion by Cisco and the only winter that can be found is at the ski resorts. Read More
You’re not losing a CubeSensor. You’re gaining a Klevio! Or something. CubeSensors, the company created by Ales Spetic, has folded itself into a wireless access company called Klevio to bring the tiny tech necessary to allow for keyless entry into homes and apartments. CubeSensors participated in our Hardware Battlefield and brought a set of clever environmental sensors to market… Read More
This is the new BlackBerry – software licensing powerhouse. With its latest signing, the once dominant smartphone maker now blankets the globe with its manufacturing deals, a completion of its prolonged pivot toward becoming a software and services-only company. This morning, the Canadian company announced an “exclusive, long-term” deal with Optiemus Infracom Ltd, allowing… Read More
Google Maps is getting an upgrade today aimed at putting the information you need most often within easier reach in the app’s interface. With a swipe up from the home screen, you’ll now be able to view things like the current traffic conditions – and how that impacts your ETAs to home and work – as well as transit schedules, places to eat or drink, nearby ATMs,… Read More
Valve’s Portal series is one of the more beloved in PC gaming, thanks to its debut of unique puzzle mechanics to inject some fresh life in the tired first-person action genre. The game looks even more interesting when you’re using its unique mechanics overlaid on the real world, with virtual objects interacting seamlessly with concrete things like tables, walls and floors.… Read More
Here’s some unusual news: the Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF) today announced that it has acquired the RethinkDB copyright and assets, including its code, and contributed it to The Linux Foundation. RethinkDB, which had raised about $12.2 million in venture capital for its open-source database, went out of business in October 2016. The CNCF says it paid $25,000 to complete… Read More
Attention, startups. The day you’ve been waiting for has finally arrived! Registration is now open for startups looking to display in Startup Alley or Hardware Alley at Disrupt NY 2017, and to kick off the festivities, we’re launching a special extra early bird special that you’ll definitely want to take advantage of. For a limited time, we’re throwing in an extra… Read More
Netflix is previewing the follow-up season to one of its most surprising and appealing hits, the eerie and bizarre Stranger Things. Stranger Things 2 isn’t going to land until Halloween 2017, but during the Super Bowl, we got our first peek at what our friends in Hawkins are up to next. The whole trailer starts with some archival Eggo waffle commercial footage, just to get you in the… Read More
After many months of speculation about a potential acquisition by IBM or private equity firms, today, finally some official news from point-of-sale payments company Revel Systems. The company announced that Welsh, Carson, Anderson and Stowe (WCAS) has led a large growth round in the company that will make it the company’s majority shareholder. Alongside that, the company’s… Read More
Over Black History Month TechCrunch is working with the Breaking Into Startups Podcast to share stories of innovators making a difference. The podcast is a platform that features inspiring stories of people who broke into tech from non-traditional backgrounds. We strive to help millions of people outside of tech understand the different paths they can take to launch careers in the tech industry. Read More
Uber is making moves to expand the scope of its flying car experiment – the company just hired NASA engineer Mark Moore, who worked at the federal agency as an advanced aircraft engineer and basically kickstarted the current interest in vertical take-off and landing craft for short-haul urban flight with a 2010 paper on the feasibility of the helicopter-like vehicles. Moore will act… Read More
Snapchat may be facing slowing user growth, and relatively no revenues, outside of the U.S. at the moment, but it is also tapping the international opportunity in other ways. Today, its IPO-bound parent company Snap announced a new deal with the UK’s BBC Worldwide to produce a new, six-episode Snapchat Show for North America based on the Beeb’s wildly popular Planet Earth… Read More
Stratoscale, a startup that gives enterprises AWS-compatible environments inside their data centers, has acquired Tesora, a database-as-a-service company that runs on top of the OpenStack platform and that allows its customers to choose between 16 of the most popular databases. Both companies declined to discuss the financial details of the acquisition. According to Crunchbase, Tesora had raised… Read More
Uber is introducing hire cars in a new pilot program in India. That’s hire cars staffed with a driver who handles multiple journeys, not hire cars that require customers to drive themselves. The company explained that the ‘Uber Hire’ service, which will be piloted in an initial eight cities, comes in response to requests from users who wanted to keep their Uber driver for… Read More
The first round of the French presidential election is due to be held in April. So it’s no coincidence that Google and Facebook are stepping up efforts locally to combat the circulation of so-called fake news as the democratic drum beat cranks up — partnering on a collaborative initiative aimed at combating the spread of disinformation online. Read More
N26 is iterating at an incredible pace these days with a ton of new product features and geographical expansions to build the most modern bank in Europe. But the new features always follow the same motto — your current bank sucks, everything should be simpler. Today, N26 introduces consumer credit done right.
I saw a preview of the feature a couple of weeks ago and it was quite impressive. Read More
Some chopping and changing is afoot in the world of payments in Europe. Today, Klarna, the startup out of Sweden that works with online merchants to enable flexible payment options, confirmed that it has acquired BillPay, a payments company based in Germany, from its previous owner Wonga, the startup that once achieved notoriety for predatory payday loans. The companies are not disclosing… Read More
Lenovo’s Yoga line has offered some of the most innovative tablet form factors around, from modular projectors to digitizing pads of paper. The A12 borrows the latter from its predecessor — and manages to do so at a dollar under $300. The specs are fairly middling, as out would expect from the price point, but the 12.2-inch HD display swivels around at 360-degrees from the keyboard,… Read More
In a tradition that’s become almost as storied as the game itself, companies spent big dollars to push big stars and — this year more than ever — a more political agenda at the big game. Read More
Oppo is not a name that is anything like as familiar as Apple, Xiaomi or Huawei worldwide, but there’s further proof that it is most definitely one to watch, according the findings of a new report.
That’s because the little-known phone-maker scooped the top spot for smartphone sales in China last year, for the first time, fractionally beating out its sister company Vivo and… Read More
