TechCrunch

 Android Pay continues its international rollout with a launch in Japan today, some six weeks after Apple’s own mobile payment service reached Japanese shores. Read More

 Google has reportedly shelved its long-standing plan to develop its own autonomous vehicle in favor of pursuing partnerships with existing car makers. Read More

Instagram Live is rolling out to all users, Microsoft Ventures opens an AI fund, JetSmarter has a $105 million funding round, Apple’s new app sort of unifies TV and Super Nintendo World theme park is slated to open in 2020. All this on Crunch Report. Read More

 Facebook’s standalone Events app that launched in October on iOS is launching on Android today. The app will go live on Google Play soon. The Facebook Events app helps you browse nearby happenings, see the dates of your upcoming Facebook Events as well as imported calendars and aggregates wall posts and alerts from Events to declutter your main app’s notifications. The Events… Read More

 Serious motion capture setups often involve dozens of optical markers, inertial sensors or both, making them a pain to set up and tear down, and producing a ton of data. This Disney Research project produces high-quality results from just a handful of sensors by making some smart assumptions about how the body works. Read More

 You may remember that time Google was under fire for wrongfully indicating that photos of black people were gorillas, and the time Microsoft’s AI bot named Tay turned incredibly racist. Today at Google’s Mountain View headquarters, the company acknowledged its shortcomings, as well as the shortcomings of other technologies in relation to racism and bias, at Decoding Race, the… Read More

 A company’s logo is an important part of its identity, but the process behind defining, registering and protecting these trademarks is a convoluted and rather archaic one. A startup called TrademarkVision aims to simplify that with what amounts to a machine-learning-powered reverse image search. This isn’t in some lab, either: The EU just switched their whole image trademark… Read More

 It’s getting nigh on Holiday Season and how better to celebrate the old Yule log than with a nice herbal vaporizer. The Firefly 2 is a very clever and very well-built convection vape that creates a smooth, flavorful draw and can extract the maximum in herbal pleasure out of a little bit of material. Like Pax the Firefly 2 is foremost about function. The system heats herbs to 400… Read More

 SpaceX had intended to launch its first Dragon capsule with a human crew on board in 2017, as part of a NASA mission. The planned launch has been pushed back to 2018, however, representing a delay of around half a year. SpaceX has pushed back the timing for the momentous mission as it revamps its fueling procedures for Falcon 9 rockets following a launchpad explosion this September.… Read More

 Did someone order their chicken extra risky? KFC has alerted members of its Colonel’s Club loyalty system in the U.K. that its website had been targeted and several accounts potentially compromised. Read More

 Google’s head of diversity, Nancy Lee, is retiring from Google after several years of leading the company’s global diversity and inclusion team, TechCrunch has learned. Lee, who originally joined Google’s legal team back in 2006, has been working on diversity at Google for the last few years. She started her diversity efforts as director of people operations in 2010, and… Read More

 Henrik Fisker’s newest electric car company, Fisker Inc., continues the gradual reveal of its first car, the EMotion. I certainly have a lot of feelings looking at this — feelings like skepticism that this vehicle will ever make it to production. But Fisker Inc. maintains that it will, and that once it does, it’ll have a 161 MPH top speed with 400 miles of range from its… Read More

 Netflix makes so many original shows we don’t even hear about some of them until they’re airing imminently — that’s the case with The OA, a new freaky supernatural mini-series with an 8-episode season debuting December 16. The show looks spooky as heck, following the story of a girl who disappeared when she was a child, only to return seven years later (with the bonus… Read More

 NFX Guild, a young mentorship-driven startup accelerator that was already managed by three powerhouse partners — James Currier, Gigi Levy-Weiss and Stan Chudnovsky — just added another impressive name to its roster: Pete Flint, the co-founder and longtime CEO of the real estate site Trulia. (You might remember that Zillow, the real estate listing site, acquired Trulia for… Read More

 What happens when you give a general-purpose computer chip a high-resolution view of its environment and the ability to react to what it sees? Turns out you create a brand-new industry. Read More

 Along with the launch of updated tvOS software for Apple TV, Apple today also began rolling out the latest version of iOS, which at last brings the expanded lineup of new emoji to all users. In iOS 10.2, there are hundreds more emoji to choose from, including more diverse characters, more emoji representing different professions, more food, sports and animals, as well as several of the… Read More

 If you live in San Francisco and know much about tech startups, you’ve likely heard of Founders Den, a shared office space and private club for startups and investors that leases 85,000 square feet on a nondescript block in San Francisco. Founders Den accommodates between 12 and 15 startups at a time, each of them with six or fewer employees. The startups must be invited into the fold,… Read More

 Apple’s new TV application is now available to all users, thanks to the iOS and tvOS updates rolling out today. The app, first introduced this fall, offers Apple TV, iPhone and iPad users a single destination to access the TV shows and movies from across the apps you have installed on your devices, while also helping you keep track of favorites programs, search across apps… Read More

 Apple is considering investing up to $1 billion in the SoftBank Vision Fund, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. With a fundraising target of $100 billion, Apple’s participation would mean that the world’s largest tech company would be investing in the world’s largest tech fund. SoftBank itself is investing about $25 billion and the Saudi Arabian government… Read More

 Opera Mediaworks will have a new name in the new year — AdColony. Mediaworks started as the ad-focused subsidiary of mobile browser company Opera, but it split off when a Chinese consortium acquired the browser business (and took the Opera name with it) earlier this year. AdColony, meanwhile, was a mobile video ad startup that was acquired by Opera. It continued to operate within… Read More