Before today, people on Tinder only had two options for their gender: male and female. Three years after Tinder CEO Sean Rad told me the company wanted to be better for trans and gender non-conforming people, Tinder has added a feature that will let people provide more accurate information about their gender identity.
“Well, look, it’s not a race,” Rad told me. Read More
Cars are on their way to pooling their collective smarts, but vehicles that have built-in communication tech and intelligence processing are still a ways off for many. Nexar is a startup hoping to make collective collision avoidance a more achievable reality in the short-term, using their Ai-based dash cam app. Nexar’s app is available for iOS and Android, and uses your phone’s… Read More
Luckily, the game delivers a lot for players both old and new, with plenty of familiar fun, but a fresh feeling world and replacement for the Gym system that brings new life to the franchise. Islands of adventure This latest 3DS Pokémon game brings the franchise to a set of islands that is pretty clearly based on Hawaii, called the ‘Alola Region’ in game. The tropical Alola… Read More
Apple never looks back, except when it does, which is every month now. The company announced that it is releasing a hardbound photo book showcasing some of the most iconic Apple designs from the last 20 years. The book will be released tomorrow on Apple.com and in flagship American Apple stores. They will be available in two sizes. The small one will cost $199 while the big one will cost $299.… Read More
Snapchat’s ongoing marketing campaign for Spectacles continues to mean you can only buy them from a single Snapbot deployed at a single location, for a limited time. Today’s spot is just outside Tulsa, Oklahoma, the third location after Venice Beach in LA last week, and Big Sur in norther California on Sunday. The new location is the first beyond the west coast, and my colleague… Read More
Kit, the Expa-backed platform for product recommendation, has today announced the close of a $2.5 million from Social Capital, Precursor Ventures, April Underwood, Ellen Pao, Authentic Ventures, Black Angel Tech Fund, and Expa. Kit lets users choose and review products they’ve used and owned to build ‘kits’. These kits normally focus on a certain theme or category like… Read More
Level 5 self-driving tech is the highest variety, which aims for fully autonomous vehicles with no need of human steering mechanisms. AdasWorks, a Budapest-based startup launched in 2015, is charing its name to AImotive and expanding to a new U.S.-based Mountain View office to further its efforts in making Level 5 autonomy a lived reality for people and cars. AImotive’s goal is to offer… Read More
Sauce Labs, a cloud-based software testing service, announced a $70 million round today. The investment is more than double the $31 million the company had raised across four previous rounds and brings the total investment to $101 million. Centerview Capital Technology, IVP, and Adams Street Partners all participated. Under the terms of the deal, Buno Pati, partner at Centerview and… Read More
While it would have been nice to tackle this issue before the election, Google and Facebook are finally taking a tiny step in order to fight back against fake news. According to multiple statements, both companies have updated their policies to ban fake news sites from using Facebook’s and Google’s advertising networks. With the U.S. election, fake news became incredibly popular… Read More
China’s Didi Chuxing revealed last month that it plans to expand into global markets, and today we got the first hint of what that might look like after the Uber rival announced a tie-in with U.S. car rental giant Avis. Read More
If you’ve ever visited Krakow, Poland, you’ll be familiar with the smog. Born of air pollution and fog, the smog regularly shuts down the local airport and casts a pall over this beautiful medieval city. A local entrepreneur, Anna Rys, wants to do her part to shut down the smog by bringing tech to bear on the environmental problem. I spoke to her about the mess in Krakow, her… Read More
Musement, a “digital travel companion” that lets travellers discover and book things to do, has closed $10 million in Series B funding. The round was led by family fund Micheli Associati, with participation from previous backers P101, and 360 Capital Partners. Read More
A quick update to the Barcelona Mini Meetup on Thursday. We will be meeting at Bar Denou located at Carrer Pallars 122, 08016 Barcelona at 7pm. There will be a some space for pitches so please email me with the subject line “BARCELONA PITCH” if you’d like to pitch and I’ll pick ten folks to hit the stage. I’m john@techcrunch.com.
You can RSVP here.
A reminder… Read More
Back in May, Woomoo, the startup behind app prototyping tool POP, was acqui-hired by Priceline, leaving POP’s future a little uncertain. Today that uncertainty comes to an end with news that the U.K.’s Marvel, a rival web and app design platform, has acquired the company’s tech and user-base and will soon migrate POP’s 500,000 users over to its own wares. Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt in London is on December 5-6! Not long now! Come talk about new technology, your startup, raising money and the future. Grab tickets here. Amongst the many speakers already announced, today we’re delighted to say Samantha Payne Co-Founder and COO of Open Bionics which recently unveiled the ability to download and 3D print-off limbs by open sourcing their designs.… Read More
CareCloud, the revenue management and health IT platform, announced it has raised $31.5 million in strategic Series C financing from The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc., First Data Corporation and Blue Cloud Ventures. Previous investors also participated in the round, including Norwest Venture Partners, Intel Capital, Tenaya Capital and Adams Street Partners. The company previously… Read More
A UK startup is angling to build a business out of simplifying the repeat prescription ordering process for NHS GP surgeries via an app, called Echo, that lets patients use their smartphones to make a request for more of their usual medication from their doctor. Read More
WhatsApp wants to be international cross-platform FaceTime. Today Facebook-owned chat service WhatsApp is officially launching video calling for its over 1 billion users worldwide on iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Its debut follows a series of reports from people who recently found the feature had been enabled in beta versions of WhatsApp on Android and on Windows Phone – an… Read More
Zuora, the cloud company that helps SaaS companies and others manage their subscription businesses, launched Zuora Insights today, a product designed to help customers understand the nuances of the data behind the subscriptions. Like so many SaaS companies these days, Zuora understands that there is value in the data they produce on a daily basis as a byproduct of simply doing business.… Read More
