Meet Karma, GoPro’s long-promised drone. The Karma is capable, packable and easy to fly. And since it uses GoPro’s best cameras, the picture quality is superb. In the end, GoPro is a camera company that made a drone. The Karma drone is first and foremost an accessory for GoPro cameras and thus it hits the market with a unique value proposition. Read More
A controversial decision this summer by Facebook-owned messaging giant WhatsApp to share data on its users with its parent company — including for advertising purposes — continues to attract the ire of European regulators. Now Facebook has agree to pause data sharing in the UK, following an investigation by data protection watchdog, the ICO. Read More
Welcome to another episode of Social Media Managers Who Are Having a Bad Day. On todays episode we present Asus‘ assertion that a “cute girl” with a cat worse than a “sophisticated lady” with a Zenbook 3(tm) laptop. On the surface this argument might be a little specious – after all, cats are pretty cool – but what is Asus really saying? *GRABBING… Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt in London is on December 5-6! One month to go! It will be the place to come talk about new technology, your startup, other startups, everyone’s startups! Grab tickets here. Today we’re delighted to say Alex (June) Zhu, cofounder of Musical.ly is also joining. As the Co-founder & Co-CEO of musical.ly, based out of San Francisco, he has been behind the… Read More
Streaming music subscriptions have not yet reached the critical mass that physical music sales and ownership once had, but some argue that this is due mainly to product-market fit, since many of the services have been built around the concept of a small pool of dedicated music fans rather than vast majority of more casual listeners. Now, another hopeful called Electric Jukebox is… Read More
Tesla just announced that it will acquire Germany’s Grohmann Engineering, in a deal that will see the global engineering leader become Tesla’s new Advanced Automation facility based in Germany, a new subdivision of the automaker dedicated to helping Tesla increase the automation and effectiveness of its manufacturing process.
“This will really be our first acquisition of… Read More
So much for fighting the Uber fight. Today Karhoo — a company that wanted to take on Uber by pulling together prices and offerings from competing car services into a single app — announced that it is shutting down its service and looking for “the next steps for its business” after running out of money and failing to raise more. The full statement is below. We’d… Read More
In a speech today at Web Summit, Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer laid out a vision for the role artificial intelligence and machine learning will play in the company’s ambitions to improve global connectivity, technology accessibility, and human computer interaction. “People want to stay connected and close to other people, so whatever is the best current technology to deploy that is… Read More
Enterprise startups may not be overtly sexy, but they are already commanding the attention of China’s top investors. That’s according to a collection of leading VCs who took to the stage for a panel discussion around investments at TechCrunch Beijing 2016. Read More
The winner of TechCrunch Beijing’s 2016 startup competition is Ruff, a special Internet of Things development platform designed to let devs easily develop code in JavaScript to run on a variety of devices. The aim of the platform is to make it easier to develop for IoT, using development tools that web devs either already know or can pick up easily.
Ruff already has a big community of… Read More
London fintech startup Soldo — founded by tech veteran Carlo Gualandri who previously helped create Italy’s first online bank — is launching a multi-user spending account. The cloud-based service, which has been 18 months in the making and is currently available in the U.K. and Italy, is designed to enable and control the flow of money inside organisations with multiple users. Read More
Some VC firms have a global presence. But startup investment tends to be a very local activity. Gobi Partners’ Kay-Mok Ku, Convergence Ventures’ Adrian Li and Golden Gate Ventures’ Jeffrey Paine talked about what it’s like to invest in South East Asia at the TechCrunch Beijing conference. While these three firms don’t have the exact same geographic and… Read More
In recent years, a crop of companies have emerged that are using genomic sequencing to detect diseases in order to prevent the negative outcome of those diseases. It’s led to a budding ecosystem of startups that are crunching the data, as well as the cost of that sequencing coming down. But while we’re at the stage of getting the cost of genomic sequencing down and making it… Read More
While the concept of using cannabis evoked the image of a pothead smoking out of a giant bong, I found the industry had evolved significantly. Licensed doctors can prescribe marijuana in liquid, edible, and pill forms measured out to an exact dosage just like you might take any other prescription. Read More
China has some new cybersecurity laws, starting in January 2017, Tesla will charge owners of new Teslas for Supercharger use if they drive more than 1,000 miles a year, Samsung leaks its AI plans for the Galaxy S8, Gmail for iOS gets an update and, on Election Day, Google will be refreshing election results every 20 seconds. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
ClassPass is having something of a tough time in the U.S., but that hasn’t stopped others elsewhere in the world from trying to make its model work. Read More
Billionaire CEO Yueting Jia told employees in a letter last week that the company’s rapid growth was leading to stagnation and management problems at LeEco, and announced that he would invest $10 million into the company and cut his salary to 15 cents in order to keep LeEco steady as it expands into the United States and develops a self-driving car. But North American operations lead… Read More
Over the last five years, the venture capital ecosystem has seen a significant rise in theme focused investment funds. SaaS funds, hardware funds and my latest guest’s focus, consumer funds have all proliferated. So here to discuss these shifts is Justin Caldbeck, the co-founder of Binary Capital. Value Add To Portfolio Companies Thematic funds, in the majority of cases, have the ability… Read More
The date has been set for oral arguments to begin over who owns the patent rights to the gene-editing wonder CRISPR-Cas9. Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna and her colleague from the Max Planck Institute Emmanuelle Charpentier head to court on December 6th to face off against MIT’s Feng Zhang and present their argument before three US Patent and Trademark Office judges on why… Read More
Beme, the social media app founded by Casey Neistat, is getting involved in the election by launching an app called Exit Poll. The concept is simple: You download the app, tap who you are voting for (the options are Hillary or Donald or decline to answer), what state you are in and record a short video explaining your reasoning. Exit Poll then will collate these videos into a Facebook Live… Read More
