That social media post could disqualify your vote. Snap your #ImWithHer or #MAGA selfie without your ballot. It violates voting laws in many states to take a photo with your completed ballot, or even inside the polling place in some locations.
Breaking the voter secrecy laws can get you one to three years in prison or a fine depending on where you live, though they’re not always enforced. Read More
When crowdsourced labor company CrowdFlower recently raised funding from Microsoft, co-founder Lukas Biewald told me his team was focused on technology that allows businesses to supplement algorithms and artificial intelligence with human judgment from crowdsourced labor pools. Now CrowdFlower bringing on more experts to shape the development of that technology. Specifically it’s… Read More
As Messenger continues its steady growth as a communications channel distinct from its social network parent Facebook, the company today is taking the wraps off a new version of the platform that will give developers some new tools for how they present content in it, but it also opens the door wider to a new phase of how Messenger is evolving: get ready for more Messenger traffic from… Read More
Google has been working throughout this election to make voting information more accessible, and today that continues with an integration in Google Maps that will help users find their polling place. When you launch Google Maps on web or mobile and prepare to type into the search box, a banner pops up at the top of the screen which reads, “Find your Polling Place.” Clicking on… Read More
Samsung is no doubt eager to put this whole Note 7 situation behind it as quickly as possible. In fact, the company apparently can’t stop talking up the Galaxy S8, even though that device is still a few months over the horizon. But of the seven stages of exploding smartphone grief, Samsung is currently on the apology tour part, issuing an open letter to readers both on its site and… Read More
There’s still a little time to get a handset out before year’s end. And while increased competition from a number of relative new manufacturers (not to mention Google) have seemingly made things a bit more crowded, Samsung’s recent struggles have, perhaps, left an opening for another flagship. At just under three years old, OnePlus certainly still qualifies as a newcomer, but… Read More
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
