Google today launched the first major update to its Firebase backend-as-a-service platform since it first announced its plans to turn the service into its unified platform for developers six months ago. While Facebook decided to shut down its competing Parse service earlier this year, Google decided to double down on Firebase (which it acquired in 2014) as its flagship development platform… Read More
GoOpti might be described as an Uber (or UberPOOL) for independent shuttle bus providers. It connects travellers from smaller European cities who want to travel to or from larger city airport hubs, and in doing so ensures economies of scale so that laying on a shuttle bus is viable. Read More
Freespee, which these days calls itself a “real-time conversation cloud technology company,” has raised €9.25 million in Series B funding. French venture capital firm Ventech led the round, alongside existing investors Sunstone Capital and Inventure. Silicon Valley Bank also participated, signalling that this is a mixture equity and debt financing. Read More
Robot vacuums may have once seemed an eccentricity, but they now represent a non-trivial portion of the overall vacuum market – 20 percent worldwide, according to iRobot CEO and co-founder Colin Angle, who I spoke to at TechCrunch Beijing 2016. And Roomba makes up 70 percent of that market, giving iRobot a commanding lead in the space. Exactly how many robots does that translate to? Over… Read More
The regulation would require instant messaging services and other internet companies to require users to register with their real names and personal information, and to censor content that is “prohibited.” Real name policies restrict anonymity and can encourage self-censorship for online communication. Read More
In recent months, we’ve seen several well-funded startups with strong teams either going through layoffs or shutting down entirely. The natural question to ask is why?
The short answer is that “on-demand” is not the optimal solution for most customer needs. Read More
Say you’ve inherited a rare genetic mutation that guarantees you’ll get a certain form of cancer by the time you reach 50 years of age. And that this is most likely how you are going to die. But what if I told you this cancer gene, passed down from generation to generation, can be snipped out of your genome entirely and you never pass it on to any of your offspring? Read More
Given that Sinovation Ventures founder Dr. Kai-Fu Lee has around 50 million followers on Chinese social networks, he has become an oracle when it comes to predicting the future of tech in China. Kai-Fu Lee talked about the most important trends in Chinese startups at TechCrunch Beijing 2016.
Sinovation Ventures recently raised the equivalent of $675 million in total across a Chinese and an… Read More
Robots — and the smart home in general — are a hot topic, and it’s one where an enormous amount of investment is happening right now. There are many companies like Nest and Ring that are trying to target segments of the home in the hopes of making everything smarter.
But it’s easy to forget that the home is still a physical space, and in order for everything to work… Read More
Six years ago, Google raised a lot of eyebrows when it announced it was developing a self-driving car. At the time, very few people took the technology seriously. However, things have been gearing up, and now self-driving cars are about to be part of our everyday life. Just last August, Uber rolled out its first batch of 100 driverless taxi-cars in Pittsburgh.
This is one of the most… Read More
Ford, GM, Toyota and VW are just a handful of the car manufacturers planning to put self-driving cars on the road in the next five years. If you ask Uber or Tesla, they might say driverless cars have already arrived… which means we’re running out of time to secure one of the juiciest new targets for hackers. Read More
Need a teeny tiny computer that can run Android or Linux? Only have $20? Well you’re in luck. When we first met the Orange Pi (get it?) the company was selling a nice Raspberry Pi clone for $15. Now they’re selling a souped up version with all the trimmings. The board includes an Ethernet port and three USB ports. It has 1GB of memory, H5 High Performance Quad-core 64-bit… Read More
I’m a really lucky guy. In the course of this work I get to talk to a lot of my personal heroes and my favorite so far has been Ruben Bolling aka the creator of Tom the Dancing Bug. Bolling is a fixture in the alt-comics scene and he has a lot to say about the rise and fall of the alt-weekly and the new laws of popularity. If you want to know how to build and keep an audience you can look… Read More
Imagine a typical day in 2020: You read the news and realize the presidential election is coming up. Based on a predicted model that takes into account your previously expressed views and data on voters in your state, your AI assistant recommends how you vote. A message on your phone asks if you want your AI assistant to cast the vote on your behalf. You tap “agree” and get on… Read More
Tesla’s new Gigafactory opened at the end of July, with much excitement from both the media and the general public. Only 14 percent of the massive structure has been built, with the rest of the $5 billion project to be concluded by 2020. According to Tesla, battery cell production will start in 2017; by 2018, the Gigafactory should be cranking out cars to the tune of 500,000 Model 3s… Read More
Every company has a board of directors — but few founders and entrepreneurs give the matter of board composition much thought. We’d like to offer some advice to founders and CEOs seeking to learn more about their boards, as well as to people who have been invited to sit on a board. Read More
Facebook-owned messaging app WhatsApp is experimenting with a new Status feature that lets users share mood-setting pictures and videos overlaid with other custom elements such as emoji, with the content disappearing 24 hours after it’s shared — so basically a copy of Snapchat Stories. Read More
As the Internet of Things evolves toward becoming one of the fastest expanding sectors in the tech industry, a lot of focus is being given to greenfield development, the process of creating new devices from scratch. The greater potential lies in brownfield development, the integration of connectivity and data collection into things and designs that already exist. Read More
Video is eating the internet. It accounts for nearly 75 percent of internet traffic, with Americans consuming more than an hour of online videos each day — more than three times as much as in 2011. Established platforms like YouTube and Netflix capture a large portion of this traffic, but there are also a number of new players exploiting the video opportunity. Read More
Good news, my friends! The day we have all ostentatiously longed for has arrived. I come to announce that the days of sugar water are over. The era of SoLoMo photo apps, messaging copycats, new niche social networks, “Uber for X”, and on-demand delivery of artisanal civet coffee is behind us at last. No more trivial apps and web services. At long last it is time to solve the… Read More
