In his best-selling 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman hypothesized that thinking could be broken down into two distinct processes — aptly named fast and slow thought. The former is all about your gut, the initial automatic responses you have to things, while the later is calculated, reflective and time-consuming. A new algorithm from… Read More
pple’s retail footprint today spans nearly 500 Apple Stores globally and serves as an important public touchstone for the company, its products and aesthetic vision. Now, the very first store it ever opened in Europe, on London’s iconic Regent Street, is about to unveil a refurbishment that points to where the company wants to take its retail experience next. Designed by Foster… Read More
ISIS reportedly carried out its first successful drone attack this week, using a commercially available drone to deliver explosives and kill two Kurdish fighters. It’s an effort that has been a long time coming: a Facebook group dedicated to supporting Kurdish forces reported that two small drones packed with explosives were shot down in December, and reports of ISIS using commercial… Read More
Today, Pinterest said it hit 150 million monthly active users, up from the 100 million it announced in September 2015. However, as TechCrunch previously reported, Pinterest in 2015 was targeting that it would hit 151 million monthly active users by the end of 2015. We reported the story in October last year, and the information was used by Andreessen Horowitz to solicit limited partners to… Read More
It’s been an open secret that Amazon’s AWS division and VMware were going to announce a partnership at a press conference in San Francisco later today. Thanks to VMware mistakenly posting its announcement early, we didn’t have to wait for the afternoon to know what the two companies will announce.
In what is surely a play to get more enterprises to move to AWS over its… Read More
Los Angeles is famous for two things: entertainment and traffic. Back in the 1950s, any association with “stars” and “cars” would be the envy of any modern city. But today, that’s sometimes overshadowed by images of aggressive paparazzi and gridlocked freeways. But when it comes to transportation, there might be more to LA than just bloated commute times. Read More
Hyperloop One is getting even cozier with its partners in the United Arab Emirates. The futuristic transportation system that aims to ship things and people faster than a speeding plane just pulled in $50 million in strategic investment led by DP World Group of Dubai, bringing up the total raised to $160 million. DP World Group is the third-largest ports operator in the world and has… Read More
A number of Evernote users are now being alerted via email message of a serious bug that may cause data loss in certain versions of the company’s Mac application. Not all Evernote Mac users were affected by this bug, however, but those who received the email will need to update their Mac app immediately in order to protect themselves from experiencing the issue. According to the email… Read More
Samsung is on the ropes. It pains me to say it but the Note 7 fiasco is probably going to hurt them more deeply than they’ll admit and I suspect we’ll see two or three quarters of slow growth thanks to Explode-gate. It’s bad. Consider the damage done to the brand. Pilots were telling users not to turn on their Note 7 phones as they taxied for takeoff. A total recall is now… Read More
If you know the name BlueParrott (assume you’re not just conflating two other similarly focused companies), it’s probably for their budget office headsets. Sure, the company has branched out into other categories (if you make headsets, you’re going to make earbuds at some point, that’s just how it works), but office telecommunication hardware is the company’s… Read More
Mateusz Mach and Piotr Polański wanted to create an app to send jokey hand signs to each other. They created little animated figures that signed “I love you” or “I see you” and sent them to each other. They got 56 downloads and were about to give up when an occupational therapist named Cindy Chen asked them to modify the app for the deaf. Ten thousand users and $150,000… Read More
TechCrunch is pleased to bring you Disney Accelerator’s Demo Day today, October 13th, from 2:30pm – 3:50pm PT. This marks the first time that Disney has run its accelerator fully in-house without relying on Techstars, the outside partner that helped it get the program off the ground in 2014. Unlike previous batches, participants span from seed- or very early-stage companies… Read More
Vine has a new feature for iOS app users called Soundboard, which lets users incorporate viral sounds within their own Vines, including Vine-sourced classics like ‘why you always lyin’ – it’s basically an express remix feature for trying to give your own content some reflected glow from memes that already made it big. The Soundboard comes in at the portion of the… Read More
Facebook wants you to lean back and watch its News Feed videos on your television with a new feature that lets you stream clips via Apple TV, AirPlay devices, Google Chromecast, and Google Cast devices. The move could help Facebook generate more video ad revenue, and increase usage time by giving people the richest possible viewing experience while at home. The feature is now available on iOS… Read More
It’s happening! The 10th annual Crunchies Awards show is coming and will be held at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House on February 6th, 2017. This is the tenth show and we’re determined to make it the best one yet, with a renewed focus on the startup community that we cover day in and day out.
We did a few things differently last year and they were a huge success. Read More
It’s not uncommon to feel a bit helpless at the end of a news binge. Oftentimes, the news leans toward the negative side and doesn’t offer much in the way of a solution. But Speakable, a startup founded by Jordan Hewson, wants to give people the opportunity to do something at the exact time and place that they feel called to take action. The year-old startup today introduced the… Read More
It’s been a good week for Science, a five-year-old, L.A.-based startup studio that’s known for both funding nascent startups and incubating them, including FameBit, a three-year-old outfit that helps marketers connect with digital influencers and which sold on Wednesday to Google.
Science was the majority owner. FameBit was the firm’s third exit of the year… Read More
Samsung is hoping to keep its customers with incentives, including a $100 credit for Note 7 owners who stick with a Samsung device as their replacement hardware. But carriers are leaving the door open for buyers to pick whatever kind of smartphone they want instead. A new survey conducted by e-commerce agency Branding Brand suggests that a decent number may end up moving to other brands,… Read More
Periscope is embracing professional streaming and expanding beyond amateur content shot on phones with its new Periscope Producer feature. It allows creators to generate a special URL that they can then stream to from a wide array of devices, including professional cameras, studio editing rigs, satellite trucks, desktop streaming software like OBS, games, VR headsets, drones and later,… Read More
When the Nokia Ozo launched late last year, it was clear that the virtual reality camera didn’t have everything figured out. The key, according to Nokia’s Head of Presence Capture Guido Voltolina, was just getting the camera out there. Since then the team at Ozo has been consistently upgrading the feature set of the camera through firmware and software updates, and now the… Read More
