Southwest Airlines has confirmed with TechCrunch that a flight from Louisville to Baltimore was evacuated while still at the gate after a device began to emit smoke. “All customers and crew deplaned safely via the main cabin door,” a representative explained. “Customers will be accommodated on other Southwest flights to their final destinations.” No passengers were… Read More
With online video exploding as the fastest medium for digital content, publishers are struggling to find ways to take advantage of their own libraries and keep more of their audience on their sites.
Right now audiences are being siphoned by Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat, costing publishers hundreds of thousands of dollars on the millions of page views generated by the content they own.
As… Read More
Happy Twitter-versary (for the nth time around), Jack Dorsey. Things haven’t been going well, it seems, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel — Twitter may be acquired by someone somewhere in the tech (or entertainment) industry, perhaps. To be perfectly fair, the company Dorsey inherited from his predecessor(s), including an array of former product leads as well as CEO… Read More
Get ready for furry surfers: MIT engineers have created “fur-like, rubbery pelts” that mimic the insulating behaviours exhibited by beavers. The new design could pave the way for more effective wetsuits, which can insulate human bodies in cold water, but also quickly dry off for time spent up in the air. The concept of a warm, dry wetsuit is a surfer’s perfect dream… Read More
It’s time to call it: the mobile wars are over. The mobile market was once vibrant and variegated, a virtual coral reef of odd devices aimed at specific users. There was phone with a 3D camera! There was one with weird version of Android that catered to the security-conscious! There was one with a bigger, removable battery and another made up of small parts that you could put together. As… Read More
With Flow, Built.io has long offered an integration tool that allowed technical users (think IT admins and developers) to create complex, multi-step integrations with the help of an easy to use drag-and-drop interface. Now, however, the company has also launched a more basic version of Flow that is aimed at business users who want to create IFTTT-like integrations between applications like… Read More
Metamorphic Ventures, a six-year-old, New York-based seed-stage fund, is officially taking the wraps off a $50 million fund — its third. The firm is also rebranding itself simply as Compound. (One-word names seem to be a growing trend; you might recall that Pejman Mar Ventures is now simply Pear.) The name change is a nod to the way that the firm sees itself — as an element that… Read More
Things have changed a lot in the four and a half years since Pebble first took to Kickstarter to help fund its first device. Apple’s entered the space, Samsung has released about 200 different devices and Google has attempted to create some semblance of consistency among dozens of new players — all while fitness wearable manufacturers have continued to blur the lines of what an… Read More
Google’s celebrating another milestone in its self-driving car project – a 2 million milestone, in fact. The search giant’s autonomous test cars have now racked up that many miles in public road testing, which it notes adds up to about 300 years of human driving based on the average person’s yearly total.
What’s interesting about the volume of miles Google has… Read More
Today’s Blue Origin flight was a unique one. Upon testing their rocket’s in-flight escape system (a means of bringing passengers to safety if something were to happen during launch), Jeff Bezos’ rocket company ended up with a safely recovered crew capsule and an unexpectedly-intact New Shepard rocket. The company had considerably downplayed the odds of successfully… Read More
Fenox Venture Capital has put plans for its India focused fund on hold after a recently-appointed general partner who was hired to lead that fund, Venktesh Shukla, hastily departed the firm. TechCrunch reached out to Shukla and Fenox partners for information about the abrupt change to its senior investing team. Shukla did not offer much detail, but in an email to TechCrunch said, “I… Read More
It’s a classic Twitter conversation: Someone complains about a bad experience with a company, then the business responds, promising to make things better. But is that actually an effective use of the company’s time? It is, according to a new study conducted by Twitter in collaboration with Applied Marketing Science. Specifically, Twitter says that when a customer tweets at a… Read More
I’m in Sao Paolo for a few days and I’d love to meet with some startups this Friday afternoon/evening, October 7. I have nothing in mind just yet – I need your help to find a spot and decide on a time – but I’d be happy to hear pitches and talk about what you all are working on down here.
I’m staying at the Hotel Tryp Nações Unidas but I’m open to… Read More
During pregnancy, soon to be first-time parents will often devour manuals like “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” to get clued into all the changes taking place in mom’s body along with details on the baby’s development. But after the baby arrives, it’s often fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants time with 3 AM Google searches and teary phone calls to mom,… Read More
Known as an “Airbnb for dogs,” Santa Monica-based DogVacay has spent almost five years building up a robust dog-sitting business. Betting that owners were looking for better solutions for boarding their pets, DogVacay created a platform that made it easier to find and book affordable care. From overnight stays to dog walking, DogVacay offers a range of services in regions… Read More
It’s been just over a year since Adobe launched its Adobe Stock photography service, with deep integration into the company’s Creative Cloud suite. Today, it expands the number of photos available with the EyeEm Collection, a hand-picked selection of the best images EyeEm’s customers have shared and offered for sale on the platform. Read More
Yahoo issued a statement this morning on Tuesday’s report that the company built a custom software tool to allow U.S. intelligence agencies to scan incoming email for all Yahoo users for certain selectors, calling the report “misleading” but not outright false.
“The article is misleading. We narrowly interpret every government request for user data to minimize disclosure. Read More
There are, of course, lots of smartlocks in the world. August, Ring, Kwikset. The list, as you’re likely well aware goes on and on. Designed by a pair of former Google Glass engineers, the forthcoming Gate aims to set itself apart from the ever-growing ranks of connected security devices by cramming as much functionality into the face as humanly possible. The little circular security… Read More
Skylanders, Amiibo, Disney Infinity – the toys-to-life category got big, fast, but most of the action in the space following Skylanders tended to be mostly derivative, without really pushing the category forward when it comes to the breadth of available technologies. Lightseekers, a new cross-platform action RPG game debuting on Kickstarter today that incorporates physical toys created… Read More
I’ve recently seen a few examples of services that ask customers to type in their online banking usernames and passwords so the service can access their bank accounts on their behalf. The applications are fairly broad and definitely useful — making payments, ID verification and analyzing data, for example. This is a security anti-pattern. This is bad news. Read More
