Tumblr this week quietly announced plans to roll out a new advertising program across its site which will see it implementing ads across users’ blogs. The company did not provide specific details on how the program will operate, but it appears to be an expansion of its earlier Creatrs program, which connects brands with Tumblr users directly, instead of having advertisers work with… Read More
The Department of Motor Vehicles is one of the most notorious ways to waste your life away. Density could help ease this pain. Today, Density is launching its people-counting sensor for measuring how many people are inside a space at any given time. The company is also announcing a $4 million Series A round led by Upfront Ventures Managing Partner Mark Suster with participation from Ludlow… Read More
Microsoft Pix is looking to become your new go-to camera app on iPhone. The new iOS offering from Microsoft’s mobile team employs some artificial intelligence smarts to help make sure you take the best pictures, by eliminating human error through batch captures and by enhancing image color, exposure and other variables that can make the difference between drab and dramatic for your… Read More
During the second quarter of 2016, smartphone shipments saw a modest return to growth after a first quarter which saw the first ever year-over-year decline in worldwide smartphone sales, according to research firm Canalys. But sequentially, shipments didn’t improve, and historical data reveals that the year-ago quarter was also relatively disappointing, all of which points to this return… Read More
Today Big Health, which is already backed by Index Ventures, is disclosing that it has raised $12 million (£9.15m) in new funding led by Octopus Ventures. Also participating are Kaiser Permanente Ventures, Index, Sean Duffy (CEO, Omada Health), and JamJar Investments (the UK-based investment fund of the innocent drinks founders). Noteworthy is that Esther Dyson, and Peter Read are also… Read More
Daimler isn’t about to let Tesla own any more ‘firsts’ in electric transportation; the German company revealed the Mercedes-Benz Urban eTruck today in Stuttgart, an all-electric truck with a total admissible weight capacity of 26 tonnes (29 U.S. tons), which makes it the first clean energy big rig of its kind.
As the name implies, it’s designed for use in urban… Read More
Upthere isn’t your parents’ personal cloud storage service. The team behind the service, which is coming out of beta today with $77 million in financing from a slew of investors, believes that the cloud should be your primary storage and not just a place for keeping backups or helping you sync data between machines. Upthere wants you to think of its service as the canonical… Read More
Xiaomi dropped a surprise today when it outed its first laptop — perhaps predictably a cheap rival to Apple’s Macbook — at an event in Beijing, but it also made a more routine reveal: the Redmi Pro. Read More
It’s finally here folks, Nintendo’s quarterly earnings day has never been so anticipated. But the Pokémon phenomenon hasn’t translated into success for the games giant, which carded a $49 million loss (5.13 billion yen) for Q1 2016. Revenue came in at $587 million (62 billion yen), 30 percent lower than Q1 2105. Read More
PSA Group — the carmaker behind brands Peugeot, Citroën and DS — has acquired a majority stake in European auto-repair marketplace Autobutler. Read More
Chinese smartphone and smart device maker Xiaomi just announced its first laptop — and boy does it look familiar to products belonging to a company that begins with the letter ‘A’. Read More
With Pokémon Go, delays are inevitable it seems. The game’s much-hyped launch in Japan was subject to cancelations last week, many people across Asia still don’t have the title — including China — and now it seems that the even Pokémon Plus, a wearable that accompanies the smash hit game, has had its arrival date pushed back. Read More
Israeli startup Zeek, whose app lets you buy and sell unwanted store gift vouchers, has closed $9.5 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Scale-Up Venture Capital, with participation from long list of additional investors, some of which contributed to the company’s Series A early last year. They include Blumberg Capital, Qualcomm Incorporated (via its venture investment… Read More
Stefan Etienne tries out a very real meaty veggie burger, Hailo sells 60% of company to Daimler, eHarmony CEO steps down, Solar Impulse completes record flight around the world on only solar electricity, and Mobileye and Tesla will be going separate ways. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
The quantum leaps in productivity created by the car, train, ship and plane have dramatically changed our lives and movements. But today, we’re at the forefront of a new revolution in mobility, from on-demand ride-sharing and navigation, to car ownership and autonomous connected vehicles. And like most industries in which software is eating the world, Israeli innovation is playing an… Read More
TechCrunch is pleased to bring you TechCode‘s Demo Day today, Tuesday July 26th from Mountain View, California. TechCode’s U.S. accelerator program focuses on artificial intelligence and hardware startups that already have a prototype. The goal is to help expedite commercialization for these startups by introducing them to partners and investors. TechCode also provides supply… Read More
We can’t all be botanists, unfortunately, but most of us do have smartphones, and that may be a start. A computer vision system built by Microsoft Research Asia can identify thousands of species of flowers with nothing but a picture. Read More
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) issued a preliminary report on the fatal crash involving a 2015 Tesla Model S and a 2014 Freightliner Cascadia truck in Williston, Florida in May. Unfortunately, the report yields no major new insights. The report confirms that the driver of the Tesla was going 74 miles per hour just prior to the crash, and on a highway where the speed limit was… Read More
Apple’s third quarter results came out today. They’re pretty good! Or, at least, not bad — and good enough to keep investors happy. Very happy, actually: the stock jumped more than 7%, recovering pretty much all of the value it lost when it reported a complete whiff of a second quarter. It’s no monster crash or jump like Twitter regularly experiences, but 7% is enough… Read More
