The summer in Northern Europe may have been a bit hit and miss so far this year but no one had cause to complain of being chilly inside a packed Glashaus yesterday evening at TechCrunch’s 2016 Berlin Meet Up + Pitch-Off… Read More
Technology alone is not the answer, but the promise of blockchain could act as an enabler for a decentralized global identity database, where the people owned their own identity and no single government or corporation could assert sovereignty. Read More
Pokémon Go is already a phenomenon that has captured the attention of millions and added billions to Nintendo’s market cap, but it is limited to a handful of countries. There’s good news for wannabe players, then, with word that it will expand globally rapidly. Read More
PureLifi, the University of Edinburgh spin out that is developing what it calls ‘LiFi’ technology, an alternative to Wi-Fi that uses modulating LED light as a way of sending data from one LiFi-equipped device to another, has raised just over £7 million in Series B funding. Leading the round is Singapore’s state-owned investment firm Temasek, while the startup says the new… Read More
Fresh from a positive listing in New York on Thursday, messaging company Line saw its share jump as high as 50 percent after it listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in its native Japan. Read More
For early- to mid-stage B2B software and SaaS companies, selling in to the enterprise is hard. Getting enterprise customers to pay for your solution on a repeated and long-term basis without seeing your sales growth stall out? That’s really hard. Welcome to the challenging world of enterprise sales. Many factors are in play, including competitive challenges, timing issues and product… Read More
Nest’s new outdoor cameras are released, Amazon acquires Cloud9, Nintendo is relaunching the NES, technology executives come out against Donald Trump in an open letter, T-Mobile’s latest deal is unlimited data for Pokemon Go. All this on Crunch Report! Read More
One year ago today, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto and forever changed how we think about this frozen world. After more than nine years and three billion miles of traveling through the solar system, New Horizons swung by Pluto and its moons on July 14th, 2015. Although the spacecraft was moving at over 30,000 mph, it managed to capture images and data that revolutionized… Read More
The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation has called out Tesla CEO Elon Musk to answer some questions about the company’s Autopilot technology, and what the Silicon Valley automaker is doing to educate drivers about it. Sen. John Thune, chairman for the committee, issued the letter today seeking a response from Musk and Tesla no later than July 29th. The inquiry… Read More
The accelerator’s demo day has grown so big we’re now live streaming it on TechCrunch. But it was just a couple years ago that the only pure biotech accelerator launched out of SOS Ventures. Many accelerators and venture firms have started to take a keen interest in the space since then, but Indiebio is still the one many look to in the industry for weird and interesting ideas like… Read More
The “middle-out” algorithm that has its roots in the most infamous (and probably funniest) scene in HBO’s “Silicon Valley” may have been fictional, but something like it can be found in Lepton, a cool new lossless image compressor created by Dropbox. Read More
How far can the Pokémon brand carry Pokémon Go? Will its popularity fade after that initial burst of activity thanks to the power of its brand? That’s a huge question that’s circulating now that the game has immediately popped to the top of the App Store and has cemented itself as one of the most successful game launches of all time. The mechanics of the game are fundamentally… Read More
Greg Reichow, who in May left his post as Tesla’s vice president of production (and reportedly as one of its highest-paid executives), has joined Eclipse Ventures as an investor.
If the Eclipse brand isn’t entirely familiar, it may be soon, given its growing star power. Venture geeks might recall that Eclipse was originally part of Formation 8, a firm that has since… Read More
Did you know nowadays there are more people who dislike their jobs than like them? While there was once a time where the vast majority of Americans were happy with their current job, now anywhere from 50 to 70 percent of employees are dissatisfied with their current position. Combine that statistic with the fact that more than 90 percent of millennials expect to switch jobs every three years… Read More
The Tesla Model X that crashed in Pennsylvania on July 1 had autopilot disabled at the time, Elon Musk announced on Twitter. This info comes straight from the vehicle’s own logs. Read More
Zoom.ai wants to give managers and others in enterprise a gift that has a very high value in business: Time. Company founder Roy Pereira told me at Montreal’ Startupfest that while tools are making us more productive, we’re also expected to handle more, and that’s causing a growing problem his startup hopes to address with AI.
The startup, just six months old, is part of… Read More
You’ve heard of turning water into wine, but Alec Lee and his founding team of bioengineers have taken to their San Francisco laboratory to turn molecules into wine. “We create the wine without any grapes, yeast or any kind of fermentation,” Lee, the founder of Ava Winery, told TechCrunch. Ava does this by analyzing molecular profiles of select wines and reconstructing them… Read More
Analyzing activity from nearly 300,000 users, we found that tvOS apps retained poorly compared to their phone- or tablet-based sister apps. We concluded that any updates to tvOS must focus on solving this retention problem if tvOS is to be a success. At WWDC, Apple announced changes to the way tvOS works and integrates with other Apple products. Will these changes solve the tvOS retention issue? Read More
Atlassian today announced that it has acquired StatusPage, a Y Combinator-incubated service that allows online businesses to keep their users updated about the status of their online services. The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. This marks Atlassian’s first acquisition since going public last December. Adding a service like StatusPage, which launched three… Read More
Pretty much every PR agency under the sun has had a meeting this week trying to determine how they can get a slice of the Pokemon GO popularity, and, to be fair, so has every newsroom. But now it’s time for T-Mobile to bask in the sunshine with its contribution to the media lightning storm. T-Mobile announced today that as a part of its “T-Mobile Tuesdays” promotion… Read More
