Studying for med school is tough. What if it was more Pixar-like? Sketchy, a visual learning platform, takes complex material that a med student might need to memorize for an exam, and puts the information in an illustrated scene. For example, it uses a countryside kingdom to explain the coronavirus, or a salmon dinner to […]
Amazon in September announced it was bringing video calling support to its Fire TV platform. Today, the company says two-way video calling is now available with its Fire TV Cube devices (2nd gen.). The new feature will allow customers to pair a third-party webcam with their Fire TV Cube in order to make and receive […]
Trump’s crusade against a key internet law known as Section 230 tends to pop up in unlikely places. His Twitter feed on Thanksgiving, for one. Or at times you’d think the nation would be hearing from its leader on the matter at hand: a worsening pandemic that’s killed nearly 270,000 people in the United States. […]
Twitter said Wednesday that accounts protected with a hardware security key can now log in from their iPhone or Android device. The social media giant rolled out support for hardware security keys in 2018, allowing users to add a physical security barrier to their accounts in place of other two-factor authentication options, like a text […]
Amount, a new service that helps traditional banks compete in a digital world, has raised $81 million from none other than Goldman Sachs as it looks to help legacy fintech players compete with their more nimble digital counterparts. The company, which spun out from the startup lending company Avant in January of this year, has […]
2020 was a tough year for all of us, but a strong one for books (how often do you get to say that?). Sales are up, driven by lockdowns, boredom, and the need for escape. Yet, 2020 also felt like a watershed year for media in general, a time when we started to deeply question the value of real-time communications driven by fear.
Discovery is the latest media company to launch a standalone streaming service — and the latest to adopt the simple naming strategy of just adding a plus sign — with discovery+, set to launch in the United States on January 4, 2021. While Discovery doesn’t have the name recognition of (say) Disney/Disney+, it’s pitching the […]
For much of its existence, Salesforce was a cloud service on its own with its own cloud resources available for its customers, but as the company and cloud computing in general has evolved, Salesforce has moved some of its workloads to other clouds like AWS, Azure and Google. Now, it wants to allow customers to […]
Amid the pandemic, workplace cultures have been turned on their heads. Meanwhile investment and growth haven’t slowed for many tech companies, requiring them to still onboard new engineering managers even while best practices for remote management are far from codified. Because of remote work habit shifts, plenty of new tools have popped up to help […]
Given the attention that TechCrunch pays to Y Combinator’s Demo Days, we also try to keep tabs on the same startups as they scale and raise more capital. Yesterday we covered YC Winter 2020 participant BuildBuddy, for example. Today we’re taking a look at Heru, a startup based in Mexico City that is announcing a […]
Fylamynt, a new service that helps businesses automate their cloud workflows, today announced both the official launch of its platform as well as a $6.5 million seed round. The funding round was led by Google’s AI-focused Gradient Ventures fund. Mango Capital and Point72 Ventures also participated. At first glance, the idea behind Fylamynt may sound […]
The 2021 Ford Mustang Mach-E features a giant touchscreen, and at the bottom is a sizable knob for volume control. I love it. There, stuck on a touchscreen, is a physical knob. Twist it! Spin it! There’s even a resounding click as it twists. The knob works so much better than a touchscreen slider bar, and […]
The European Union said today that it wants to work with US counterparts on a common approach to tech governance — including pushing to standardize rules for applications of technologies like AI and pushing big tech to be more responsible for what their platforms amplify. EU lawmakers are anticipating rebooted transatlantic relations under the incoming […]
YouTube today is launching three new features designed to improve its “Premieres” experience, including trailers, themes and live stream “pre-shows” that later redirect to the main event. Premieres, which first arrived in 2018, are designed to give creators the ability to leverage the revenue-generation possibilities that come with live videos without having to actually “go […]
Walmart+, the retailer’s lower-cost alternative to Amazon Prime offering same-day delivery of groceries and other items, is making its service more appealing with today’s launch of a new perk. The company says that starting on Friday, December 4, it will remove the $35 shipping minimum on orders from Walmart .com for its members. However, this […]
A mere two weeks remain until we kick off TC Sessions: Space (December 16 & 17), our first conference focused on the technology designed to push galactic boundaries and the people making it happen. Building successful space programs, whether private, public or hybrid combination, requires a well-trained workforce — today and for generations to come. […]
With a pandemic raging across many parts of the world, many companies have customer service agents spread out as well, creating a workforce management nightmare. It wasn’t easy to manage and route requests when CSAs were in one place, it’s even harder with many working from home. To help answer that problem Salesforce is developing […]
Orbit, a startup that is building tools to help organizations build communities around their proprietary and open-source products, today announced that it has raised a $4 million seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Martin Casado. A number of angel investors, including Chris Aniszczyk, Jason Warner and Magnus Hillestad, as well as the a16z’s Cultural Leadership […]
Wellory, a startup that bills itself as taking an “anti-diet approach” to nutrition and wellness, is announcing that it has raised $4.2 million in funding. The round was led by Story Ventures, with participation from Harlem Capital, Tinder co-founders Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, Ground Up Ventures, NBA player Wayne Ellington, Hannah Bronfman and others. […]
