Spending too much time on your phone? Moment can help. The mobile application that’s designed – ironically – to help you battle your smartphone addiction, can now train you over the course of a couple of weeks to change your habits and spend less time staring at your tiny screen. Launching today, Moment’s latest release offers a “Phone Bootcamp” course… Read More
The hoverboard wars are all but over with casualties on either side. Swagways, Segaways, Wamboards, and Zoomers have all been relegated to the back of the garage and now that most of these things are recalled and new ones can’t be sold. There is a vacuum forming in the “dumb little Segways for your feet” category so enter the granddaddy of two-wheeled locomotion, Segway,… Read More
Everyone likes a good vibration — which is why recording artist Timbaland teamed up with SubPac, a Los Angeles-based startup that has created a wearable device set to redefine entertainment through new immersive physical-sound technology. Read More
Twitter and Bloomberg Media have announced today that they signed a deal to live stream three Bloomberg shows, as well as the network’s markets coverage. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. The shows included in the agreement are “Bloomberg West,” which broadcast technology news, “What’d You Miss?”, which delivers global financial news at the close of… Read More
Nobody has ever accused AWS of being too easy to use. While Amazon’s cloud computing platform is extremely powerful and launches feature updates on an almost daily basis, all of that power comes with a lot of complexity. Even if you only want to set up a basic WordPress install on a single machine, getting started with the AWS Management Console can be daunting. Cloud With… Read More
Applications are now open for student groups to attend Disrupt San Francisco at Pier 48 on Tuesday, September 13 or Wednesday, September 14th. The program is part of Include, TechCrunch’s diversity program aimed at facilitating opportunities for underrepresented groups in tech to gain better access to the startup scene. For the past several Disrupts, TC has worked informally with… Read More
Despite all the capital that venture firms have managed to raise in the first and second quarters of this year, VCs at an investor panel at Fortune’s Brainstorm conference this morning said that early-stage valuations are softening, reality is “setting in” for unicorn companies that are too richly valued to be acquired and too immature to go public, and that there’s… Read More
Pokémon Go used Google-incubated AR MMO Ingress as a functional model, but the same model doesn’t make sense when applied to Mario, Zelda or Animal Crossing. Investors are looking at Pokémon Go as a sign that Nintendo’s ready to unlock its mobile value, but the wrong move would be to assume a one-size-fits-all approach will be the best way to get there. Instead, it can look to… Read More
Amazon Prime Day has arrived – the sales holiday the internet lovingly dubbed last year as Amazon’s online garage sale, in reference to consumers’ disappointment with the deals’ quality. The company still broke sales records, despite complaints. This time around, Amazon is aiming to best last year’s deals with a good handful of price drops on Amazon devices… Read More
The last couple of decades haven’t been particularly kind to the Polaroid brand. The once mighty king of instant photography (which had a heck of a mid-to-late 70s) declared bankruptcy in 2001 and again in 2008. These days, the brand name is licensed out and mostly shows up third-party products of varying degrees of quality.
Polaroid Swing is certainly one of the more… Read More
Oculus says it has resolved its shipping delays to the point where new orders now ship in two to four business days, which is a considerable improvement to where things were at just a short while ago, if you’ve been paying attention. The reason things are improving is that the virtual reality company has finally caught up with the pre-order backlog incurred by its hardware, the Rift… Read More
Lots of startups want to reinvent email, and some, like Slack, occasionally manage to change the way we work. At the end of the day, though, email isn’t going away and company-wide collaboration tools only really work when everybody is on the same platform. RedKix, which is launching its private beta today, has raised $17 million in seed funding from a group of high-profile investors… Read More
Oculus is running its third developer conference for people interested in building VR experiences. Oculus Connect 3 is (you guessed it) the third annual developer conference hosted by the company, and it’s taking place in San Jose between October 5 and October 7.
The event typically contains some news relevant to both developers and end users, presented at one big keynote and ensuing… Read More
Microsoft announced this morning a new program aimed at expanding Surface’s footprint in the enterprise, dubbed “Surface as a Service.” The initiative will allow businesses to lease Surface devices, alongside subscriptions to Office 365 and Windows 10. The company says this will allow customers to benefit from access to the latest hardware as well as faster device refresh… Read More
Future Mobility is only four months old, but that isn’t stopping the auto startup from rolling out with its ambitious plans. Backed by Chinese Internet giant, Tencent, Future Mobility is aiming to sell premium electric cars by 2020 on a worldwide scale, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. The startup has already poached 50 engineers from the likes of Google, Tesla, Mercedes-Benz and… Read More
People with deafness have plenty of ways to navigate everyday situations as if they had no disability at all, but there are still situations that present dangers unique to them — not being able to hear a smoke alarm or gunshot, for instance. SoundSense is a small wearable device that listens for noises that might require immediate attention and alerts the user when it detects one. Read More
Pokémon Go isn’t reading your Gmail. The makers of the hot, new mobile game are fixing a bug that allowed the app to gain full access to users’ accounts, when they signed in using their Google account information. The company claims it didn’t mean to ask for such elevated permissions, and it will now correct this. The app had the power to access your Gmail, your Google… Read More
For those in need of substantial PC storage, spinning hard drives are still very much a reality. That’s changing, of course, though not quite as quickly as many upgraders are hoping. $700 will get you a 2TB solid state hard drive from the friendly folks at Samsung, and now you can double that storage at more than double the price. The company’s been offering up server-ready drives… Read More
Yesterday afternoon, before he took the stage at the Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference, we sat down with GV CEO Bill Maris in a billowing white tent on the campus of the Aspen Institute, where the conference is being held. We talked about how Brexit impacts GV’s European strategy. (You may recall it has an office in London.) We also asked Maris about some of GV’s… Read More
At TechCrunch’s upcoming Disrupt SF (Sept. 12-14), artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual/augmented reality (AR/VR) will be a big subject on the main stage as well as a featured presence on the exhibit floor, where TechCrunch will host a startup pavilion for each category. Because there are lots of very early stage startups in AI and VR/AR, we are offering five companies in each… Read More
