We’ve just wrapped up Startup Battlefield MENA in Beirut, Lebanon. Throughout the day, 15 companies pitched their ideas, demonstrated their technology and answered questions. We took the feedback from all our expert judges and chose five teams to compete in the finals. Then after another round of pitches and Q&A, …
Connie Loizos Contributor More posts by this contributor Divvy, an interesting new fractional home ownership startup, just raised a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz Forerunner Ventures just closed a $360 million fund, tripling the size of its last effort Yesterday, a Saudi news outlet broke the news that …
In 2015 Switzerland was fucked. This blunt belief, grunted out by Apple’s Jony Ive and repeated by the media as a death knell for the watch industry, seemed to define a sad truth: that the Swiss watch was dead and Apple pulled the trigger. Now, three years and four Apple …
Tesla plans to speed up construction of a factory in Shanghai as tariffs, shipping costs and missed incentives continue to drive up the price of the company’s electric vehicles and dampen demand. Trade tensions between the U.S. and China have led to 40% tariffs on Tesla vehicles compared to 15% …
A judge today denied Lime’s request for a temporary restraining order that would block Skip and Scoot from deploying their electric scooters in San Francisco on Monday. This means San Franciscans will be able to use electric scooter services again first thing next week. Following the SFMTA’s decision to grant …
How’s this for eyebrow-raising? In London, for the last year and a half, a team of lawyers, cryptographers, software engineers, and/or former military consultants have been brewing a bizarre and/or brilliant plan for a bridge between the blockchain and the real world — a system whose success is directly proportional …
Google is about to have its Cambridge Analytica moment. A security bug allowed third-party developers to access Google+ user profile data since 2015 until Google discovered it in March, but decided not to inform users. When a user gave permission to an app to access their public profile data, the …
Brr… Winter is here. The overnight temperature plunged into the 30s a few times last week. This seems a bit early to me. Usually, it doesn’t get this cold in Portland until December. The weather is strange this year. It’s been a lot drier than usual. The crisp sunny days …
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg may yet regret underestimating a UK parliamentary committee that’s been investigating the democracy-denting impact of online disinformation for the best part of this year — and whose repeat requests for facetime he’s just as repeatedly snubbed. In the latest high gear change, reported in yesterday’s Observer, the …
Hard to believe, but Startup Battlefield MENA is just over a week away. We’ve got some of the top founders and investors in the region speaking, including Magnus Olsson of Careem, Imad Kreidieh of Ogero, Mai Medhat of Eventtus, Konstantinos Papamiltiadis of Facebook and Henri Asseily of Leap Ventures, and …
The Internet is of course amazing if you want to send messages across borders. But different languages can still put a wrinkle in your conversational flow, even with all the handy translation apps also on tap to help turn zut alors into shucks! So Microsoft -owned SwiftKey is probably still …
You may recall my tale of woe from last year when I recounted how I was locked out of my Google account for a month. It was a tough time, made all the more frustrating because there wasn’t any customer support to contact. That is changing for Google One users …
Happy Valentine’s Day! In honor of this special day, I’ll take a break from personal finance and share some stories instead. Life isn’t all about money, right? Well, I hope you aren’t suckered into spending hundreds of dollars on Valentine’s Day. Save it for next weekend, everything will be much …
The tech scene in São Paulo is an absolute delight, and we’re honored to have seen such an amazing turnout at the Startup Battlefield Latin America. In case you missed it, we’ve put together a little recap of the event below. Editor’s Note: We will embed videos from the event …
We cared about Cambridge Analytica because it could have helped elect Trump. We ignored LocationSmart because even the though the company was selling and exposing the real-time GPS coordinates of our phones, it was never clear exactly if or how that data was misused. This idea, that privacy issues are …
Human action requires motivation, but what exactly are those motivations? Donating money to a charity might be motivated by altruism, and yet, only 1% of donations are anonymous. Donors don’t just want to be altruistic, they also want credit for that altruism plus badges to signal to others about their …
Amazon, one of the world’s largest companies, has transformed the face of commerce in part because it has managed at once to be “The Everything Store” but still with a route into its sea of products that, for most users, surfaces what they might most want to see (and importantly …
Ben Plomion Contributor Ben Plomion is the chief image scientist of GumGum. By now, most of us have a general idea of what a neural network is, at least insomuch as its role in enabling the “machine learning” part of what’s considered AI today. Also known as deep learning, neural …
App maker turned music social network Smule has raised another $20 million. The latest round follows a $54 million raise in May of last year, led by Tencent, intent on helping the company expand Asia operations. This time out, funding is arriving via Times Bridge, the VC wing of India …
Diversity and inclusion is a topic that all too often starts and ends with white women. MotherCoders, while targeting women, aims to support moms of all backgrounds — whether they be LGBTQ, single and/or people of color. “If you look at our cohorts, they tend to be really represented,” MotherCoders …
Stephen Hawking<a href=”https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/13/stephen-hawking-has-died-at-76/”> passed away earlier this year at the age of 76, but his incredible intellect isn’t yet done contributing to the scientific community. The acclaimed physicist’s final paper is now online for anyone to read and it revisits some mysteries of the physical world that came to define …
Google’s last major piece of hardware for the year is finally shipping this week. A number of pre-orders have already begun receiving shipping notifications for the Pixel Slate, and the company just popped up a blog post noting that the device will officially be available at retail starting this Thursday …
iPad magic pro#iPad #magic #mac #apple #iphone #magician #gadget #ガジェット #マジック #手品 #art #表参道 #Tokyo #iPadpro pic.twitter.com/DdfNupZhQE — Shinya Uchida(内田伸哉) (@shinyamagician) November 7, 2018 TechCrunch editor Matthew Panzarino’s more conventional iPad Pro review is a must-read if you’re thinking of forking out for the device — tricks not included. Review: …
Until autonomous vehicles are here, ride-hailing companies like Lyft and Uber have to attract and retain human drivers if they hope to sustain their businesses. Lyft announced Thursday a half dozen new driver-friendly features, from default tipping and in-trip tipping to ways to protect their ratings and an events planner. …
In April, TechCrunch broke the news that some of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook messages were deleted from recipients’ inboxes in what some saw as a violation of user trust. Then, Facebook suddenly announced that it would actually build this Unsend functionality for everyone. Then six months went by without a peep …
The high-profile failure of a normally reliable Soyuz rocket during a crewed mission to the International Space Station earlier this week spooked the space community in more ways than one, but NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said he expects to launch a new crew in December via Soyuz anyway. Speaking to …
Facebook has removed 82 pages, groups and accounts for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” that originated out of Iran. The social networking giant discovered the “inauthentic behavior” late last week, according to a blog post by the company’s cybersecurity policy chief Nathaniel Gleicher. He said the operation relied on posing as U.S. and U.K. citizens, …
The team behind mileage-tracking app MileIQ, a company Microsoft acquired a few years ago, is out with a new application. This time, the focus isn’t on tracking miles, but rather expenses. The new app, simply called “Spend,” arrived on the App Store on Thursday, offering automatic expense tracking for work …
Stripe, the fast-growing payments startup that is now worth over $9 billion, is working on a new product to help it fill out some of the gaps in its product suite as it bids to become the go-to financial services partner to startups and other businesses. It has been testing …
Netflix and The Roald Dahl Story Company announced today that they’ve signed a deal for the streaming service to create a slate of animated “event series” based on a long list of titles by the classic children’s author, including “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Matilda” and “The BFG.” All of …
