Today, the fine folks at the Webbys announced that TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, Equity, is the best of its kind in the technology category. We’re stoked! Alex Wilhelm, Natasha Mascarenhas and Danny Crichton sit down in front of their mics multiple times each week to regale dedicated listeners with news and analysis from the money part […]
There’s a lot of how-to guidance out there when it comes to starting a company, and much of it has reinforced certain beliefs, including that solo founders don’t get very far on their own, that the most successful founders attend a small circle of top schools and that the best companies are created by people […]
If the Instagram ads feel like they’re closing in and you can’t bring yourself to toggle your Zoom camera on these days, you’re far from alone. Well into 2021, many of the social apps and virtual chat tools that kept the world connected during the pandemic feel more exhausting than the real-life interactions they’re meant […]
At its I/O developer conference, Google today announced a slew of updates to its Firebase developer platform, which, as the company also announced, now powers over 3 million apps. There’s a number of major updates here, most of which center around improving existing tools like Firebase Remote Config and Firebase’s monitoring capabilities, but there are […]
At Google I/O today Google Cloud announced Vertex AI, a new managed machine learning platform that is meant to make it easier for developers to deploy and maintain their AI models. It’s a bit of an odd announcement at I/O, which tends to focus on mobile and web developers and doesn’t traditionally feature a lot […]
Things have been a bit quiet on the foldables front of late, but plenty of parties are still bullish about the form factor’s future. Ahead of today’s big I/O kickoff, Samsung (undoubtedly the most bullish of the bunch) posted a bunch of metrics this morning, noting: The global outlook is just as impressive. This year […]
Flutter, Google’s cross-platform UI toolkit for building mobile and desktop apps, is getting a small but important update at the company’s I/O conference today. Google also announced that Flutter now powers 200,000 apps in the Play Store alone, including popular apps from companies like WeChat, ByteDance, BMW, Grab and DiDi. Indeed, Google notes that one […]
At its I/O developer conference, Google today announced the first beta of the next version of its Android Studio IDE, Arctic Fox. For the most part, the idea here is to bring more of the tooling around building Android apps directly into the IDE. While there is a lot that’s new in Arctic Fox, maybe […]
Google is working on a video calling booth that uses 3D imagery on a 3D display to create a lifelike image of the people on both sides. While it’s still experimental, “Project Starline” builds on years of research and acquisitions, and could be the core of a more personal-feeling video meeting in the near future. […]
Google today announced it’s partnering with Shopify, giving the e-commerce platform’s more than 1.7 million merchants the ability to reach consumers through Google Search and its other services. The integration will allow merchants to sign up in just a few clicks to have their products appear across Google’s 1 billion “shopping journeys” that take place […]
Google is working with BMW and other automakers to develop a digital key that will let car owners lock, unlock and start a vehicle from their Android smartphone, the company announced Tuesday during its 2021 Google I/O developer event. The digital key is one many new features coming to Android 12, the latest version of […]
For years, Wear OS has been, at best, something of a dark horse among Google operating systems. It’s certainly not for lack of partnership or investment, but for whatever reason, the company has never really stuck the landing with its wearable operating system. It’s a category in which Apple has been utterly dominant for some […]
With a long-standing history of working together on the mobile side, it’s always been a bit of surprise that Samsung hasn’t had much patience for Google’s wearables play. The hardware giant had flirted with Android Wear in the past, but for the last several years, it’s been invested in building out its own version of […]
The one-dozenth version of Android has been something of an odd duck. The latest version of Google’s mobile operating was announced back in February, and a beta version is already available to developers. But up to now, we’ve known glancingly little about how the final version of Android 12 will actually look. Fittingly, the new […]
Google’s Android operating system is now running on 3 billion active devices, Google announced at its (virtual) I/O developer conference today. In a briefing before today’s event, the company also noted that there were 250 million active tablets running Android last year, which is likely a larger number than some expected, but which explains Google’s […]
Electric aviation startup Beta Technologies closed a $368 million Series A funding round on Tuesday, with investments from Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund. The new capital is the second round of funding announced by the company this year, after the company raised $143 million in private capital in March. The funding round was led by Fidelity […]
Commission-free trading app Stake, which is available in the U.K., Brazil and New Zealand, has raised $30 million from Tiger Global and partners of London-based DST Global to expand into Europe. Matt Leibowitz, founder and CEO of Stake said: “We’re really excited to get to this point but it’s just the start. We set out […]
Google announced a series of upgrades to its Google Photos service, used by more than a billion users, at today’s Google I/O developer event, which was virtually streamed this year due to COVID. The company is rolling out Locked Folders, new types of photo “Memories” for reminiscing over past events, as well as a new […]
