The band OK Go is known for its insanely creative music videos. From scooters, to cars, to planes, to treadmills, these guys have perfected the art of unique choreography. But this time, the band is going for something a bit old school. In the new video for “Obsession”, OK Go has created a wall of 557 printers that are used as the backdrop for the band throughout the video. As… Read More
Amazon has been one of the strongest driving forces behind the surge of e-commerce holiday sales around Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and the rest of the days leading to the end of the new year. Now, some of its workers in Europe have picked one of the biggest shopping days of the year to protest the company’s practices, dubbing the day “Strike Friday” instead. Workers at… Read More
Ever wonder what Black Friday’s consumerist rush looks like in real time? Now you can see it visualized in the stream above, which is a visualization of sales occurring on Shopify’s platform across its many merchants globally. Those dots represent sales in actual merchant stores, and the lines indicate where the buyers are coming from relative to where the shops are based. As you… Read More
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week we assembled the full crew — Matthew Lynley, Katie Roof and Alex Wilhelm — along with Stephanie Palmeri from Uncork Capital. Palmeri has invested in Poshmark, Chariot, and ClassDojo, for context. Her investment in Poshmark made her a… Read More
Twitter is experimenting with a new feature that will show how many people are “talking about” individual, popular tweets. The metric shows up under some embedded tweets when they appear elsewhere on the web, and seems to replace both the retweet and replies totals with one, cumulative total. The new look for embeds as seen above is just a small experiment according to Dan Jackson,… Read More
Effectively, they want to fight radicalization by “mapping ideologies”, providing a compass to navigate belief systems and using cryptocurrency to reward contributors.
The UK-based new charitable foundation plans to create a platform which works by creating an infrastructure that allows members of an ideology to piece together the elements that best represent them on top of a… Read More
The UK’s digital minister has said the October 2016 data breach that Uber disclosed this week does affect UK users — though it’s still unclear how many are impacted at this stage. Read More
We here at TechCrunch love a good holiday sale as much as the next person — maybe even more. So, we’re jumping on the Black Friday bandwagon to offer an outstanding deal on Disrupt Berlin tickets. Today only, we’re going BOGO on Berlin. Yup, buy one general admission ticket to Disrupt Berlin today, and you’ll get a second general admission ticket for free. Read More
Fintech startup Revolut has reached a big milestone. The company now has over a million customers across Europe two years and a half after launch. The company says that customers have saved $160 million in foreign exchange fees compared to a traditional bank account (£120 million). The startup tries to match the interbank rates as much as possible and charges 0.5 percent on your transaction… Read More
The Moto Z is a phone built around a strong gimmick, but it’s a gimmick nonetheless. A little over a year after release, the company has added some interesting Mods to its selection, but none have offered an entirely compelling justification for the phone’s modular system. That certainly applies to the new Alexa Smart Speaker. Read More
Black Friday, the day after a quiet Thanksgiving Thursday, traditionally has been thought of as the start of the holiday sales season, but the rise of e-commerce in the last few years has changed all that, and the action kicked off with a loud bang on Thanksgiving itself. Adobe says that Thanksgiving online sales hit a record, whopping $2.87 billion, up 18.3 percent on a year ago and… Read More
Over in India, there are a handful of startups working to get the country’s billion-person population on bikes. One of them is Yulu, co-founded by Amit Gupta, who formerly co-founded profitable, billion-dollar startup InMobi. In the next three to four weeks, Yulu will launch its bike-sharing service in Bangalore with a few hundred bicycles. Yulu is starting with regular, dockless… Read More
The Tesla Semi, the automaker’s all-electric transport truck, will retail starting at $150,000 for a version with 300 miles of range, and will also be available in a $180,000 version with 500 miles of range. Interested parties can pre-order them with a base reservation price of $20,000 – or, if they want a “Founders Series,” they can get one for $200,000, with the… Read More
Welcome to Thanksgiving table talk circa 2017. It’s true that AI and machine learning are changing the world, and in a few years, it will be embedded in all of the technology in our lives. So maybe it makes sense to help folks at home better understand machine learning. After all, without deep knowledge of current tech, autonomous vehicles seem dangerous, Skynet is coming, and the… Read More
The lunch took place just after well-known tech investor Moshe Hogeg announced he would invest in every Israeli blockchain that approached him. That investor group, called Alignment, consisted of the Singulariteam Technology Group, together with CoinTree Capital, and BlockchainIL. Held at Alignment’s new blockchain Hub in Tel Aviv, we got to hear from an array of new companies. Dubbed… Read More
Lyft is seeking to raise an additional $500 million, over and above the $1 billion it raised in a round led by Alphabet venture arm CaptialG last month. The $500 million is an extension of that round, the company told Axios, and is not yet closed. But it should add to Lyft’s overall valuation once closed, bringing its post-many total to $11.5 billion. The round extension would allow Lyft… Read More
Another neat addition to end-to-end encrypted email client ProtonMail: It’s added a zero-access encrypted contacts manager that also digitally signs the contact info you store in it. Read More
Last month, Twitter started work on a new “save for later” feature for Tweets in your timeline that you wanted to flag to refer back to in the future. Now it’s given the feature a name — it will be called Bookmarks — and is running tests with it. The news was made public last night in a series of Tweets from Tina Koyama, a staff product designer at the company,… Read More
Tesla has managed to deliver something on time, even if it \’s falling behind its projections for the Model 3 electric car: It has completed production of a massive battery farm in South Australia, which is designed to capture and store energy produced by a wind farm and distribute it to the grid when it’s needed most, in an effort to curb frequent summer blackouts. The Tesla… Read More
Everyone loves drones, including companies with very specific needs. Drones once were the hot new thing and the perfect birthday gift. But drone makers are now realizing that there’s a bigger opportunity with commercial use cases, from farming to inspection. That’s why we’re excited to announce that three founders of three amazing companies in the drone industry will join us… Read More
