President Trump’s Twitter account was deactivated on Thursday for 11 minutes at the hands of a rogue employee on their last day at the company. While many cheered the attempt at halting the controversial tweets, others expressed concern at the lack of control Twitter had over its own service. Read More
Unubo, a new U.K. startup soft-launched a couple of months ago, is pretty meta: a software-as-a-Service to help you track the cost of SaaS and other subscription-based products or services you are signed up to. Read More
Amazon is pulling the plug on Fresh, its grocery delivery service, in parts of nine states throughout the country, Recode reports. So, if you live in certain parts of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and California, you’re out of luck. Read More
Niantic, the company behind the hit mobile game Pokémon Go and its predecessor, Ingress, announced today it has acquired the team from the startup Evertoon to help it further build out its mobile products. Deal terms were not disclosed, but from how it’s described, the move seems to be more of an acqui-hire focused on gaining access to talent, rather than Evertoon’s IP. Launched… Read More
Twitter today published a new version of its rules, in an effort to further clarify its policies about abuse, spam, self-harm and other topics, as well as to better explain how it determines the appropriate action – like suspending an abuser’s account, for example. The company says the updated documentation doesn’t represent changes to the “fundamentals” of its… Read More
Did WhatsApp go down for you earlier today? You weren’t alone. The Facebook-owned messaging service experienced a roughly hour-long global outage on Friday, which led to difficulties in accessing the app and sending messages to friends. While no online service is immune to the occasional hiccup, this outage was notable for its global scale which impacted WhatsApp’s sizable user… Read More
Going from food delivery to data integration might seem like an unlikely progression for a startup team, but it was a natural fit for Hevo Data’s founders. Manish Jethani and Sourabh Agarwal previously launched SpoonJoy, an on-demand restaurant delivery app in India. The challenges they encountered while analyzing data in order to improve SpoonJoy’s service inspired them to create… Read More
Want to exercise more, but lack motivation? An app called Lazy Jar, aimed at Fitbit owners, may be able to help. The app actually penalizes you a monetary amount if you fail to meet the fitness goals you’ve set for yourself, in terms of metrics like steps per week, miles walked, or calories burned, for example.
The idea that some people may need a little bit of an extra push to start… Read More
As Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, gears up to report its quarterly earnings next week, it looks like the company is making some moves to beef up its primary business line, advertising. TechCrunch has learned that the company has acquired Metamarkets, an ad tech startup that provides programmatic ad data-related services to marketers, such as a data dashboard to measure how campaigns… Read More
I’ll be rolling through Oman next week for a conference and I thought it would be fun to see what the region has to offer. I’m holding one of my patented MicroMeetups in Muscat, Oman on Thursday November 9th from 3pm to 6:30pm. We will meet at the Sheraton Oman. There is no RSVP list so just show up! You can also apply to pitch on stage. If you do not receive an email that you… Read More
Snapchat’s mobile app fell out of the top 10 for the first time this year during Q3 2017, according to a recent report from Sensor Tower. The app, which had been ranked at #8 during Q2 2017 dropped to #18 on iOS during the quarter, but remained ranked at #2 on Google Play. Combined, that gave the app an overall ranking of #5 for the quarter, the report noted. Sensor Tower’s data… Read More
Facebook Questions first launched in 2010 as a Quora wannabe before shifting into lighter-weight polls, but Facebook shut down the feature in 2012. Apparently it was just ahead of its time, as Facebook went poll-crazy this year. Now the social network is launching Facebook Polls, with the options of using photos or GIFs as answers. Polls are coming to people and Pages today. Read More
Kat Kinkead and Peter Weijmarshausen met at their old company, Shapeways. Weijmarshausen recently stepped down as CEO and was looking for something cool to do when he and Kinkead realized that the most popular application of 3D scanning and printing was in 3D figurines. These tiny action-figure-like representations were wildly popular print subjects back at Shapeways but they were… Read More
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was a treat due to the huge news cycle we followed. So, Katie Roof and I — Alex Wilhelm — brought David Golden into the studio to help us carve through it all. Golden is a managing partner at Revolution Ventures, an investing shop… Read More
Apple’s blockbuster Q4 pushed the company’s valuation to $900 billion, but it also saw the firm return to growth in key market China following a challenging past couple of years.
Analysts already reported that Apple saw shipment growth in China during the last quarter with a 41 percent increase, but now the company’s latest financial report confirmed that revenue was up, too. Read More
Fintech startup N26 is announcing yet another international expansion move. The company plans to launch its bank of the future in the U.K. at some point during the first half of 2018.
As N26 already has a German banking license, the company can also operate in the U.K. Without getting a separate license. British customers will get an account in GBP, a debit card and personal account… Read More
Adobe and Microsoft expanded their continuing partnership today when they announced that they are making it easy to share data between Adobe Experience Manager, a website marketing tool and Dynamics 365, Microsoft’s CRM tool.
For a sales person that means seeing the latest sales activity and customer interactions from the company website right in the customer record. From a customer… Read More
Small business has long been held as a key driver of the global economy, but these businesses often don’t have access to large multinational companies who could use their services. Hoping to change that paradigm, is Globality, a startup founded by Joel Hyatt, the former founder of the low-cost law firm Hyatt Legal Services, which has just raised $35 million in new financing. With the… Read More
BMW Group, Daimler, Ford Motor Company, and the Volkswagen Group (with subsidiaries Audi and Porsche) will join up to create a high-power charging network for electric vehicles called “Ionity,” which will build and operate around 400 charging stations across Europe by 2020. The collaborative venture formed by the automakers is intended to make it easier for Europeans to manage… Read More
Two weeks after announcing $164 million in funding, mapping data startup Mapbox has made its first acquisition. The company has acquired MapData, a artificial intelligence mapping startup based out of Minsk in Belarus that focuses on building neural networks to improve computer vision for applications like augmented reality. It will be using the deal spearhead the opening of a new office in… Read More
