Twitter, a platform infested with trolls, hate and abuse, can be one of the worst places on the internet. As a followup to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s tweetstorm last week, in which he promised to crack down on hate and abuse by implementing more aggressive rules, Twitter is gearing up to roll out some updates in the coming weeks, Wired reported earlier today. Read More
The football ticket is about to go paperless. As part of a multi-year contract extension between The National Football League and Ticketmaster, the ticketing giant has said it will be selling the NFL “the first open architecture, fully digital ticketing system in sports.” Ticketmaster will also continue to run the NFL’s resale marketplace, the NFL Ticket Exchange, which will… Read More
Expect to see plenty of censorship news coming out of China over the next week. The country’s National Congress is a hugely influential political summit that takes place every five years, and includes the selection of central party leadership. It is also a time when Chinese censors are on high alert, particularly when it comes to online media. Read More
Semantic Scholar, an effort to index scientific literature using natural language processing and other AI methods, has added tens of millions of papers to its trove, expanding from computer science into biomedical studies. It’s a good opportunity for people in more fields to try this useful tool. Read More
If you’re still poking around Pokémon GO, there’s a good chance you’ve caught most of what’s available by now. Good news! It seems Niantic is getting really, really close to adding Gen 3 (or “Hoenn”) Pokémon to the game. Some of them, at least. Read More
Prenetics, a genetic testing startup, plans to expand into more Asian countries after raising a $40 million Series B led by Beyond Ventures and Alibaba Hong Kong Entrepreneurs Fund. Read More
An identity is a difficult thing to lose. I found this out the hard way when my passport was stolen while backpacking through Asia and Africa earlier this year. The bureaucratic process to get a new passport gave me a glimpse at how broken our system of identity management is today. Fortunately, technology is on the cusp of a major paradigm shift in the field of identity. Read More
Less than a week after being suspended from his gig as the head of Amazon Studios, Roy Price has officially stepped down from his role, TechCrunch has learned. The resignation came after producer Isa Hackett told The Hollywood Reporter that she was subject to “shocking and surreal” sexual harassment by Price. Read More
Sharing your current location with someone is a great way to passive-aggressively explain that you’re on your way when they ask where you are. But it also has other uses, and WhatsApp has now joined rivals Facebook Messenger and iMessage in offering the feature (with its own somewhat unique twist). Read More
More than 3,000 skilled tech workers have now signed on to help a nonprofit called Tech for Campaigns that injects tech talent into the campaigns of centrist and liberal candidates who need advice and tools to better make use of Facebook and Twitter, craft individualized emails for segmented voters and more. We talked recently with co-founder Jessica Alter. Read More
Media mogul and IAC chairman Barry Diller had some choice words for venture capitalists when he took the stage at WSJ D.Live in Laguna Beach on Tuesday. “These valuations don’t bear reality,” said Diller, speaking about the high multiples that some startups are generating. “They’re truly made up.” Read More
Between the release of Windows 10 Fall Creators Edition and the announcement of a new Surface Book, today’s Microsoft news was firmly focused on the desktop. But as the company works to build its future ecosystem, it’s keenly aware that no play in the space is complete without a mobile strategy. What shape that strategy will take, however, has been pretty unclear in the wake of… Read More
Mixed reality slash augmented reality startup Magic Leap announced today that it raised a $502 million Series D round led by Temasek with participation from EDBI, Grupo Globo, Janus Henderson, Alibaba Group, Fidelity Management and others. Just last week, a Delaware filing confirmed that Magic Leap authorized up to $1 billion in new shares. Read More
Hard to believe that TechCrunch’s first Startup Battlefield Australia is just one month away. The Sydney event on November 16 at ATP’s Locomotive Workshop will present a tremendous day of programming and an epic competition to find early-stage best startups across Australia and New Zealand. TechCrunch and our partner, Elevacao, are very pleased to announce the agenda for the big day. Read More
Government civilian and military agencies had a 90-day deadline to review and assess their cybersecurity status and propose improvements.
Eight deadlines related to this have come and gone, and more are approaching. Why the sluggish performance? Read More
Robots increasingly have to interact with ordinary (that is to say, human-focused) objects and environments, and part of that is imitating the extremely delicate and complex human grip. A new type of electronic skin allows a robot to feel not just the pressure from its grip, but whether and in what direction an object is sliding or slipping. Read More
Alphabet-owned Sidewalk Labs, the Google parent’s company focused on smart city technologies, will build a “mixed-use, complete community in Toronto on its eastern waterfront, with the aim of building a livable space from the ground up using innovations in construction techniques, self-driving, climate friendly energy systems and more to build a community that’s affordable… Read More
A recent Amazon patent could be an answer to range anxiety, albeit one that sounds a bit more sci-fi than practical solution at the moment: the newly granted patent (via Roadshow) describes a drone that could carry a battery charge for electric cars, and deliver them to any cars out on the road that need them while in route, providing enough juice to get to a proper charging station.… Read More
Facebook’s Regina Dugan, who led the company’s secretive Building 8 hardware lab, is leaving the company after just 18 months in the role. Dugan detailed in a Facebook post that she would be leaving to focus on “building and leading a new endeavor.” She will be staying in her position until “early next year” to help the team transition into 2018. Read More
Intel has formally unveiled its Nervana Neural Network Processor family of chips designed for machine learning use cases. The technology underlying the chips is heavily tied to Nervana Systems, a deep learning hardware startup Intel acquired. Intel’s NNP chips nix standard cache hierarchy and use software to manage on-chip memory to achieve faster training times for deep learning models. Read More
