If the Russian-bought election interference ads hadn’t been bought by fraudulent accounts, “Most of them would be allowed to run” Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said this morning. “The responsibility of an open platform is to allow people to express themselves” she said during the first of an Axios interview series with Facebook execs.
“The thing about free… Read More
Last year the NBA launched a program where they streamed one regular-season game in virtual reality each week, all season long. Today they announced that they’re doing it again, starting with a free preview on October 21st when the Houston Rockets host the Dallas Mavericks. Just like last year, games were selected to give all 30 teams the opportunity to play in VR at least once. There are… Read More
BuffaloGrid, a London and New Delhi startup that recently picked up backing from LocalGlobe and Kima Ventures, offers something akin to mobile phone charging as a service in remote parts of the world that are either without electricity or where power supply is sporadic. Read More
Writing applications for large cloud-based platforms often means that you, as a developer, write your code, push it to a development environment in the cloud, test it, and then do it all over again as you iterate. And if some code that you have already deployed starts misbehaving, you can’t easily troubleshoot on your own machine either, of course. With CF Local, the Cloud Foundry… Read More
Twitter has blundered into yet another moderation crisis after it temporarily suspended the account of actress Rose McGowan as she was using its platform to speak out against sexual harassment of women in the wake of sexual abuse allegations coming out against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. Read More
Zenkit, the project management service from German software producer Axonic, has recently made a name for itself as an alternative to Trello and similar Kanban-style systems. Today, it’s expanding its service with the launch of a new task management feature that more closely resembles Wunderlist, the extremely popular to do list app that Microsoft acquired in 2015 and that it will… Read More
Token sales, also called ICOs, are the new normal when it comes to early stage cash. Originally envisioned as a way to create new and unique rails for payments, customer interaction, and peer-to-peer networking the token is now both an integral part of most companies and a great way to fund a great (or awful) idea. This year in Berlin we’ll be joined by Zoe Adamovicz of Neufund… Read More
One night in Larry Guterman’s freshman year, he was at a loud party in a gym — and ended up with what he says was “ferocious” ringing in his ears afterward. But trip after trip to an audiologist, he said, came up without helpful results even though his hearing seemed to be headed south. Then, one day, he said he picked up the iPhone and listened to the speakers.… Read More
As Box CEO Aaron Levie pointed out at his BoxWorks keynote this week, content management has been an evolving field since it came into being as an enterprise software concept in the 1990s. Back in those days, the state of the art was network drives. As content spread across the organization, we saw the rise of enterprise content management. Later file sharing tools developed and finally the… Read More
Disappointment for Uber today if it was hoping an apology and a personal visit from its new CEO would quickly reboot relations with the local transport regulator in London, which last month stripped the company of its license to operate. Read More
If you’re a budding entrepreneur and the VC you’re pitching switches gears and asks you about your exit strategy that’s your cue to get up and leave, says Apple CEO Tim Cook. Read More
Just as pre-teens in the 1990s were warned away from dialing 1-900 numbers, kids now need to learn how to navigate social media responsibly. Kudos, an app for kids aged eight to 13 with around-the-clock moderation, positions itself as a safe introduction to social media that also teaches its young users, some of whom were born before the first iPhone was released, how to be “good… Read More
On October 11, TechCrunch and Facebook hosted Startup Battlefield Africa in Nairobi, Kenya. The Startup Battlefield pitch-off competition featured startups from all over Africa in three categories: Productivity and Utility, Social Good, and Gaming and Entertainment. Top notch investors and founders served as judges to pick the winners in each category as well as an overall winner. We also had… Read More
Being able to buy a digital copy of a movie in a second through something like Google Play or iTunes or Amazon is great.
Keeping track of where you bought each movie, though, is pretty busted. When you’re buying based on where it’s cheapest or which device you’re currently watching on, it’s easy to end up with a bunch of movies sitting behind a bunch of different… Read More
The new $199 Oculus Go, the California DMV is changing rules for self-driving cars, Amazon’s new way to have your teens shopping and a new waterproof kindle from Amazon. All this on Crunch Report! Read More
After its Senate counterpart made clear that it had no intention of doing so, the House Intelligence Committee announced that it plans to publish the Russian-bought Facebook ads that the company provided as part of the committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
The news comes on the heels of a meeting between Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and the… Read More
Google is permanently axing all “top touch” functionality from its new Home Mini device after a nasty bug was documented yesterday that essentially recorded everything around the gadget and sent it to Google. These things happen! Either the company couldn’t be sure it could fix it or it couldn’t be sure people would trust that it did — so they made the choice to… Read More
This year marks the 10th anniversary of Mint’s win at the first ever TechCrunch Startup Battlefield competition (back then – lost in the mists of time – it was known as TechCrunch 40). But what is less known about founder Aaron Patzer is that he’s one of the pioneers of AI. Now based in the Southern Hemisphere, he’s coming to speak at Techcrunch Battlefield… Read More
FastPay has acquired AnchorOps in a deal that brings together two businesses focused on media financing. FastPay’s model revolves around lending money to digital media companies, helping them deal with cashflow issues as they wait to get paid by advertisers. AnchorOps, meanwhile, has built invoicing and payments software for those media companies. In the acquisition announcement, CEO… Read More
SpaceX successfully launched a Falcon 9 today, its 15th rocket launch of this year. The rocket took off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying a satellite with a dual-purpose mission for both EchoStar and SES. The rocket used on this flight included a first stage that was previously flown for a Space Station resupply mission in February, and then recovered and refurbished by SpaceX.… Read More
