Apple CEO Tim Cook is optimistic about the progress of human rights across the globe, despite the fact that things seem to be growing more bleak by the minute. In an interview with the Independent, Cook explained history gives him hope that humanity is moving in the right direction: I think that history sort of ebbs and flows at time, but the arc always goes in a certain direction. And I… Read More
Here in Seattle, we are proposing to convert Interstate-5 between Seattle and Vancouver, over a number of years, into an autonomous vehicle-only highway. Seattle and Vancouver are vibrant cities, but the transportation between them is tedious and impedes valuable economic partnerships. Read More
Box has vast amounts of content in its stores, and as it begins to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to make it easier to surface, it also wants to expose each piece of content and how it relates to other content and users. To help achieve that, the company announced the Box Graph today at BoxWorks. “The Box Graph enables customers to predictively recommend content… Read More
The California Department of Motor Vehicles is changing its rules to allow companies to test autonomous vehicles without a driver behind the wheel — and to let the public use autonomous vehicles. The DMV released a revised version of its regulations and has started a 15-day public comment period, ending October 25, 2017. California law requires the DMV to work on regulations to cover… Read More
Box CEO Aaron Levie has always had a vision for the company that extended well beyond its earliest use case as way to transfer files between machines online. His company has continually kept looking to the future at ways the Box toolset could adapt to the changing needs of the market. More than a decade after launching the company and almost three years after going public, the company continues… Read More
Today, TechCrunch is down in San Jose, Calif. for the Oculus Connect 4 keynote, where Facebook’s troublesome VR company is expected to maybe introduce some new products and definitely wax poetic on the future of VR and why they’re sure it’s not dead.
This is year #4 for the conference and it’s the only one so far that hasn’t preceded an imminent hardware release. Read More
Top streaming media device maker Roku announced in September it was launching its own channel featuring free movies and TV shows, including those it licensed itself and those aggregated from other channels across its platform. However, the channel was not immediately available to all Roku customers, as it was a phased rollout. That rollout has now completed, the company says this morning.… Read More
The phone number is probably one of the most important identifying numbers in your life — it’s how people reach out and get in touch with you outside of Facebook, Google, and whatnot. But the landline phone number, especially for small businesses, has basically gone nowhere in years. That’s where NumberAI and Tasso Roumeliotis’ team come in. The company launched to… Read More
At the very beginning, there were 15 startups coming from all around Africa. After an incredibly fierce competition in Nairobi, Kenya, here are the winners of TechCrunch’s first ever Startup Battlefield Africa. Startups participating in the Startup Battlefield have all been hand-picked to participate in our highly competitive startup competition. They all presented in front of… Read More
Glu Mobile, the gaming company responsible for hits like Kim Kardashian: Hollywood and bombs like Nicki Minaj: Empire is at it again with The Swift Life, an app that’s all about the one and only Taylor Swift. The app, which doesn’t seem to be quite as game-focused as other celebrity titles in Glu’s portfolio, won’t go live until “late 2017,” according to… Read More
Mobile shopping is on the rise, with U.S. consumers now spending nearly 50 minutes in shopping apps per month, or 10 hours per year, according to a new report out this morning from App Annie. Digital-first shopping apps, like those from Amazon, Etsy, Wish and others, are also growing more quickly in terms of total sessions and monthly usage, compared to shopping apps from traditional… Read More
They say porn adopts new technologies first and PornHub [NSFW], a site that is as NSFW as it sounds, is proving that old adage true. The site – which receives 80 million visitors a day – found that its old, antiquated methods of tagging videos by hand was not sufficient. Rather than hire someone to go through the hundreds of thousands of videos and tag them by hand, the team at… Read More
MioTech, a financial tech startup with offices in Hong Kong and Shanghai, has raised $7 million in Series A funding to develop artificial intelligence based software for investment managers. The round was led by Horizons Ventures, the private investment arm of Hong Kong business tycoon Li Ka-shing, with participation from returning investor Zhenfund. Read More
Mattel’s been taking great pains to update its product lines for a plugged-in generation of kids. Last month, the toy maker teamed up with Osmo for an iPad-ready update to its popular Hot Wheels line, and now the company is enlisting the help of another tech startup, Dash Robots. The pair’s first collaboration is Kamigami, a robotics platform that lets kids build their own… Read More
Amazon today announced a new way for teens to shop its site independently of their parents’ accounts and place their own orders, which parents can choose to review before allowing the purchase. Teens can also be assigned pre-set spending limits per order as an alternative to having orders reviewed. The new service, available via amazon.com/forteens, is meant to give teenagers ages 13… Read More
Cloud Foundry, the open-source platform as a service (PaaS) offering, has become somewhat of a de facto standard in the enterprise for building and managing applications in the cloud or in their own data centers. The project, which is supported by the Linux Foundation, is announcing a number of updates at its annual European user conference this week. Read More
We had some minor heart palpitations the other week when Amazon skipped the Kindle during a deluge of product announcements. But have no fear, the company insists that it’s still committed to its hardware roots — the Kindle oversight was due to the fact that the “event was focused on Alexa.” Read More
eShares wants to be the platform for all things equity.
From cap table management to secondary transactions, eShares’ software helps businesses like Slack, Flexport and Funding Circle keep tabs on their shares.
The startup is raising a $42 million Series C, led by Menlo Ventures and Social Capital. Matt Murphy from Menlo Ventures and Arjun Sethi from Social Capital will be joining the… Read More
The U.S. Department of Justice’s deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, gave a speech on encryption yesterday and boy was it a snoozer. It’s almost as if all those decades of crypto wars never happened. Read More
When we last saw Zenefits, the company essentially handed off one of its initial core selling points — insurance brokerage — to partners. Since that rebrand rolled out, Zenefits seems to be following the sort of drip-drip-drip of updates that many startups trying to create a sort of “home” for a core employee experience utilize. That continues today with the launch… Read More
