Poultry farms are focused on getting female eggs, but currently there’s no way for them to determine sex in a non-invasive way before going through the incubation process. EggXYt is tackling this problem through a gene-editing solution that allows chicken farms to detect the sex of an egg pre-incubation. The startup is launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield. Read More
Good news, Hulu subscribers with a Roku. (Or bad news, maybe, if you’re not a fan of Hulu’s big makeover.) The streaming service announced today its new Live TV service is now available on the Roku platform, including Roku streaming players, Roku Streaming Stick, and all Roku TV models.
Specifically, the list of supported devices includes the Stick, Express/Express+… Read More
Google’s big Pixel 2 event is coming up very soon – it’s set for October 4. The Pixel 2 XL has leaked, however, with pictures of both a black and a white color option, and the Pixel 2 XL name is apparently going to be the official one, too, according to a new report from Droid Life. The smartphone looks like the original, but with a sleeker rear two-tone look, with what… Read More
Every day spent with late stage cancer matters — that’s why it’s so important to get treatments right the first time. Unfortunately, despite having dozens of cancer treatments available, we don’t have great processes for determining what treatments to prioritize. The consequence of this is that we often miscalculate and waste critical time pursuing the wrong path.… Read More
At last year’s Disrupt NY, SeaDrone made it to the Battlefield finals with its simple, robust and affordable underwater drone. With a few customers and a year of feedback under their belts, the engineers behind the robo-sub are putting out a version 2.0 with a few improvements. Read More
This summer, Amazon debuted a new program that made it easier for those on government assistance programs to join Prime at a reduced cost. Today, rival Walmart is announcing a change that will benefit that same demographic of low income shoppers. The retailer says it will allow customers using EBT benefits to use its Online Grocery Pickup service to pay for their groceries with their… Read More
Sebastian Thrun is one of the godfathers of autonomous driving. More importantly, he has a puppy named Charlie, which he brought to TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017: We have very strong feelings about this puppy. Strong enough to completely derail a discussion about Matthew Panzarino’s thoughts on the iPhone 8, which is not the iPhone X and will likely be not as good. As a quick reminder, this… Read More
You might think you’re impervious to Facebook’s ads, but you probably do get seduced every once in a while. But because ads aren’t always permanently available anywhere, it can be impossible to find a Facebook ad that led somewhere you want to revisit. Now Facebook has a solution called Recent Ad Activity for when (if) you click an ad and want to see it again. Read More
Today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017, Warriors player Kevin Durant and his partner Rich Kleiman took the stage to tell the crowd about The Durant Company. While The Durant Company has made about 30 investments to date, Kleiman and Durant were hesitant to call it a VC firm. Instead they likened it to a private equity fund. Read More
There have been rumors for weeks about Google nearing the release of a smaller version of the Google Home. DroidLife just posted what it claims is the upcoming Google Home Mini. If true, the design speaks the same language of the Google Home. The little puck uses the same cloth covering found on larger version. Gone are the multi-colored lights, replaced by four soft-white lights on top of… Read More
Apple’s Vice President Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives Lisa Jackson has a lot to say about the Environmental Protection Agency. She served as the administrator of the EPA during Obama’s first term, and she now thinks Donald Trump’s administration is causing a great threat to the agency.
“The Environmental Protection Agency is, to me, an extension of the… Read More
With the launch of iOS 11 today from Apple, one of the most anticipated developments is the rush of new augmented reality apps that will be hitting the market, leveraging Apple’s new ARKit development platform. Houzz, the design and home renovation community, is among them, with a new version of View in My Room 3D, with a catalog of 500,000 images for people to view, move and install… Read More
Golden State Warriors small forward Kevin Durant had a bit of a scuffle on Twitter yesterday calling out his former organization, the Oklahoma City Thunder. Given his status as one of the most prominent figures in basketball, it got quite a bit of attention.
Durant is a pretty prolific Twitter user and was on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017 to give a short explanation of what happened. Read More
Organizations have raised more than $1.8 billion through initial coin offerings (ICO) since January 2017. For the first time, this June, Blockchain entrepreneurs raised more money through ICO than traditional venture capital investment. If you haven’t heard of ICOs, it’s the new fundraising phenomenon that has caught almost every investor’s attention. Read More
Agent AI is looking to automate more of the customer service process. To do that, it’s built its own customer relationship management product, as well as AI tools that sit on top — and now it’s making the CRM part available for free. While giant software businesses have been built around CRM, CEO Fred Hsu said the market has changed, with the software becoming less… Read More
Luno, a bitcoin wallet and exchange based out of Singapore, is riding the crypto wave into Europe after it closed a $9 million Series B round for market expansion. The funding was led by new investor Balderton Capital, with participation from existing backer Digital Currency Group. South Africa’s AlphaCode — also a new arrival on the cap table — joined the deal which… Read More
John Giannandrea from Google had many great things to say about artificial intelligence at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. In particular, he thinks that people are too scared about general purpose artificial intelligence. A few years ago, Giannandrea compared artificial intelligence to a 4-year-old child. Today, he revised his statement and said that it’s even worse than that.… Read More
Autonomous driving is often considered the brainchild of Sebastian Thrun, among a few other technologists, but Thrun is already looking to move on to the next mode of transportation — and he isn’t alone. At TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017, Thrun talked a lot about flying cars and how that was the future of transportation. So did GGV’s Jenny Lee. And so did Steve Jurvetson. Read More
In its latest Transparency report, which covers requests it’s received from governments pertaining to content on its platform, Twitter has reported a big decline in the proportion of pro-terrorism accounts being reported over the past six months, as well a drop in the number of accounts it removed for terrorism-related content during this period. Read More
