Call of Duty: WWII is one of the most anticipated titles of the year; after three years of jet-packing the franchise returns to its roots of boots-on-the-ground action. On the heels of the CWL Champs tournament (congratulations, Optic Gaming!), Activision and Sledgehammer have announced that the private beta for CoD: WWII will go live on August 25, and have concurrently released a trailer for… Read More
Chris Lattner, one of the key creators behind the Apple programming language Swift, is on the move again. After a short six-month stay at Tesla, which he joined last year from Apple to act as VP of Autopilot Software, Lattner announced on Twitter today that his next stop is Google Brain. Read More
Amazon’s AWS cloud computing service hosted its annual NY Summit today and it used the event to launch a new service: Amazon Macie. The idea behind Macie is to use machine learning to help businesses protect their sensitive data in the cloud. Read More
London-based Tail is a new fintech startup that offers a glimpse into the promise of Open Banking. This is seeing upcoming legislation in the EU and U.K. force banks to offer third-party developer access to your bank account data — with your permission, of course. Read More
A subset of smart locks made by Lockstate have been bricked after an update. The smart lock vendor is part of Airbnb’s Host Assist program, and integrates with the accommodation rental platform so, for instance, hosts can automatically generate and email one-time codes for their guests to use during check-in. Read More
SpaceX has successfully launched yet another rocket, this one carrying a Dragon capsule loaded with over 6,400 pounds of cargo destined for the International Space Station. That makes an even dozen for ISS resupply missions launched by SpaceX under contract to NASA, and this is the most significant thus far in terms of potential scientific impact.
CRS-12’s payload was over 75 percent… Read More
Facebook is rolling out a “Trending News” section on mobile that includes its own link in the app’s main navigation. This follows the company’s earlier announcement this spring of a redesign for Trending Topics, an increasingly important part of Facebook’s social network, where it tracks the news stories that are buzzing across its service. That redesign is… Read More
SpaceX is launching a Dragon spacecraft using a Falcon 9 rocket on Monday, with a launch window set for 12:31 PM EDT (9:31 PM PDT). The mission is CRS-12, the twelfth commercial resupply mission conducted by SpaceX, which is set to deliver a payload of over 6,400 pounds of supplies and experimental support materials to the International Space Station. The launch’s payload includes a… Read More
MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) wants to ensure your streaming video experience stays smooth. A research team led by MIT professor Mohammad Alizadeh has developed an artificial intelligence (dubbed ‘Pensieve’) that can select the best algorithms for ensuring video streams both without interruption, and at the best possible playback quality.… Read More
On Wednesday night ABC will be airing the CMA Music Festival, Nashville’s paean to the boot-scootin’, honky-tonkin’, hoedown throw-down music that the Grand Ole Opry helped build. As part of the celebrations, some of country music’s rising and established stars are going to be streaming in 360 video on YouTube — airing select songs from their performance as if… Read More
Attention nonprofits and NGOs! Apply to showcase in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt SF on Wednesday, September 20th. Applications are open from now till August 21st. Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Denis Pombriant, Keith Teare, Frank Radice, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Sunday, August 13, 2017. The battle for the center screen — Facebook Watch, Disney v Netflix, Twitter turns the tables on cable news. 2 weeks ago: G3: Care Bares recorded Thursday, July 27, 2017 with Mary Hodder, Elisa Camahort Page, Maria Ogneva, Francine Hardaway, and… Read More
Didier Hilhorst is a director of design at Uber. In this episode, he shares how his graduate degree in economics helped mold him as a designer and, in turn, shape how he and his team redesigned Uber from the ground up. It’s not every day economics and design overlap with one another. But for Didier, they do. He explains how elements usually not thought of as a design tool, such as price,… Read More
Serverless applications are all the rage right now — and some companies are even leapfrogging containers to go all-in on services like AWS Lambda and Azure Functions. Unsurprisingly, these services are now spawning their own startup ecosystems. IOpipe, coming out of beta today, is an application operations platform (with a current focus on monitoring) for AWS’s pioneering Lambda… Read More
Poncho, the betaworks-backed weather service, has raised $2.4 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed Ventures. Poncho launched out of betaworks the same year as Giphy and Dots, and uses SMS and email to bring the news to you in an entertaining way. The premise is simple. Instead of having users seek out their own information via weather apps and being bombarded with numbers like… Read More
The DeLorean name is iconic thanks largely to Back to the Future, in which one of the original automaker’s cars was turned into a time machine by ‘Doc’ Emmett Brown. Now, the original DeLorean founder’s nephew is working on making flying cars a reality, with his own aerospace company. Paul DeLorean’s DeLorean aerospace isn’t actually aiming to exactly… Read More
Amazon is getting out of the DVD rental business with the closure of Lovefilm, the so-called “Netflix of Europe” that Amazon bought in 2011 for a reported $312 million valuation. The company, which operates in the U.K. and Germany, is a subscription service that lets consumers rent DVDs that are sent out by mail – similar to Netflix’s original business model before… Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017 is less than a month away at Pier 48 in San Francisco. This year’s lineup includes a stellar group of speakers, including Pinterest’s Ben Silbermann, Golden State Warriors superstar forward (and also investor) Kevin Durant, Forerunner Venture’s Kirsten Green and Udacity co-founder Sebastian Thrun. Read More
Microsoft today announced the launch of two new Azure regions in Australia. These two new regions will complement Microsoft’s existing two regions on the continent and bring the total number of global Azure regions to 42. The plan is for these new regions to go online in the first half of 2018. Microsoft specifically notes that these two new regions will be certified to run both… Read More
K9 Ventures, a nine-year-old, seed-stage venture firm that has become renowned in Silicon Valley circles for working closely with budding startups at the paper napkin stage, has closed its third fund with $42 million. The firm’s founder and its sole general partner, Manu Kumar — a serial entrepreneur with a PhD in computer science from Stanford — tends to invest less than… Read More
