TechCrunch

Falcon Heavy launch is set for November, i.am+ acquires Wink and Stitch Fix has confidentially filed for an IPO. All this on Cruch Report. Read More

 The Tesla Model 3 is unique in a lot of ways, but one of the more interesting is its use of your smartphone as the only key – there’s not fob, even, let alone an ignition for a traditional key. The vehicle uses the Tesla app on your smartphone to communicate your identity, unlock the vehicle, and know when it’s ready to start and turn off. The Model 3 uses Bluetooth LE to talk… Read More

 The Tesla Model 3 was delivered to its first 30 customers at a special event for employees at Tesla’s Fremont factory on Friday night. Here’s a look at some images of a few of those initial production vehicles, both outside the car and from within, from the perspective of the surprisingly spacious backseat. Read More

 Tesla revealed more about its brand-new Model 3 than it ever has before just in time for the first deliveries to customers. We know the details of pricing and available options, as well as a bit about how Tesla plans to scale to an annual run rate of 500,000 vehicles produced per year, hopefully by the end of 2018. “The major challenge we faced with the Model 3 is not really the… Read More

 The Tesla Model 3 is now a known quantity – we have information about the different kit options available at launch, as well as interior and exterior measurements, and car performance and cabin comforts. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that the whole point was to make car that is “the best car, hands down,” for “anything close to the same cost,” and it makes a strong… Read More

 Ahead of Tesla’s Model 3 handover event, I got to drive one – a black version with the Premium Upgrade Package. Not for long mind you: I drove it around Tesla’s Fremont factory in an extended loop on city streets, but I still got to test its mettle on some relatively long, unbroken stretches of road, push the accelerator and throw it around corners. Again, this is just… Read More

 Founders Fund just lost one of its founders. Luke Nosek, known for starting PayPal with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Ken Howery, is off to start something new. Known as a member of the “PayPal Mafia,” Nosek has stayed in contact with Musk as a director of SpaceX, the space exploration company. As Axios first reported, he’s launching an investment firm called… Read More

 T-Mobile and Sprint have been in merger talks for a long while now, but the latter may be attempting to jockey for position by allying itself with Charter and Comcast. Sprint would likely be selling a minority stake to the ISPs in exchange for providing access to its network infrastructure. Read More

 Earlier this week scientists stunned us with the announcement they’d genetically altered the first human embryos in the U.S. using CRISPR technology — but don’t hold your breath if you think the ability to make designer babies is right around the corner. Read More

 Dear Floyd Mayweather: While perusing Facebook, I chanced across your post drumming up interest in the upcoming Stox initial coin offering (ICO). I understand your motivations in wanting to diversify your portfolio of investments, but I caution that your actions are reckless and potentially financially damaging to you and your fans. Read More

 It was a great day for Redfin, the Seattle-based real estate site that finally went public after 13 years as a startup. After pricing higher than expected at $15 per share and raising $138 million, the stock soared 45 percent before closing the day $21.72. This gives Redfin a market cap of $1.73 billion, well above its last private round, which was about $770 million. Redfin raised over… Read More

 They say you can tell a real smile because it reaches the eyes. Of course, that just means we all have to learn to fake that kind of smile, too. But the subtle expressiveness of our eyeball area has a fringe benefit: VR researchers can use it to guess at what the rest of your face is doing. Read More

 In an unsurprising move by credit card thieves, police have found a new credit card skimmer that sends stolen data via SMS. By tearing apart cheap phones, crooks are able to send credit card information to their location instantly without having to access the skimmer physically or rely on an open Bluetooth connection. Brian Krebs received images of the skimmer from an unnamed source. They… Read More

 This was not the conversation iRobot CEO Colin Angle expected to have this week. In the past few days, iRobot posted excellent Q2 earnings, thanks to brisk Prime Day Roomba sales, and acquired its largest European distributor in a $141 million deal. Yet the CEO and the company he founded were suddenly at the center of home privacy concerns over a report that he was looking to sell Roomba… Read More

 Startups are dying all over the place as last year’s investment cool-off leads many to run out of cash. But Whisper refuses to race into the graveyard like fellow anonymous social apps Secret and Yik Yak. Read More

 Amazon and its enterprise cloud division AWS have been making a number of moves to expand the company as a platform to build and host games. One of the latest developments has been an acquisition: Amazon in the last quarter reportedly quietly acquired a company called GameSparks, a “backend as a service” for game developers to build various features like leaderboards into games,… Read More

 The political press ate it up, alternatively excoriating the program for costing too much in tax breaks and crowing a win for Wisconsin’s conservative governor, Scott Walker. I wouldn’t encourage either party to hold their breath. Gou is in the habit of promising big and rarely delivering. Four years ago business journals crowed about a plan to bring a Foxconn flat screen… Read More

 Voting is the free world’s Achilles heel and/or Trojan horse. Valid voters are suppressed. Vote audits are suppressed. Voter registration systems are hacked. And the worst-case scenario of all looms before us all like a monster in a horror movie: what if voting machines themselves are hacked, the “results” are faked and democracy is quietly cancelled without the general… Read More

 A new voice app from Life Bot wants to make it easier to use Amazon Alexa as a digital assistant, by aiding with your daily routines and learning your personal preferences. At launch, Life Bot’s Alexa app has a handful of tricks up its sleeve. But Life Bot’s longer-term ambition is to learn from its users, then be able to kick-off personalized workflows with a single voice command. Read More

 Alistair Goodman, CEO of mobile marketing company Placecast, said location data is the “next frontier” when it comes to ad measurement and verification. For example, Goodman pointed to a study by Factual and the Mobile Marketing Association that found that 40 percent of marketers are concerned about the quality of location data. He said there are a number of different… Read More