Apple has teamed up with Australian-based Cochlear to bring iPhone users the first made for iPhone Cochlear implant. Approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in June, Cochlear’s Nucleus 7 Sound Processor can now stream sound directly from a compatible iPhone, iPad or iPod touch to a patient’s surgically embedded sound processor. The device also allows those with the… Read More
After a beta that kicked off earlier in 2017, crowdsourced navigation app Waze is coming to Android Auto. The Google-owned Waze seemed like a shoe-in for gaining app support for Android’s native in-car mode, but it’s taken a while to bring it to Android Auto – but the months-long beta and the time show that Waze wanted to get the experience right for drivers. The Waze… Read More
When August Home raised its last big round nearly two and half years ago, the smart lock maker was targeting retail expansion. That’s still part of the plan for the company’s new $25 million Series C, but the real story of this latest round is increasing focus on its partnership program, August Access. The service has already made some headway in the rental market, counting… Read More
On the heels of announcing a fresh $70 million in funding led by Swedish investment firm Kinnevik AB, Betterment is launching a new messaging feature that will allow users to ask questions and get answers from its team of financial advisors. Read More
Things in the normally placid world of open source hardware are heating up as major figures in the Maker movement have begun speaking out against the current managing director of Arduino AG, Frederico Musto. The Italian engineer became a part owner in the company after buying out one of the original five founders and ultimately came to run Arduino AG, a holding company that owns the trademark… Read More
Nintendo is selling its new Switch console as fast as it can make them, with 1.97 million sold during the quarter ended in June, which the company just reported. The total Switch sales to date now stand at 4.7 million, which is very strong for under two quarters of market availability, and on track to eclipse total lifetime Wii U sales in perhaps under a year, especially if Nintendo has a… Read More
Jinn, the U.K. same-hour ‘shop on your behalf’ delivery app, has pulled out of all markets outside London, TechCrunch has learned. According to sources, the startup shut down operations in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds as of yesterday, whilst I understand the Spanish team may have been let go, too. Read More
Since 2010, Marqeta has quietly established itself as the underlying tech provider for businesses that are looking to issue virtual and physical debit and credit cards to employees, partners and customers alike. As it looks to expand internationally and sign up customers around the globe, the company has taken $25 million in strategic investment from payments heavyweight Visa. Read More
LinkedIn is giving businesses a new way to see what kinds of audiences they’re attracting with their marketing efforts. The Website Demographics tool allows businesses to break down their website visitors across eight categories including job title, industry, company and location. After all, that’s the kind of data that we’re all providing as LinkedIn users. To connect that… Read More
China’s Xiaomi, once the world’s highest valued tech startup, is getting over a disappointing two years with a notable spike in sales in its homeland during the second quarter of 2017. That’s according a new report from analyst firm Canalys, which estimates that Xiaomi, which was valued at $45 billion at the end of 2014, shipped 15 million phones during the quarter to… Read More
Hot on the heels of reports that Facebook is developing its own take on Amazon Echo, China’s Xiaomi has joined the tech company masses by jumping into the increasingly crowded smart speaker space.
The Mi AI Speaker is Xiaomi’s first take at rivaling the Echo, which has already inspired a product from Alibaba in China and counts offerings from Google and Apple among its… Read More
Consumer robot maker iRobot is to acquire its largest European distributor, Robopolis, in a cash deal worth $141 million. The company said it’s signed a definitive agreement to acquire the privately-held, French company, with the acquisition expected to close in October 2017. Read More
Cleo, the London-based fintech startup that offers an AI-powered chatbot to help you manage your finances, has closed £2 million in further funding, adding to an impressive list of backers that already includes Skype founder Niklas Zennström. The new round is led by LocalGlobe, the seed VC firm founded by father and son duo Robin and Saul Klein, with participation from a number of… Read More
Elon Musk’s Boring Company is getting closer to becoming a reality.
The businessman conceived the idea in December in response to the pain of clogged up roads and traffic jams, and it has begun to take shape thanks to work carried out this summer.
The basic idea is that underground tunnels can transport vehicles from A to B more quickly and efficiently than roads, with no time wasted… Read More
Having a baby and want to know if your hospital is particularly C-section happy? Yelp aims to make that process a bit easier with the addition of a new maternity care rate feature. Expectant mothers have been able to get similar information about the maternity care of a particular hospital from state websites already but the information is often hard to find. Yelp, which rolled the feature… Read More
Tencent, Asia’s highest-valued tech company, has continued to invest in India after it backed online education service BYJU’s. The startup that includes the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Sequoia among its investors. The size of the investment has not been disclosed, but a source close to the deal told TechCrunch that it values BYJU’s around the $800 million mark. Tencent… Read More
Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg might not be able to agree about much when it comes to AI these days, but the pair do seem to see the same potential in Vicarious, a startup applying unsupervised learning techniques to robots. Musk and Zuckerberg were two of the early backers of Vicarious. The startup announced that it raised an additional $50 million in financing this morning (via… Read More
Facebook is apparently working on its own smart speaker and has acquired digital rights management company Source3, SoftBank could bet billions on Uber, Duolingo raises $25 million and more. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Beijing-based Momenta announced this morning that it raised a $46 million Series B round led by NIO Capital, Sequoia Capital China and Hillhouse Capital. Momenta produces self-driving car software that applies deep learning to mapping, path planning and object recognition problems. Shunwei Capital, Sinovation Ventures, Unity Ventures and Daimler also participated in the round.
Quite a few U.S. Read More
As moviemaking becomes as much a science as an art, the moviemakers need to ever-better ways to gauge audience reactions. Did they enjoy it? How much… exactly? At minute 42? A system from Caltech and Disney Research uses a facial expression tracking neural network to learn and predict how members of the audience react, perhaps setting the stage for a new generation of Nielsen ratings. Read More
