Daimler and Bosch teamed up to bring autonomous driving tech to one of the more annoying parts of driving – finding and parking a vehicle. Their automated valet system is debuting today at the parking garage for the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany, making it easy for vehicles to simple drive up, leave their vehicle, and trust the system to negotiate the multi-story parking… Read More
Restaurant owners have a lot of responsibilities and a wide array of skills to handle those responsibilities. That said, building a website isn’t usually within that skill-set. That’s where BentoBox comes in. The company, which helps restaurant owners quickly build full-featured websites for their restaurants, has just closed a $4.8 million Series A funding round. The round was led… Read More
Nexar has released a dataset that it says is the world’s largest photo set featuring geographically diverse images for automotive tech development, for an open competition. There are 55,000 tagged photos in the set, taking from over 80 countries, in a variety of lighting and weather conditions. Each of the photos is taken from street level, using Nexar’s community-based V2V dashcam… Read More
Hinge Health, a startup originally founded out of London but that has since moved its headquarters to San Francisco, is on mission to “digitize the delivery of healthcare”. Beginning with musculoskeletal (MSK) disorders, the company is combining wearable sensors, an app, health coaching and peer support to remotely deliver physical therapy and behavioural health for chronic conditions. Read More
Freelance workers and consultants make up a third of the US workforce, but that figure is expected to approach 40 per cent according to some studies. And we know how big the overall gig economy is going to become. Thus, marketplaces which meet that need are going to continue to grow. Hence, this is probably why Expert360, an online marketplace to access and manage freelance consultant talent… Read More
Fairphone, the European mobile phone maker and social enterprise that has made it its mission is to build and sell fairer smartphone hardware, has announced it is ending support for its first handset, the Fairphone 1. Read More
Some consolidation is afoot in the world on health-focused online media properties. Today, WebMD, one of the biggest sites in the world for health-related information — announced that it would be acquired by Internet Brands — the company that is controlled by KKR and owns a large portfolio of B2B and B2C websites in verticals like automotive, health, home, travel and legal —… Read More
Currently large enterprises require large accounting teams to do what’s known as cash matching and credit collection. This is very manual stuff. Some of the ERP vendors (most notably SAP) have their own modules to do this, but in this world the big players are firms like Hanse Orga which is focused on Germany and the SAP ecosystem, and US players HighRadius and Billtrust. However, much… Read More
Microsoft has revealed that it is preparing to equip the second version of its HoloLens VR headset with its own AI processing capabilities to enable more features and services. The firm said that it is customizing the current processor within the headset with an AI coprocessor that will allow HoloLens to analyze data without needing to use the cloud. That means faster processing times, and… Read More
An airport transfer service which Uber offers in the Spanish capital Madrid has been referred by the city council to the country’s national antitrust watchdog, the CNMC, for review, Reuters reports. Read More
Less than a month after announcing plans to spin out its transportation and mobility business, Korean tech firm Kakao has inked deals to put hands-free systems inside cars from Korea’s second largest automotive firm Hyundai and its Kia affiliate.
Kakao is best known for operating Korea’s top messaging app, Kakao Talk, which is installed on over 95 percent of the country’s… Read More
Private equity giant KKR is said to be in acquisition talks with medical site WebMD, according to a report from Reuters on Sunday. Shares of WebMD ticked up slightly in after-hours trading after the report. Read More
How do you teach people to use an interface that’s invisible? That’s been the marketing communications problem for Apple since the day Siri became the first big mass-market voice assistant. Read More
Grab, the ride-hailing company competing with Uber in Southeast Asia, has pulled in $2 billion of new financing from existing investors Didi Chuxing, the company that defeated Uber in China, and SoftBank. Didi said the round could expand by $500 million more with input from other existing backers and new investors, too. A Grab representative confirmed that SoftBank’s Vision fund is not… Read More
TechCrunch is headed to Australia to find the most disruptive early stage startups poised to compete on a global stage. How? We are bringing TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield to Australia this year in partnership with ELEVACAO. Many are familiar with the many adventurous innovations — zorbing, bungee jumping, and jet boating to name a few — that have come out of the… Read More
“Do people still play Pokémon go?” It’s a question that pops up pretty much any time the game gets mentioned. The answer: yep! It’s rarely the sidewalk-filling, flash mob-inducing hype monster that it was for a few weeks after launch — and that’s probably better for everyone. But lots and lots of people do still play. Enough people that the game can still… Read More
Poland has worked diligently over the past decade to become an entrepreneurial powerhouse. Once home to businesses focused primarily on app design and outsourcing, social, societal, and economic pressures forced the country’s brightest to start building for themselves. And they did. I’ve covered Polish startups for almost a decade, first on TechCrunch and then on a new blog I… Read More
I want to talk about a relatively little-discussed aspect of the venture-capitalist sexual-harassment revelations that have rocked the Valley of late. In their wake, I have seen, first- and secondhand, men react with statements which can be collectively paraphrased as “Now I’m nervous about hiring women / investing in women / being alone in a room with a woman, what do I do?”… Read More
Two global tech forces are putting their mark — and money — into Southeast Asia’s nascent startup ecosystem, but they may not be the Western names that you expect. Rather than Google, Facebook or Microsoft, increasingly Chinese duo Alibaba and Tencent are the driving forces behind the importing of large sums of capital and vast business experience into Southeast… Read More
Just a quick bit of news for anyone paying attention to all the hubbub out of Pokémon Go Fest:
Legendary raids — the hardest form of the massive co-op battles that have players gather in the real world and team up to catch the game’s rarest Pokémon — will begin in the next 24-48 hours. The first Legendary Pokémon to show up in game will be Lugia.
Meanwhile, everyone who… Read More
