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
The UK government has announced a plan to require drone owners to register their devices. It says the incoming rules are aimed at ensuring safer use of the technology. Read More
A student at Monday’s TC Sessions: Robotics event in Cambridge asked me “How do I launch a successful startup?” I explained that I might not be the person at the show best equipped to answer, but I offered some simple advice nonetheless: find a problem that needs solving, address a need that already exists and don’t go offering solutions in search of problems. Oh, and get… Read More
If you’re wondering how Steven Spielberg will bring the dystopian, VR-heavy world of Ready Player One to life, you can get your first real glimpse in the trailer (technically, a teaser for San Diego Comic Con) above. The film is based on Ernest Cline’s novel — a book that’s been recommend to me many times as one of the best depictions of virtual reality and gaming… Read More
Heading into Niantic’s Pokémon Go Fest — a gathering of roughly 20,000 Pokémon Go players in Chicago’s Grant Park — everyone seemed to have the same concern: the weather reports said a thunder storm was coming.
The weather turned out fine. Most other things, unfortunately, did not. Read More
At first blush it may seem like insurance and venture capital make an odd couple. Venture capital is all about taking big risks for the potential of even bigger payouts down the road, while insurance is all about quantifying and mitigating risk. But make no mistake, there are vast sums of venture dollars going into insurance deals. Read More
Last weekend, I traveled from San Francisco to Los Angeles roundtrip on Cabin. When I arrived to the bus pickup location in San Francisco, a smiley attendant greeted me. She then proceeded to check me in and stow away my bag. Upon entering the bus, I saw the social lounge, where people can chit chat and hang out if they don’t want to go to sleep right away. I bypassed that area and… Read More
Lyft launches new self-driving division, Shyp is having some issues and Y Combinator wants in on the 3-comma club. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
The RealReal CEO Julie Wainwright tells TechCrunch in a video interview that she’s preparing the luxury consignment e-tailer to go public someday. “That’s the goal,” she said when asked about IPO plans. “We really aren’t in the mood to sell the business, we’re in the mood to go public at some point in the future.” It makes sense that a… Read More
Online finance startup SoFi has lost yet another senior executive, TechCrunch has learned. Chief revenue officer Michael Tannenbaum is the latest exec to leave, following a string of departures in the company’s senior ranks. Read More
Playbuzz helps online publishers make their content more interactive by adding elements like polls and galleries. Until recently, those elements have taken the form of widgets that publishers can embed into their stories, but that’s changing with the launch of Playbuzz’s new Storytelling platform, where writers are creating entire articles, not just one-off widgets. Read More
In the second part of our “A Mathless Guide to Neural Networks,” we’ll take a look at why high-quality, labeled data is so important, where it comes from, how it’s used and what solutions our eager-to-learn machines can expect in the near-term future. Read More
In and interview earlier this week at the TechCrunch Robotics Session held on the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA, Sami Atiya, president of ABB’s Robotics and Motion division, said he believes bringing robots into the manufacturing process actually adds jobs instead of killing them. Read More
San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera is seeking a court order to force both Uber and Lyft to share records on driver safety, disability access and other operations, in compliance with the city attorney’s subpoenas from last month. Read More
Playkey, a game streaming service we saw earlier this year at Disrupt NY, has just closed an additional $2.8 million round of funding from Russia’s Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF). Created at the suggestion of Vladimir Putin in 2013, the IIDF has invested in 293 companies to-date with the objective to strengthen infrastructure for Russian businesses. However, the investment… Read More
Want to chat with Alexa via Slack? A new bot called Silent Echo now makes that possible. The idea is that there are times when you want to interact with Amazon’s virtual assistant, Alexa, but you don’t want to do it by voice. For example, if things are too noisy in the room for Alexa to properly hear you, or, alternately, if you need things to be very quiet. The service… Read More
Aditya Agarwal, who came to Dropbox via its acquisition of Cove way back in 2012 and was given the CTO role last year, will be leaving the company. Agarwal held the CTO role for about 9 months and was previously the VP of engineering. Agarwal is leaving the company as it begins to aggressively tout its success as a business. Read More
