When Facebook removed messages from the main app, I swore I would never download Messenger. That’s been a pretty easy promise to keep, especially since they introduced the idea of huge ads that take up half your screen while you try to use the service. Today Facebook redesigned them as part of a larger rollout — but fixed none of the reasons these ads are bad and should be destroyed. Read More
Some LeEco employees in China will not get paid until August. According to an official statement provided to TechCrunch, Leshi Holdings, LeEco’s holding company has decided to postpone July’s payroll until August 10th. This is at least the third time this year LeEco has delayed paying some of its workers.
Right now, it seems only employees in China will not get a paycheck into August. Read More
The TechCrunch Summer Party is a thing of tradition and we hope you can make it out this year. As in years past we’ll gather on the spacious grounds of August Capital in Menlo Park and enjoy an evening of cocktails and the spirit of entrepreneurship. Read More
A CBS creative team must’ve done a lot of acid while bingeing 90s TV on their smartphones – that’s the only conceivable reason this Candy Crush TV series, hosted by Mario Lopez and featuring contestants pulled from past seasons of Survivor and Big Brother exists. That or CBS looking to learn a few tricks from MTV’s The Challenge, while also picking up some brand… Read More
Toyota is the latest Fortune 500 company to launch an AI focused venture capital fund. The initial early-stage fund will deploy $100 million and operate as a subsidiary of the Toyota Research Institute. The automaker has strategically positioned itself as an ROI rather than strategic-focused fund — meaning that it aims to profit like any other VC firm. Read More
Astronomer aims to ease the pain around data analytics. Collecting data is just part of the operation. After the data has been collected, it needs to be assembled and organized and sometimes that’s the most time-consuming part of the process. Astronomer says its solution helps with this process, freeing up engineering resources to actually analyze the data. The Cincinnati-based company… Read More
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s newest “Who Has Your Back?” report details what exactly tech giants are doing — or not — to protect their users from potentially invasive government data requests. The annual report includes a solid who’s who of tech’s most established players. Some of the winners and losers are who you’d expect, though… Read More
Wiz Khalifa’s Furious 7 homage, See You Again, has overtaken Psy’s Gangnam Style for the title of YouTube’s most-watched video ever. The music video has garnered more than 2,897,575,000 views. Gangnam Style held the title of most-watched video on the service for nearly half a decade, being the first video to skyrocket past one billion views just a few months after it was… Read More
Google today clarified a change to its ad policies, which have now been updated to include a ban on Google advertisements on any websites that utilize “pop-under” advertisements. These obnoxious, irritating and often spammy advertisements are those that load “under” your current window – meaning you don’t see them until you minimize your browser. “We… Read More
Two of the largest communities for chatbot developers are joining forces with the belief that bots are only just getting started.
Howdy, a company backed by Bloomberg Beta and Slack among others, announced that it has acquired Bot Metrics, a year-old company funded by Social Capital and Graph Ventures.
The deal is undisclosed, and it will see Bot Metrics founders Arun Thampi and Sandeep… Read More
The new Audi A8 revealed by the automaker today features a new level of self-driving for production vehicles – Level 3 autonomy, which actually allows drivers to stop monitoring the vehicle under certain conditions – and where allowed by law to do so. Level 3 is one that some autonomous experts have argued shouldn’t even exist, since it requires a driver to still be ready… Read More
Fresh out of 500 startups, Datatron has raised $2.7 million in seed financing for its data-savvy assistant, Emma. But under the somewhat trite coating of an assistant, Datatron is making it easier for employees to gather insights from the complex web of historical and real-time data. Read More
Messaging is the center of mobile, and Facebook wants ads in front of all those eyes. After seeing “promising results from Australia and Thailand,” Facebook Messenger is expanding its display ad beta test that lets businesses buy space between your chat threads. Later this month, a small percentage of users will start seeing ads in the Messenger app’s home tab. Read More
Curve, the London fintech that offers a platform that lets you consolidate all your bank cards into a single Curve card and manage your money, is on the verge of closing $10 million in Series A funding. Read More
Matthew Prince knew what was coming. The CEO of Cloudflare, an internet security company and content delivery network in San Francisco, was behind his desk when the emails began. College classmates-turned-defense attorneys were reaching out to say hello and to ask: did Prince perhaps need help to fight a lawsuit they’d seen filed against Cloudflare? Read More
With a growing number of streaming TV services entering the market, it’s becoming difficult for consumers to make comparisons. People want to know which service is best for them in terms of channel selection, feature set and price, but this involves a lot of research these days. A new startup launching today called Suppose.tv aims to help, offering an online utility that lets consumers… Read More
Over the past few years, Disney’s accelerator classes have been transitioning away from what was once a roughly standard early-stage growth framework. Rather than the “adopt-a-company” models prevalent among most accelerators, it has been leaning hard into how it can create mutually beneficial relationships with companies that run the gamut from well-established to really… Read More
Louis Vuitton is throwing its hat in the smart watch ring with the launch of the Tambour Horizon. The device runs on Android Wear 2.0 software and was developed in collaboration Qualcomm and Google. Oh, and it starts at $2,450. The 42mm case sports a 1.2-inch AMOLED 390×390 touchscreen and is powered by a Snapdragon Wear 2100 processor. It also has 521MB of RAM and 4GB of internal… Read More
It’s certainly hard to resist the siren song of online deals on Amazon Prime day, so while you’re at it, why not also grab a deal on a great tech conference – TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Today only, we’re releasing a limited number of two-for-one Disrupt SF tickets – the lowest price available on admission to our flagship event this September 18-20. What does admission… Read More
One thing is clear: The market for startup equity is on firmer footing now than it was three months ago. With two successive quarters of growth, both in the number of deals struck and the amount of money invested, as well as a growing appetite on the part of public markets for shares in venture-backed startups, there’s reason for cautious optimism going into the second half of this year. Read More
