SEGA is bringing some of your favorite games to mobile in new, free-to-play formats that include ads as a way to drive revenue, support offline play and other more modern features like cloud saves. The games can also be rendered ad-free with a one-time $1.99 purchase, which is a really good deal given the pedigree of some of these titles, and what you might pay elsewhere to get re-released… Read More
The online tutoring market in the US is well-developed. Varsity Tutors raised $50m; Wiseant $20m; Tutor.com sold to IAC and InstaEdu was recently bought out. So it makes sense that this model would be big in other markets. This is the thinking behind MyTutor, a London-based edtech company that connects school pupils to high-performing university students for one-to-one, online… Read More
As Amazon and Walmart continue their battle to become the world’s largest retailer, another longtime rival in the e-commerce business, eBay, is now stepping up its game as well. The company this morning announced a new Price Match Guarantee for over 50,000 items across its site – promising that it will have the best deal online, or it will match the lowest price of a competitor.… Read More
What do Kevin Durant, Rich Kleiman, Kirsten Green, and Sebastian Thrun all have in common? Well, they’ll be at Disrupt SF (September 18-20) to tell their stories on stage, and we’re absolutely thrilled to have them join us for the biggest tech startup conference in all the land. We hope to see you at the conference, too, and general admission tickets are currently available with… Read More
London could be a lot more green by 2050 – Mayor Sadiq Khan has outlined a plan for transportation service (via Engadget) in the city that would make the whole system, including taxis, cars and buses, totally emission free by that year. Even though that’s over 30 years away, it’s still an incredibly ambitious plan that will require a lot of pieces to fall into place. Those… Read More
Millennials remain a hot target for digital marketing and advertising, and so perhaps unsurprisingly, a startup building news and other publishing services targeted specifically at that demographic has raised some money from one of the world’s biggest ad agencies. Mic, the New York-based site and publisher of “branded content” aimed at 20- and early 30-somethings with an… Read More
Rapid changes in the shipping industry has caught the attention of investors who are starting to pour large sums of money into the industry. And likely for good reason: as a future where trucks are run autonomously becomes ever clearer, the sensors and software behind that is going to have to be able to keep up. One company, Samsara, is working on just those kinds of sensors and products to… Read More
Industrial IoT startup Petasense emerged from stealth today, officially announcing $1.8 million in seed funding and a hardware/software solution designed to help industrial customers understand when equipment needs maintenance by “listening” to its vibrations. As it turns out, machines vibrate at a certain frequency when they are operating smoothly, but as parts begin to wear down,… Read More
As it looks to expand beyond recruiting and job postings, Textio has raised $20 million in new funding led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Bloomberg Beta, Cowboy Ventures, Emergence Capital, and Upside Partnership. Read More
Chris Lattner has built a solid reputation after working for 11 years at Apple on low-level software technologies. In particular, he developed Apple’s most recent programming language, Swift. In January, Tesla announced that it had recruited Lattner as VP of Autopilot Software.
Six months later, he announced on Twitter that he was leaving the car company. “Turns out that Tesla… Read More
Oscar Health seems to be expanding rather than shrinking in the next year. Despite worries that the Affordable Care Act wasn’t working out for health insurance companies, Oscar has filed to expand in 2018, adding the states of Ohio and Tennessee, expanding in Texas and California and heading back to New Jersey, where it pulled out at the beginning of this year. Some of the expansion has… Read More
When Slack implemented threaded conversations, it seemed like the holy grail for internal communications. Slack finally lets you talk about multiple things in separate conversations. But Slack remains a real-time messaging service at heart, so threads don’t feel native. It works well for many teams, but some companies would prefer something a bit more asynchronous and focused. At the… Read More
TrueLayer, a London startup that’s built a developer platform to make it easy for fintech companies to access bank APIs — and ride the PSD2 gravy train — has raised $3 million in Series A funding. Read More
Earlier this year, Spotify introduced a new Messenger bot that let users share song clips with friends. Today, the company is expanding on that bot’s functionality to now allow a group of friends to build a playlist together via Messenger – even if not everyone in the group is on Spotify. The feature, called simply Group Playlists for Messenger, is accessed through… Read More
Uber’s embattled CEO Travis Kalanick is resigning from the ride-sharing company he helped found in 2009 following a “shareholder revolt” led by some of Uber’s most prominent investors, the New York Times reports.
An Uber spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that Kalanick has stepped down.
The report states that five of Uber’s most prominent investors, including… Read More
Mobike, the Chinese bike-sharing company that raised $600 million last week, has lifted the lid on its plans to expand beyond rides and move into services. The company announced last week that it plans to expand to reach 200 cities before the end of the year, many of which are expected to be outside of China. But, as if that ambitious target wasn’t enough, the company is also working… Read More
Netflix launches a “choose your own adventure” style cartoon for children, Uber adds tipping as the first change in its “180 days of change” campaign, Skype outage causes connectivity issues and Boom has 76 pre-orders for its supersonic Jet. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Tesla has hired deep learning and computer vision expert Andrej Karpathy in a key Autopilot role. Karpathy most recently held a role as a researcher at OpenAI, the artificial intelligence nonprofit backed by Elon Musk. He has an extensive background in AI-related fields, having completed a PhD at Stanford University in computer vision. Read More
On the heels of what must feel to employees like the longest six months in Uber’s eight-year history, this morning the company introduced an initiative that it’s calling “180 Days of Change” and announced, most notably, that it will start allowing riders to tip drivers in the app. This is no small thing. Read More
