Shenzhen has been called China’s Silicon Valley (or at least one of its Silicon Valleys). A panel on hardware startups at TechCrunch Shenzhen took a stab at explaining why.
“There’s a new startup model coming out of Shenzhen,” said Eli Harris, whose startup Ecoflow is building the River Mobile Power Station. The city’s history as “the land of OEM… Read More
India-focused mobile messaging service Hike landed funding from Tencent last year, and today it took a major step to emulating the Chinese firm’s WeChat app with the introduction of mobile payments.
The launch of Hike Wallet not only shows an ambition to build a messaging platform, it also means Hike has beaten WhatsApp, the chat app that dominates India, to the punch. Facebook-owned… Read More
Nokia announced at Mobile World Congress back in February that it would be sunsetting the Withings brand this summer. After giving fans of the French connected health device maker sufficient time to mourn, the brand name is finally officially being removed from its existing product lines. All Withings products will be branded Nokia from here on out. The transition will be marked by a few… Read More
Looking for a new job is getting easier. Google today launched a new jobs search feature right on its search result pages that lets you search for jobs across virtually all of the major online job boards like LinkedIn, Monster, WayUp, DirectEmployers, CareerBuilder and Facebook and others. Google will also include job listings its finds on a company’s homepage. The idea here is to give… Read More
Earlier this year, several LGBTQ YouTube creators noticed that their videos were hidden in Restricted Mode, even though they didn’t contain mature content. YouTube apologized and promised to fix its system. Now CEO Susan Wojcicki has detailed the steps YouTube is taking to make its policies more inclusive. Read More
Fritz Demopoulos, who co-founded Chinese travel portal Qunar and now makes early-stage startup investments through Queen’s Road Capital, said that if he had a single piece of advice for founders looking to pursue their “China dream,” it boils down to one word: “Commitment.”
Demopoulos was interviewed on-stage at TechCrunch Shenzhen, which we organized with TechNode. Read More
Freshly has raised a big funding round from a big name — the U.S. division of food and beverage giant Nestlé. Co-founder and CEO Michael Wystrach has pitched the startup as a way to get healthy, on-demand meals. That doesn’t mean you order from Freshly every time you want to eat — instead, you get one delivery of all your meals for the week. Then, when you’re hungry,… Read More
Microsoft is rethinking its strategy when it comes to startup acceleration in Paris. The company is going to focus on artificial intelligence. This will lead to a new program for AI startups at Station F.
Microsoft has had a startup accelerator in the Sentier neighborhood for a few years now. When Station F opens at the end of June, the company is going to focus exclusively on artificial… Read More
As countries progress, citizens migrate from remote villages to large cities and foreign countries. Their economic power rises and they participate in the global economy. People need to purchase food, pay electricity bills, top up transportation cards, arrange online services, buy overseas goods, repay loans, and send money to relatives. Unlike the U.S., however, where 93% of people have… Read More
Pokemon Go has a big summer update, Vice Media raises $450 million, the FTC wants to block the FanDuel-DraftKings merger and Blue Apron is looking to raise $586 million in its IPO. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Over the past few years we’ve seen Amazon testing new ways of getting groceries in consumers fridges, with Amazon Fresh, Amazon Fresh Pickup, drone delivery, and Amazon Go. As I look back with this acquisition, I can’t help to think, “Were they just preparing for this the whole time or did they realize they couldn’t do it alone?” Read More
Google’s brain team is open sourcing Tensor2Tensor, a new deep learning library designed to help researchers replicate results from recent papers in the field and push the boundaries of what’s possible by trying new combinations of models, datasets and other parameters. The sheer number of variables in AI research combined with the fast pace of new developments makes it difficult… Read More
Jared Kushner might be singlehandedly tasked with securing peace in the Middle East among other totally reasonable assignments from his father-in-law, but today he basked in the warm glow of his favorite private sector heroes. At a White House tech summit that lured Silicon Valley’s most powerful and obsequious, Kushner made a rare public speaking appearance to mostly say some… Read More
AimBrain, a London startup that offers “biometric identity” as a service to help fintech companies and other financial institutions fight fraud, has raised £4 million in Series A funding. Read More
Aspect Ventures, the San Francisco-based early-stage venture firm founded in 2014 by longtime VCs Jennifer Fonstad and Theresia Gouw, has begun raising its second fund, and the outfit is looking to raise up to $175 million, shows an SEC filing. The firm hasn’t responded to questions about its fundraising plans, but we’d guess that investors will line up quickly to fund the firm.… Read More
Blue Apron’s IPO moved closer to reality this week as the firm set a price range for its shares. The company is set to go public at a higher IPO price than its last private round, undercutting worry that future unicorn IPOs may only point one direction: down.
The meal-kit startup may IPO at a price between $15 and $17. At midpoint, Blue Apron is worth “just under $3… Read More
Since November, the Trump campaign’s possibly brilliant, maybe-just-lucky data strategy launched a thousand thinkpieces. Now, we’ve got a more intimate look at that data than we were ever meant to have.
As discovered by Chris Vickery, a cyber risk analyst at UpGuard, and reported by Gizmodo, an analytics firm hired by the Republican National Committee left the data of 198 million U.S. Read More
TechCrunch is headed to Seattle this Thursday for the annual Meetup + Pitch Off. And we are ready to announce our esteemed judges. The pitch-off will consist of 10 startup companies presenting for 60 seconds on stage in front of TechCrunch Editors and tier 1 investors from the Pacific Northwest. The winning team will get a free table at TechCrunch Disrupt SF Startup Alley this September.… Read More
Knowing of the significant contributions foreign-born founders have made to the entrepreneurial ecosystem and the broader U.S. economy, NVCA has long championed the creation of a Startup Visa for talented immigrant entrepreneurs to remain in the U.S. if they can demonstrate their enterprise is viable and has appropriate funding. Read More
A mysterious “Sponsored Content” opt-out setting recently appeared in Spotify, and now the streaming giant has confirmed to TechCrunch what it’s about. Spotify is now testing a new “Sponsored Song” ad unit that a company spokesperson tells us is “a product test for labels to promote singles on the free tier.” Instead of appearing as obvious ad banners… Read More
