Look out, Netflix and Amazon. After dipping its toe into the water with Planet of the Apps, today Apple announced the latest development in its push into original content. It is hiring Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg, who since 2005 had been co-presidents of Sony Pictures Entertainment, to lead video programming at the company. We’ve been hearing rumors about Apple’s interest… Read More
Amazon has made a bid to buy Whole Foods in what would be a whopping $13.7 billion deal.
The all-cash acquisition (which includes Whole Foods Market’s net debt), will radically shake up any number of businesses and completely changes the online retail and bricks and mortar landscape. Read More
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where each week we discuss other people’s copious dollars and lacking sense. This week, Katie Roof, Matthew Lynley and I — Alex Wilhelm — were lucky enough to have Charles Hudson join our little crew. Hudson is both a managing partner at Precursor and a venture partner at SoftTech. The… Read More
This week The Europas Startup Conference and Awards once again pulled together the best startups in Europe for a day of conversation, networking and partying. The conference day is rounded out by the evening awards where the hottest startups in Europe are honoured, based on the merged votes of 10,000 people in the industry and 30+ judges. You can check out all the pictures on Flickr here,… Read More
Samsung has been bullish on virtual reality hardware, hoping that its early moves in headsets and devices to shoot content will give it a stronger position in the space as (and if!) it continues to expand to more applications and users. Now TechCrunch has learned that as part of that effort, it’s also made an acquisition. Samsung quietly bought a New York-based startup called VRB, which… Read More
Monese, the London-based fintech startup that offers a mobile banking app and current account, continues to fill in missing features that might otherwise stop it from replacing your bank altogether.
The latest is Direct Debit functionality, a mechanism for reoccurring payments, such as those required by a mobile phone contract and many other subscription services. Read More
See you in Shenzhen next week for our inaugural TechCrunch China event in the world’s hardware innovation capital. The show runs June 19-20, and we’ll be interviewing and talking to top level executives from a range of tech companies that include: Vice President of the Didi Chuxing Research Institute Dr. Fengmin Gong — Didi opened its U.S.-based research lab earlier this year… Read More
Alibaba could substantially increase its business interests in Southeast Asia with an investment in Uber rival Grab. Bloomberg reports that Alibaba President Jack Ma is considering joining an upcoming $1.4 billion funding round for Grab which will be led by SoftBank, a company with many links to Alibaba. Separately, TechCrunch has confirmed with a source that Alibaba has held meetings with… Read More
We’re looking for a few good startups based in sub-Saharan Africa to participate in our inaugural Startup Battlefield Africa, and all you startup folks out there in the region aren’t going to want to miss this. TechCrunch is excited to be partnering with Facebook to bring our illustrious startup competition, the Startup Battlefield, to Nairobi, Kenya, later this year. The… Read More
Mobike, one of two fast-emerging on-demand bike rental services, has landed $600 million in new funding as it seeks to expand its business outside of China.
Bike rentals are shaping up to be the first global tech industry that was born in China. The principle is simple: bikes are fitted with GPS trackers which allows them to be picked up from and left anywhere using an app. With companies… Read More
If you’re a U.S.-based founder and you’ve ever wondered how to pitch the London-based firm Atomico or, more specifically, who to pitch, Hiro Tamura is someone you might get to know better. Though he’s based in London, Tamura is the general partner who spends the most time in the U.S. — about one week a month on average. How does it work? Tamura says he gets ample… Read More
Twitter gets a redesign to their Desktop and mobile expereince, Slack is raising $500 Million at a $5 billion valuation, Musically starts creating original content and Careem raises $150 Million. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Nostalgia sells. No one knows that better than Nintendo. Much of the company’s intellectual property is well past the 30 year mark at this point, and yet it manages to find new scenarios for its most popular franchises year in and year out, reinventing its stable of characters for each subsequent platform. Read More
As with so many things in the world, the key to cracking Ms. Pac-Man is team work and a bit of positive reinforcement. That… and access to funding from Microsoft and 150-plus artificial intelligence agents — as Maluuba can now attest. Last month, the Canadian deep learning company (a subsidiary of Microsoft as of January) became the first team of AI programmers to beat the… Read More
It’s only been a few days since she started her new job, but Alda Leu Dennis, the newest partner (and COO) of Initialized Capital, seems like she’s ready to hit the ground running. Given her background, that’s not surprising. Dennis just joined the 15-person, San Francisco-based firm from the secondary investment firm 137 Ventures, where she led investments in Planet Labs,… Read More
The race to crown a winner in the AI-powered recruiting software space is on. With both Workey and Mya nabbing rounds in the last few weeks, the timing is prime for a few players to seek advantage in the form of growth capital. This seems to be exactly what Entelo, a six-year-old player in the space, is doing. The company is announcing a $20 million Series C round of financing today led by U.S. Read More
In April we reported that Justin.tv founder and Y Combinator alum Justin Kan had assembled a team to “disrupt the legal industry” and was raising $10 million to do so. This week Kan confirmed that the company has completed its fundraising process, raising $10.5 million in what ended up being one of the biggest “party rounds” I’ve ever seen. Read More
When it looks, feels and is packaged like a competitor’s, is it really competition or just a knockoff?
The Juiced Board comes dangerously close to echoing that sort of sentiment. Juiced and Boosted are words that loosely share the same meaning, but it’s the appearances where both electric skateboards really seem to converge.
Until now, I never would have recommended a sub-$1,000… Read More
