Jaguar Land Rover has brought two new startups into its Portland Tech Incubator: LISNR and PILOT Automotive Labs. Previous cohorts at the incubator have ranged from parking apps to drones; these two continue to build on JLR’s creative approach to the automotive future. LISNR uses ultrasonic audio to transmit data. That’s right — it transmits and receives sounds we… Read More
The potential for VR truly boggles the mind. In the future, it’s easy to imagine the various use-cases in education, entertainment, business, and social. But like any new technology, VR needs a ‘gateway drug’, and thus far that initial use-case has been gaming. Sony is pushing PlayStation VR hard with a handful of new games, some existing and others brand new. Nintendo is… Read More
Live TV streaming service Sling TV is today rolling out an improved DVR feature, while also making the option to record TV shows available on more devices and channels. The DVR is one of the key selling points for Sling TV, given the increased competition in the live TV space from newcomers like YouTube TV, Hulu (which recently added live TV), and AT&T’s DirecTV Now. According to… Read More
We have another filing for a tech IPO today, this one from a company called CompuLab coming in amid a continued flurry of IPOs. But, really, the story here is just that — it’s just another small tech IPO amid a flurry of filings. Snap started off the year with a bang, rattling off a highly successful IPO (though its continued performance is not so great) and opening up the… Read More
Though Facebook is rarely mentioned alongside Apple, Microsoft and Amazon in discussions about conversational AI, the company has published a hoard of papers that underscore a deep interest in dialog systems. As has become clear with Siri, Cortana and Alexa, dialog is hard — it requires more than just good speech recognition to deliver a killer experience to users. From the sidelines… Read More
Personal media player software maker Plex says it’s now easier for mobile users on Android to play any video file saved on their device within its app. The move will enable it to better challenge VLC, an app users have historically turned to in order play a wider variety of video file formats. The new feature is entering a public beta today, and will support local playback of a number… Read More
Facebook’s Safety Check feature was activated today, following news that a fire had engulfed a 24-storey block of flats in West London, with reports of several fatalities. Clearly this is a tragedy. But should Facebook be reacting by sending push alerts — including to users who are miles away from incident in question? Read More
Correction below Stories of countesses bathing in virgin blood, or vampiric nobles sucking the juice out of the young, have captured our attention for centuries. But when stories started coming out that tech billionaire Peter Thiel was interested in transfusing teen blood into his own body, it sent Silicon Valley into a fever dream. Peter Thiel, the vampire! Thiel has been alleged to have a… Read More
The majority of consumers in the U.S. and Canada are no longer interested in hefty pay TV packages filled with channels they don’t watch. According to a new study from TiVo out this morning, 77.3 percent now want “a la carte” TV service – meaning, they want to only pay for the channels they actually watch. And they’re not willing to pay too much for this… Read More
Teaching people to code in bite-sized, gamified chunks delivered via mobile app is Py’s mission. The fledgling startup is the brainchild of two friends and college computer science majors who found themselves repeatedly asked for advice on how to learn to Read More
Finding a good backpack, one you can use in a range of situations, is tricky. But Venque’s Transformer A, which is currently on Kickstarter, might just fit the bill for a good chunk of customers, however. The modular pack is the latest from Venque, which got its start on the crowdfunding site back in 2013 but has since scaled to distribution via a range of retail partners and a big lineup… Read More
TechCrunch is kicking off the summer with a meetup in my beautiful hometown, Seattle. In addition to the usual hoisting of glasses and something called “networking,” we’ll be hosting a good old fashioned pitch-off with some promising local companies. Read More
Facebook today announced a series of improvements for its Safety Check feature – the service that allows Facebook users to communicate about their safety to friends and family during a crisis. Most notably, people will now have the option to start fundraisers from within Safety Check, in order to immediately translate concern for victims of a crisis or natural disaster into specific actions. Read More
Ads aren’t enough to support professional online content makers. So Patreon is equipping them with new ways to organize, measure, and entertain fans who use its platform to pay them a monthly subscription fee for special access. With 1 million patrons paying an average of $12 per month to 50,000 creators, Patreon is on track to send musicians, comedians, journalists, videographers, and… Read More
TechCrunch is pleased today to announce the companies and judges participating in the pitch-off at TC Sessions: Robotics. This is going to be great. New life is important. And while TC Sessions: Robotics features the best engineers and companies in the robotics field, we’re excited to host a small pitch-off that will pit four budding companies against each other in a bid to exhibit… Read More
French startup Shadow, also known as Blade, just raised a Series A round of $57.1 million (€51 million). Shadow thinks your next computer is going to be in a data center. Your existing phones, laptops and Shadow’s own device (pictured above) act as a thin client, a window into your virtual machine running on a beefy server in a data center near you. Shadow had already raised $14.6… Read More
Instagram is creating a standardized format that should make it clearer to everyone when a post has been paid for by an advertiser. These aren’t for ads that businesses buy directly from Instagram, but rather for influencer marketing, where brands pay celebrities and other users with a significant online following to promote their products. It’s an area that every big tech and… Read More
Box just made it a little easier to access your files while you’re at your computer.
The company is introducing Box Drive, a desktop application that works on Windows and MacOS. People will be able to credit, edit, find and share files without pulling up a web browser.
This is the “final frontier,” CEO Aaron Levie told TechCrunch. With Box Drive, you’ll have… Read More
When housing costs too much or educators have to commute from far away, there’s rapid teacher turnover that hurts students. That’s why Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s philanthropy vehicle is funding home down payment assistance for roughly 60 educators and support staff at three schools near Facebook’s headquarters. The $45 billion Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is… Read More
Managing inventory is one of the most challenging parts of running a retail business. It’s not easy to predict exactly how popular each item will be. That’s why retailers often offload their unsold clothing and products to other businesses. Some of these designs find their way into”off-price” stores like T.J. Maxx or Ross, known for their perpetually low prices. Now… Read More
