Apple is working on a way to bring businesses to iMessage platform, in order to answer customer questions, offer customer service and even perform transactions. Though not announced at WWDC, a new page on Apple’s Developer site briefly details this new service, dubbed “Business Chat,” which will be able to operate across platforms, including iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.… Read More
At least since Isaac Asimov posited the Three Law of Robotics, many have wondered whether robots would ultimately help or harm humanity. Or maybe do a little of both. Humanity still has time to shape the answer to that question, and we’re pleased to announce three speakers who have distinctive, grounded perspectives on how to secure a world made better (not worse) by robots. These… Read More
For years, Box has been seen by many in the press, analyst and investor communities as a storage product and nothing more, which given its roots, was an understandable misperception. But CEO Aaron Levie and his company have always had a much broader ambition. Through the years, Levie made it clear that he was in business to transform the entire category of enterprise content management, and… Read More
New Yorkers are about to get even more friendly!* Today, Via and Curb are bringing ride-sharing through a digital wallet to yellow taxis in the Big Apple. Both apps will let New Yorkers hail a yellow taxi with a ride-sharing option, with Via’s intelligent routing platform ensuring that the driver takes the most efficient route possible on multi-passenger rides. The service can save users… Read More
Lyft has another partners in the world of autonomous vehicles, its third behind GM and Waymo if you’re keeping count. The newest partner is Nutonomy, the Boston-based autonomous vehicle technology company that made waves by being first to real roads with a self-driving taxi – thanks to a team-up with Singapore’s economic development board. Now, Nutonomy and Lyft are launching… Read More
For religious Muslims looking to get started with investing, the options are limited. Average Muslim investors can’t afford the kind of nuanced advice that a high end financial advisor can provide, but they can’t just throw money at a random fund that might not be Sharia-compliant either. Wahed CEO Junaid Wahedna believes there’s a better way — and with a new $5… Read More
TechCrunch is excited to announce that representatives from China’s top on-demand startups will be speaking at our inaugural event in Shenzhen. Didi Chuxing, the company that beat Uber out of China, and red-hot bike-sharing startups Ofo and Mobike — which have pioneered a new kind of point-to-point transportation in China — are among the speakers confirmed for TechCrunch… Read More
As enterprises continue to move more of their computing to the cloud, and across an ever-expanding range of devices from computers to phones and tablets and more, hackers continue to find ways to break into those systems — resulting an unprecedented number of breaches globally. Now, one of the more prominent security startups fighting this has raised a significant round of funding to… Read More
One of the ways companies fill their ranks with good employees is by scouting “passive talent,” or people who aren’t currently looking for new jobs but might be convinced with the right offer. This usually takes hours of networking, but a Tel Aviv-headquartered startup called Workey uses artificial intelligence to streamline the process by matching companies with potential… Read More
Shipt, the Birmingham, Ala.-based online grocery delivery marketplace, has raised another $40 million in its quest to rise above its southeastern roots to become the dominant grocery delivery brand in the U.S. From its home southeast, Shipt is challenging companies like Instacart, Amazon, and Google with a strategy that had, to date, ignored many of the biggest coastal cities in the U.S.… Read More
Apple CEO Tim Cook has revealed the company has been co-operating with the UK government in handing over metadata in the wake of a series of terror attacks in the country — which he described as “horrendous”. Read More
Delivery Hero’s much-anticipated IPO is on. Today the European food delivery company officially announced that it plans to raise as much as €450 million ($506 million) from a public listing on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in “the coming months”. It’s been a busy past year or so for Delivery Hero, and when you look back on its recent happenings and developments,… Read More
At the invitation of Saul Klein, I’m here to interview him, his father and four other members of the now eight-person LocalGlobe team, none of whom I have met previously despite being one of the journalists who has covered the firm’s investments the most in recent years. Based on my own sources, I planned to break news of a new £75m fund, but Klein had other ideas. Read More
Apple, ever the late adopter, has added QR reading to its camera in what is the latest example of the U.S. company seemingly following a trend with blind optimism that it’ll work out for the best. QR codes have never been an established thing in the U.S., the country where Apple’s influence and marketshare is highest worldwide, but in Asia — particularly in China — it is… Read More
In a bid to heal its fractured company culture, Uber has hired Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei as its new SVP of leadership and strategy. According to the company’s announcement, Frei will report to CEO Travis Kalanick, “work as a partner” with chief human resources officer Liane Hornsey, and serve as an executive coach for Uber’s leadership team. Read More
French startup Clustree just raised a $7.9 million Series A round (€7 million) from Creandum with Idinvest Partners and Alven Capital also participating. Clustree leverages machine learning to help both good employees who feel stuck in their jobs and HR departments who might not think to check their own companies for the perfect candidate. In order to do this, Clustree has structured more… Read More
Apple releases iOS 11 High Sierra, the iMac gets a hefty update and a pro model, new hardware — the HomePod speaker, Apple updates the iPad Pro, we get some new laptop specs and TechCrunch editor-in-chief Matthew Panzarino joins us to tell us his thoughts on everything. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Police body cameras don’t just record shootouts and other crises — they’re on all day every day, providing unprecedented detail of officers’ interactions with the public. If you can handle that volume of data, that is. Researchers at Stanford created a method to do just that, and soon found that officers in Oakland consistently used less respectful language when… Read More
If Snapchat’s growth remains slow, it must maximize how much it can charge per ad by demonstrating they inspire purchases and physical store foot traffic. Snap confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s acquired location-based analytics and ad measurement startup Placed. Placed will help Snap scale its measurement systems so advertisers can chart how online Snapchat ads translate into… Read More
Remember when QR codes were the next big thing? In the U.S. you used to be able to find them on billboards, business cards — you name it. They were supposed to change the way we use our devices. Remember CurrentC? But the technology never really caught on stateside, mainly because users had to download a totally separate third-party app to scan them, and the whole system was pretty… Read More
