On this week’s Technotopia I interviewed Cindy Gallop, the outspoken TED speaker and found of MakeLoveNotPorn. Cindy worked tirelessly to bring SexTech and FemTech out of the shadows and she’s bringing all her attention to bear on the creation of technology that will bring us closer together and make us happier – something few founders think about.
Gallop believes that the… Read More
As we inch closer to E3, games are top of mind.
The Destiny 2 gameplay trailer was finally released earlier this week, which you can check out below.
But as Forbes pointed out, there is still a hint of mystery and a dash of disappointment when it comes to the Destiny 2 PC port.
For one, Destiny 2 for PC is not officially slated for the same September 8 release date as its PS4 and Xbox One… Read More
Call it the Triumph of the Stacks. I attended Google I/O this week, and saw a lot of cool things: but what really hit home for me, at the keynote and the demos and the developer sessions, was just how dominant Google has become, in so many different domains … and, especially, how its only real competition comes from the four other tech behemoths who dominate our industry’s… Read More
The world’s most popular cryptocurrency is now worth over $2,000 per coin. That’s according to a range of bitcoin exchanges, including Coinbase and Kraken. That valuation puts the total market cap of bitcoin — the total number of coins in circulation — at $32.92 billion. Bitcoin has been on a tear this year, as this chart from Coindesk shows. Bitcoin first broke… Read More
SoftBank’s huge $100 billion investment fund — the largest tech fund in history — announced its first close today… and it’s huge. The Japanese telecom giant revealed that its VisionFund has closed an initial commitment of $93 billion from a bevy of high profile backers. They include Apple, Qualcomm, UAE-based Mubadala Investment Company, Saudi Arabia’s… Read More
Startups put great effort into finding the perfect name. Ideally, it should be short, memorable, descriptive, and easy to pronounce. Names that meet all the criteria are commonly taken, however, so most founders find a compromise. They settle on a creative misspelling, add a word or just string together sounds they like. In the end, the hope is that a well-named startup will have an easier… Read More
People are taking photos and videos all over major cities, all the time, from every angle. Theoretically, with enough of them, you could map every street and building — wait, did I say theoretically? I meant in practice, as the VarCity project has demonstrated with Zurich, Switzerland. Read More
Deep Algo was one of the more fascinating companies on display in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt this week. The French team aims to make coding languages more accessible for the masses with SaaS (software as a service) offering that promises to do for languages like C++, C Sharp and Javascript what WYSIWYG does for HTML. It’s a pretty bold claim, but the company is confident that… Read More
Portland, Oregon, continued to keep it weird (and cute) this week when it rolled out Parking Kitty, a new app that lets you pay for metered parking. The app is based on Passport, one of the largest parking payment vendors in the United States. “We didn’t make a lot of changes,” said Malisa McCreedy, the parking division manager at the Portland Department of Transportation. Read More
Salesforce is on a steady climb toward a $10 billion revenue run rate. And while it’s not quite there yet, its recent, nearly $2.4 billion quarter puts it squarely in the neighborhood. According to the company’s CEO, Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s revenue growth results give it “the fastest growth of any top [five] enterprise software company.” It’s clear… Read More
The next few months will be full of bitter dissent regarding the FCC’s net neutrality rules, how they should be enforced, and indeed whether they should exist at all. Several primary arguments against the rules as they stand have appeared as talking points or recurring themes; they are worth considering seriously and refuting definitively if possible. That’s what I’m hoping… Read More
Uber has issued a sternly worded letter to Anthony Levandowski, the engineer at the center of a lawsuit alleging theft of trade secrets from Google parent Alphabet’s self-driving technology unit Waymo. The gist? Comply with the court’s orders or risk being terminated. Read More
The FAA’s drone database hit a major snag this week, courtesy of a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling. The D.C.-based court sided with drone hobbyist John Taylor, who argued that the Federal Aviation Administration doesn’t have jurisdiction over what the law classifies as model aircraft. “Taylor does not think that the FAA had the statutory authority to issue the Registration Rule… Read More
Twitter is alerting Vine users of a bug that exposed their email addresses and, in some cases, phone numbers to third parties. It’s also advising affected users to be cautious about any emails from unknown senders as a result. The company says the bug was only active for 24 hours before being patched, and doesn’t believe that the data was misused in any way, at this time.… Read More
There’s hardly anything that we haven’t tried putting machine learning to work at, and usually they take to it like a duck to water. That’s not the case here, with a neural network attempting to learn how to give paint colors those fancy names like “spring rain” and “harbor mist.” How would you like to paint your house in a nice “dorkwood”… Read More
Facebook is now making it easier for you to order food from your favorite restaurants directly within its app, without having to navigate away to a delivery service or restaurant’s own app or website. In the main Facebook navigation on both web and mobile, a new option called “Order Food” is rolling out to select users. Indicated by a colorful hamburger icon on desktop and… Read More
Startups in Latin America are using creative solutions to address not just local but also global problems. For investors outside the region, the prospect of working with these startups can appear attractive, yet complicated. Investing in early-stage startups in Latin America can present challenges; however, time and time again I’ve found it can be well worth the effort. Read More
What do people actually want in luggage? A phone charger, unbreakable exterior, and maximum packing space at a resonable price is what Away discovered. So it built a line of sleek but expansive polycarbonite suitcases equipped with battery packs, and sold them direct-to-consumer. Now after selling nearly 100,000 suitcases and generating $20 million in revenue, Away has raised a $20 million… Read More
This week the TechCrunch team threw another successful Disrupt conference, this time in New York City. 20 companies took the stage at TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield, where they presented their products and took questions from our expert judges. The judges narrowed the competition down to five finalists. But RecordGram, a mobile recording studio where aspiring artists can find… Read More
In addition to Facebook’s announcement of a new partnership with the MLB to live stream a number of regular season games, the social network this week also signed a deal with global esports company ESL to bring over 5,550 hours of esports events and other original content to Facebook, including 1,500 of original programming. The move will aid Facebook in challenging Amazon-owned Twitch… Read More
