Earlier this week, at TechCrunch’s Disrupt event in New York, we sat down with AngelList cofounder and CEO Naval Ravikant to talk primarily about the platform’s new Angel Funds product, wherein a select number of proven “angel-operators” is being provided capital from AngelList and outside VCs to invest in a basket of startups. (We wrote about that new program here.)… Read More
A team of engineers at the University of California San Diego have applied the biologically inspired principles of soft robotics in order to develop a robot capable of navigating uneven terrain like rocks and sand. The soft and pliable materials mean the robot’s four legs are capable of conforming to their surrounds, so its on-board sensors don’t need a precise picture of the… Read More
Twitter seems to be having some technical difficulties this morning, with the network going down for some folks.
Down Detector’s live outage map shows Twitter suffering outages in Japan, the UK, and now parts of the East Coast in the United States.
Around 2am ET, Twitter’s Support account tweeted that some users may have had issues sending tweets, but that the issue had been… Read More
Hello and welcome back to another episode of Equity, TechCrunch’s weekly podcast focusing on all things venture and capital. This week we pulled off our very first live episode, taping the session during the last day of TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017. For our inaugural public show, Ellie Wheeler of Greycroft joined our merry band of nerds: Katie Roof, Matthew Lynley, and Alex Wilhelm. In… Read More
Ford is updating a large number of 2016 model year cars equipped with SYNC 3 infotainment software, adding Android Auto and CarPlay to the vehicles with a free, over-the-air update via Wi-Fi, or using either USB or going through their dealer. The upgrade will be available for around 800,000 vehicles in total, giving a huge number of Ford car owners the chance to get big infotainment… Read More
Silicon Valley VC Menlo Ventures has closed a new $450 million fund to invest primarily in early-stage “consumer, enterprise and frontier technologies”. The funding brings the firm’s total capital to more than $5 billion under management, while Menlo Ventures says the fund was oversubscribed with both new and existing limited partners. Read More
TechCrunch is hosting its first startup competition in Sub-Saharan Africa. We’ve wanted to bring TechCrunch to Africa for a long time, and now thanks to our sponsor Facebook, we will bring the Startup Battlefield competition, to Nairobi on October 11 this year. Read More
Spotify has made its fourth acquisition of the year: AI startup Niland has joined its ranks. Paris-based Niland offered an API-based product focused on providing more accurate search and recommendation options for music. Spotify said the French company will join its R&D team to help hone its personalization and recommendation features for users. Read More
Sennheiser is great at doing a lot of things, namely in the audio space. Headphones, microphones and the like. When Sennheiser combines the two and creates a gaming headset, you’d expect it to be pretty good, if not great. The 373D is an attempt at integrating 7.1 Dolby Surround Sound into a pair of headphones. The problem with that is, it’s not exactly as interesting as it sounds. Read More
Restaurant guide and food delivery service Zomato looks like it is getting off lightly after it suffered a hack that compromised personal information belonging to 6.6 million users. The India-based company, which offers services in more than 20 countries worldwide, set off alarm bells when it revealed that a hacker had made off with 17 million user records. Read More
One of the areas that Google talked up regarding Android beyond phones at I/O this year was in vehicles, and Android in the Car was the main way it’s expanding its in-car presence. The expansion of its Android Auto software offers deeper integration with vehicle infotainment and climate control systems, and putting Assistant front and center for more voice control inside the car and out. Read More
Kickstarter and its crowdfunding brethren have played a pivotal role in the hardware revolution of the past decade. But even now that developers have a wide range of democratizing tools at their disposal, hardware is, as ever, hard. Today the service launched Hardware Studio, a new suite of tools aimed at helping developers navigate the choppy waters of hardware development. Read More
Messaging app Telegram has dropped a major update today that sees its service gain support for chatbot payments. It has also added short video messages and new design options for its Instant View reading mode. Read More
For the last few years, Google’s skunkworks ATAP unit always held its own keynote at I/O, Google’s flagship developer conference. Often, this was where Google would show off its most experimental and interesting projects — and sometimes, this ATAP keynote was more fun than the larger, flashier I/O keynotes. This year, however, ATAP is nowhere to be found on the I/O schedule. Read More
Meanwhile, at Twitter HQ, the leadership revolving door at the entrance stops spinning clockwise for just a moment as a new face enters the building… Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey today announced that the company has hired Bruce Falck, previously the CEO of adtech firm Turn, as its head of revenue product. Read More
As the #DeleteUber count increases, Lyft has cleverly seized the opportunity to distinguish itself as a beacon of goodwill. In its most recent attempts to gain public favor, Lyft will soon be taking a stand by pledging fixed commitments to charities when you take a seat as a Lyft passenger. Read More
Facebook and the MLB announced today a new live-streaming partnership that will bring 20 live, regular season games to the social network. The games will air weekly on Facebook, with the first — Rockies at Reds — showing tomorrow night at 7:10 PM ET on the official MLB Facebook Page. Additional games and times will be announced later. Read More
As Google looks for ways to keep people using its own mobile search to discover content — in competition with apps and other services like Facebook’s Instant Articles — the company is announcing some updates to AMP, its collaborative project to speed up mobile web pages. Today at the Google I/O developer conference, Google announced that there are now over 2 billion AMP… Read More
Medium has launched a new feature that could add more incentive to its paid membership program: audio stories. The paid member exclusive offering will provide an audio version of every story created specifically for its members, and will also be made available for some of the best posts on Medium, as selected from the company’s own staff. These aren’t just text-to-speech… Read More
Today the FCC voted to officially propose an order that would eliminate net neutrality rules as we know them. To be clear, the rules are not being adopted today — that vote will be about three months from now, during which time the proposal is open for comment. Read More
