FactGem, which is launching in our Disrupt NY Battlefield competition today, was born out of Megan Kvamme’s frustration with trying to juggle hundreds of Excel spreadsheets when she was an investment banker. When she tried to find a product that would allow her to more easily analyze all this data, she couldn’t find what she was looking for, so she started working on what became… Read More
Health insurance in the US is broken. That much seems to be regarded as a universal truth. Oscar Health co-founder and CEO Mario Schlosser acknowledged that the system is need of some major fixes this afternoon during a panel at Disrupt New York. And the country, he added, certainly has a ways to go in order to address those key shortcomings. Asked whether the United States has a moral… Read More
No one wants to fall behind on rent, and being evicted for lack of payment would be a catastrophic event for the 40 percent of Americans who rent their home. Launching today at Disrupt NY, Domuso provides more flexible rental terms for tenants, while helping property owners and managers to more efficiently collect rent. Read More
After spending time at a London fintech accelerator last year, enterprise database startup ZeroDB scrapped its first business plan and mapped out a new one. By January this year it had a new name: NuCypher. It now will try to persuade enterprises to switch to their specialized encryption layer to enhance their ability to perform big data analytics by tapping into the cloud. Read More
Apple just released a new ad featuring the “practically magic” tagline at the end. The ad focuses on Portrait mode once again. It takes place in a barbershop in New Orleans.
Portrait mode is a software feature for the iPhone 7 Plus. It takes advantage of the two cameras to calculate different depth levels. It then automatically makes the background blurry so that it feels like… Read More
The founders of Glossier and Outdoor Voices, Emily Weiss and Tyler Haney, respectively, spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York today about how they’re taking a bite out of the massive beauty and apparel industries. Key to both startups’ success? A digital-first, and friendly, approach to everything from sales to product development. Read More
Amazon’s smart assistant has gotten pretty good at recognizing its own name (much to the apparent chagrin of many who share it), but that doesn’t make it immune from false positives. To make Alexa better at filtering out similar words, Amazon is today introducing a new feature called Cloud-Based Wake Word Verification for third-party manufacturers who have Alexa built into… Read More
AI is one of the buzzwords of the moment in the world of tech, with startups coming at the concept from all angles — computer vision, machine learning, unstructured data inference and natural language processing being just a handful — in a wider effort to create more intelligent machines. Now comes a new organization that hopes to find and foster the next wave of AI businesses… Read More
WeWork, which is said to be raising as much as $4 billion at a valuation of more than $20 billion, is still on its way to hitting $1 billion in annual revenue this year — though CEO Adam Neumann said at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017 that it’s not quite as simple as betting big on enterprise deals. Neumann said that enterprise deals, which would help handle office space for larger… Read More
I’ve been playing around with Libratone’s on-ear headphones for a while, and I have to say that they sound quite convincing. I’m not really into headphones as I’d rather carry some tiny earbuds in my pocket when I’m walking around. But when I travel, I need a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. When I’m flying, I’ve been relying on Bose headphones or… Read More
AOL co-founder Steve Case took to the stage at Disrupt New York this morning to discuss myriad issues, from his former company’s merging with one-time competitor Yahoo (pro) to a potential run for Congress (naw). It’s clear, however, that Case’s current passions lie in his organization, Rise of the Rest, which seeks to shine a light on startups outside of a few key tech hubs. Read More
This is the age of the citizen journalist where people on the street armed with a smartphone and a Twitter account are often the first on the scene of an accident, fire or other emergency. These folks know about an incident that requires emergency services well before first responders. Dataminr introduced a new product on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt today in New York City that… Read More
Razer, the gaming company that acquired the Robin smartphone maker Nextbit earlier this year, is now opening the curtains on the next steps to make a deeper move into the mobile space. Razer has announced a strategic partnership with Three, the Hong Kong-based mobile phone carrier owned by Hutchison Whampoa. Read More
Facebook is banning misleading uses of its Live video format. The company tells TechCrunch that it’s adding a section to its Live API Facebook Platform Policy that reads “Don’t use the API to publish only images (ex: don’t publish static, animated, or looping images), or to live-stream polls associated with unmoving or ambient broadcasts.” Read More
Being the chief information security officer at the company that’s suffered the biggest (known) data breaches in history isn’t the kind of fame most CISOs would be looking for. But it’s Yahoo’s Bob Lord’s bag. His LinkedIn profile includes the line: “I lead the Paranoids, the information security team at Yahoo.” Read More
What’s it like to be an entrepreneur in a place that has little to no Internet access? Today at TechCrunch’s Disrupt NY, we got the perspective of a trio of Cuban entrepreneurs to learn about the challenges they face in building businesses as the country gradually opens up to the outside world. Read More
To most of us, communication is a single task. But in reality, it’s not and if you’re a machine trying to replicate dialog, you need to be good at lots of tasks like answering questions, completing sentences and even having small talk. It’s common for research in each of these areas to be done independently, to the detriment of anyone trying to put the pieces together… Read More
Singapore is a country known worldwide for both a very high cost of living and limited real estate space — that combination makes it hard to imagine a better location for a gigantic vending machine that spits out luxury cars.
That’s right, folks. Autobahn Motors, a company that started out selling used vehicles in conventional showrooms, recently opened a 15-story building in… Read More
Mark Thompson, CEO of the company that President Donald Trump has called the “failing” New York Times, doesn’t sound too bothered by presidential criticism.
“I’ve been in journalism for more than 30 years,” said Thompson, who appeared this morning at TechCrunch’s Disrupt New York conference. “Politicians attacking media is not a new thing. Read More
TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos took to the stage at Disrupt NY today with Stuart Ellman from RRE Ventures, Maha Ibrahim from Canaan Partners and Amish Jani of FirstMark Capital to talk about Trump, the economy and Uber. Apart from Peter Thiel, most venture capitalists were adamantly opposed to the idea of a Trump presidency during the U.S. election last year. But now that we are a few… Read More
