TechCrunch is excited to announce the judges of the next round of Startup Battlefield. These are the experts tasked with picking the finalists and winner of the startup competition held at Disrupt NY. It’s a big task, but these judges are up to the challenge.
This year the competition will feature 19 young companies vying for attention and funding. At stake is the Disrupt Cup and… Read More
Microsoft announced this morning at its Build 2017 conference that all developers can now publish their Microsoft Teams applications through the Office Store. The apps will be surfaced in Teams through a new discover apps experience, the company also said. At the event, Microsoft also demoed a handful of Teams features, including its support for tabs, its companion mobile app, integrations… Read More
At its Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced a new feature for the Azure Portal, its central dashboard for managing applications that run on Azure. The new Azure Cloud Shell brings a full Bash shell to the Portal, with support for Microsoft’s own PowerShell coming later. Access to this shell is also available in the Azure mobile apps.
Your Cloud Shell sessions are… Read More
The early-stage venture firm Obvious Ventures has a sense of humor that any math nerd can appreciate. The three-year-old, SF-based firm closed its debut fund with $123,456,789. Today, the firm is announcing the close of its second fund, and the amount this time is $191,919,191. Read More
The Disrupt NY Hackathon is this weekend! Check out the bevy of tools and prizes that will be featured as the assembled hacking teams compete for glory (and prizes). Read More
In an effort to grow its paid subscribers base, Spotify this morning announced a partnership with Capital One that will offer Spotify customers half off the price of their Spotify subscription if they pay with a Capital One Quicksilver or QuicksilverOne cards. The year-long partnership will conclude on April 30, 2018 and will be applicable to all the Premium tier memberships Spotify offers.… Read More
PokitDok, a healthcare API company, announced today it has teamed with Intel to offer a healthcare blockchain solution it’s calling ‘Dokchain.’ The partnership includes using Intel’s open source Hyperledger Sawtooth as the underlying ledger, and processing blockchain transaction requests at the chip level using Intel chips. This partnership and the broader… Read More
Microsoft Maluuba, the research team of PhDs that Microsoft acquired back in January, has been hard at work exploring the nexus of machine learning and question generation with the aim of delivering an intelligent personal assistant that surpasses the limited capabilities of today’s market leaders. Read More
StockX, the marketplace for limited-edition goods, has just announced they are expanding beyond sneakers. Starting today you’ll be able to buy and sell watches and handbags from luxury brands like Rolex, Audemars Piguet, Hermes, etc. Read More
Pinguin is a new app that lets you chat with people based on your interests. Really into startups? They got a room for you. Like you some programming? Right this way, sir. Like food? They got a room for you. The team, Josh Purvis, Devon Woodruff, Vijay Kumar, and Bryan O’Reilly built the app from he ground up with the needs of the online set in mind. There are a few of these apps… Read More
A lot of what Microsoft is showing at its Build conference this week is squarely aimed at developers. But in the barrage of news about Azure, Visual Studio and .NET, the company also showed off a preview of a new add-in for PowerPoint that is aimed at everyday users. The Presentation Translator can automatically provide real-time translated subtitles or translate the text of their actual… Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt NY is right around the corner. In anticipation of the occasion, here’s a helpful rundown of everything you’ll need to get the most out of your Disrupt experience. Read More
At its Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced the launch of Azure Batch AI Training. While that’s a mouthful, the name pretty much tells you what it is: a new service for batch training deep neural networks on the company’s Azure cloud computing platform. This service is now in private preview. It’s unclear when it’ll become available in public preview.… Read More
As part of its Build developer conference, Microsoft is launching a new program for independent software vendors (ISVs) today that aims to make its Azure platform more attractive to them: If they deploy their applications on Azure and make them available on its AppSource marketplace, Microsoft will allow its users to access them from tools like PowerApps and its IFTTT competitor Flow… Read More
Earlier this week, Harman Kardon announced the Invoke, its Cortana-enabled Amazon Echo competitor. While Harman Kardon was the first company to integrate Cortana into this kind of device, it’s not going to be the only one for long. As Microsoft announced today, HP has also signed on to build similar devices. Intel, too, is getting into this game. Read More
After a few months in preview form, Visual Studio for Mac is now officially officially available. This version of Microsoft’s flagship development tool is based on the cross-platform IDE from Xamarin, which it acquired last March. Read More
While Microsoft’s big Azure database news today is the launch of Cosmos DB, its new “planet-scale” distributed database service, there is a good chance that many developers will be more interested in a slightly smaller update to Azure’s database portfolio. At its Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced the launch of Azure Database for MySQL and PostgreSQL. Read More
At its Build developer conference, Microsoft announced it is adding four new services to the 25 already available for Cognitive Services, its platform for making various kinds of machine learning models easily available to developers. What makes three of these new services stand out is that they are customizable. Read More
There’s nothing wrong with tooting your own horn a bit when you hit a number like 500 million, and that’s what Microsoft did this morning to kick off its Build developer conference. That’s the company’s latest count of monthly active devices using Windows 10. Read More
“We want this to be the database of the future and to last for many decades to come,” Microsoft’s Dharma Shukla told me when we talked about Cosmos DB, the new globally distributed database the company is launching at its Build developer conference today. Read More
