One more regional on-demand transport startup is raising a big round of funding to fortify itself for the next phase of competition against the likes of Uber and incumbent taxi firms. Cabify, the ride-sharing startup that operates in Latin America, Spain and Portugal, has raised just under $100 million in new funding ($99,999,994 to be exact), according to a Form D SEC filing for Maxi… Read More
The Disrupt NY hackathon is a week away and we are giddy with excitement. Over the course of the week, we’ll be sharing all the details you need for a successful hackathon and the best place to start is to highlight our judges and amazing MC. Tarikh Korula Tarikh Korula has a decade of experience founding companies that ship and grow consumer technology products to the delight of millions… Read More
Amazon is expanding its perks for Prime subscribers, with the launch of its own concert series called Prime Live Events. The debut shows will take place in London in May through July, starting with Blondie later his month. Alison Moyet, Texas, and Katie Melua will also each have their own shows this summer. If you can’t make it to London or afford the tickets, you’ll be able to… Read More
Look out, world: Alexa is coming to a screen near you. Today Amazon unveiled the Echo Show, a WiFi-enabled home device with a seven-inch screen that is the newest addition to its Alexa-powered Echo range of home hubs that plays media and responds to voice commands. While previous versions of the Echo have been all about asking Alexa questions and getting responses from her, this new device… Read More
When you’re looking at moving into a new space, Street View is often a useful tool to get the general vibe of the area but it’s almost impossible to really tell what spaces look like indoors without physically being there. Today, users clicking through locations on Google Street View will start seeing quite a bit more houses and businesses pop up that they can actually jump into… Read More
The Samsung Galaxy S8 is one of the best Android phones out there. Until now, you had to contact your phone carrier to get a new phone with some bloatware. What a terrible deal. Starting today, you can now buy a Samsung Galaxy S8 or S8+ without any of the bloatware. You can purchase the device on Samsung.com or in Best Buy stores. The Samsung Galaxy S8 starts at $724.99 with 64GB of storage,… Read More
If you haven’t seen Blade Runner 2049’s new trailer yet, get ready to become really excited about the upcoming movie. I didn’t know much about Blade Runner’s sequel except that they were making one. The trailer caught me by surprise when I saw both Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford discussing our gloomy future. Just like Ridley Scott’s original movie, the ambiance of… Read More
Signal Sciences, a venture-backed startup that wants to help companies secure their web apps in a modern DevOps context, announced a $15 million round today led by CRV with participation from Harrison Metal, Index Ventures and OATV. The company founders started at Etsy, which helped pioneer the DevOps idea, and while they were there, they found that securing a product that was changing… Read More
CityStream from Nexar harnesses the company’s dashcam app and allows municipalities to make use of the crowdsourced data. The idea is to share traffic patterns and behaviors so that cities can tweak routing and make infrastructure changes based on how cars are actually using roads day to day. The basis for CityStream is Nexar’s app for iOS and Android that turns your smartphone into… Read More
Opera, the Norwegian browser-maker that was sold to a Chinese consortium last year, is doubling down on the African market after it announced plans to invest $100 million to grow its business in the emerging region. The company is well known for its reach in emerging markets, and Africa in particular where it recently reached 100 million users. This $100 million budget is principally for… Read More
Empower, a startup looking to help millennials better manage their finances, is today launching its mobile app for iOS devices. The new application combines the ability to see an overview of your day-to-day transactions and spending behavior, with other tools to transfer money between accounts, automate your savings, and soon, pay bills and pay down your debt.
The ultimate goal, explains… Read More
At TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics, on July 17 at MIT’s Kresge auditorium, the programming lineup is set to showcase the fast developing new ecosystem around robotics. For a long time robotics was more the domain of academic research, defense spending, and big corporations, but the surge in new technologies, from sensors to AI to GPUs has made the field more accessible to entrepreneurs… Read More
UK teleconference company StarLeaf, which sells cloud-based video and conferencing services to businesses, has taken on its first external capital almost ten years after being founded, back in 2008. The $40 million round is co-led by Highland Europe and Grafton Capital. Read More
The major cloud infrastructure vendors know a thing or two about securing their platforms, but they still can’t protect their customers against user configuration error. That’s where RedLock, a startup emerging from stealth today comes in. It can warn you or fix a user error that could expose your data. Clearly, the cloud vendor has primary responsibility to ensure that the… Read More
Podium, a Utah-based enterprise software company specializing in customer review management has pulled in an over-subscribed $32 million Series A round, led by Accel Partners. Several sources close to the matter told us about this round, which we wrote about yesterday in an article about Utah-based Peak Ventures. However, Podium has now confirmed the numbers to TechCrunch. We were previously… Read More
Here’s a novel fix for the headache of interacting with all sorts of connected devices: researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have devised a system that lets smartphone users tap their phone against an IoT device in order to have a contextual menu automatically loaded on screen. Read More
Apple announced a couple of weeks ago that it would change its affiliate program, reducing the commission from 7 percent to 2.5 percent on all App Store purchases. Apple has clarified this change, saying that the commission cut is only going to affect in-app purchases after all.
Here’s Apple’s statement:
We’d like to clarify some changes being made to the Affiliate Program. Read More
China’s dominant mobile payment service is making its move in the U.S.. Ant Financial, the Alibaba spin-off that operates Alipay, has inked a deal with payment processor firm First Data that will allow its service to be used at point-of-sale with more than four million retail partners in the U.S.. The deal is the first of its kind for Alipay in the U.S.. The two companies… Read More
Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on TechNode, an editorial partner of TechCrunch based in China. China’s bike rental startups have hogged the startup limelight and investor dollars this year. The trend has been impossible to ignore, both on the ground and in reporting. Ofo became the industry’s first unicorn, while Mobike has pulled in over $300 million in… Read More
The U.S. isn’t the only market where media companies are consolidating to offer an advertising platform to rival Facebook and Google.
While AOL (which owns TechCrunch) is in the process of acquiring Yahoo, over in Malaysia a similar consolidation was announced this week — although not quite on the scale of AOL-Yahoo (Oath?!) and its $4.48 billion price tag. Media Prima, a… Read More
