Just six months into its life, Growlabs, a startup using machine intelligence to support outbound sales teams, has raised a $2.2 million seed round. Growlabs helps businesses reduce their customer acquisition costs by enabling smalls sales teams to do more with less. Read More
Spotify has taken a tip from Snapchat with its new feature for sharing music via scannable images. The new Spotify Codes feature creates a unique barcode and album cover image for every song, artist and playlist. Scan these Spotify Codes with the new camera in the Spotify app’s search bar to instantly play that music. Read More
This week we got to see what Elon Musk’s Boring Company is all about, Google Docs users were targeted in a phishing attack and Apple, Facebook and Tesla reported earnings. These are the top stories to catch you up on the biggest tech news this week. Read More
Intel opened a new Autonomous Driving Garage in San Jose this week, and the facility’s launch gave us an inside look at the kinds of projects the chipmaker is focused on with its driverless business. The relatively young business unit is already doing a lot, from HD mapping, to better wireless connectivity standards, to human machine interaction models, and beyond. We got the chance to… Read More
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is one of those rare CEOs who has, for a remarkably long and storied period, been at the helm of a company he helped create. What began as a provider of relatively niche graphics processing units (GPUs) with a narrow field of general computing uses has evolved to become, arguably, the bedrock underlying the current AI market explosion. Read More
A little more detail has emerged about how a key component of the controversial U.K. surveillance law (the Investigatory Powers Act, which was passed at the end of last year) is likely to function — after a government consultation document on so-called Technical Capability Notices was published yesterday by the digital rights organization Open Rights Group. Read More
There are a number of great deals to be had on Amazon, but finding them across the retailer’s vast array of products is still a challenge. That’s where a new app called Nugget comes in. The app scours Amazon for higher-quality products at lower prices, and then curates them into categories you can browse from your phone. All its deals are sourced from Amazon, so you don’t… Read More
In 1997, robotic scientist Rodney Brooks predicted a future where sensors and robots would be pervasive, and people could simply tell a door to open. His prognostication has come to pass. Brooks will be onstage at Disrupt NY to discuss what it will take to make the robots of science fiction into reality, how robotics will make the greatest impact on humanity in his lifetime and more. Read More
Rumor has it that Amazon has been working on an Echo device with a touchscreen for a while. AFTVnews spotted an image on Amazon’s own servers. And it looks like a device we’ve never seen before. As you can see, this isn’t exactly the best image of the device. It’s extremely pixelated because it’s a tiny thumbnail. I believe it’s going to appear at the top of… Read More
This weekend, Eliud Kipchoge, Lelisa Desisa and Zersenay Tadese will attempt to run a marathon in under two hours. It’s a bold – and some say impossible – goal, and a hell of a marketing campaign for Nike, which has been dumping time, money and resources into Saturday’s event for a few years now. The Breaking2 race (not to be confused with the mid-80s breakdancing sequel… Read More
If the Surface Laptop wasn’t enough, Microsoft is going to announce new devices once again at an event later this month. The company’s vice president of devices Panos Panay teased the event in a tweet and Instagram photo. Besides the city and date, the only hint we have is the use of the hashtag “#Surface.” Given that the Surface Laptop is brand new, the Surface Studio… Read More
According to a report from Recode this morning, Apple and Amazon may have come to an agreement that will finally bring the Amazon Video app to Apple TV. The app is expected to be released in the third quarter of 2017, and would offer Amazon subscribers an easier way to watch content on Apple TV instead of having to use AirPlay. Amazon and Apple have been at odds for years, as both want… Read More
The conventional thinking about profiling online users is that Facebook (in particular) has enormous amounts of profile data about your tastes, while Amazon has equivalent quantities of data about your shopping habits. While both are true to some extent, the reality is that your liking of cat videos and flirt-Liking work colleagues’ posts doesn’t amount to a heck of a lot, while… Read More
Alongside the rollout of its TV app last year, Apple introduced support for single sign-on in iOS and Apple TV, which allows you to enter TV provider’s credentials just once in the Settings so that you can watch streaming TV across a number of authenticated TV apps without having to configure each one with your credentials. Now, it appears that Amazon is working on a similar feature… Read More
Whether you’re an unsung mathematical genius with a penchant for writing complex equations all over everything or a damn vandal, you’ll find the WriteyDesk quite useful. This test is essentially a big whiteboard that upon which you can write, draw, or sketch and it’s erasable. It comes in white or “birch” and is $300 on Kickstarter ($400 when it hits… Read More
Welcome back to another episode of Equity, TechCrunch’s weekly podcast that works to put the ‘fun’ in ‘venture capital.’ This week from our SoMa studio, Katie Roof, Matthew Lynley and Alex Wilhelm were joined by Sequoia’s Roelof Botha. Sequoia, as you might know, was an early backer of companies like Google and Apple. Celebrating the continuing… Read More
Fender’s second app, Tone, is far more ambitious than its predecessor. In fact, it’s the first smartphone app I can recall that’s launched alongside a trio of amplifiers. It’s not necessary to operate them, of course, but it’s certainly a big part of their appeal, opening up access to a seemingly infinite range of guitar tones in the way only a smartphone can. The… Read More
Amazon is expanding its R&D facilities in Cambridge, UK, with a plan to move into a new 60,000sq ft site in the city with capacity for more than 400 staff. Read More
It looks like there’s more trouble round the corner for Uber. Reuters is reporting that the U.S. Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into the company’s controversial “greyball program” which helped it sidestep law enforcement officials and regulators. The existence of the program was made public in early March following an explosive report from The… Read More
Go-Jek raises $1.2 billion, Soylent raises $50 million, wheelchairs get a makeover from Izzy Wheels and Uber attempts to make UberPOOL a little less like a game of Russian roulette. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
