SiriusXM has acquired Automatic, the maker of the Automatic Pro and Automatic Lite connected car OBD-II port accessories. The deal is acknowledged by SiriusXM CFO David Frear to be worth a little north of $100 million, and SiriusXM and Automatic both note in releases announcing the news that the brand will remain separate, and Automatic’s products and team will remain focused on the… Read More
Origin Ventures, an early-stage, 18-year-old venture firm based in Chicago, has closed its fourth fund with $80 million in commitments. The fund is twice as big as the firm’s third fund, which closed in 2013. The sum is even more meaningful when compared to the outfit’s first two funds. One of those was a $1.5 million fund that cofounder Steve Miller pooled together with a… Read More
Lyft previously announced that it would be introducing “Round Up & Donate,” a program that would allow its riders to automatically top-off their fare to the nearest dollar and donate the excess to a worthy cause. The program is now all set to go live for the first time on Monday, May 1, and the first organization that Lyft is supporting is United Services Organizations (USO),… Read More
Mobile applications saw a record number of downloads and revenue in the first quarter of the year, according to a new report from app store analytics firm App Annie out this morning. Across both iOS and Android, downloads grew by 15 percent year-over-year to reach nearly 25 billion worldwide – a figure that includes only new downloads, and not re-installs or downloads from prior quarters.… Read More
Iliad’s cloud hosting division Scaleway is launching a new type of server today. In just a minute, you can launch your server with its own dedicated ARMv8 processor, 2GB of RAM, 50GB of SSD storage and unlimited bandwidth. And it only costs around $3.25 per month (€2.99).
If you’re not familiar with processor architecture, your computer and your smartphone use two different chipsets. Read More
Cloudflare, the content delivery network that promises speed and security for websites, announced today that it’s moving into the internet-of-things industry with a security product called Orbit. Now, instead of just securing websites, Cloudflare wants to secure IoT devices too. Orbit has been developed over the last 18 months in response to customer demand, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Price… Read More
Some big names are making an investment in food stamps — specifically in Propel, a startup that helps food stamp recipients manage their benefits. Propel is announcing that it has raised $4 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Omidyar Network, Kevin Durant’s The Durant Company and Max Levchin’s SciFi VC, as well as previous investors Jay Borenstein, WinWin and… Read More
Miss out on the first two rounds of tickets to the hackathon at Disrupt NY 2017? Don’t fret. Today, we’re releasing a new batch of hackathon tickets, so everyone out there who has been waiting to get tickets to the best hackathon in New York can get in on the action. You can get your tickets here. At the Disrupt NY Hackathon, you’ll spend a grueling, fun-filled weekend… Read More
Ride hailing and bike sharing come together under one roof through Didi Chuxing’s new partnership with Ofo, the bike sharing service easily spotted in China thanks to its signature canary yellow bicycles. The team-up makes a ton of sense, given Didi’s strategic investment in Ofo from September 2016, and the way its short-term bike rentals can supplement car travel and sidestep… Read More
TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics is a couple of months away, and the agenda is filling up. Our one-day event in cooperation with MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) takes place on July 17, and today we’re thrilled to highlight just some of the excitement taking place on stage, in workshops and in exhibits.
Tickets are now available for purchase. Read More
LG Electronics has posted its Q1 2017 results, which show a nearly 10 per cent year-over-year jump in revenue. The electronics maker is reporting KRW 14.66 trillion ($12.70BN) in revenue, an increase of 9.7 per cent from the same period last year. Read More
R&B artist and producer Ne-Yo is making his first move into tech via an investment in the Holberton School for full-stack software engineers. Yup, it turns out Ne-Yo participated in the $2.3 million round Holberton announced in February. He’s also joining the school’s board of trustees in order to help attract people from underrepresented groups to learn how to… Read More
As Uber continues to get more negative attention for its business culture and practices, the company today is taking one step ahead in the UK to try to improve its relationship with drivers here. The company is today announcing a new partnership with the Association of Independent Professionals & the Self-Employed (IPSE) to offer personal injury and illness cover for its 40,000 drivers… Read More
Nintendo has sold 2.74 million Switches to date, the first official number released by the company by way of its FY 2016 earnings report, released on Thursday. The total hardware units sold have also led to decent game sales – 5.46 million total across the library, but Zelda: Breath of the Wild looks to be the only real breakout hit for the console with 2.76 million Switch units sold,… Read More
Zeta Global, the marketing tech company that has recently acquired the likes of eBay’s enterprise arm and Acxiom Impact, is preparing for another round of acquisitions and investments in its technology. To do so, the company today announced that it has raised a $140 million Series F round. Read More
TransferWise, the billion-dollar valued startup that reduces the cost of cross-border payments, has taken a big step to globalizing its service after it opened an Asia Pacific office in Singapore. The UK-based service was started in 2010 by Estonian entrepreneurs Kristo Kaarmann and Taavet Hinrikus, its CEO, as a method for sending money from country to country more efficiently. It… Read More
The world is awash with bots these days — applications the run either partly or entirely using natural language processing, machine learning, computer vision and other artificial intelligence technologies to help consumers ask and answer questions, buy things and get other stuff done. In the enterprise equivalent, a company that is building something akin to this for large… Read More
Despite the Galaxy Note 7 saga and the arrest of its defacto head on bribery charges, Samsung’s business has bounced back. The company just announced its first quarter financial results, and they are as impressive as it had forecast earlier this month. Operating profit for the quarter rose by 48 percent year-on-year to reach 9.9 trillion KRW, or approximately $8.7 billion. That makes… Read More
Didi Chuxing, the on-demand giant that drove Uber out of China, is set to become the world’s second-highest valued tech startup. Beijing-based Didi is in the process of raising a round that could reach as high as $6 billion at a valuation that would exceed $50 billion, a source with knowledge of discussions told TechCrunch. That’s not far from Uber itself, which is said to… Read More
The New Zealand government has created a new rating for the Netflix series “13 Reasons Why” that says a parent or guardian must be present when it is viewed by teens under 18. Read More
