Is Twitter the new TV? The social network hopes to become something resembling that, with plans revealed by CFO and COO Anthony Noto to eventually be airing live video content 24 hours a day, 7 days per week via both its website and app. Noto discussed the plans with BuzzFeed News, ahead of the company’s earnings report Wednesday morning. Twitter already plays host to a number of live… Read More
Genetic engineering startup Synthego makes synthetic ribonucleic acid (RNA), an important genetic component found in all living cells and also used in CRISPR Cas9, a technology enabling scientists to rip out unwanted genetic code with scissor-like precision. The company was founded four years ago by brothers Paul and Michael Dabrowski. Read More
Digital ad revenue grew to $72.5 billion in 2016, up 22 percent from the year before. That’s according to the latest Internet Advertising Revenue Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (a trade group for online publishers and advertisers). The report also says that for the first time, mobile ads accounted for more than half of that spending —… Read More
Before its adorable little robot Cozmo arrived on the scene, Anki was in the business of making smart toy cars. The hardware startup’s robotic race car line Overdrive is getting a pretty high profile promotional boost in the form one of the most profitable franchises in film history. In September, the company will be launching Anki Overdrive: Fast & Furious Edition, a racing kit… Read More
As industries go, agriculture represents one of the worst environmental offenders, according to research by the United Nations Environment Programme. Farms need tending around the clock. So besides all the fertilizers, pesticides and water they use, farms also burn a lot of fossil fuels and money to keep the lights on, tractors rolling and refrigerators humming. Now one major agricultural… Read More
There is nothing better than giving someone the perfect gift. So it’s only natural that giving the wrong gift, for which you searched tirelessly and still came up short, is one of the worst feelings in the world. That’s where Token comes in. The startup, launching publicly today from the Human Ventures startup studio, wants to take on the challenge of gift-giving with a little… Read More
Almost nobody looks forward to going to the tailor. For one, you have to trek your clothes to and from this place — in metropolitan centers where walking/biking is a primary source of transportation, this becomes compounded. Plus, pricing isn’t always clear at local tailors and turnaround time is anyone’s guess. Enter Air Tailor, a new startup graduating from the… Read More
Offering a more complete home insurance package for less money than traditional insurance sellers, startup insurance broker Hippo Insurance launched its first service this week in California. According to chief executive Assaf Wand, the company intends to be available to 60% of all U.S. homeowners by the end of the year. To that end, the company had previously raised $14.5 million last October… Read More
Zero-fee stock trading app Robinhood has joined the unicorn club. That’s thanks to it reaching 2 million total monthly users, and 17% month-over-month growth of its revenue-driving Robinhood Gold subscription product. The startup confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s raised a $110 million Series C at a $1.3 billion valuation led by DST Global, with participation by existing investors… Read More
Huddly, a Norway-based startup that sells a camera targeting remote company meetings (or huddles) and is building out what it describes as a “computer-vision” platform to help managers glean better data from those meetings, has raised $10 million in Series B funding. It brings total raised to $20 million, not including a $3 million research grant. Read More
OverOps, a startup that wants to help companies find software bugs more efficiently than by pouring over log files, announced a $30 million Series C round led by Lightspeed Ventures with participation from Menlo Ventures. Both are existing investors. In a nutshell, OverOps delivers a cloud or on-prem solution that helps developers and operations teams nail down bugs in a more automated… Read More
Dating app Paktor, often dubbed ‘The Tinder of Southeast Asia,’ just sealed up its move into live-streaming and media content after it announced a merger deal with Taiwanese startup 17 Media.
Under the deal, a new company called M17 Entertainment has been created with shares from both Paktor and 17 Media, company representatives confirmed. They didn’t, however, reveal a… Read More
Looking for some insight into the societal cost of buying a cup of coffee, a double cheeseburger, or a pack of cigarettes? Well, financial services startup Aspiration now has an app for that. The fascinating fintech company that was co-founded by former Bill Clinton speechwriter Andrei Cherny just launched a new feature inside its mobile banking app that tracks a customer’s… Read More
Instagram has doubled its user base to 700 million monthly actives in two years, fueled by Stories, web signup, and better onboarding on low-end Android phones. Instagram’s growth rate is actually speeding up. It took just four month to add the last 100 million users since hitting 600 million in December, while it took 6 months to go from 500 million to 600 million. Here’s a… Read More
Oracle announced a slew of AI-driven capabilities across its Customer Experience Cloud Suite today that are designed to help users to deliver better, faster and more personal experiences. If you think you’ve heard this before, it’s because Oracle joins its customer experience competitors in offering a similar set of capabilities complete with underlying artificial… Read More
IBM, which has been putting a lot of emphasis on its cloud services and infrastructure lately, today announced that it is opening four new data centers in the United States. These new facilities — two in Dallas, Texas and two in Washington, DC — bring IBM’s total number of data centers for its cloud to 55. In the U.S., IBM not operates 22 data centers.
As IBM noted in… Read More
A ‘lunar base’ is a phrase previously used mostly by Bond villains, but the Chinese and European space agencies are discussing creating exactly that in a new collaborative effort. The discussions were confirmed by the ESA’s Pal Hvistendahl, speaking to Bloomberg on Wednesday, and involve working together to build a human-occupied “moon village” from which both… Read More
Twitter delivered a surprising and much-needed positive quarterly earnings report this morning — and it’s finally seeing some positive moves in its stock price.
That’s going to be important going forward, as the company needs to convince Wall Street it can stay independent and also attract talent. Twitter, as we’ve seen time and again, reports a huge stock-based… Read More
Google’s Pixel already boasts a formidable camera, among the best in smartphone photography. A Google Daydream engineer Florian Kainz revealed how much more incredible it could be specifically in the area of night photography, when he set himself the task of reproducing DLSR-style nighttime picture quality using both a Pixel and a Nexus 6P. The experiment, detailed on the Google… Read More
In an very un-Twitter move, the company completely beat out the increasing decline of its business that tech observers were expecting.
This is a hugely positive sign for the company, which has seen continued bad news on the whole company operating front. Not only was it able to generate more money than expected, its user numbers also made a surprising spike. Twitter’s faced a ton of… Read More
