Theranos has been agreeing to a lot of things lately. This new attempt to play nice seems to be an effort to keep the company going. Theranos had to pivot to working on a “miniLab,” which is essentially a lab on a chip in a desktop box, last year, dropping two-thirds of its workforce in the effort. The company also reportedly has just a quarter of its $800 million in funding left. Read More
More revolving doors at a London venture capital firm. TechCrunch has learned that Ophelia Brown has left LocalGlobe, the VC fund founded by father and son duo Robin and Saul Klein. Read More
At three years old, Oak HC/FT is a young firm. But its investors clearly have faith in the outfit. It closed its debut fund with $500 million in late 2014; yesterday, it closed its second fund with $600 million. Read More
Milanote’s visual workspace platform feels part Evernote, part Pinterest — offering users digital spaces (“boards”) paired with a drag and drop interface that can be used to add and position photos and notes to create visual moodboards and/or display a grouping of ideas as part of a research project. Read More
In the battle to lure artists to its platform, Spotify has used exclusives, free advertising, the promise of more listeners, and open access to data artists care about, like number of fans and listens. On that latter front, Spotify released a data dashboard called Fan Insights in late 2015, allowing artists to see how well their music is performing on the service. Today, Spotify is taking the… Read More
SeatGeek is announcing a deal to acquire TopTix for $56 million. While SeatGeek has made acquisitions before, this is its biggest, and the company funded the deal by raising a $57 million Series D led by Glynn Capital. (Previous investors Accel, Causeway Media Partners, Haystack Partners, Mousse Partners and Technology Crossover Ventures also participated.) “We really weren’t… Read More
We need to have a conversation about medical insurance claims, because the system is ridiculous. It’s a pain to deal with, and most people aren’t equipped to know all the codes or have time to jump through all the hoops. So Rachael Norman decided to do something about it: She co-founded Better, a startup advocating on your behalf to reduce your medical bills. Read More
Disrupt NY is right around the corner, and we are delighted to reveal the agenda for the conference, which returns to Manhattan. Tech luminaries, TechCrunch’s famed Startup Battlefield Competition, Disrupt after-parties and, for the first time ever, a live concert are on tap, and at the end of it all, one startup will take home $50,000 and the Disrupt Cup. Read More
Microsoft announced today that it was acquiring Bellevue-based Intentional Software for an undisclosed amount of money. With the purchase, Charles Simonyi, Intentional founder, Chairman, and CTO, who helped develop some of Microsoft’s famous Office tools like Excel and Word returns to Microsoft. Simonyi left Microsoft in 2002 to launch Intentional. While it’s not crystal clear… Read More
Today at 10am Pacific, Facebook is set to reveal a Camera Effects Platform, offline Instagram features, and group chat bots at its F8 conference. You can watch Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote right here in this post and see an updated list of all the day’s announcements. It’s the 10-year anniversary of Facebook’s Platform. While it’s had some stumbles along the way,… Read More
We’re gearing up for a great Disrupt NY and this year we’re pulling out all the stops. Like the pavilions we had in London and San Francisco last year, we are highlighting some of the best startups from 12 distinct categories to exhibit in New York’s Startup Alley plus they will demo their products on our Showcase Stage. Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning… Read More
Master & Dynamic has been making high-end headphones for a while; some of them are okay, others are great. But this is the first time they’ve entered speaker territory. The concrete behemoth in question is the MA770, with a price to match: $1,800. Pre-orders start today, with shipping in mid-May. Besides the material, it’s the first time I’m seeing this many… Read More
Last week Samsung announced that the Galaxy S8 would ship without Bixby Voice control. It seems unlikely that little bombshell will dissuade anyone from buying the new flagship. It is, after all, a great piece of hardware, as detailed in our recent review. Still, it’s a notable disappointment for one of the phone’s key selling points and a stumble for a feature that’s… Read More
Murj, a new company backed by $4.5 million in new venture financing, is looking to make data collection from implantable heart monitoring and management devices easier and more manageable. The company was founded by a former Medtronic sales rep who’d previously worked as a product manager on Apple’s iPads. After a few years in sales, Murj founder Todd Butka began thinking about ways… Read More
Alright future Disrupt attendees. We gave you an extra week to save $1,000 on Disrupt NY 2017 tickets, but this week we aren’t feeling so generous. You now have just three days left to get an early-bird ticket for $1,995 before prices jump to $2,995 after Friday.
Seriously, no more extensions. This is it.
Get your tickets now.
Disrupt NY 2017 is going to be one of our best Disrupts yet. Read More
Uber finalized a new tool in its business arsenal today called Uber Central that enables business users to order multiple Ubers on behalf of customers or clients from a single app. It was originally announced in July. The tool solves a problem businesses have had up to now, where they might need to order multiple cars for guests or customers, but were limited to one car per app at a time.… Read More
It’s been just under a year since Backblaze‘s B2 cloud storage service came out of beta. The platform’s main selling point at the time was definitely its pricing, which undercut virtually all of its larger competitors (think AWS, Google and Microsoft). Today, it’s launching a new round of price cuts, this time focused on download cost. Instead of $0.05 per gigabyte… Read More
The Samsung Galaxy S8 is a strange beast. All at once it seems like both the culmination of several generations’ worth of solid smartphone evolution, while feeling like a still-incomplete peek at the company’s grand plans moving forward. Read More
Flying drones to inspect a farm, construction site, or any other venue from overhead can generate a huge amount of data. It takes time, though, for drone users to upload and turn this high-resolution data into maps, graphs or business intelligence they can act upon. Today, a data management platform for drones called DroneDeploy, is launching a tool called Fieldscanner that makes it possible… Read More
Flipboard is following the launch of its “smart magazines” by boosting the role of videos. It’s not that videos were totally absent from the news app before this, but they usually showed up as an accompaniment to articles — not exactly prominent placement when compared to the beautiful treatment that Flipboard would often give photos. Now, CEO Mike McCue said videos… Read More
