Four years after we made our TechCrunch China events a twice-annual affair in Beijing and Shanghai, we are very proud to announce that we will host the event in Shenzhen, known as ‘The Silicon Valley For Hardware,’ for the very first time this coming June! This is hugely exciting for us and our China partner Technode. We’ve done one-day events in the city in the past, but… Read More
A group of Marines is demanding that Facebook get a grip on the systemic harassment that plagues its female servicemembers. In a thorough, thoughtfully articulated letter, veteran and Not in My Marine Corps co-founder Erin Kirk-Cuomo calls for Sheryl Sandberg to take a personal interest in fighting the spread of nonconsensual photo sharing and gendered harassment on Facebook. Read More
Instagram Stories surpasses Snapchat in terms of users, Susan Fowler joins Stripe, Google makes its fashion image searches look more like Pinterest and Yext shares pop more than 20 percent in public debut. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
For every bad idea, there’s a crowdsourcing campaign with a soapbox and a big-ass megaphone, ready to make it even worse. Interested? In case you missed it, it’s not too late to vote to shake up the executive branch — surely the No.1 priority of every red-blooded American in these mostly ho-hum, sleepy times. Read More
Baidu is acquiring xPerception, a U.S. startup specialized in computer vision, according to Reuters. Details are sparse, but we know the startup has its own module for object recognition and depth perception that can be deployed on robots and drones. Read More
Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies today, CIA Director Mike Pompeo went off on WikiLeaks. Pompeo is pretty mad about that whole Vault 7 hacking tools data dump, it looks like. “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service,” he declared Thursday. I think he means that it’s a hostile… Read More
SpotHero is an app that allows you, a driver in search of a space, to reserve and prepay for a spot in a parking garage before you even leave the house. Parking Panda came at the problem from the other direction by focusing on B2B services and event parking. Now, SpotHero has acquired Parking Panda to expand the parking spaces that can be reserved to nearly 5,000 in North America. Read More
Nearly 1,000 miles from Silicon Valley and just west of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, in practically the middle of nowhere, is the tranquil Grantsville, population 9,617. There, in a warehouse the size of a combined eight Walmarts, you’ll find Purple, a direct-to-consumer mattress startup, hard at work prepping hundreds of thousands of pillows, powerbases and mattresses for shipment. Read More
If you’ve dug into any articles on artificial intelligence, you’ve almost certainly run into the term “neural network.” Modeled loosely on the human brain, artificial neural networks enable computers to learn from being fed data. This guide to neural networks aims to give you a conversational level of understanding of deep learning. Read More
Yext, the company that helps businesses power their location data, went public on the New York Stock Exchange today. After pricing shares above the expected range at $11, the price rose 21 percent to $13.29 by the end of the first day of trading. Read More
DJI has announced a new drone in the Phantom 4 lineup. The Phantom 4 Advanced will take the place of the regular old Phantom 4, which will be discontinued on April 30th when the new version launches. The new drone will cost $1,349 – $50 less than the original Phantom 4’s starting price. The Phantom 4 Advanced will borrow a bunch of features from the Phantom 4 Pro, which remains… Read More
Nintendo had a bonafide – and apparent surprise – hit on its hands with the NES Classic Edition. But like all good things, its time is done. This afternoon, the company confirmed with TechCrunch that, “Throughout April, NOA territories will receive the last shipments of Nintendo Entertainment System: NES Classic Edition systems for this year.” It’s not… Read More
Tesla is going to show Tesla 3 buyers what their call will officially look like in July, Elon Musk revealed on Twitter on Thursday. The Model 3’s first unveiling took place in April of 2016, where it said cameras weren’t allowed (unless they were built into your phone). Because smartphones are as good as they are, we got a fairly decent look at what the Model 3 looked like at the… Read More
What will Facebook launch next week at its F8 conference? The schedule reveals plans to give Instagram offline features that are already in testing, opening its Camera Effects Platform to developers so they can create more powerful photo and video overlays for people to use and a Places Graph for developers to do more with Facebook’s location database beyond the existing APIs. Read More
Google is getting into the restaurant delivery and home services businesses – nope, not in the U.S., but rather in parts of India. The company has quietly launched a new app called Areo which currently only works in Bangalore and Mumbai, India, allowing users to order meals from nearby restaurants or schedule appointments with local service professionals, including electricians,… Read More
NASA held a press conference on Thursday to reveal some exciting new discoveries about ocean worlds within our solar system: It has found evidence that suggest a type of chemical energy that can support life exists on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s 62 confirmed moons. The new evidence comes from the Cassini spacecraft, which has been probing Saturn and its natural satellites since 2004… Read More
When it comes to home surveillance cams there are two kinds of cams – low-end, highly-motorized, wireless IP cams that are (typically) fairly insecure and higher-end cloud service systems like Dropcam that offer secure but more expensive cameras. SpotCam seems to land squarely in the middle with their SpotCam Sense Pro line. I tested two models and found them more than acceptable for… Read More
Tesla plans to show off an electric pickup truck sometime within the next two years, the company’s CEO Elon Musk said on Twitter today. The pickup was teased originally when Musk revealed the second part of his “master plan” for Tesla, which began with selling expensive vehicles like the Roadster and Model S, and eventually leads to producing a wide range of more… Read More
In an interview about his thoughts on the next big things in tech, Golden State Warriors small forward Andre Iguodala gushed on augmented reality and undoubtedly skated the lines of violating his Magic Leap NDA as he described his demo with the product, which he called a “disruption of life.” Read More
