TechCrunch

YouTube is now blocking ads on channels with less than 10,000 views, Amazon pulls Diapers.com and other Quidsi apps and Spotify’s invisible IPO. All this on Crunch Report. Read More

 You can imagine that Stripe CEO Patrick Collison is asked a lot about whether his San Francisco-based payments company plans to go pubic any time soon. Last year, the seven-year-old company raised $150 million in a deal co-led by General Catalyst Partners and CapitalG that valued the startup at $9.2 billion, almost double the valuation it was assigned in 2015. Read More

 I’ve seen the light. A few weeks ago, Avegant showed off an early look at some of the crazy tech it has been working on that — in its most simple terms — seeks to make head-mounted displays function more like human eyes. It’s an ambitious goal with more than a few interested parties. Read More

 Google’s DeepMind announced today that it was open sourcing Sonnet, its object-oriented neural network library. Sonnet doesn’t replace TensorFlow, it’s simply a higher-level library that meshes well with DeepMind’s internal best-practices for research. Read More

 Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could make a lighter guitar, they didn’t stop to think if they should. As TC’s resident guitar lover I have to take all the high-tech in git-fiddles I can get. To wit, I present the Enlightened Collection of electric guitars. These guitars, made by Michael Kelly, are 30 percent lighter than standard solid-body guitars,… Read More

 Okta came out of the gate strong today in its Wall Street debut, attracting the type of institutional investors CEO Todd McKinnon says should be around for the long haul. This IPO comes at a time when Wall Street appears ready to embrace enterprise technology companies. Read More

 If you’ve ever ventured into the comment section of a website or spent any time on forums or social media, you’ve probably encountered sockpuppets, fake accounts controlled by a single person — though it’s possible you didn’t know it at the time. New research may help ID these overeager commentators automatically, which is good news for engendering sane… Read More

 Okta, the identity management software company, went public on the Nasdaq today, continuing a wave of tech IPOs. After pricing its IPO at $17, Okta raised $187 million by selling 11 million shares in the offering. Read More

 Benchmark partner Peter Fenton, who had been on Twitter’s board since 2009, will not seek re-election after his term expires in 2016, according to a new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Read More

 Slowly but surely, Google is transforming itself into a formidable VR player. This week, the Daydream maker hired Logan Olson, best known as the developer of SoundStage, a well-received HTC Vive title built around a VR music studio sandbox. Read More

 This week, a massive international array of the most powerful radio telescopes on the planet set its sights on the most camera-shy subject of all, the black hole. Badassly known as the Event Horizon Telescope, the global web of telescopes seeks to capture the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Read More

 Some babies won’t sleep unless they get a nighttime cruise around the neighborhood, as many parents (my own included) can attest. That’s why Ford’s latest creation isn’t a car at all – it’s a small cot for babies called Max Motor Dreams (via CNET) that simulates a drive using sound and motion, along with LED lighting designed to mimic yellow-hued… Read More

 Adidas unveiled their latest 3D-printed shoe last night, the Futurecraft 4D. The shoe is a huge improvement on their last 3D-printed runners, which were more of a concept than an actual product. The new version is better suited for mass production – Adidas plans on selling 5,000 pairs this upcoming fall, which will scale up to more than 100,000 pairs by the end of 2018. While the… Read More

 Happy belated Equal Pay Day! The U.S. Department of Labor testified in court today that pay inequities at Google are “systemic,” The Guardian reports. Earlier this month, Google said it had closed the gender pay gap globally. Read More

 The researchers over at OpenAI were able to use a recurrent mLSTM character-level model trained on Amazon reviews to identify the sentiment of blocks of text. And perhaps more interestingly, the team was able to generate new text with customizable sentiment. Read More

 The last time I wrote about Save, the French startup had just raised $16.7 million to prove that you could scale smartphone repair services. It’s been a roller coaster ride since then as the company had to claim insolvency. After this process, Remade Group is picking up Save’s business and employees. While the startup managed to grow quite rapidly, it was hard to keep up with the pace. Read More

 Apple reveals that it will be resetting its approach with the Mac Pro, the Waymo v. Uber lawsuit moves forward and Tesla surpasses GM to become the most valuable U.S. automaker. Here are the top stories of the week. Read More

 Less than 24 hours after news broke that Twitter was suing the federal government to protect the privacy of the person or persons behind a popular “rogue” anti-Trump account, the government has backed off. Today in a filing, Twitter dropped its charges against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Customs and Border Protection after the government withdrew its request to… Read More

 Many hot new enterprise technologies are centered around free, “open-source” technology. But how can corporate customers, and investors, evaluate all these new open-source offerings? These questions are especially tough to answer because most open-source companies are still private. That’s why we created a detailed index to track popular open-source software projects. Read More

 How do you like your eggs? If you answered “Easter,” you have something in common with billionaire tech visionary Elon Musk, who never tires of building the things into the software for his Tesla vehicles. Now, the CEO is teasing a forthcoming Easter Egg for people he’s heard like Easter Eggs: An Easter Egg with Easter Eggs in its Easter Egg. Musk’s tweet suggests a way… Read More