Club Penguin Island, the mobile-only replacement for the original Club Penguin (which shut down last night) has launched. Started in 2005, Club Penguin was one of the first successful virtual worlds for children and, as they grew up, teens and adults. At its peak the platform had 200M users, and a few months ago was still seeing upwards of 5M visitors to the Club Penguin website each month.… Read More
Business intelligence platform Looker is announcing an $81.5 million Series D today led by CapitalG. Rather than compete in segmented markets against visualization and data preparation startups, Looker wants to own the vertical of business intelligence. The company supports the adoption of enterprise machine learning by providing a source of clean and reliable data. Read More
Multi-factor authentication or MFA is designed to protect your identity by forcing you to enter a second independent security method to determine it’s really you. Yet like every security system, there is a fine-line between usability and safety. That’s why OneLogin rolled out a new version of its mobile MFA tool today that uses machine learning to determine your typical usage… Read More
Audi plans to acquire Silvercar, a U.S.-based car sharing startup that was founded specifically to address the high-end airport rental car market. The company’s fleet is already made up exclusively of Audi A4 cars, so it’s not exactly going to be a dramatic upheaval in terms of Silvercar’s offering. Audi also already has a minority stake in the company, since an investment… Read More
HelloSign, founded in 2011, has been best known to this point as an e-signature company, but today it announced something a bit more substantial, a new product called HelloWorks, which allows the company to move into workflow, digitizing processes that involve complex forms. For many years now, HelloSign CEO Joseph Walla said, the way we moved paper processes into the digital realm was… Read More
Uber talked about a few of the changes coming to help improve its relationship with drivers during a press call last week held to address a number of concerns, including regarding its leadership and culture. Now, it’s releasing a few of those features it discussed, including pickup corrections users can make after they’ve already booked a driver, and a number of new customer… Read More
Toyota’s dedicated research organization, Toyota Research Institute (TRI), is investing $35 million into collaborative research efforts with a number of university and corporate partners focused on materials science. TRI believes progress in artificial intelligence can help further efforts in this key area of basic research, specifically around three key areas, including fuel cell… Read More
A Santa Clara, Calif. startup called JoyRun has raised about $10 million in Series A and seed funding for its peer-to-peer food and drinks delivery app. Floodgate led the $8.5 million Series A round in JoyRun, and Norwest Venture Partners led the company’s earlier $1.3 million seed round. Other investors joining both rounds included: Visionnaire Ventures, Morado Ventures, CrunchFund… Read More
The latest Tesla software update brings anticipated new features to Autopilot 2.0 cars, including Summon, which calls your car to you from its parking spot – but it also has a lighter side, as Tesla software updates tend to. Tesla added a new Easter Egg (a goofy software gag generally slightly hidden from view) to its vehicles with the 8.1 update, and this time it’s a sketch pad.… Read More
Telegram is the latest messaging app to get a major new feature, but unlike Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber, Hike and countless others, it isn’t cribbing from Snapchat. That’s because Telegram is introducing voice calls. Admittedly the company is a little late to the audio calling party, but that is likely because of its focus on security, and in particular end-to-end… Read More
When Amazon acquired Kiva Systems in 2012, other retailers and third-party fulfillment centers panicked. The e-commerce giants took Kiva’s robots off the market, leaving their competitors without an important productivity tool. Lots of newcomers have cropped up to help warehouses keep up with demand since then. But one of the most hotly anticipated robots in this space was under… Read More
There are more problems for ambitious Chinese tech firm LeEco. Its acquisition of U.S.-based TV maker Vizio, a surprise deal announced last summer, has run into issues, according to media reports in China.
Back in February, LeEco brushed off concerns around the deal after Vizio settled an FTC charge for surreptitiously collecting customer viewing data, but this time the issue seems… Read More
Samsung releases its new phones the S8 and S8+, pet-sitting companies Rover and DogVacay merge, Lyft launches Lyft Shuttle, a new feature that works like a bus route, and five reasons why BuzzFeed is going public. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
The Deck, an ad network whose funding members included Daring Fireball, Kottke and Waxy, announced today that it’s shutting down. As a simple, clean ad network focused on independent websites,The Deck may have seemed like a bit of a throwback — and indeed, in his blog post announcing the shutdown, founder Jim Coudal tied the network’s fate to broader changes in the online… Read More
Munchery, an on-demand food delivery startup that has already raised more than $120 million, is reportedly looking to raise an additional $15 million in funding that would force a recapitalization of the company, Bloomberg reports. Munchery reportedly has raised more than $5 million in this new financing. As part of the recapitalization, Munchery issued shares to new investors in the form of… Read More
Have you seen the viral GoFundMe campaign floating around that vows to buy and publish the web histories of every politician and exec who is helping internet providers sell your data? Yeah, don’t give that dude your money. I’m all for wacky clever revenge plots, but this one just looks like a straight up scam. Read More
With its House counterpart imploding thanks to the late-night excursions and executive coziness of its chairman Devin Nunes, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee soldiers on in its investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. Read More
Samsung promised a revolution today. The company opened today’s Unpacked event by contextualizing the history of mobile phones, from the 1980s to today. The conceit was simple: Today’s big announcement marks a step in cell phone evolution akin to the jump from the Zack Morris brick to the flip phone or the clamshell to the smartphone. What it delivered was a phone with fewer bezels. Read More
Google’s self-driving car unit, Waymo, pursued arbitration against one of its star engineers last fall before filing a lawsuit in February against his current employer, Uber, for theft of trade secrets. Waymo claims that its former employee Anthony Levandowski stole 14,000 confidential documents before leaving to start the self-driving truck company Otto, which was acquired by Uber. Read More
AdSemble has launched a new way for businesses to buy ads on digital billboards.
To use the company’s new Open Display product, advertisers just set their weekly budget, choose the region where they want their ad to be displayed and upload their creative assets. Then AdSemble will automatically serve the ad to different billboards across its network, optimized to deliver the most… Read More
