A joint resolution has just been passed by both houses of Congress and all but signed by the president, reversing the Broadband Privacy Rule, a piece of regulation from the FCC that made some inconvenient changes to the ways internet providers can collect and sell the data they collect on consumers. But what exactly can they do now that they couldn’t last week? Read More
Sound Ventures, the venture firm founded by Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary, has hired a new managing partner and COO. Effie Epstein, who most recently led global strategy at Marsh & McLennan subsidiary Marsh, will be joining the firm to make investments and help run day-to-day operations. Read More
A billion and a half photos find their way onto Facebook every single day and the company is racing to understand them and their moving counterparts with the hope of increasing engagement. And while machine learning is undoubtedly the map to the treasure, Facebook and its competitors are still trying to work out how to deal with the spoils once they find them. Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt NY is around the corner, and with it we’re introducing a brand new way for startups to get their moment in the sun on our main stage. You’re probably familiar with our fireside chats — last year we spoke one-on-one with USV’s Fred Wilson, Uber’s David Plouffe, Facebook’s Stan Chudnovsky, Soledad O’Brien, Carmelo Anthony and… Read More
Raise.me, a service that gives colleges and universities (including my alma mater, Oberlin) an ability to award “micro-scholarships” for academic and extracurricular achievements throughout high school — rather than doling out lump-sum awards after a student applies to their school — has attracted $12 million in new venture capital financing to expand the service… Read More
It’s no secret that communications between patients and their doctors and pharmacists is anything but seamless. The same is true for communications between doctors and the labs and insurance companies with which they work. Carbon Health, a San Francisco-based startup, is aiming to create a two-sided marketplace that makes it easier for everyone involved to know what’s what. To… Read More
Today’s the main event for Samsung. It’s been well over a year since the company unveiled its last flagship and, well, a lot has happened to the company in the interim. After several months of recalls and some bizarre executive scandals, this is the moment where the company needs to dust itself off and show the world what helped make is such a smartphone powerhouse in the first… Read More
Media company BuzzFeed is trying to do the impossible by creating a new public media company today. According to reports from The Wall Street Journal and Axios, the company is working on an initial public offering for 2018. BuzzFeed has already raised hundreds of millions from VC firms and NBCUniversal. And if you’ve raised a ton of money in order to grow rapidly, you don’t have… Read More
To accompany the launch of the latest Gear VR, the Oculus team has rebuilt Home from the ground-up for mobile. The latest version is a doozy, with 3x faster load times and a number of new features and optimizations that bring the experience closer to that of desktop. If things feel a lot more like the experience on the Rift, it’s because Oculus has taken advantage of the new… Read More
Pretty much everything you’ve already read about the Samsung Galaxy S8 is true. And that’s a good thing. Whether by accident or design, the company did a truly abysmal job keeping its new flagship under wraps. Read More
The Galaxy S8’s main selling point still isn’t fully formed. Announced the week leading up to today’s main event, Bixby is as much a key building block for the company moving forward as is the shiny new piece of a flagship phone. The company is finally ready to make its play for the smart home, and the new messenger is going to be a key component. Read More
Samsung wasn’t going to get out of today’s Unpacked event without an update on the VR front. The company has long had the best low-cost VR headset (courtesy of a partnership with Oculus), and the package is getting a bit better with the addition of a controller to the mix. And as a show of goodwill (in case anyone was wary of jumping back in with the company after last… Read More
Since the dawn of machines, mankind has dreamed of shoving one small computer into a larger one. The vision resurfaced last week in the form of a strange Apple patent for a laptop-style device that slotted in an iPhone in place of the trackpad. Of course, Apple patents all sorts of crazy stuff. That’s just a thing that Apple does. The actual possibilities of such a device coming to… Read More
A reminder that I’ll be holding a micro-meetup at Boomtown on Broadway in Boulder, Colorado on today, March 29th, at 7pm. You’ll have 2 minutes to pitch in front of two local judges and then 2 minutes of questions. No slides, no props, no costumes (Ok, maybe costumes.) Boomtown is at 2060 Broadway B1 in the basement. To get there, park around Spruce and Broadway and it’s in… Read More
Alchemist Accelerator has raised $2 million from GE Digital to start a new program for industrial IoT startups. Stanford lecturer Timothy Chou, formerly President of Oracle On Demand, will chair Alchemist’s new IIoT accelerator along with GE Digital’s West Coast group. In the past, enterprise hardware and software startups were seen as capital intensive, with the challenge of… Read More
A thousand planets. One mission to save them all. Watch the new #Valerian trailer and like this Tweet to explore more. In theaters July 21 pic.twitter.com/dUau9Hz697 — Valerian Movie (@ValerianMovie) March 29, 2017 Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets promises stylish, sci-fi action with the kind of whimsy and fun you can’t find an ounce of across all… Read More
Facebook’s launch of Stories may be the social network’s big news of the week, but some Facebook users have spotted another addition, and are thoroughly confused. A “rocket ship” icon has popped up in the app of select users worldwide, adjacent to the News Feed button. Its appearance is prompting a lot of users to wonder, “what on earth is this thing?”… Read More
Mercedes-Benz had already committed to launch 10 new electric vehicle models within the next decade, but now it’s looking to launch them by 2022, which is at least three years earlier than it had previously discussed. Mercedes sees the shift to electric as a more urgent one than it anticipated, and wants to lead, rather than follow as the industry makes this shift. Bloomberg reports… Read More
Xbox One is getting an update starting today, echoing some of the major changes coming to Windows in its forthcoming Creators Update. The big new additions include streaming via Microsoft’s own Twitch competitor Beam, as well as a brand new Xbox user experience made up of a new design for Guide, improvements to Home and more. The new features are designed around encouraging gamers to… Read More
SpaceX is set to launch its next Falcon 9 rocket on Thursday, March 30 for SES-10, a mission for a private communications satellite company. This is different from every Falcon 9 launch that has preceded it, because the rocket SpaceX is using has already flown once before – on April 8 last year, when it was the first of the company’s rockets to nail a landing at sea on a floating… Read More
