It’s World Water Day. Time to wake up and take shorter showers. That is, if we’re fortunate enough to have them. Water scarcity and pollution are persistent global problems. According to End Water Poverty, some 663 million people around the world have absolutely no reliable access to clean, safe water year-round. And two-thirds of the world population faces water scarcity for… Read More
The News Lens, an online journalism startup that aims to be the voice of reason in Asia’s raucous media landscape, will focus on creating more original video content after landing a Series B round. The startup hasn’t disclosed the exact amount, but says it is in the range of $2 million to $3 million. Read More
Google Maps launches a location-sharing feature, Coffee Meets Bagel has a new paid membership tier and AI expert Andrew Ng leaves Baidu. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Amazon has postponed its much-anticipated entry into Southeast Asia. The company initially planned to launch local e-commerce services in Singapore during the first quarter of this year, as we reported in November, but two sources with knowledge of the plans told TechCrunch that the schedule has slipped to “later this year”.
Amazon did not respond to multiple requests for… Read More
Republican Senators led by Arizona’s Jeff Flake proposed a resolution earlier this month that would roll back privacy rules adopted by the FCC last year that prevented ISPs from collecting personal data without asking permission first. Today the Senate was alive with oratory as people spoke for and against the proposal. Read More
Apple has finalized a deal to acquire Workflow today — a tool that lets you hook together apps and functions within apps in strings of commands to automate tasks. We’ve been tracking this one for a while but were able to confirm just now that the ink on the deal is drying as we speak.
I haven’t been able to get financial details for the deal, but if I come up with them… Read More
Pickup basketball can be difficult to just stumble upon if you want to play. It also can be difficult to get a game going out of the blue. “We wanted to play and find games and it was hard to find,” Donte Morris said. “We thought that there has got to be an app for this.” When Morris and his brother Dominic couldn’t find an app for it, the brothers created Hoop Maps. Read More
Perhaps you’ve been watching the BBC’s Spy in the Wild, in which meticulously recreated robotic animals cohabitate with their fleshy brethren and record all their secret goings and doings. But haven’t you ever wondered what fruit gets up to during the long trip from its homeland to your local produce department? These robo-fruits are your best bet to find out. Read More
Official platform of hot takes Medium has launched its new business model: paid subscriptions, which the company said it would debut sometime this quarter at Upfront Summit back in early February. Medium started the year with some tough times, including layoffs and a change in direction, so it’s got a lot riding on these subscriptions attracting some… well, subscribers.… Read More
Raising money for a venture fund is almost never easy, but it’s a whole lot harder in certain places that are struggling economically, like Greece. Thankfully for the country, a new seed-stage firm has formed, called Marathon VC. Its mission, broadly: to back Greek tech entrepreneurs, regardless of where they are based. Read More
Formula E announced the nine manufacturers that will race electric cars in seasons five, six, and seven. You may think this is no big whoop, but it is. Here’s why the whoop is big: beginning in season five, each team will race one car per driver for the entire race — like every other racing series on the planet — rather than two. Because battery technology lagged behind… Read More
Facebook is testing an enhanced local search feature that could see the social network creeping in on Google Maps, Foursquare and Yelp territory, TechCrunch learned and Facebook confirmed. Facebook users are now able to surface recommendations of nearby places – like “dinner nearby” or “bars nearby,” for example – by entering a query in… Read More
BMW is combining the best of real and virtual worlds to make the process of creating new car designs as quick and painless as possible. The carmaker has tapped Unreal Engine’s rendering capabilities to generate virtual surfaces and objects overtop 3D-printed prototype vehicle pieces, letting designers and engineers preview how various materials or surfaces will look on a final… Read More
News broke earlier this week that the U.S. would ban laptops and tablets (and any other electronic device larger than a smartphone) from all U.S.-bound flights that take off from 10 airports in the Middle East and Northern Africa. The U.K. then followed suit and instituted its own ban, which targets a slightly different list of airports, which — at least on the face of it —… Read More
Almost everything seems like it’s on demand, delivered with the push of a button. And yet, the U.S. is only the 15th happiest country. What’s more, that level’s been dropping since 2005. So why haven’t we developed happiness on demand? We’ve seen more technological growth in the last 10 years than we saw in the 100 years before that, and it seems we’ve… Read More
Nintendo’s latest console, the Switch, has been received quite favorably by us and others (having one of the best games ever on it helped) — but one recurring complaint concerned the Joy-Con L, or left controller, as everyone else calls it. Interruptions in the wireless signal were rare for me but more common for others, and Nintendo has finally acknowledged the problem as a… Read More
Station F is going to be the world’s biggest startup campus. A thousand startups are going to work in this huge building. And Station F wants to partner with the biggest tech companies, such as Zendesk, so that young startups don’t even have to pay to be there. “By now, everybody knows where we are. We are at Station F, the world’s biggest startup campus. We will have… Read More
Two months after its release, Hillbilly Elegy hit the top of The New York Times bestseller list, thrusting author J.D. Vance somewhat reluctantly into the spotlight. In the nine months since the book’s release, Vance has been something of a lightning rod for both the left and the right. Now the author is using his newfound platform to join forces with Revolution LLC. Read More
VR is all over the place, but sometimes it’s not where you most expect it. Plenty of apps out there might could do with a wee bit of VR to help show off an apartment or a bit of 3D content, but those experiences can be pretty labor-intensive. Viro is a new company that hopes to empower mobile developers to add VR to their apps simply and using familiar tools and code bases. Read More
