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
I’ll be in Boulder for a few weeks and would love to hear some pitches and maybe give out some tables for Disrupt. I’ll be holding a micro-meetup at Boomtown on Broadway in Boulder, Colorado on Wednesday, March 29th at 7pm.
Boomtown is at 2060 Broadway B1 in the basement. To get there, park around Spruce and Broadway and it’s in the same building as Zeal Optics and Unseen Bean. Read More
Facebook is taking a swing at Twitch while also one-upping its mobile live streaming video competitors. Today, all users can go Live directly from Facebook’s desktop website via their webcam, stream through professional equipment and software hooked up to a desktop and broadcast gameplay from their computer. Read More
3D printing factories, machine learning APIs, and electric planes made our list of the most high-potential startups out of the 51 that presented at Y Combinator’s Winter 2017 Demo Day 2. We asked the top Silicon Valley investors and conferred with the TechCrunch team to pick these 8 companies. But there were plenty more startups with big opportunities from this batch of backend… Read More
Posts on Google started out as an experiment during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It essentially allowed candidates to post Twitter-like status updates directly to Google’s search results pages and those updates would then appear in various election- and candidate-related widgets. As the company announced at an event in Brazil today, it’s now opening this feature up to a… Read More
The Plug and Play network of accelerators and corporate partnerships is launching nine new cohorts in various industry verticals. It’s the largest group ever for the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based firm that bills itself as the largest accelerator in the world. Read More
Google’s standalone video-calling app Duo is no longer just for video calls. The company announced today it’s adding support for audio-only calls – a feature aimed at increasing the app’s adoption in emerging markets, where a strong, high-bandwidth network connection isn’t always available. The option is first rolling out to users in Brazil, with an expansion to… Read More
Casio makes beefy watches for not-always-beefy people. Their latest, the Edifice EQB-501 is an interesting amalgam of form, function, and high tech features and it has enough dials, buttons, and sensors to keep well-connected on your trek through the jungle, urban or otherwise. This monster watch is 44.4mm wide and water resistant up to 100 meters. It connects to your phone and the CASIO… Read More
