Facebook is introducing yet another feature that clones Snapchat Stories to more users in Chile, Greece and Vietnam. [Correction: An earlier version of this post stated that Facebook Stories was rolling out worldwide. That’s not the case. It’s only expanding to a few more countries.] Read More
Twitter today announced another content partnership to bring more live-streamed sports to its social network — this time, with the National Lacrosse League, of all things. Lacrosse represents an opportunity for Twitter to build out a network of sports programming that TV channels don’t want and don’t air because of their smaller numbers. Read More
Email marketing company Campaign Monitor is announcing that it has acquired Tagga. Founded in 2008, Tagga is a customer data platform, which means businesses can use it to combine user data from different sources and create different segments to target with marketing campaigns. Read More
A number of prominent Twitter accounts were hacked to tweet Nazi messages after Twitter Counter, a popular tool for analyzing Twitter followers, was hacked. Official Twitter accounts belonging to Amnesty International, Forbes and other prominent organizations, not to mention many regular users, were accessed to post swastikas and other Nazi-related messages in a move thought to be… Read More
While Apple’s retail team is currently remodeling all its stores, the company is also opening brand new stores around the world. Apple is opening a flagship store in Downtown Miami, a new store in a historic building in Cologne and a third store in Nanjing. Last weekend, Apple reopened the 35th remodeled store across 18 states. “Almost 50 percent of the stores in the U.S. were… Read More
You’d think it would be a bit harder to get new users when your startup is a bank. But N26 is now available in 17 European countries and has opened 300,000 bank accounts for its user base. Currently, 1,000 people sign up to N26 every day. The vast majority of the user base still lives in Germany and Austria, but other countries are catching up quickly as more than half of new signups… Read More
Guten tag, European startup fans! TechCrunch is thrilled to announce that we are headed back to the Arena Berlin in the heart of Berlin, Germany for Disrupt Berlin 2017. Although Disrupt is returning to Berlin after a three-year stint in London, this is not to be thought of as a purely “Berlin” event. This is our European event, which happens to be in Berlin. So we want startups… Read More
Grab, the main rival to Uber in Southeast Asia, is expanding its engineering footprint after announcing new development centers in India and Vietnam. The addition of bases in Bangalore, India and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, will take it to six R&D locations worldwide. Read More
iRobot CEO Colin Angle has been repeating for some time now that the next step in the evolution of the company’s hit Roomba vacuum is becoming a connective tissue for the smart home. This morning’s announcement takes it a couple of steps closer to that dream, introducing Alexa voice integration and advances to the robotic vacuum’s mapping system. Read More
Roblox gets $92 million in new funding, Parker Conrad’s new company, Rippling and Waze and Spotify partner up to play music and navigate seamlessly. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
The U.S. Department of Justice is ready to indict four people related to a hack of Yahoo affecting “hundreds of millions” of users, according to a Bloomberg report. Read More
In Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s nearly 6,000-word manifesto published last month, he laid out a number of global ambitions he had for the social network in the days ahead — including one where its users became more “civically-engaged” and voted more often. Now it seems Facebook has taken its first steps toward making that possible, through a new feature it’s… Read More
Goodlord, a U.K. startup that has built a platform to handle transactions and the ‘paperwork’ normally associated with renting a home, has raised £7.2 million in Series A funding. Rocket Internet’s GFC led the round, with participation from existing backer LocalGlobe and new investor Ribbit Capital. Read More
Serial entrepreneur Jason Goldberg has famously had his ups and downs, most notably with the e-commerce company Fab.com. He hasn’t stopped moving forward, however. In October, he launched a new messaging app called Pepo. In December, Pepo announced $2.35 million in seed funding. And today, Pepo is announcing $400,000 in additional seed funding. He shared the latest in a call. Read More
Jonathan Zdziarski has been a leading expert on Apple and iOS security and forensics for years — and now he’s taking his expertise inside the company. Zdziarski announced on his blog that he’s joining Apple’s Security Engineering and Architecture team to work on protecting user security and privacy. Read More
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman announced today that he’s joined the board of directors at Microsoft. This follows Microsoft’s $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn last year. Read More
It’s 2017, and conversational interfaces (people talking with machines the same way they talk to other people) are everywhere. Siri has become a household name. Taco Bell lets you order tacos over Slack. It feels like we may spend more time talking to computers than to one another in just a few short years. How did we get to this point? Read More
It seems Bill Maris’s venture fund might actually be more than vaporware. Maris, founder of Google Ventures, now called GV, is raising money again for a new healthcare, biotech and tech-focused venture capital fund, according to sources familiar with the matter. What was initially thought to be a $230 million fund has evolved into a smaller fund with the same focus. Read More
