This is a pivotal week for Google Cloud Platform. As it hosts its annual Google Cloud Next Conference in San Francisco, it will offer the usual lineup of speakers, customer testimonials and product announcements one would expect at this type of event, but the broader and more challenging task is showing the world that it is ready to take on the enterprise. Read More
Firebase, the mobile app development platform Google acquired in 2014, is getting a major update at the Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco today. The general theme here is that Firebase is moving closer to the Google Cloud platform. It’s adding support for Google Cloud Functions, for example, and is getting support for all the storage options the Google Cloud Platform now offers. Read More
After a couple of stops and starts – and some concerns – media player software maker Plex is opening up its online service known as Plex Cloud to all paying Plex users. The service, which was first introduced into private beta in September, eliminates the need for an always-on PC or other network-attached piece of hardware in order to use the Plex media player software for… Read More
Why should you trust an advertising giant with the most sensitive personal data you possess: aka your medical records? That’s the hugely sticky issue Google-owned DeepMind is facing as it seeks to embed itself into the UK’s healthcare space — a big push publicly announced in February last year. Read More
At its Cloud Next event in San Francisco, Google today announced the beta of a new pricing option for virtual machines on its Google Compute Platform. These new committed-use discounts lock you into a one- or three-year commitment. You decide how many cores and how much memory you want to buy in bulk for those years, but you can then distribute that allotment between machines at will. In… Read More
Today at Google Cloud Next in San Francisco, the company announced three new regions for its Google Cloud Platform. The Netherlands, Montreal and California are set to join the rapidly growing list of host locations. The move benefits users by allowing more flexibility for where users keep their resources. Being able to utilize additional local infrastructure can decrease latency and… Read More
Words cannot express my excitement, but they’ll have to do. Brittany Packnett, VP of National Community Alliances at Teach For America and co-founder of social justice organization Campaign Zero, social justice activist will be joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt New York in May. I first heard Packnett speak at the Obama administration’s South by South Lawn festival at the White… Read More
Yesterday was just the beginning of Google’s Cloud Next conference. The company talked about the vision for Google Cloud. Today will be all about product announcements that are going to make your life easier as a developer. At 9 AM PT/12 PM ET/5 PM GMT, you’ll be able to watch Google introduce all those new features live. Today, you can expect to see Urs Hölzle, Prabhakar Raghavan… Read More
Ford’s still keen on its mission of delivering a fleet of self-driving vehicles in operation by 2021, but their remain significant technical hurdles to overcome between now and then. Ford’s Chief Program Engineer for Autonomous Vehicle Development Chris Brewer detailed some of the biggest challenges his team needs to take on to ensure its self-driving cars can take the road… Read More
A new generation of tech-enabled startups are beginning to reimagine how students finance their education. Higher ed’s transformation is fueling a convergence of fintech and edtech that aims to blur the line between learning and earning — and will force students, colleges and financial institutions to think differently about return on education investment. Read More
Kidizen, a marketplace for secondhand children’s apparel, has raised $3.2 million in Series A funding, the company announced today. The funding was led by Chicago-based Origin Ventures, who backed the startup following its over 100 percent year-over-year growth in 2016, which has allowed the business to reach over a quarter million registered users across the U.S. Also participating in… Read More
After the vacation marketplace Airbnb last year filed SEC forms raising $555.5 million, today the company filed a new form D that has closed off its Series F with an additional $447.8 billion, bringing the total to over $1 billion – or $1,003,312,065 billion to be exact. Techcrunch has confirmed with sources close to the company that it is now valued at $31 billion.
Note: the $31… Read More
RealConnex, a four-year-old, Miami and New York-based platform connecting real estate professionals to capital, investments, and services, has raised $3.5 million in strategic funding led by Silver Portal Capital, a San Diego-based real estate investment and merchant banking firm. The round is part of a much bigger trend of startups working to change how properties are built, bought, and… Read More
Meet Hugging Face, a new chatbot app for bored teenagers. The New York-based startup is creating a fun and emotional bot. Hugging Face will generate a digital friend so that you can text back and forth and trade selfies. Playing with Hugging Face was a lot more engaging than talking with a customer support bot. Like other companies, Hugging Face doesn’t want to be useful. It wants to… Read More
Viva Republic, the company behind Korean financial services app Toss, has closed a $48 million Series C funding round which includes a strategic investment from payment giant PayPal.
The deal is PayPal’s second investment this year — coming just days after it backed health startup Virta — but the round was led by San Mateo-based VC firm Goodwater Capital, which led Viva… Read More
Triplebyte wants to make recruiting and technical screening for tech companies more efficient. The screening process happens background-blind, so instead of putting the emphasis the applicants’ resumes (and the colleges they went to), it emphasizes programming smarts. The previously only worked with Y Combinator-incubated companies, though. Now, however, it has expanded its program and… Read More
SD2 released a new cloud management platform today it’s calling CloudOps.ai to help startups, especially in emerging markets, control and manage cloud costs on AWS. Company co-founder Sachin Dev Duggal says SD2 has put together these services over the years, and decided to pull them together into a platform where startups and other interested parties could pick and choose the services… Read More
Ready for some XTREME WRIST GAMING ACTION? Sure you are. But here’s the Gameband, a new smartwatch for gamers that lets you play simple games on a tiny, wrist-mounted screen. Founded by Feargal Mac Conuladh the watch has a MicroSD slot for storage of up to 256GB of games and it can play games like Terraria and Pong on a 1.63-inch screen. The watch runs Android Marshmallow 6.0.1 with a… Read More
Founded by Matthew Ford, who was previously Head of Acquisitions for OnTrees, a personal finance app that exited to MoneySuperMarket in 2014, Pariti is a mobile app that helps you keep an eye on your spending and, crucially, tracks how much you are paying out servicing existing debt, such as overdrafts or credit cards. It then suggest changes you can make to pay off that debt quicker. Read More
Dish’s streaming TV service, Sling TV, is today launching its new Cloud DVR feature to more customers through a “First Look” early access program. The DVR was first announced back in November, but has been in private beta for Roku users until now. The feature works a lot like a standard DVR, but instead of storing recordings locally on a hardware device, they’re… Read More
