TechCrunch

More news about Jay Z’s new venture (Arrive), robots that fix their mistakes and Y Combinator launches its MOOC. All this on Crunch Report. Read More

 Uber may have a reputation for steamrolling its competitors, but it can be conciliatory at times. In 2015, a year before its retreat from China via the sale of its Chinese business to rival Didi, the U.S. company agreed to a non-compete deal with Go-Jek, a fast-growing on-demand service from Indonesia that’s valued at over $1 billion, TechCrunch has learned. In a bid to strengthen… Read More

 With the introduction of its own in-house social stream, Twitch hopes users won’t stray too far beyond its purple walls. Twitch’s newest feature is called Pulse and will collect into one big gaming-obsessed feed the real-time social happenings of everyone you follow. Read More

 After several courts shot down his executive order that banned travelers from seven nations from entering the United States, President Trump today made another attempt to implement his proposed Muslim immigration ban. Trump signed a new executive order this morning that reduces the list of affected nations to six — it now excludes Iraq — and provides some clarity about the… Read More

 The Supreme Court announced Monday that it would vacate a lower court’s ruling in the case of Gavin Grimm, sending what was to be a landmark case on transgender rights back to the drawing board. The previous decision by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals drew on Obama-era guidance from the Department of Education stating that schools should treat transgender students in a way… Read More

 Like bizzaro Facebooks, Tagged and Hi5 launched in 2004 to help you meet new people instead of connecting you with friends you already know. Through social games and paid dating features, they earned a surprising amount of revenue despite being relatively unknown. Tagged bought Hi5 in 2011 before branching out into standalone social app development and renamed the parent company If(we). But… Read More

 Two of the best-marketed names in artificial intelligence are coming together to pitch their wares to new customers with the announcement that IBM and Salesforce are going to partner. The new partnership amounts to a way for IBM to sell consulting services across both Salesforce’s Einstein and IBM’s Watson AI-branded businesses. Read More

 Pie Tops are not the future of sneakers. They’re not some cool prototype like the HyperAdapt that point to a shoe company finally realizing a long sought-after feature. They’re a good gimmick from a pizza company looking for a way to capitalize on March Madness with a pair of shoes that order a pizza when you squeeze their tongue. I’ve tried them, they’re real… Read More

 It looks like AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing arm, has made another acquisition to add more productivity tools for its customers beyond basic cloud-computing services. It has picked up Thinkbox Software, which develops and sells solutions for media design and content creation aimed at people in the video and wider visual media industries. Examples of services that Thinkbox already… Read More

 Roboticists at Disney Research are investigating how to improve the quality of human-robot interactions by studying how speech patterns affect engagement with a creepy anthropomorphic bot that imitates its playmates’ speech. Read More

 The idea might not be as dumb as you think (or maybe it is). Read More

 Serial entrepreneur Justin Kan, best known for co-founding Twitch, Justin.tv and Socialcam, has left his position as a partner at Y Combinator to start his own startup incubator program. The venture is called Zero-F — think ‘zero to funding’ — and the idea, Kan told TechCrunch, is to take a very hands-on approach to building new startups in Silicon Valley.… Read More

 Snapchat parent Snap Inc. debuted on the stock market Thursday and immediately saw substantial gains on its first two days. But the excitement has already worn off, with shares tumbling more than 12 percent on day three. After finishing Friday at $27.09 per share, Snap closed at $23.77 on Monday, beneath the $24 where it opened on its first day of trading. This is still above the $17… Read More

 Chicago-based Hazel Technologies is on a mission to reduce food waste. The company has developed packaging inserts that, through the magic of basic chemistry, can ward off fungus and mold and slow the spoilage of fruits and vegetables. How big a problem is food waste? The most recent available reports from the U.S. Department of Agriculture have found that each year we waste more than 25… Read More

 Last fall, Google introduced a new system for machine-assisted language translations, Google Neural Machine Translation system (GNMT), which takes advantage of deep neural networks to translate entire sentences – not just phrases – for greatly improved translations. The company put the system to work in Google Translate for eight language pairs in November, and is today… Read More

 A report from Bloomberg paints a grim picture of left-leaning political groups being targeted by (apparently) Russian hackers; but don’t worry: this seems to be more “open season on DC” than Russki cyber-soldiers trying to derail the democratic process (again). Read More

 This is the Samsung Galaxy S8. Sure, it’s still a couple of weeks until we get the see the thing in person on March 29, but we’ve gotten what appears to be a pretty solid view of the handset from just about every angle. Once rare and coveted, device leaks have long since become part of the release cycles for many manufacturers, built into the hype machine ahead of a… Read More

 With a growing number of streaming TV services on the market – including, as of last week, YouTube TV – Sony’s PlayStation Vue is today launching a new feature aimed at differentiating its offering from the rest: “multi-view.” As you might guess by its name, this feature will allow you to watch multiple channels all on the same screen. With multi-view,… Read More

 Last week, two-year-old, NFX Guild, a Silicon Valley-based, invite-only accelerator program, hosted its newest demo day before 200 venture investors from Sand Hill Road and San Francisco. The outfit — which is backed financially by the venture firms CRV, Shasta Ventures, Greylock Partners, and Mayfield and works only with startups that have been referred to it through a network of… Read More

 At its height, River City Media, run by Alvin Slocombe and Matt Ferris, sent out a billion emails a day, slamming Gmail servers with fragmented traffic in order to ensure all of its email went out on time. After failing to password-protect a remote backup, however, the company has exposed its nearly 1.4 billion email records, some of which contain real names and addresses. The company, for… Read More