Many of tech’s largest and most powerful companies have signed an amicus brief in support of transgender student Gavin Grimm as the first case on transgender rights makes its way to the highest court in the land later this month. Read More
Uber is now in the process of getting a permit from the California DMV to resume testing its self-driving vehicles on public state roads. Uber started testing its self-driving Volvo XC90 SUVs in San Francisco last year – but the state DMV ultimately opposed the tests since Uber had not applied for its autonomous testing permit prior to beginning service. While Uber took its test fleet… Read More
In the hype period for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the game’s creators compared it to the original NES classic. I chalked this up to the usual pre-release silliness; how could a brand-new game be anything like something released in 1986? It turns out I’d underestimated both Nintendo’s candor (understandable) and the timelessness of the first Zelda’s design. Read More
Facebook’s Messenger bots may not be having the impact the social network desired. Just yesterday, online retailer Everlane, one of the launch partners for the bot platform, announced it was ditching Messenger for customer notifications and returning to email. Following this, Facebook today announced an upgraded Messenger Platform, which introduces a new way for users to interact with… Read More
Upstart, a nearly five-year-old online lending company that prides itself on quickly identifying people who are less likely to default on money leant them, has raised $32.5 million in fresh funding that brings its total funding to date to around $85 million. Partly, the company plans to use the capital to further fuel its current growth trajectory. In fact, according to CEO… Read More
For the first time ever, the price of one bitcoin has surpassed the price of one ounce of gold. While today’s swap can be attributed to a good day for bitcoin (up ~3%) and a bad day for gold (down ~1.3%), the big picture is that bitcoin has more than doubled in the last year (up ~185% from a year ago) while gold is essentially trading exactly at the price it was a year ago. Even… Read More
Floodgate, a Palo Alto, Ca.-based early stage venture capital firm, has raised $131 million for its sixth fund, according to an SEC filing that shows the 11-year-old firm turned to just eight investors for the capital commitments. Though small by today’s fundraising standards, the fund reflects a bit of a departure for the firm, whose fifth fund closed with $76 million in 2014. (Its… Read More
With the dawning of the digital age, low-income students face a new, unprecedented challenge: access to high-speed internet. Startups and nonprofits across the country are stepping up to help low-income families connect to the internet. They deliver programs that aim to facilitate the personal, academic and professional growth of their local communities. Read More
Your Android phone is about to get an upgrade. Google today is making good on its promise to bring its Siri alternative known as Google Assistant to more Android devices, starting today. The company announced at Mobile World Congress over the weekend that its Assistant would soon launch in the U.S., followed by English-language launches in Australia, Canada and the U.K., as well… Read More
AWS took a lot of heat when its S3 storage component went down for several hours on Tuesday, and rightly so, but today they published a post-mortem explaining exactly what happened complete with technical details and how they plan to prevent a similar event from occurring again in the future. At the core of the problem was unsurprisingly human error. Some poor engineer, we’ll call him… Read More
NASA has just published its 2017-2018 software catalog, which lists the many apps, code libraries and tools that pretty much anyone can download and use. Of course, most of it is pretty closely tied to… you know, launching spacecraft and stuff, which most people don’t do. But here are a few items that might prove useful to tinkers and curious lay people alike. Read More
Building on its promise to give the entrenched a run for their money, conversational AI startup Ozlo is making its meticulously crafted knowledge layer available for purchase today. Ozlo’s new suite of APIs that includes tools for both expressing knowledge and understanding language will help to democratize the creation of conversational AI assistants. In the spirit of the expert systems… Read More
If you’re looking to roll up your sleeves to help put on the best startup show in the Big Apple, you should definitely sign up to be a TechCrunch Work Exchange Volunteer at Disrupt NY 2017. TechCrunch is thrilled to announce that we are now accepting applications to the Work Exchange at this year’s show in New York City, and we hope you’ll consider joining us.… Read More
Publishing platform Medium recently laid off dozens of people. So if you don’t want to hand away your precious writing to a startup that is still looking for its business model, you can move your content to WordPress.com in just a few clicks.
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, just launched a new importing tool that makes it easier to copy all your Medium content to a… Read More
Co-founder Ernestine Fu hopes that Blackstorm Labs, the makers of a bullet hell-ish fantasy shooter called EverWing, has figured out how to tap into that real-time co-operative experience that you might find in a massive online game like World of Warcraft within Facebook Messenger.
The company is calling the experience Boss Raids. EverWing runs on HTML5 within Facebook Messenger, where… Read More
There is an inherent problem that plagues all dating apps. The world is getting smaller — instead of choosing a mate from the pool of our college classmates or neighborhood friends, we’re now connected to everyone on the planet with a few taps of the thumb.
This means that dating apps rarely run short of people to serve up, which means that we’re playing a game of optimization. Read More
Update 11:25 AM PT: An Uber spokesperson provided the following statement regarding the separate firm it retained aside from Holder’s: The law firm Perkins Coie is looking into the specific allegations raised by Susan. They will report into Eric Holder, who is responsible for the overall investigation into Uber’s workplace practices. To be clear: they are investigating… Read More
A new startup called unGlue wants to help kids better manage their time on connected devices. Just don’t call it parental control software, says co-founder and CEO Alon Shwartz. The idea, he explains, is to offer families a simpler solution for setting limits on screen time across devices, whether inside the home or away. Shwartz, a serial entrepreneur, came up with the idea for… Read More
News outlets are having the time of their lives as people are flocking in to subscribe, but what if you want to read more than one news outlet? You could keep a giant stack of subscriptions, or you could reach for Discors. The startup recently announced it’s adding The New York Times and the Financial Times to its $4.99 per month subscription model. Read More
Most of Snap’s top products came from acquisitions, and now it will have the war chest to make more. Yet it didn’t have to blow its momentum to collect this cash. After pricing its IPO at $17, above its original $14 to $16 range, today its shares popped over 40 percent to start trading at $24. That means it pocketed $3.4 billion while still looking cool and confident on the… Read More
