What makes it better than other 4K laptops is its decent battery life and healthy selection of ports. If Windows is your jam and you need full-size screen, this is the notebook to get. The latest edition of the 15-inch Spectre x360 is only offered with a 4k (3,840 x 2,160 pixels) screen. HP is that committed to providing an ultra-high res experience. But having a 4K display on a 15-inch… Read More
I really like Gboard. It’s been my primary iOS keyboard since Google launched it back in May of 2016, and it’s pretty much the only third party iOS keyboard that I’ve stuck with for more than a week. But it was missing one glaring feature that iOS’ own keyboard has offered for years: voice transcription. Not anymore! Google shipped an update to Gboard this morning… Read More
This is a first. MyKronoz just introduced the ZeTime, a hybrid smartwatch with arms like those found on traditional watches. Essentially the company put a watch movement behind the touchscreen, drilled a hole, and let gears stick through. At this point, the watch is not available for purchase though the company says it will be out in September for $199. Apparently, even with the watch… Read More
Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor, two early investors in Uber, are feeling “disappointed” and “frustrated” in light of Uber’s response to claims of sexual harassment at the company, the two wrote on Medium today. Earlier this week, Uber said it had hired US Attorney General Eric Holder and Tammy Albarran, partners at law firm Covington & Burling, to work… Read More
Food delivery startup Thistle was never in the business of making meal kits, those boxes of pre-measured ingredients and recipes to help customers cook at home. The startup’s married cofounders, Ashwin Cheriyan and Shiri Avnery, thought that prepared meals, ready-to-heat or raw and ready-to-eat, were a better fit for their busy customers. Meal kits, they said, felt like time consuming… Read More
Diverse teams perform better. First Round Capital found that, over 10 years, teams with at least one female co-founder performed 63 percent better than male-only teams. Racially diverse teams also perform 35 percent better than their industry peers. Yet only 8 percent of venture capital money is going to women-led companies, and 1 percent is going to companies with a black founder. Read More
Mark Zuckerberg believes we should be “coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community.” That’s why Facebook’s latest feature feels a bit confusing. Facebook has added nearly 200 flags to its Profile Frames feature, which lets you overlay imagery filters atop your profile photo. Facebook first launched profile frames for sports teams in… Read More
Privacy Labs, a stealth-stage startup that wants to enable internet users to “regain control” of their personal data, has landed a $4 million seed funding round. The company doesn’t have a product right now and is cagey about what it will eventually release, but nonetheless its promise has persuaded Initialized Capital to lead this round. Other investors… Read More
Once again, tech companies are again finding themselves in the midst of a culture war in response to action by the Trump administration. On Wednesday, the administration rescinded guidance for transgender students in public schools, repealing a similar letter which the Obama administration had issued in May 2016 to allow those students to use school facilities that conform with their… Read More
Have you ever wanted to feel smack of the punches coming at you from sweaty aliens? The whang of bullet hitting your guts? The feeling of hitting the deck as pirates stream over the virtual bow? The subtle vibration of the VR sexual encounter with a many-tentacled sex robot? Well here we go. The Hardlight VR Suit is ready to please. This vest contains multiple vibrational elements and can add… Read More
A young Silicon Valley venture firm is taking the wraps off a piece of software that it says makes it a cinch for founders to figure out which VCs are worth approaching, based on stage, sector, and a variety of other factors.
It’s called Signal, and it’s the first project of NFX Guild Labs, an offshoot of the venture firm and invite-only accelerator program NFX Guild, which… Read More
Revcontent, a self-funded company powering content recommendations for publishers like Forbes and The Atlantic, has acquired Rover.
That’s not Rover the pet-sitting marketplace, but rather the content discovery app formerly known as Flipora and Infoaxe. CEO John Lemp told me that Revcontent is paying “north of $30 million” in cash and stock for the acquisition, which he… Read More
Like all great programmers I get most of my code from StackOverflow questions. Can’t figure out how to add authentication to Flask? Easy. Want to shut down sendmail? Boom. Now, thanks to all the code on the Internet, a robot can be as smart as a $180,000 coder. The system, called DeepCoder, basically searches a corpus of code to build a project that works to spec. It’s been used… Read More
FOSSA wants to help developers manage the tricky terrain of open source license management, and today it announced a $2.2 million seed round. The company also announced that its license management product by the same name was available in open Beta. Let’s start with the funding, which was led by Bain Capital Ventures along with an all-star list of participants including Salesforce… Read More
Facebook today announced it has begun testing ad breaks that interrupt on-demand video, using a small set of partners who will earn a 55 percent ad revenue share while Facebook keeps 45 percent. That could change the way creators make video content so they tease viewers enough to sit through the ads, while luring more producers to Facebook. On-demand video publishers will get to select where… Read More
Hiatus, a New York-based startup that helps you identify (and potentially cancel) your monthly reoccurring subscriptions, has raised $1.2M in seed funding. Founded in 2015, Hiatus first connects to your bank account and identifies your paid reoccurring subscriptions, some of which you may have forgotten you’re even paying for. Each month it will notify you before an auto-payment happens,… Read More
Spotify is expanding its podcast selection today, with the announcement that it’s adding three new original podcast series on its service, with plans for more originals to arrive later this year. The series, which are produced in partnership with other media partners like Slate spin-off Panoply Studios, Gimlet Media, and Loudspeaker Network, aim to help further differentiate… Read More
Late last year, it was revealed that Amazon’s Echo had become a key piece of evidence in an on-going murder investigation in Arkansas dating back to 2015, as police sought access to voice recordings from the smart home assistant. Now the tech giant is firing back, arguing that both user commands and Alexa’s responses constitute protected speech. In a lengthy filing issued late… Read More
Security researchers at the CWI institute in Amsterdam working with a team from Google Research say they have found a faster way to compromise the SHA-1 hash algorithm — announcing what they describe as “the first practical technique for generating a SHA-1 collision” in a blog post today. Read More
After a very successful two-year run, we’re going to be changing the way that contributions work on TechCrunch. When we started the Crunch Network experiment, the goal was to bring a wide array of voices to the site that were delivering deep domain-related experience that augmented the work of our staff writers. The startup community is rich with people thinking hard about a lot of… Read More
