3Doodler’s getting out ahead of Toy Fair with the release of a whole bunch of new products, including a handful of kits and a pair of pens that mark some big licensing deals for the New York-based startup. The new devices don’t represent new entirely products, so much as spinoffs of its existing lines, the flagship Create and the Start, a larger and safer version targeted at… Read More
Over the summer, smart lock maker August announced its first integration with Amazon’s smart home assistant Alexa. It was pretty basic – letting users check whether unit was locked or not. Naturally, people wanted to know, for better or worse, when they’d actually be able to unlock their front door with the sound of their voice, for when you’re chopping onions like the… Read More
IBM is today taking the wraps off its new Internet of Things headquarters in Munich — a $200 million project at over one year in the making. And to underscore its IoT push, IBM is announcing a series of related deals and partnerships with companies including Indiegogo, Visa, Bosch and French railway SNCF, among others. More on the deals below, but first, some context: IoT is part… Read More
What if our photographs and social media updates could be turned into memories we – or our children – could later access just by asking a virtual assistant, like Amazon’s Alexa? That’s the premise behind a new startup called Mylestone, which is experimenting with turning our digital footprints into narratives that help us recall highlights from our lives, as well… Read More
TechCrunch is partnering with Matrix Partners for February’s Include Office Hours Program. Partners Anoushka Vaswani and Ilya Sukhar will be meeting with underserved and underrepresented founders in San Francisco. Submit your application here.
Recognizing the gaps in the tech community, TechCrunch launch the Include program in 2014. Aimed at underserved and underrepresented founders… Read More
There’s a new venture fund in Michigan and it aims to have deep pockets. Grand Ventures is the result of longtime Michigan businessman McKeel Hagerty teaming up with Huron River Venture co-founder Tim Streit. The two came together to found Grand Ventures and an SEC filing reveals the venture firm is looking to raise up to $50M for its first fund.
The firm is based out of Grand Rapids, Mich. Read More
Truebil, a marketplace for selling used cars in India, has closed a $3 million post-Series A funding round from China’s Shunwei Capital. Its $5.5 million Series A was raised in January 2016. Unlike more traditional rivals like CarTrade, which just raised $55 million led by Singapore’s Temasek, its sister site CarWhale and Cardekho, Truebil dis-intermediates the professional… Read More
Another mobile carrier, Telenor, has partnered with Google to roll out a next-gen SMS tech — this time targeting Android users in Europe and Asia. Read More
Chances are that your current company is collecting a ton of data about your customers every second. It’s a goldmine and it often sits there in a corner, unused. Vize is a business intelligence tool that will let you learn more about your business and take advantage of all your data. The company is currently participating in Y Combinator’s winter batch. “The main use case… Read More
Baidu is furthering its push into artificial intelligence after it announced the acquisition of Raven Tech, a Chinese startup that developed an AI voice assistant platform. Baidu confirmed it has bought the startup’s tech, product and staff of 60. The deal comes a month after Baidu hired noted AI expert Qi Lu, formerly with Microsoft, as its COO and Group President.… Read More
Atomico has closed its fourth fund with $765 million, making it one of Europe’s single largest venture capital funds. The firm began raising the fund eleven months ago (we’d flagged it for you after searching the SEC filings). And while it represents a sizable step up from Atomico’s third fund, which closed with $476.6 million in 2013, its pace of fundraising highlights… Read More
Verizon is reportedly getting a $250 million discount on its Yahoo deal, judge rules CRISPR-Cas9 belongs to the Broad Institute and not UC Berkeley, Pixar teaches the art of storytelling on Khan Academy and MakerBot cuts 30% of its workforce. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey spoke on stage with COO and CFO Anthony Noto at the Goldman Technology Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. The leaders of the social media giant reiterated Twitter’s mission as a real-time information platform and spoke of its latest accomplishments, but also talked about the challenges of growing what is already a widely-used site. “We… Read More
The decision of who owned the rights to a hotly disputed CRISPR gene editing patent came down in favor of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard today so you’d think the mood would be sour at the University of California, Berkeley, the other contender in the case. But Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna tells TechCrunch this is a positive for her. “I’m actually delighted to know… Read More
Deep in the Valley this afternoon, 500 Startups’ 19th demo day drew to a close at the Computer History Museum. Business-to-business software, fashion and beauty products made up the largest proportion of companies, but 500 left room for a few outliers. It’s tough for anyone to say who the next Twilio will be, but it just might be hidden somewhere in the 40 companies that… Read More
Google and Kaggle today announced a new machine learning challenge that asks developers to find the best way to automatically tag videos. The challenge, which comes with a $30,000 prize for the first-place finisher (and $25,000, $20,000, $15,000 and $10,000 for the next four teams), asks developers to classify and tag videos from Google’s updated YouTube-8M V2 data set. This data… Read More
The front page of reddit is a good place to catch up on the latest internets, or so an increasing number of users think. To broaden the appeal of the site to lurkers and first-time visitors, the company is making some small but significant changes to the front page that gets presented to anyone who isn’t logged in. Read More
U.K. startup PawSquad is expanding coverage for an on-demand service that brings vets to pets — offering convenience and reduced stress for pet owners willing to stump up a little more than they’d pay for a check-up at a bricks-and-mortar vet. Read More
Last year, Huawei leapfrogged a couple of fellow Chinese hardware companies to secure its spot as the third-largest smartphone maker worldwide. As the company takes aim at the No. 2 spot, it’s apparently working to differentiate itself even more from the competition by developing more proprietary tech, adding to a list of components that already includes its own in-house chips. According… Read More
Tesla CEO Elon Musk addressed President Trump’s immigration ban on Muslim majority nations directly via Twitter on Wednesday, saying that the order is “not right” and refers to it as a “Muslim immigration ban” — but he then deleted those tweets almost immediately, referring to them as “earlier drafts.” The specific wording was very strong,… Read More
