TechCrunch

 Another Brexit bump: Microsoft has increased the cost of its Surface Book laptops for UK consumers. Read More

 An impetuous 20-something year old team of startup founders may not automatically reach out to the AARP to bring its products to market. Ignoring the aging population isn’t the sharpest move, however. With its Innovation Champion Award, AARP wants to highlight that those over 50 have sacks of disposable cash and aren’t afraid to spend it — as long as the value is there. Read More

 It’s safe to say that we had a blast last year at our Tel Aviv meetup. To nobody’s surprise, we’re holding a TechCrunch Meetup + Pitch-Off again in June. Save the date as June 28, 2017 is going to be a great time for the tech community in Tel Aviv. What do we have in store exactly? Let’s be honest, TechCrunch doesn’t come often enough to Israel. So we’re… Read More

 Health startups are pulling in money in Southeast Asia. A week after wellness-focused insurance brokerage CXA drew $25 million from investors, fellow Singapore-based startup mClinica has announced a $6.3 million Series A raise. mClinica was founded in 2012 and its mission is to provide healthcare data in Southeast Asia, much like Nielsen and other traditional analyst houses, through an… Read More

 London and Copenhagen-based fintech startup Pleo, which offers a card and app to manage company expenses, has closed an additional $3.25 million in funding. The round was led by European VC firm Creandum, with participation from pre-seed and seed investor Seedcamp, and previous backer Founders. Read More

 Australia-based payment firm PromisePay, which raised $10 million last year, has a double shot of news this week: it has rebranded to Assembly Payments and inked a major partnership deal with Gumtree. The deal will see Gumtree, which is owned by eBay, introduce a new services-focused business in Africa. Gumtree Connect links users with local home services, such as cleaners, machine repairs… Read More

 As publishers — scrambling for revenues and audiences in a rapidly changing media industry — try to get a grip on how to make the best use of social platforms like Facebook and Twitter (without simply conceding traffic to those social platforms), a startup that’s building tools to help them surface interesting content has raised $6.4 million in funding to grow its… Read More

 It’s hard to fathom that the work of Reverend Thomas Bayes is still coming back to drive cutting edge advancements in AI, but that’s exactly what’s happening. DARPA-backed Gamalon is the latest carrier of the Bayesian baton, launching today with a solution to help enterprises better manage their gnarly unstructured data. The world of enterprise is full of unstructured data. Read More

Apple shows us trailers for its first original shows, YouTuber Pewdiepie gets in trouble over some anti-Semitic remarks in some of his videos, Microsoft wants a digital Geneva Convention and Twitter drops the ball on anti-abuse. All this on Crunch Report. Read More

 In a first for in-car convenience features, Jaguar is teaming up with Shell to launch a new payment feature that lets you use Apple Pay or PayPal (with Android Pay coming later on) to easily pay for gas right within their vehicles at the pumps. The feature is coming to the UK first, but will roll out around the world after that. The feature requires installation of the Shell app to make… Read More

 Twitter is fighting to disclose how many times the government has secretly accessed its users’ data — and a judge may soon allow the company to do so. Twitter’s fight has been ongoing since 2014, and the company recently saw progress when it was allowed to publish two national security letters. The government uses national security letters (NSLs) to extract user data from… Read More

 Making women like your technology starts with listening to the women working on it. That’s not what former VP of marketing at Magic Leap Tannen Campbell says she experienced while on the job. Campbell was brought in by the company to help improve Magic Leap’s appeal to women, but she is now suing the augmented reality startup for sexual discrimination. Read More

 Japan’s SoftBank has made another acquisition to widen both its business strategy and its portfolio of investments. Today the company announced it would pay $3.3 billion in cash to acquire the Fortress Investment Group, an asset manager and investor in its own right, with significant holdings in Lyft, ZestFinance, Xapo, Jawbone and other tech companies. This is SoftBank’s… Read More

 A startup called Caavo thinks it has a solution to the too-much-TV problem, with a device that brings together all the different streaming boxes and TV services you subscribe to. The company, which has raised $15 million in funding, provides a universal remote with voice control and a unified TV interface so users can search and discover all the TV content available to them. Read More

 Yelp is releasing a new feature with the simple, self-explanatory name Questions and Answers. Well, mostly self-explanatory. This is distinct from Talk, a feature where Yelp users can ask an incredibly broad range of questions (as I write this, the New York page currently includes conversations about the travel time to the airport, when it’s legal to kick out a roommate and The… Read More

 VC investment in dating startups declined over the past year, with smaller average rounds and fewer funded companies, according to Crunchbase company profile data. Read More

 Since 2001, impact VC firms have raised $13 billion to invest in companies that provide a social or environmental benefit as part of running their for-large-profit business. Indeed, $10 billion of that has been raised since 2010 alone. Impact VCs are VCs first that intend to generate market-beating financial returns because of, not in spite of, an impact-oriented investment thesis. Read More

 For $2 billion, Caltrain electrification would wire the line between San Francisco and San Jose and buy new high-performance electric trains, reducing local travel time by twenty minutes, and yet, the Republican Party is threatening to cancel the project. Read More

 PayPal has agreed to buy bill payment management company TIO Networks for $233 million in cash. The deal will allow PayPal to gain access to a market of customers who pay their utility and cable bills at kiosks in locations like Rite Aid. This will help the company reach the “underserved” chunk of North Americans who are living paycheck-to-paycheck, some who even lack bank… Read More

 Many things that used to be true primarily of the public market now happen within the world of private company investing, including the participation of mutual fund investors. Now, you can add equity research reports to that list. Goodwater Capital — a two-year-old, consumer-tech-focused venture firm is today taking the wraps off a detailed snapshot of pre-IPO Snap, parent of the… Read More