In the first of a new series focusing on city eco-systems, TechCrunch Editor-at-large Mike Butcher gets under the skin of one of Europe’s hottest startup cities. Being thrown into the fire of an economic recession made for a much more dynamic culture that many observers had typically come to expect from a southern European country. When the country had to turn to the European Union for… Read More
Linode has been in the virtual private server (VPS) game for longer than most, but in recent years, companies like DigitalOcean and Vultr have taken quite a bit of mindshare from the company. Now it looks like Linode is ready to fight back. The company today announced the launch of a new $5/month plan that offers twice the memory (1 GB) of DigitalOcean‘s and AWS Lightsail‘s… Read More
At CODE Media today, Facebook VP of partnerships Dan Rose said combatting fake news is “something that’s really important to us,” but acknowledged that the company is “just getting started” and “there’s a lot of work we can do.” Read More
A drone recently crashed into a Boeing 737 as it approached a landing strip in Mozambique. The damage to the aircraft was extensive. Over the last year, drone crashes have been reported at a nuclear facility, the Empire State Building and one crashed through a window into an office building. For some, the war of the machines has begun — and you don’t need deep pockets to play. Read More
There’s nothing quite like the atmosphere of a college hackathon. Amidst the free t-shirts and apps to help you find parties on campus always lie a few hidden gems for those with the patience to hunt. ThirdEye, one of those gems forged out of PennApps, UPenn’s hackathon, is being acquired today by TheBlindGuide for an undisclosed sum. Started by three current Penn… Read More
Facebook wants its users to upload and consume more videos, and it’s making a couple of changes to the way that it displays and distributes those videos. Today at CODE Media, Facebook VP of partnerships Dan Rose said the company would also launch a series of apps for Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV and Samsung Smart TV. Read More
The adorable little Smart cars you see on North American roads from here on out will likely be primarily electric, as the company has decided to cease sales of its gas-powered Fortwo and Fortwo Cabrio in the U.S. and Canada from 2017 on.
It sounds like the decision has less to do with overwhelming demand for electric Smart cars, however, and more to do with the North American market’s… Read More
Twitter earlier this month announced a series of changes aimed at silencing abuse on its network, but a recent change to its service – which was quickly reversed following user feedback – indicates the company still doesn’t have a good handle on how to handle online harassment. Via a tweet posted yesterday by the Twitter Safety account, the company announced it would no… Read More
Etsy just announced what it’s calling its first marketplace in 11 years — Etsy Studio, where businesses can sell supplies to other Etsy users.
CEO Chad Dickerson told me that while craft supplies were already available through the existing Etsy website, “It was a category that we didn’t focus on.” Then, about a year ago, the team started to work on the idea of… Read More
Entoro Group today announced that it has acquired OfferBoard, a company that removes barriers from the process of raising capital. OfferBoard isn’t AngelList nor FundersClub. It’s a platform designed to make crowdfunding work for growth capital. But instead of tech startups, the company supports general solicitation for multimillion dollar financing projects in spaces like… Read More
Disrupt NY 2017 is just a few short months away. Soon, thousands of entrepreneurs, investors, innovators and other tech enthusiasts will make their way from around the world to Manhattan’s Pier 36 for the best startup show in the city that never sleeps. Will you and your budding international startups be one of them? One of our favorite things about Disrupt is the country pavilions,… Read More
Google today announced the beta launch of Cloud Spanner, a new globally distributed database service for mission-critical applications. Cloud Spanner joins Google’s other cloud-based database services, like Bigtable, Cloud SQL and the Cloud Datastore, but with the crucial difference of offering developers the best of both traditional relational databases and NoSQL databases — that… Read More
Intuition Robotics, maker of elder care assistant ElliQ, announced today that it has raised $6 million in funding from iRobot and equity crowdfunding platform OurCrowd. With the funding, the Jerusalem-based company plans to open an office in the Bay Area and begin testing ElliQ with senior citizens in San Francisco. Read More
As the public grows more concerned with state-sponsored hacking, Microsoft is calling on tech companies to form a so-called “Digital Geneva Convention” by promising to protect users from nation-state attacks and vowing to never mount offensive cyber attacks. Microsoft is also pushing governments around the world to establish norms for engagement in digital warfare. Microsoft… Read More
Back in 2015 we were intrigued by the launch of a brand new take on online learning. It was driven by mobile and also ‘gamed’ users into learning. That was the idea behind SmartUp.io, a mobile app which had a points-based game which would incentivize learning. It’s early implementation was clunky to say the least, and content-lite. But that hasn’t held them back.… Read More
Instapaper says today it has fully recovered from its extended outage, which caused the service to be down for over a day last week, then saw it return in a limited capacity. The popular bookmarking service, which had millions of users at the time of its acquisition by Pinterest, suffered an outage last week caused by hitting a system limit on its AWS hosted database. When the company posted… Read More
YouTube says it’s cancelling the second season of vlogger star PewDiePie’s reality show, and has booted his channel from its premium advertising program. The announcement comes shortly after news that Disney’s Maker Studios was severing ties with PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, after he posted a series of videos featuring anti-Semitic clips and… Read More
Hardware Battlefield favorite Wiivv has announced a $4 million Series A funding and an acquisition. Not too shabby for a shoe company. But remember: this isn’t just any shoe company. Founded by Shamil Hargovan the team at Wiivv is making and selling 3D-printed shoes and insoles. The company has sold 10,000 insoles already and they’re going to start shipping custom-printed shoes… Read More
Autonomous vehicle system startup Drive.ai is ready to show off its technology in use for the first time, with a video showing the company’s test vehicle making its way through the streets of Mountain View.
Other companies have shown us similar videos, of course, including GM-owned Cruise very recently, and Tesla. But Drive.ai’s demonstration is interesting because it depicts… Read More
