Club Penguin may be shutting down, but there’s a new social network for kids arriving today from LEGO. The company known for its physical blocks and building sets is launching LEGO Life, a safe, online space where kids can share their LEGO creations, and connect with a broader community. Available as an iOS and Android application, the social network is aimed at those under the age of… Read More
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has already weighed in on Donald Trump’s January 27 executive order on refugees in a LinkedIn post, but now the company has made public additional thoughts on the subject from its top executive. On its official corporate blog, Microsoft shared an answer provided by Nadella during a corporate Q&A regarding the order and Microsoft’s stance on the… Read More
FOX Sports just announced that they will be streaming Super Bowl highlights in “near real-time” in VR via their FOX Sports VR App. Specifically, the app will show somewhere highlights consisting of 16-20 of the best plays of the game in VR. These plays will be uploaded in near real-time, so you can ideally see a great play on TV and throw on a headset to check it out from… Read More
The UK’s online supermarket, Ocado Ltd, has plans to test a new robotic arm for picking and packing groceries in some of its warehouses the company announced today. A grasping robot arm dexterous enough not to bruise bananas, crack eggs or fumble when it picks up a sack of citrus could allow e-groceries like Ocado to process a high volume of orders rapidly, without exhausting human… Read More
To be great at poker you gotta know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away, and know when to core dump. That’s only part of the technique a new AI system created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon used to beat four of the “world’s best professional poker players” – Dong Kim, Jimmy Chou, Daniel McAulay and Jason Les. The AI played the… Read More
Jason Nazar, the Los Angeles-based co-founder and chief executive of Comparably is aiming to unseat some of the web’s most successful tech companies in human resources and job search world. Nazar, who previously launched Docstoc, is looking to crack the market for business intelligence dominated by Glassdoor and break the chain LinkedIn has wrapped around the job-hunting process for… Read More
Club Penguin, the Disney-owned social network for kids, announced this morning it’s shutting down. In its place, the company will launch a new product for mobile, Club Penguin Island, which has been in development over the past several years. Club Penguin Island will launch in March, while the Club Penguin game on the desktop and mobile devices will shut down on March 29, 2017. The… Read More
Some additional insight out of today’s Nintendo earnings. The gaming giant offered some key contextual information about Mario’s recent mobile debut. The title has racked up more than 78 million downloads globally, according to the company, pulling in a respectable $53 million or so since it hit iOS in December. The company puts Super Mario Run’s conversation rate at… Read More
The FCC won’t be considering a proposal to open up access to pay TV services via third-party hardware under newly appointed commissioner Ajit Pai, Variety reports. The proposal, originally put forward under FCC Commissioner Tom Wheeler, at first sought to create an open-standard to make it possible for third parties to build their own set-top boxes ready to receive and display content… Read More
Radish is officially launching its mobile apps for reading bite-sized chunks of serialized fiction — and it’s announcing that it has raised $3 million in seed funding. This isn’t the first startup to experiment with new ways to deliver fiction via e-readers and mobile devices. In fact, I wrote about one of them in my very first piece for TechCrunch five years ago. But… Read More
In recent months, streaming media app Plex has expanded its focus from offering tools to organize and stream your home media collection of photos, TV shows and movies, to more directly targeting cord cutters. Related to these efforts, the company has now made its first acquisition, with a deal to bring in the news video service Watchup to its platform. Founded by a former journalist,… Read More
Algorithmic commerce startup Feedvisor is growing quickly, now managing more than $2 billion in goods sold through marketplaces like Amazon and eBay. To fuel that growth, the company has raised an additional $20 million in Series B funding led by General Catalyst. The Feedvisor platform uses machine learning to track different market dynamics and optimize the amount of money sellers… Read More
Nintendo has a whole bunch of mobile titles planned to capitalize on the success of Super Mario Run, but the success of that game and its anticipated launch plans for its next, Fire Emblem Heroes, might actually be causing its release plans to extend out a bit further than anticipated. Nintendo noted in its quarterly earnings report (via The Verge) that an Animal Crossing mobile game will… Read More
Many startups in FinTech are attempting to disrupt the banking world with consumer-focused apps, but the real prize and the most lucrative is going to be in the small business space. Especially since Main Street / High Street banks don’t really care enough about small businesses as they are small fries compared to much of the rest of the business. UK startups Tide, out of the UK, is… Read More
A couple of years ago Jobspotting, out of Berlin, decided job sites were dull and pretty useless (right?) so they put a modern search interface on top of results from third-party recruitment sites, woven into your social accounts and applied an algorithm to give users better results. But although they raised $1.5M, they entered a tough market where similar players like Adzuna in the UK had… Read More
We’ve kicked off 2017 with a surprise acquisition of what was planned to be the first big IPO of the year — Cisco snapping up AppDynamics for $3.7 billion, just days before its public listing — and what many believe will be an IPO filing for Snapchat’s parent Snap. But in contrast, it appears that 2016 represented a shift less frothy times. CB Insights has published… Read More
SoundHound has been around for 10 years and, before today, had raised around $40 million in financing as it’s worked to build a massive conversational AI platform. But today, the company is adding even more cash to that pile, nearly doubling the amount already raised with a $75 million round including strategic investors like NVIDIA and Samsung Catalyst Fund, among others. SoundHound… Read More
Eventbrite, the billion-dollar event-management platform that some tip for an imminent IPO, has made another acquisition in Europe to build out its presence here, and to move deeper into ticketing services. It has acquired Ticketscript, a startup based out of Amsterdam that offers a popular platform for event organisers to set up and sell tickets online for live events like music… Read More
Nintendo only takes a fraction of the revenue from Pokémon Go, the smash hit game of 2016, but its popularity has certainly boosted its own Pokémon games as evidenced by the company’s latest financial report. Nintendo reported a 64.7 billion JPY ($569 million) profit on revenue of 174.3 billion JPY ($1.5 billion). That’s a return to the black following a $57.1 million loss… Read More
Seedcamp, an early backer of TransferWise, has sold part of its stake in the London-based money transfer startup, in a Secondary dealing that may well represent one of the best European seed exits in recent years that wasn’t an acquisition or IPO. Read More
