Once, long ago when magazines still existed, I bought a copy of Popular Mechanics. Inside was a guide on how to build a robotic lawnmower. Now this was back in the 1980s so it wasn’t a very complex machine – it basically backed up when it hit stuff – but I was amazed. Being only ten at the time I was unable to build the thing and, now that I’m 40, I still… Read More
Welcome to the 2016 TechCrunch Holiday Gift Guide! We’ll be rolling out a bunch of guides leading up to Christmas, hopefully making your holiday shopping a little easier. Looking for gifts for others on your list? Check out our full 2016 Gift Guide Hub. Read More
Google today announced the launch of App Maker, the newest entry in the low-code, drag-and-drop app building market. Like its competitors from Microsoft and numerous startups, App Maker promises to make it easy for anybody to quickly develop basic apps that serve a very specific purpose inside an organization. The new service features a cloud-based drag-and-drop development environment that… Read More
As any new industry takes shape, technical fragmentation occurs. The connected car is new and hot and, like markets prior, there’s a huge land-grab unfolding in front of all consumers. It feels very much like the early days of smartphones: Everyone was trying to be a player. All companies built their own flavor of software and, as a byproduct, all hardware (smartphones) was weak, at best. Read More
Email apps are a dime a dozen. There are the regular emails apps that come with our phones, there’s Gmail and Spark and there’s 50 others that all offer just about the same thing. Zero is trying something different. Think of Zero as an AI-enabled email system. It reads your messages as they come in and allows you to do all the regular stuff – move emails into trash, snooze… Read More
Earlier this fall, Twitter opened up access to its storytelling feature “Moments” to all Twitter users, allowing anyone to create their own stories using tweets and photos uploaded to the service. At the time, Moments creation was only available on the web, but the company promised that mobile support would arrive soon. Today, it has — Twitter has announced that the ability… Read More
Amazon kicked off its 2016 AWS re:Invent conference with a peppering of announcements regarding its EC2 instance roadmap. The company dropped an updated R4 instance, expanded T2 instances, and a new F1 instance. The F1 utilizes field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to offer a solution that is faster than traditional CPU/GPU combinations for quick reprogramming. While those new instances… Read More
Amazon today announced the launch of its new Amazon AI platform at its re:Invent developer event in Las Vegas. This new service brings many of the machine learning smarts Amazon has developed in-house over the years to devs outside the company. For now, the service only makes three different tools available, but the plan is to add more over time. Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy… Read More
YouTube enabled support for 4K video on its site back in 2010, and today it’s bringing that same capability to live streaming. Both standard videos and 360 videos will be able to be live streamed in 4K, the company announced this morning. One of the first live streams to feature the new 4K support is the Game Awards, which kicks off tomorrow at 6 PM Eastern on YouTube.
Delivering… Read More
AWS fired a shot across Digital Ocean’s bow this morning at the AWS re:Invent conference when it announced new virtual private servers starting at just $5 a month. The VPS service, called Lightsail, allows a customer to easily fire up a server in the cloud for a low price and hide the complexity of the underlying services being used. It’s been designed, according to AWS CEO Andy… Read More
Amazon is rolling out a new tool for users of its Amazon Web Services that will allow them to essentially use just as much GPU power as necessary without using up a full cluster on Amazon’s EC2 instance types. That means companies can tap into just a sliver of GPU power, or a larger amount, on demand as they need it and pay for that amount. GPUs can run a ton of tasks in parallel and have… Read More
Amazon’s AWS cloud computing service today announced that it is launching a new instance type (F1) with field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The promise of FPGAs is that they are essentially chips that you can reprogram on the fly and tune them for your specific applications, making them faster than traditional CPU/GPU combinations. These new instances will be available in preview… Read More
Singapore’s Jungle Ventures today confirmed the final close of its newest $100 million fund for investments in Southeast Asia. The firm first announced plans for the fund, which is its second, in September 2015 when it completed a first close. Read More
The death of the devoted e-reader has been foretold time and time again. But while there’s been an unquestionable thinning of the herd, the devoted few still continue to move devices. That’s due in no small part to the benefits offered by E Ink. When it comes to battery life and daylight reading, full color can’t compete, so Amazon keeps selling a lot of Kindles – and… Read More
Excited about the new Netflix offline viewing feature but unsure where to start? Here’s a quick tutorial that shows you how the feature works in the iOS app, where to find settings, and how to manage downloaded movies and TV shows once you have them. It’s easy, but not necessarily immediately apparent where to find what’s available or how to adjust the quality settings to… Read More
Ditching frills for focus The Headphone doesn’t offer activity tracking or fancy gesture controls – instead, it promises Bluetooth audio, with physical buttons on the right earbud to control playback and volume. The case for The Headphone just holds the buds for charging; unlike The Dash, the storage container does not also hold backup charge for the headset. Despite everything… Read More
Got a new NES Classic Edition but woefully disappointed at the official controller’s short, corded-only options? Third party alternatives are popping up, but the new NES30 Classic Edition Set and Retro Receiver are a good bet, and are up for pre-order now. The kit is from 8Bitdo, which has been making wireless and wired retro versions of classic control controllers for a while now, and… Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt London is next week! (December 5th-6th, Agenda, Tickets). The conference will see our now traditional set-up of a single stage and a Startup Alley.
TechCrunch is excited to announce the judges of the next round of Startup Battlefield. They pick the finalists and winner of the startup competition held at Disrupt London. The judges are experts in their respective fields and… Read More
Over the past few months, Samsung has been understandably manic, trying to get replacement phones in the hands of former Note 7 owners. According to the company’s public-facing numbers, its bids have been pretty successful, convincing customers to stick with the brand by way of the S7 and S7 Edge, even as confidence in the brand has been deeply shaken. There are, of course, plenty of… Read More
TraceLink, the SaaS platform for tracking and tracing pharmaceuticals, has today announced the close of a $51.5 million Series C financing led by Goldman Sachs Growth Equity. Existing investors, such as FirstMark Capital, Volition Capital, and F-Prime Capital, also participated in the round.
As part of the deal, Goldman’s Jason Kreuziger is joining TraceLink’s board of… Read More
