A Finnish startup called Ōura Ring has closed a series A round of €5 million to ramp up production of its smart, health-monitoring jewelry. Oura Ring’s Series A backers included MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito, Jaan Tallinn who was Skype’s founding engineer and a cofounder of Kazaa and the Future of Life Institute, along with other finance professionals and tech entrepreneurs… Read More
The sales results from Cyber Monday 2016, Facebook Messenger launches Instant Games, Starburst Ventures wants to bankroll space, Lyft now tells you the cost of your ride ahead of time and BreakfastNY creates an analog wonder. All this on Crunch Report! Read More
On Thursday, Adidas will open a new flagship retail location on the outskirts of Times Square. It’s the largest of German shoe giant’s stores – and the first in a string of upscale brick and mortar shops soon to include a sizable location opening up soon in London. The company is currently giving some private tours of the space, and it’s all pretty nuts –… Read More
You might think Europe is treading water these days, with one of its biggest financial centers, London, hamstrung by Brexit and the uncertainty it has fostered. You’d be wrong. So suggests a new survey by the venture firm Atomico that persuasively argues that Europe’s tech scene is instead being fast propelled forward by three new trends: a well of so-called “deep… Read More
Once upon a time, in 2014, Tumblr announced that it was adding SSL, the standard protocol for establishing a secure connection on the web, as an option on all blogs. Two and a half years later, it’s finally the default! For new blogs, anyway. Read More
Members of the porn site xHamster should be changing their passwords today after a set of nearly 380,000 usernames, emails and poorly hashed passwords appeared online. The subscription-only breach notification site LeakBase has published the set of login credentials, which Motherboard reports were being traded online. It’s not clear exactly where the database originated, but it… Read More
The future of urban mobility is rapidly changing as drivers look for safer and more effortless ways to move from point A to point B. While autonomous vehicles are on the horizon, ridesharing options are expanding beyond Uber and Lyft to incorporate drivers of single-occupancy cars to accept other riders on their commutes. Read More
Revenge is sweet, but irony is sweeter. Apparently, the hacker who infiltrated San Francisco’s Muni transportation system late last week fell victim to his own horrible personal cyber hygiene. According to security reporter Brian Krebs, a separate individual infiltrated the Muni hacker’s own email using nothing more than the ransom note provided by the hacker himself. Read More
Hayo’s pitch video could use some work. It’s stilted and strange and has some trouble conveying precisely what the product does, owing in part to holographic representations of the product’s functionality. It’s clear that the product is different and probably compelling — but it’s not exactly clear what it does.
Earlier this week, I sat down with the… Read More
2016 has been a very good year to bury very bad news. And political distractions perhaps explain why a bill that has been described as the most extreme surveillance legislation ever passed in a democracy has today passed into law in the U.K.. never having faced substantial opposition. Read More
Lucid Motors, a new electric car company, announced at a press conference today that it would begin building its manufacturing center in Casa Grande, Arizona, in 2017. Parts and supplies for the facility will come from the state of Sonora in Mexico, which borders Arizona. The company’s headquarters will likely remain in San Francisco. Arizona Governor Doug Ducey said that the company… Read More
Apple is misplaying the hand Steve Jobs left them, making themselves vulnerable to competition for the first time since iPod. The company has always been at least one step ahead of the competition in hardware advancements and software experience. It used to be that to switch to Android or Windows, you’d have to give up functionality, user experience and access to the latest and… Read More
Knotch promises marketers a better way to collect user feedback about the effectiveness of their sponsored content. Now it’s announcing that it has received a design patent for its approach. Basically, when a sponsored article uses Knotch, a survey question pops up at the end, which is supposed to help advertisers assess your state of mind after reading the article. The big difference… Read More
Starting today you can play games inside Facebook Messenger and News Feed, but which should you try? There are old classics like Pac-Man and Space Invaders, as well as modern titles like EverWing and Words With Friends you can play by tapping the game controller icon in a Messenger thread. Click or scroll through to see our quick reviews and scores out of 10 for all 17 of the launch titles,… Read More
Intel is following up on news early Tuesday about its partnership with Mobileye and Delphi on self-driving tech with more autonomous vehicle news: it’s creating a whole group dedicated to pursuit of self-driving solution development, called – you’ll never guess – the Automated Driving Group (ADG for short). The new Intel ADG will be headed up by Intel vet Doug Davis,… Read More
Amazon’s AWS cloud computing division is hosting its annual re:Invent developer conference in Las Vegas this week. Ahead of the main part of the event, the company today hosted a keynote for its ecosystem partners who sell tools and services for AWS. During the keynote, the company announced a major extension of its partner programs, as well as a few new features for vendors who want to… Read More
Before the streaming era, if you found yourself watching a movie or TV show with a great soundtrack, you may have gone out later to buy the CD. These days, at best, you may remember to look up the soundtrack on iTunes or a streaming service like Spotify. But the premium TV network Starz has a different idea: in partnership with Spotify, it’s putting soundtracks directly into its… Read More
If we’re to keep thousands of expensive satellites in working order, the job isn’t going to be done by humans — and DARPA suggests we all get on the same page before we start designing robotic systems to pick up the slack. Read More
Ford’s pushing forward in its efforts to get autonomous cars on the road, with a plan to begin testing self-driving vehicles in Europe next year. The testing is in advance of extending its plans to debut an autonomous car specifically for ride-sharing fleets in the U.S. in 2021 to Europe, sometime in the future following that initial launch.
Ford tells TechCrunch it will be testing… Read More
Should our kids learn to code? I can’t argue against the value of every child having a working knowledge of software development. But there is a difference between coding foundational technology and front-end development — and the divide is growing. Read More
