Humble beginnings
When Google debuted Cardboard at its 2014 Developers Conference, then- Google Product Chief Sundar Pichai showed off the headset made of modest materials with an insouciance that indirectly poked fun at the ambitious and expensive Oculus purchase Facebook had announced only shortly before. Google’s VR headset was made of about $10 worth of materials, and while many… Read More
Hired, the platform that lets applicants vie for top tech jobs, has announced a $30 million extension to its Series C funding, bringing the total of that particular round to $70 million. The funding came primarily from Glenmede Trust and Ontario Pension Board, with participation from existing investors. On Hired, folks seeking a job can simply answer a few questions and receive back… Read More
PayPal users can now send and request payments using simple voice commands via Siri on iOS 10 on iPhone and iPad. The online payments company is making the new feature available to users in 30 countries, and in a number of languages, and it requires only that the iOS app be installed with a logged in user account. As you can see from the demo video above, using the feature is as easy as… Read More
It seems to have been the week for modern application performance monitoring tools to announce major updates. First, New Relic announced theirs on Monday and today AppDynamics followed suit with its own update to provide more direct insight into business performance — not just the underlying systems and applications. Both messages are remarkably similar, even the platform naming. On… Read More
Facebook popularized the idea of a “graph” (specifically social graph) to describe the relationship between you and the web of people and interests that surround you, and to help figure out what kind of content you like to see. That’s proven to be a somewhat problematic concept when it comes to social graphs, but it turns out to be an effective concept for how to tackle… Read More
Accel-backed Job Today has pulled in a $20 million Series B round, less than a year after it raised its $10M Series A. The new round is led by Flint Capital, with participation from existing investors investors Accel Partners, Mangrove Capital, and Felix Capital. Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt in London is on December 5-6! Not long now! Grab tickets here. As well as Startup Alley and Battlefield, we have a tonne of amazing speakers coming. Today we’re delighted to say Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder and Head of Applied AI at DeepMind, is coming.
Mustafa is responsible for the application of DeepMind’s technology to real-world problems, as part of… Read More
Toast, a startup that helps make cross-border payments easier and cheaper for migrant workers living overseas, is the latest to help itself to money from investors after it raised $1.5 million. Read More
Over the summer, fitness social network Strava introduced Beacon, a safety feature designed to offer peace of mind to the friends and families of long distance runners know they’re stating out of harm’s way, such as giant boulders and dogs as demonstrated in the informational video. Essentially, the Strava premium add-on sends real-time updates to a select list of contacts, so a… Read More
Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce giant, is preparing to enter the mobile games space soon, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. Read More
Belgium startup Teamleader, which began life while co-founders Jeroen De Wit, Willem Delbare and Mathias De Loore were studying together at university, has raised €10 million in Series B funding. The round is led by previous backer Fortino Capital. Read More
Tim Cook has rallied staff at Apple following Donald Trump’s historic and controversial U.S. election win by reassuring them that the company will “move forward together” despite political divisions and tension. Read More
Zipline International Inc. has raised $25 million in a Series B funding round to expand its humanitarian delivery drone business in Rwanda, the U.S. and beyond. The startup builds drones and runs delivery services, dropping crucial medical supplies to clinics or hospitals in areas that aren’t accessible by land. Recently, TechCrunch visited Zipline’s headquarters in Half Moon… Read More
Reactions to Trump as president, GoPro is recalling the GoPRo Drone, TeamIndus is a team of 100 engineers in India trying to get to the moon, Twitter gets twice the amount of traffic on election night and Pandora has a site redesign. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Peter Thiel should rightly be admired for sometimes seeing what many others cannot. He understood the power of online money transfers well before most traditional financial institutions. He wrote Facebook a check when it was little more than an interesting startup from another Harvard dropout. Most recently, he anticipated what few of his peers predicted could possibly come to fruition: a… Read More
Although Donald Trump’s presidential campaign never netted much support from tech companies, at least one company is now congratulating him on his election victory. “Every president-elect deserves our congratulations, best wishes and support for the country as a whole. The peaceful transition of power has been an enduring and vital part of our democracy for over two centuries, and… Read More
The Facebook bubble just popped. Half the country today is still in shock. Reality crashed down and many were presented with a world that didn’t match up with the one they’ve inhabited in the months leading up to the U.S. election. As it turns out, that was Facebook’s world. The social media network has become an outsize player in crafting our understanding of the events… Read More
While it’s not exactly sentient, SentiOne sure sounds like it should be. This Polish company watches social media for brands allowing you to create an instant monitor for any topic. Founded by Bartek Baziński, Michael Brzezicki and Kamil Bargiel, the company raised $3.5 million from Venture TFI and Trigon TFI Group to build out their platform internationally. The company has been working… Read More
The LeEco Super Bike may be the perfect analogy for the company that created it. It’s a strange amalgamation that patches together a lot of disparate ideas in a less than elegant way. It’s clearly trying really hard and will no doubt alienate some people with its over-eagerness. Also, weirdly, it’s not electric. That last point was the first thing a rep mentioned to me… Read More
Hello, Brooklyn! I’m restarting my series of micro-meetups in New York with a special tasting at the Van Brunt Stillhouse. The founder, Daric Schlesselman, is a friend of TC and showed off his wares at the last New York Disrupt and he’s offering us a special tasting on Thursday, November 10, 2016 at 7:00 PM. It’s way down in Red Hook, so put on your hiking shoes and… Read More
