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
Trump’s not a tech guy, that much we know. He reportedly doesn’t have much time for a cell phone or email. During a CNN town hall moderated by Anderson Cooper, he said that he largely composes tweets by, “shout it out to one of the young ladies who are tremendous. I’ll just shout it out, and they’ll do it.” But while he’ll never be an early adopter… Read More
Twitter just announced that Chief Operating Officer Adam Bain is departing.
Bain has been with Twitter since 2010, building the company’s ad business and becoming COO last year at the same time that founder Jack Dorsey was named CEO. Bain tweeted that he’s now “ready to change gears and do something new outside the company,” while adding, “I look at what… Read More
Fabrice Grinda, a longtime New Yorker, has helped create hundreds of jobs for Americans and others. Among the companies he has started is OLX, one of the largest free classifieds sites in the world — one that was acquired over time by the African conglomerate Naspers for $250 million. Grinda more recently co-founded Beepi, the peer-to-peer used car marketplace based in California;… Read More
For Americans struggling with stagnant wages, under- or un-employment, one of Donald Trump’s most appealing campaign promises was to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.
Navigating the complexities of policy, tariffs and geopolitics would make that hard enough already for the president elect. But technology will make this promise nearly impossible to fulfill.
Why? Because… Read More
LeEco is a weird company and the ExploreVR is a weird headset. It’s essentially a Gear VR competitor that promises to deliver a low-end virtual reality experience for a fraction of the price of Samsung’s peripheral. It is, of course, not the company’s first VR headset. In typical LeEco fashion, the company’s already got a bunch on the market already – because… Read More
As the North American Bikeshare Association begins its annual conference in Austin, Texas, participants will be focusing on social equity. If you’re wondering what that means, wonder no more, thanks to a statement from the NABSA’s project manager, Matt Martin: “Social equity in bikeshare means making a healthy and versatile form of transportation accessible to those who… Read More
TeamIndus, a private company located in Bangalore, India, is the one and only Indian entrant into the Google Lunar X-Prize, the international competition to land a private spacecraft on the moon.
For TeamIndus, there are a few, exciting things at stake. If they’re first in the competition, they’ll win $20 million and become the first private company to land on the moon. If… Read More
TechCrunch is pleased to bring you Acceleprise’s Cohort 5 Demo Day, today, November 9th, starting at 10:00am PT. Acceleprise is a SaaS-focused accelerator based in San Francisco led by partners Nick Mehta (CEO of Gainsight), Tien Tzuo (CEO of Zuora), Karen Appleton (Early Box Exec, current Apple VP) and Rowan Trollope (Senior Exec at Cisco) . With smaller cohort sizes, Acceleprise… Read More
Can you spot the lone dugong in this image? Look closer. Closer… still no? Try this larger version. Give up? Here it is. Now do that with 45,000 more. If that sounds tedious, then perhaps you, like researchers at Murdoch University, would prefer to delegate the duty to a specially-trained computer. Read More
There’s a story that Silicon Valley likes to tell about the future. Part of that story, of course, is the idea that technological change will continue to accelerate and make our lives better. But when I talk to entrepreneurs and investors, I hear a broader narrative of progress — a belief that society is becoming more diverse, meritocratic and rational. Things are getting… Read More
Everyone, it seems, is going the fast charging route these days. Thanks to the nearing ubiquity of USB-C on flagship devices, the feature is quickly becoming a standard – “standard” in the sense that everyone is doing it, not so much that there’s any consistency to the tech. All in all, it’s a nice addition to manufacturers’ newfound focus on battery life.… Read More
Google has been protecting users against dangerous and harmful websites for many years by warning web surfers when they accidentally click on links that could lead them to sites that spread malware or attempt to phish for your private information. But many sites figured out how to work around Google’s policies. Instead of cleaning up their act, they would instead temporarily… Read More
