It’s that time of year again. No, I’m not talking about the holiday season or even tech’s own winter wonderland, CES. I’m talking about Awards Show season, and the one awards show that no TechCrunch writer, reader, or subject can afford to miss: The Crunchies. This year, we’re celebrating our 10th Annual Crunchies Awards in style, at the San Francisco Opera House… Read More
Sony’s PlayStation Vue streaming TV service has just hit a bit of a roadblock in terms of its content lineup. The company says today that it is losing all Viacom-owned channels, including Comedy Central, Spike and MTV, which will be removed from the service beginning on November 11. Reading between the lines of the announcement, it seems that the cost to continue to carry these channels… Read More
This day will be a stressful one for many Americans, so naturally we turn to the internet: to paraphrase Homer, the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems. Luckily, today brings a heartwarming tale — or should I say tail? — from across the pond. A mutant snail who once thought hermself alone in the world has found love, thanks to online dating. Read More
“We’re going to see more change in the next five to 10 years than we’ve seen in the last 50,” said Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors, on record. While that statement is now a year old, it continues to ring true. Vehicle ownership is changing and self-driving cars will be implemented in the next decade. What will affect the insurance industry more: self-driving cars… Read More
Although Microsoft bought to-do list app maker Wunderlist back in 2015, the company has been working on another to list app experience, code-named Project Wunderlist, which is now in private beta testing. Not much is known about Microsoft’s intentions with its new app, but according to a report out today, this simple to do list app will soon be available on iOS, Android and on Windows… Read More
Facebook is on a mission to make the fiber optic networking inside of its data centers go from 40G to 100G. Its Wedge 100 top-of-rack network switch (basically, the device that connects all the servers in a rack to the wider data center network) was already accepted into the Open Compute Project and today, the company lifted the veil of Backpack, its next-gen 100G switch platform for… Read More
A group of Deliveroo riders in North London is pushing for improved pay and conditions by taking legal steps to obtain union recognition. To achieve that they will need a tribunal to judge at least some of them to be workers, rather than self-employed contractors as Deliveroo describes them. Read More
Now the copying is going the other direction, as Snapchat clones Instagram Stories’ rewind feature. But Snapchat is still innovating on the augmented reality features it popularized, plus adding new ways to share. Today’s Snapchat update for iOS and Android introduces World Lenses. While its well-known Selfie Lenses change the way you look with dog ears and flower crowns, World… Read More
Joy, a startup aiming to help brides-to-be plan their weddings in the digital age, has pulled in $4.5 million in seed capital. Joy launched out of Y Combinator this summer with aims to take on what some might think of as a crowded industry. There are plenty of wedding websites in existence but many more popular sites like MyWedding.com, WeddingWire and TheKnot.com popped up years ago… Read More
No matter how this election ends one thing is clear: what happens online in the next decade will have an increasingly important effect on our daily lives. Until recently politics, warfare, commerce, and education has mostly been offline. That will change drastically in the next ten years. But isn’t the world already digital? Most of it is but the places that it isn’t – parts… Read More
The main IP of a startup called Cognovi Labs is a tool called Twitris. Twitris uses both human and machine learning to interpret Twitter traffic to predict sentiment. The tool can also quantify a range of emotional reactions that whole regions of the world are collectively feeling. The startup is following a host of election competitions today and publishing their findings on their Twitter feed. Read More
A number of Comcast users noticed this morning that the channel NBC has disappeared from the programming guide on their TV – an odd and unfortunately timed glitch on Election Day here in the U.S. Many have been complaining on Twitter about the problem, posting screenshots that show the channel’s disappearance while tweeting at Comcast-run Twitter accounts for answers. The… Read More
If you were focused on, um, other things this morning, you may well have missed the launch of the HD6XX. The bad news is that the extremely limited edition Sennheiser/Massdrop team up looks to have sold out already. A rep from the company tells TechCrunch, “With the popularity of the drop this morning, we nearly broke the internet.” Sales on the $200 headphones are currently halted… Read More
It’s easy to appreciate why Bambrogan hired the firm to filter media inquiries. When it comes to handling crisis situations in particular, Sitrick is as well-regarded as they come. Its approach, neatly captured by its tagline, is: “If you don’t tell your story, someone else will tell it for you.”
“We’ve been in a tricky position a number of times and the… Read More
Slack is great for taking lunch orders and sharing GIFs with an international team (as us about “Whiplash Wednesday!”) but it breaks down when you try to get real work done. That’s why Slingr exists. Created by experienced product manager Grace F. Schroeder, Slingr was designed first as a platform and then as a product. Shroeder wanted something that a disparate team could use… Read More
Google today announced the launch of the Tokyo region of its cloud computing platform. With this, the Google Cloud Platform now features two regions (Tokyo and Taiwan) and a total of six availability zones in Asia. In the Asia-Pacific region, the plan is to also open new regions in Mumbai, Singapore and Sydney over the course of the next year, in addition to new regions in the U.S.,… Read More
That social media post could disqualify your vote. Snap your #ImWithHer or #MAGA selfie without your ballot. It violates voting laws in many states to take a photo with your completed ballot, or even inside the polling place in some locations.
Breaking the voter secrecy laws can get you one to three years in prison or a fine depending on where you live, though they’re not always enforced. Read More
When crowdsourced labor company CrowdFlower recently raised funding from Microsoft, co-founder Lukas Biewald told me his team was focused on technology that allows businesses to supplement algorithms and artificial intelligence with human judgment from crowdsourced labor pools. Now CrowdFlower bringing on more experts to shape the development of that technology. Specifically it’s… Read More
As Messenger continues its steady growth as a communications channel distinct from its social network parent Facebook, the company today is taking the wraps off a new version of the platform that will give developers some new tools for how they present content in it, but it also opens the door wider to a new phase of how Messenger is evolving: get ready for more Messenger traffic from… Read More
