Microsoft Teams throws a lot of you, right out of the gate. That’s because competitors like Slack already have a sizable head start on Microsoft’s workplace collaboration tool. More to the point, though, is that, while the company is late to the party, it’s got about as good a business suite infrastructure as anyone can ask for, from Office 365 to Skype. In a lot of ways,… Read More
Gfycat, fresh off its $10 million seed round and debut of its first mobile app for texting and editing its own flavor of GIFs, announced today that it’s acquiring the Mac desktop application GIF Brewery in an effort at expanding its GIF creation capabilities. The GIF Brewery app, which lets users create, edit and share GIFs from their Mac, has seen over 110,000 downloads to date, and… Read More
Howard Lerman will often jump in front of a white board in front of you in a room and talk about how he wants to turn Yext into one of the next huge enterprise platform plays following SAP and IBM. That’s probably not too outlandish: His company, Yext, currently serves as probably the largest database of location data for businesses and other venues around the world. It’s… Read More
No, the little feature that tells you your Uber driver is 2 minutes away (but feels like it’s more like 10 minutes) isn’t going to change. But Uber is rolling out what it hopes is a more organized app to help you book your ride quicker. Uber added a ride selection with its first major redesign in 2012. Back then it was simply a choice of UberX and UberXL. But many versions later… Read More
TechCrunch is pleased to bring you the Pitch@Palace 6.0 Demo Day, live from St. James’s Palace, starting at 5:30pm BST, 9:30am PT. Established by The Duke of York, Pitch@Palace offers entrepreneurs the opportunity to present their business in front of an audience of influencers. For those of you following along, the 12 entrepreneurs pitching in today’s event were selected… Read More
Hey, New Yorkers, I’m starting up 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
Paris-based DJiT, the French startup behind the popular DJ app edjing and more recently a hardware device called Mixfader, has raised a further $2.6 million. Read More
Sling TV, Dish’s over-the-top service aimed at cord cutters, is after your kids. By that I mean the company is rolling out a new on-demand channel that caters to children, or, more accurately, the parents of young children looking for easier access to kid-friendly entertainment from the streaming service. Called, Sling Kids, the channel offers new on-demand content as part of its… Read More
ClassPass, the subscription service for boutique fitness, has today cancelled its unlimited membership option, the most expensive tier offered by the company. This comes in the wake of a major price hike from ClassPass that fragmented its $99 unlimited plan into three tiers: Base (5 classes for $75/month), Core (10 classes for $135/month) and Unlimited ($180/month).* Today, however,… Read More
Houzz, the popular platform for all things home remodeling and decorating, is expanding to India. This marks Houzz’s entry into its fourteenth market, but none of its current markets can obviously rival the sheer size and growth potential of the Indian market. In addition to the expansion into India, Houzz is also launching its Pro+ local marketing program and subscription service for… Read More
The trucking industry is enormous and vital. it remains the primary way we move goods and touches the lives of nearly the entire American population. Trucking is the physical backbone of e-commerce, and person-to-person shipments. In the US alone, spending on overland logistics reached over $700 billion last year. At least $600 billion of that is FTL (full truckload), roughly half of which… Read More
It’s been a busy Fall for Microsoft. A week after throwing a big Windows/Surface party, the software giant has returned to the Big Apple for its latest piece of news. Clearly the company was just too excited to keep its latest addition to Office 365 under wraps, posting a launch video just prior to the event’s official kickoff. Today’s event kicked off with that same… Read More
Bots are hot. Ever since Facebook introduced chatbots at F8 last spring, they’ve been integrated into brand pages for customer service, e-commerce and fun. But how do you make a bot? Many businesses don’t have developers that are adept at creating them. Enter Octane AI, a newly formed startup launched by media personality Ben Parr, serial entrepreneur Matt Schlicht and Omegle… Read More
A controversial crime-reporting app called Vigilante has been kicked out of the App Store for an app that encouraged, well – vigilantism – and led to the potential for violent responses and racial profiling. The app had only been live for a week in New York before getting the boot, after promising a tool that opened up the 911 system, bringing near real-time reports of criminal… Read More
Microsoft is holding an event today to unveil what many expect will be its new Slack competitor. Ahead of that, it has posted an unlisted video on YouTube that spills some of the beans. The product will officially be called Microsoft Teams, it will be a part of Office 365, and it is part of the company’s big push to create a new generation of enterprise products that appeal, in… Read More
The University of Waterloo has a team dedicated to making a real, working pod system for the ambitious Hyperloop transportation system envisioned by Tesla founder Elon Musk. The so-called ‘Waterloop,’ (bonus points for puns) got a test run yesterday, making the team the first to demonstrate a functioning, pneumatic levitation system on a test track using nothing but air to float… Read More
Remember Samsung’s original Galaxy Gear watch? It’s all right if you say don’t. It was big – in the sense of being physically large, due in part to the inclusion of a camera in the bezel/strap. The company was clearly looking to jam all of the functionality possible into the device and came out the other side with an extremely large product. That’s likely a big… Read More
FilmStruck, a new streaming service aimed at film geeks developed by Turner Classic Movies, has now launched. Announced earlier this year for a mid-October arrival, the service belatedly debuted with a collection of hundreds of classic, indie, foreign, and cult film, as promised. The company also announced the pricing for its new Netflix-like competitor: a somewhat costly, comparatively… Read More
UK insurance firm Admiral had intended to launch an app this week offering discounted car insurance premiums to first time drivers based on an algorithmic assessment of their Facebook posts. Read More
Spotify — the music streaming service with 40 million paying subscribers — has made an acquisition that it hopes will help it hold on to them, and build up those numbers against encroaching streaming music competition from Apple, Pandora, Google, Amazon and more. The company has acquired a company called Preact, a cloud-based platform and service developed for companies that… Read More
