If you’re designing a piece of hardware to help design hardware, it certainly helps to have a few prominent projects under your belt. The team behind InstruMMents is responsible for a few, including, perhaps most notably, the Misfit Shine, the modular activity tracker that seemingly came out of nowhere and eventually got snapped up by Fossil. As with the Shine before it, the 01… Read More
BlackBerry’s QNX division is one of the Canadian company’s rare bright spots: The software maker’s operating system is a key ingredient in the infotainment offerings of a large number of automakers (BlackBerry says it’s currently running in over 60 million vehicles), and it’s now going to become even more integral to Ford’s connected cars. Ford and… Read More
Israel-based equity crowdfunding platform OurCrowd is launching a sector specific fund fully focused on digital health — touting it as Israel’s first fund with such a focus. The fund, called OurCrowd Qure, will invest in early stage startups at the seed and Series A level. Fundraising is starting now, with a target of $50 million for the first raise. Read More
The recent rush of allegations against countries like Russia and China and their possible roles against cyber attacks on countries like the U.S. have prompted a big move from the UK: the government said today that it plans to invest £1.9 billion ($2.3 billion) over the next five years in a new cyber defense strategy, called the National Cyber Security Strategy, to prepare for and fight… Read More
At least 30 million people wear contact lenses in the U.S., but somehow, less than one-third of this population wears daily disposable lenses, which are deemed the most hygienic and healthiest option by eye health professionals. A New York City startup called Hubble Contacts, co-founded by Ben Cogan and Jesse Horwitz, wants to make daily disposable lenses the norm here the way they are in most… Read More
Pokémon Go had its first special in-game event this Halloween, and the results are promising for people hoping Niantic will run more in the future: Revenue was up 2.3 times from the week before, according to app analytics firm SensorTower, and daily revenue on October 29, in the middle of the event, was at its highest overall level since September 10, according to analytics provider App… Read More
Music streaming continues to grow as a proportion of our recorded music consumption, with 47% of all recorded music revenues coming from streamed services in the U.S. in the first half of 2016, according to the RIAA. And in the wake of that wave of usage, we’re seeing the emergence of new startups trying to enhance the listening experience across all of them. Among them is a new… Read More
When life hands you lemons, sometimes it’s best just to get on with the damage control. That’s what we will be doing in the wake of Brexit at Disrupt London (5-6 December). We will be speaking to thought leaders and the wider tech community to understand exactly where Brexit leaves investors and founders. More specifics on that to come this week, but in the mean… Read More
Freshdesk has been moving beyond the pure customer service help desk for some time, and today it got $55 million to continue that expansion.
The round was led by Sequoia Capital India with participation from Accel Partners, which has been investing in the company from the beginning, according to Freshdesk president Dilawar Syed. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $150.5… Read More
Attention, Disrupt procrastinators. The time to pay attention is now. You have just 4 days left to get early-bird tickets to Disrupt London 2016 for just £950 apiece, saving yourself a full £250 off the final ticket price of £1,200. So, what are you waiting for? Be sure to head over to our ticketing page no later than this Friday, November 4 to get your early-bird Disrupt tickets before… Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt in London is on December 5-6! One month to go! It will be the place to come talk about new technology, your startup, other startups, everyones startups! Grab tickets here. So many speakers have already been announced. But, yes, there are even more to come. Today we’re delighted to say Shahar Waiser, founder of Gett, is also joining. Gett founder & CEO Shahar Waiser… Read More
On the back of news that Twitter is trimming nine percent of its staff with layoffs, the microblogging company is also losing the head of its business in India. Read More
There are a lot of startups looking at your DNA these days but uBiome stands out as unique among them for testing the DNA of microorganisms found in your fecal matter.
These bugs have a lot to do with your health and the startup is launching a clinical screening test called SmartGut to sequence the DNA of those microbes.
uBiome tells TechCrunch it has also closed on $22 million in Series B… Read More
A startup called Primo Toys today began online and retail sales of its latest educational product, the Cubetto, a programmable wooden robot for kids as young as 3. The London startup, which is a graduate of the PCH Highway 1 accelerator and backed by Randi Zuckerberg, promises families and educators a screen-free way to teach coding basics to kids who can’t yet read or write. Retailing… Read More
Paktor, a Tinder-like app for dating from Singapore, has raised $32.5 million in new funding as it aims to diversify into new kinds of mobile entertainment. Read More
Imagine a world where you buy mobile phone, data, voice and television services from a single provider. A world where you don’t worry about running out of wireless minutes, exceeding text message limits or running up roaming charges. A world where you talk, text and stream video on an iPad, TV, laptop or mobile phone, seamlessly using the same user interface and applications across… Read More
If you live in a building with a doorman, you don’t need Doorman. If you don’t, you do. The company is making it easy to accept deliveries when you’re out and about, but realized it was getting so successful in changing the patterns of how its customers do online shopping, that it was effectively losing money on each customer. Read More
On October 28, Tesla unveiled its new solar roof tiles. Few of us in attendance, if any, realized the solar roofing tiles were actual functional solar panels until Elon Musk said so. Sure, it’s a neat trick, but what’s the big deal? Read More
Nitrous.io, an online development environment and IDE, today announced that it is shutting down its service on November 14. The service is now closed for new signups and the team says it will refund any payments made after October 16. Nitrous’ existing users will be able to download their existing data soon. The team says that it will also soon release an open-source version of its… Read More
Apple dropped the first beta for iOS 10.2 today. And it comes with the latest update in emoji innovation. You may have noticed that Apple already redesigned most of the core emojis and added new gender and race options with iOS 10. But the company didn’t stop there. With iOS 10.2, Apple is adding full Unicode 9.0 support. Given that hundreds of millions of people use Apple-flavored… Read More
