500 Startups’ 18th demo day wrapped up this afternoon in San Francisco. The companies that presented ranged from financial technology all the way to yet another attempt to try and fix conference calls. 500 Startups has to compete with a lot of other accelerators like Techstars and Y Combinator, and in order to be successful it needs to generate hits from these classes. The firm has had… Read More
Tesla’s holding a special event at 5:30 PM PT today at Universal Studios in L.A., and we’re live on location to bring you al the news as it happens. Tesla will be unveiling their solar roofing product for the first time at this event, as well as the second generation of the Powerwall home energy battery, and perhaps more as well. We’ll be bringing you the action from the… Read More
When will Apple ship a MacBook with an ARM processor? This is a question that has been top of mind for observers of the company ever since it started designing and building its own chips from the ground up. The answer to that question is now, sort of. Apple’s new 13” and 15” MacBook Pro models come equipped with a Touch Bar – that bar and the accompanying Touch ID… Read More
Wireless carriers are building all-new cellular networks for the Internet of Things. Cell phone networks fall short for IoT in three ways: battery life, cost and wireless coverage. Solving just one of those factors would be enough to justify new networks. Solving all three is a game-changer for IoT. Read More
Apple and Microsoft both held big hardware events this week, unveiling a few new devices like the new MacBook Pro and the Surface Studio. Twitter announced it is shutting down Vine and laying off 9% of the company. Oh, and AT&T is acquiring Time Warner for a whole lot of money. These are the top stories of the week. Read More
The death of Vine was perhaps not entirely unexpected, but it’s sad nevertheless. Luckily, six-second videos are pretty easy to archive for posterity, and all-purpose GIF platform Giphy wants you to do just that. Read More
Ernest is a bit difficult to describe. It’s a device, it’s two devices, it’s an app, and according to its founder, Arturs Pumpurs, it’s a kind of virtual butler. The system secures your vehicle, tells you where it is, and controls your garage door or, if you have one, gate. The Kickstarter campaign starts October 28 and runs through December 7. The project began as a… Read More
ProPublica pointed to some potentially problematic Facebook ad capabilities today — specifically, the ability to include or exclude users from a given ad campaign based on their “ethnic affinity.”
These capabilities have existed for a while (Facebook told ProPublica’s Julia Angwin and Terry Parris Jr. it began offering them within the past two years as part of its… Read More
Microsoft’s future is three-dimensional. Up to now, we’ve seen the company embrace the notion in dribs and drabs, through the HoloLens and its work with Minecraft. But earlier this week, at an event in New York City, the company went all in, making 3D content creation a core principle of both its upcoming Windows 10 Creators Update and hardware like the Surface Studio. Read More
Blackline, a Los Angeles-based accounting software company, debuted in the U.S. markets Friday. After pricing at $17 per share, the stock closed at $23.70. In what has been a slow year for tech IPOs, Blackline decided to go public right now because it’s “part of a longer term plan to raise awareness for what we do,” said CEO Therese Tucker. She said the IPO, which raised… Read More
Twitter is testing a new design of the @reply that is intended to ‘clean up’ the conversation view by completely removing usernames from tweets. I’m in the test bucket (a group of users that Twitter is having take the features for a spin to see how they react) and it is a mess. Read More
This week the World Economic Forum released its Global Gender Gap report, which shows that the global workplace gender gap has grown bigger over the past year. Sheryl Sandberg writes “the number of women pursuing degrees in computer science is dropping,” and USA Today reported that in the U.S., female participation in the computing and tech workforce will shrink even further, from… Read More
One of the unsung casualties of long, sad death of the Note 7 was poor, poor Blue Coral. It was a really striking addition to an already lovely phone, a sort of shimmery light metallic blue. Every since Samsung and basically every regulatory body around put the kibosh on the phablet, however, the closest we’ve gotten is the Google Pixel’s Really Blue option. Which, while the phone… Read More
TechCrunch is pleased to bring you 500 Startups’ Batch 18 Demo Day, also known as Demo-ween, today, October 28th, starting at 12:00pm PT. 500 Startups is a global seed fund and startup accelerator founded by Dave McClure and Christine Tsai. 500 has invested in a variety of technology startups all over the world and maintains regional funds focused on Korea, Thailand, Turkey and… Read More
The shedding of various other ports in favor of ThunderBolt 3 ubiquity will no doubt be one of the biggest pain points for many when it comes to upgrading to the new MacBooks. Though the new ports do have benefits. Take the fact that the 15-inch version is capable of powering up to four 4K displays simultaneously. It’s overkill, likely for 99.9-percent of us, but hey, it’s nice to… Read More
GM’s Maven car-sharing service is adding yet another city to the list of places where it’s available: Los Angeles. The addition of L.A. comes quick on the heels of its recent expansion into San Francisco, which means there are now two California markets on board. Maven is GM’s in-house alternative to offerings like Zipcar and Enterprise CarShare. The program will host an… Read More
2016 has been quite a ride for the players in AI, NLP and ML technologies. From the famous advent of Microsoft Tay at the end of Q1 to the numerous acquisitions of AI and chatbot companies during the latter half of this year, artificial intelligence has been in the headlines every other day. But can chatbots help build your next website? Read More
Facebook rolled out a new feature today that gives users a full voter guide, from the presidential candidates to the down-ballot propositions and local politicians, in an effort to “encourage civic participation.” The feature allows users to “favorite” their chosen candidates and initiatives so they can refer to their favorites once they reach the voting booth. As… Read More
Too busy working to forge a startup from the ground up to think about a costume for Halloween? No worries, TechCrunch has your back. Here are six timely last-minute ideas for the tech obsessed. Read More
What happens when you tell two smart computers to talk to each other in secret and task another AI with breaking that conversation? You get one of the coolest experiments in cryptography I’ve seen in a while.
In short, Google Brain researchers have discovered that the AI, when properly tasked, create oddly inhuman cryptographic schemes and that they’re better at encrypting than… Read More
