Returning a product you bought online is inherently a statement of dislike, but smart retailers are quickly learning that they’re far better off if they shelve their defensive impulses and instead embrace your dissatisfaction with open arms. This is because it turns out that a smooth return process makes customers considerably more likely to repurchase in the days following the… Read More
Uber, the ridesharing behemoth that recently began operating driverless cars and exploring self-flying drone taxis, can’t seem to catch a break these days in the legal arena. The New York State Department of Labor has ruled that two Uber drivers, Jakir Hossain and Levon Alesanian, are indeed employees — not contractors — and therefore eligible to receive unemployment… Read More
LCDs are old hat, my friend. What you need is dozens of tiny spheres levitated and spun using ultrasonics. That’s what researchers at the Universities of Sussex and Bristol have cooked up, and it’s exactly as weird as you think. Read More
Most won’t have noticed a recent $6.5M Series A for a company called Mobilize, but it’s indicative of a major change occurring in businesses today. Companies’ growing reliance on a distributed workforce have been occupying headlines and podcasts for the past couple of years. However, these conversations must now turn to how companies increasingly depend on partnerships as… Read More
Consumer virtual reality has a clear new leader today, and it’s the just-launched PlayStation VR. Unequivocally, this is the best VR experience currently available outside of the kinds of high-flying, super-secret test rigs that exist out there for army training or whatever that cost millions of dollars. That includes top-of-line hardware like HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, as well as… Read More
mParticle announced today that it has raised $17.5 million in Series B funding. The New York City startup helps marketers collect user data through a variety of services and then funnel that data to other marketing and analytics tools. Co-founder and CEO Michael Katz said this not only reduces integration challenges and technical difficulties, but also helps businesses get a more unified view… Read More
I’ve spent quite a bit of the last few months with headsets strapped to my face. Whether that has enriched my life significantly or left it in shambles I cannot say, but I will report that the games are at least starting to get really fun and the video content is only getting better. The PlayStation VR launched today, and with that there are about three great options for consumers… Read More
This morning, fintech startup Affirm announced a new $100 million credit line from Morgan Stanley. The money will go directly to supporting the company’s current financial products that help customers purchase goods and spread their expenses over a period of time. Morgan Stanley is not the first institutional lender to issue a line of credit to the company. In May of 2015, Affirm closed… Read More
A maker of delivery drones called Zipline began nationwide delivery of blood and other critical medical supplies in Rwanda today, through a partnership with the Rwandan government. The program strikes a hopeful note about drones, following news earlier this week that ISIS fighters had packed a hobbyist drone with explosives in Iraq, killing two Kurdish fighters who captured and disassembled it. Read More
Today Google added a new “fact-check” tag to its popular Google News service. The site aggregates popular timely news from multiple sources and has traditionally grouped them with tags like “opinion,” “local source” and “highly cited.” Now readers can see highlighted fact-checks right next to trending stories.
The company cites the growing… Read More
HP isn’t out of the woods just yet. In an address to this year’s 2016 Securities Analyst Meeting, Dion Weisler, the President and CEO of the newly formed HP Inc., attempted to put a positive spin on a tricky situation. “I’m proud of the progress we have made in our first year as the new HP. Our focus is clear, our execution is solid, and we are positioned well for the… Read More
“Index… ring… pinky… index… middle…”
Nathan Copeland is telling a researcher which of his fingers he feels a touch on. But the researcher is touching a robotic hand, not Copeland’s, whose hand hasn’t felt a thing in over a decade. Read More
Hillary says Trump “makes you just want to look at cat GIFs”, and she even pronounced it correctly.* Hillary Clinton appealed to the tech crowd of San Francisco today at a campaign event, discussing technology in more depth than she or Trump has in weeks. Clinton said that because of Donald Trump’s bragging about sexual assault and insults toward immigrants, Muslims and… Read More
In this episode we catch up with the founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, and dive into its implications in the world of cryptocurrency. Ethereum is considered the most exciting innovation using blockchain technology, as its use cases go beyond that of bitcoin and could eventually have more overarching effects on how we run the world. However, after a recent hack of its Decentralized… Read More
It looks like those 500 million hacked Yahoo accounts may affect its sale to Verizon (TechCrunch’s parent). At a company public policy round table in DC this afternoon, Verizon general counsel Craig Silliman said: “I think we have a reasonable basis to believe right now that the impact is material and we’re looking to Yahoo to demonstrate to us the full impact. If they… Read More
In his best-selling 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman hypothesized that thinking could be broken down into two distinct processes — aptly named fast and slow thought. The former is all about your gut, the initial automatic responses you have to things, while the later is calculated, reflective and time-consuming. A new algorithm from… Read More
pple’s retail footprint today spans nearly 500 Apple Stores globally and serves as an important public touchstone for the company, its products and aesthetic vision. Now, the very first store it ever opened in Europe, on London’s iconic Regent Street, is about to unveil a refurbishment that points to where the company wants to take its retail experience next. Designed by Foster… Read More
ISIS reportedly carried out its first successful drone attack this week, using a commercially available drone to deliver explosives and kill two Kurdish fighters. It’s an effort that has been a long time coming: a Facebook group dedicated to supporting Kurdish forces reported that two small drones packed with explosives were shot down in December, and reports of ISIS using commercial… Read More
Today, Pinterest said it hit 150 million monthly active users, up from the 100 million it announced in September 2015. However, as TechCrunch previously reported, Pinterest in 2015 was targeting that it would hit 151 million monthly active users by the end of 2015. We reported the story in October last year, and the information was used by Andreessen Horowitz to solicit limited partners to… Read More
It’s been an open secret that Amazon’s AWS division and VMware were going to announce a partnership at a press conference in San Francisco later today. Thanks to VMware mistakenly posting its announcement early, we didn’t have to wait for the afternoon to know what the two companies will announce.
In what is surely a play to get more enterprises to move to AWS over its… Read More
