Unscrupulous scammers have been pilfering money out of charity donation boxes for as long as they have existed. The rapid rise of crowdfunding platforms has moved this practice into cyberspace. GoFundMe today announced that it is fighting back with a limited guarantee ensuring that the money you drop in a collection bucket goes where you think it does. Read More
Last week, a congressional delegation with ties to SpaceX competitor ULA issued an open letter to the FAA, criticizing their admittedly fully legal self-directed investigation into the cause of the early September Falcon 9 rocket explosion. Now, a group of 24 bipartisan members of congress have issued a retort. This letter maintains that SpaceX has conducted the investigation in keeping with… Read More
Closing a Series A is notoriously hard — so much so that it has been coined the “Series A Crunch.” It’s estimated that only about 25 percent of startups that raise a seed round go on to close an A round. Shippo, a multi-carrier shipping API, is one startup that made it through. Last month, the company announced their $7 million Series A led by USV. Albert Wenger will… Read More
Google is hosting a press event today in San Francisco… and if the rumors are true, it should be a doozy. We’ve heard whispers about everything from new phones, to new Chromecasts, to a new VR headset, to a complete rethinking of Android as we know it. You might’ve assumed we’d be at the event covering it live with up-to-the-second updates from the scene… and,… Read More
Hypothetically, let’s say you run a company called ESI that makes office phones. Now let’s say that you’re looking to respond to the near ubiquity of smartphones with a desktop product that is “Google fast and Apple easy.” What, pray tell, would you call such a device? “ePhone7” has a certain ring to it, no? ESI is calling its rather familiarly… Read More
Consolidation continues to work its way through the world of enterprise startups. Today Akamai announced that it has acquired Soha Systems in an all-cash deal. Soha provides enterprise secure access as a service. Akamai is not disclosing the value of the deal, saying it was immaterial for the company. The news comes less than a week after Akamai announced that it acquired an… Read More
Paperspace founders Daniel Kobran and Dillon Erb set out to solve a hard problem, one the typical startup might shy away from. They wanted to disrupt the mature virtual desktop market dominated by giants like VMware, Citrix and Amazon. Today they got a healthy $4 million seed round to pursue the dream — and announced general availability of the product. Investors for this round… Read More
iOS 10 may have only reached roughly half of iPhones and iPads so far, but developers who readied their mobile apps for the new iMessage App Store are already benefitting, a new study finds. Existing apps that added support for iMessage have seen their downloads increase significantly, with early movers like JibJab seeing the largest download growth. With iOS 10, iMessage expanded beyond… Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt in London is on December 5-6. It’s literally the conference you watched on “Silicon Valley”, so you’d better be there. We’ve already announced a tonne of great speakers. Today we’re delighted to say Amy Chang, CEO and Founder of Accompany — an intelligent, adaptive virtual chief of staff application — is coming. Amy is a… Read More
It’s time for Google’s now-annual hardware event. Today, we expect to hear more about Google’s new phones (which will now fall under the Pixel brand), as well as its Google Home Alexa competitor, an updated Chromecast dongle. Maybe we will also see even more hardware in the form of a new Nexus tablet or updated Pixel Chromebooks and tablets. Rumor has it that Google… Read More
MasterCard is moving from trials of facial biometrics for payment authentication, including one in the U.S. and Canada launched earlier this year, to its first proper rollout of what is colloquially referred to as ‘selfie pay’ (aka MasterCard Identity Check). Read More
Yahoo’s homepage used to be the place where web users started their day, reading the top headlines, sports scores, stock updates, and other news. On mobile, that’s no longer always the case. In an effort to get back into the game, Yahoo this morning is launching a rebranded version of its flagship application, now called Yahoo Newsroom. The goal with the new app is to compete… Read More
It makes sense – Amazon makes Prime Originals for video, so why wouldn’t its digital comics brand make its own comics? Now, ComiXology is doing just that with the debut of ComiXology Originals, a new lineup that brings series’ you can’t find anywhere else to the Kindle and ComiXology customers. The new books feature some heavyweight talent that reveal the people behind… Read More
Turns out Dreamforce isn’t the only enterprise conference going on this week. VMware is also holding its at AirWatch Connect conference in Atlanta, and today it announced support for enterprise smart glasses on the AirWatch enterprise mobility management platform. Smart glasses, which are essentially computers that sit on your face, haven’t found widespread usage quite yet, but… Read More
Who says you can’t physically mod an iPhone? This video shows it’s still possible. Using an industrial saw and massive belt sander, this guy shaves off just enough of his iPhone 7’s edge to make the sides flat. And you know what? It looks rad. Removing the rounded edges gives the iPhone 7 an industrial look — good luck finding a case that fits, though. Read More
Olympus unveiled the OM-D E-M1 Mark II at Photokina this year, and the follow-up to the company’s original pro offering is the kind of evolution you’d expect from a digital camera coming four years later on. Everything about the camera has been touched, from exterior design, to sensor and processor, to software features, and the result is a compact, capable device that seems ready… Read More
Base isn’t the biggest player in a crowded CRM market by any means, but it’s not shying away from a fight with industry giants like Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. This week it introduced Apollo, a stand-alone artificial intelligence piece its CEO claims is well ahead of its well-heeled competitors — and it chose to announce this new product in the middle of… Read More
Henrik Fisker, designer of the Aston Martin V8 Vantage and Aston Martin DB9, is back with an electric car company called Fisker, Inc. – not to be confused with the old Fisker, which was acquired by Chinese auto parts giant Wanxiang and retooled as Karma Automotive. The new Fisker will also be making EVs, though, with an all-electric “spiritual successor” to the Fisker Karma to… Read More
If you, like me, are nearing the end of your Luke Cage binge and feeling the imminent absence of new Marvel Netflix content, take heart: Danny Rand will be making his streaming service debut on March 17, 2017 with the premiere of Iron Fist. Iron Fist sets the stage for Marvel’s The Defenders miniseries on Netflix, bringing in the last hero on the team alongside Daredevil, Jessica Jones… Read More
The world of sunglasses may be long in the cool stakes but has up to now been somewhat short on innovation. Now, the winds of technology are shifting those sands. You may have heard already about Snap (née Snapchat) turning the not-so-humble pair of 80s-style retro shades into a device for recording and posting videos on Snapchat. Now, at the other end of the spectrum, a startup out… Read More
