Afters years of waiting, Spotify has finally launched its music streaming service in Japan. We reported earlier this month that the launch would happen before September is out, and the company just about delivered on that timeframe. Read More
Didi Chuxing, China’s largest ride-hailing company, has hired two distinguished security experts to lead a new U.S.-based research center as part of a major push to increase its data security efforts. Read More
Uber’s self-driving trucks are coming in 2017, BlackBerry will stop making its own hardware, Facebook gives us a behind-the-scenes look at its server farm in Sweden, Nvidia researchers teach a car to drive from studying humans, Twitter opens up Moments so they can be created by anyone. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Here Be Dragons is a term for describing dangerous or unexplored areas. It’s also the name of Chris Milk’s new VR creative studio that’s looking to explore the dangerous world of spherical video. The VR production studio is aiming to continue rediscovering storytelling techniques for the immersive medium. With filmmaker Chris Milk taking the role of Creative Director at… Read More
Living in San Francisco for a few years, you learn a few things about the fall: First, the weather tends to be hotter and sunnier than the summer months. Second, you learn to avoid the area around the area around the Moscone Convention Center in late September and early October. That’s when the software giants Oracle and Salesforce hold their almost back-to-back annual conferences that… Read More
The systems underlying our elections process are more important than ever this year, and the bad guys know it too. FBI director James Comey said at a House Judiciary Committee hearing today that “bad actors have been poking around” voter registration systems lately. Read More
Latin America just might be the most overlooked emerging market on the planet. The venture dollars in Latin America can’t hold a candle to India or China (compare China’s $11.8 billion in new VC funds for the first half of 2016, down 14 percent according the WSJ, to Latin America’s $218 million), and the region’s 600 million inhabitants get overlooked by investors who… Read More
Probably not the kind of thing Samsung was hoping it would be dealing with in the wake of a massive Galaxy Note 7 recall, but here we are. And here’s the statement from the company’s media relations wing: It is important to note that Samsung customers have completed hundreds of millions of loads without incident since 2011. That message comes after the U.S. Consumer Product… Read More
The world’s largest technology companies hold the keys to some of the largest databases on our planet. Much like goods and coins before it, data is becoming an important currency for the modern world. The data’s value is rooted in its applications to artificial intelligence. Whichever company owns the data, effectively owns AI. Right now that means companies like Facebook,… Read More
Papa John’s has a catchy motto: “Better Ingredients. Better Pizza.” This analogy works in technology, as well. As better ingredient technologies arrive on the scene, they open the door for new, iconic companies to be formed that meet our needs in fundamentally better ways. Read More
Facebook couldn’t fit all the developers for its F8 conference into San Francisco’s Fort Mason any more, so F8 will take place at San Jose’s McEnery Convention Center on April 18th and 19th, 2017.
Registration hasn’t started yet but will follow the same rules as last year, which you’ll want to follow if you’re trying to get a seat as it always sells out quickly. Read More
Google today announced an expansion of its home delivery shopping service Google Express, which is now available across a large part of the East Coast. The service lets online shoppers order consumer products like electronics, clothing, health and beauty items, home décor and even dry good groceries, from either the web or a dedicated mobile app. With the expansion, Google Express will… Read More
Aetna just threw in with Apple in a big way. The healthcare provider announced a number of different iOS-only apps aimed at quantifying wellness and streamlining the healthcare management process that are set to arrive early next year. It’s also investing a ton in the Apple Watch, providing the wearable for all of its 50,000 or so employees (who are, naturally, enrolled in its own… Read More
Skymind, a company developing an open-source deep-learning library for Java, along with tools for implementation, today closed $3 million in financing from Tencent, SV Angel, GreatPoint Ventures, Mandra Capital and Y Combinator. Skymind was previously part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch and has taken money from Joe Montana’s Liquid 2 Ventures and a number of other… Read More
Humans are pretty good at ballparking distances, even with one eye closed — but it turns out computer vision systems have a hard time with it. Researchers hope to fix that, or at least make robots a little more robust, by teaching them to navigate a space without the benefit of stereo vision — in zero gravity, to boot. Read More
For those of you unawares, the Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator, like other accelerators, is a program that provides participating start-ups exposure to potential investors. Read More
My first home-way-from-home was a room in a house with an unrepeatable nickname on West College St. in Oberlin, OH. I lived with 8 other people in a two-story, rambling warren filled with rooms and roomlets that had been created over the years to shelter increasing numbers of people in the same finite amount of space. While increasing numbers of college students are choosing the manicured… Read More
Meetup is giving users a new way to find the meetups that give the company its name. The New York City-based company is launching new smartphone apps and a (partially) redesigned website with new branding, as well as a new way to browse meetup listings. “We killed the calendar,” CEO and co-founder Scott Heiferman said. Instead, Meetup will recommend listings for you based on your… Read More
It’s definitely not the sexiest platform play in tech town but b2b startup Paddle thinks it’s found an underserved niche — selling a SaaS ecommerce service to scaling SaaS startups seeking to offload the headache of administering international sales so they can focus on building core product. Read More
Last year, privately held online lenders like Prosper, SoFi and Avant looked all but certain to go public at same unicorn valuations their venture investors had assigned them, if not higher. It seemed their apt reward for reshaping the student, consumer and small business lending business. Fast forward today and the picture is much changed. While the market that online lending companies… Read More
