As publishers of dead-tree newspapers continue to look for ways to pivot and profit from the massive consumer shift to digital platforms, one of the more storied of them is putting some money into an online icon to boost its position. Digg, an early mover in online content aggregation that was acquired by the New York incubator Betaworks back in 2012 for a mere $500,000, is raising another… Read More
Following its accidental reveal of a newer, cheaper version of its Alexa-powered Echo Dot speaker on Monday, Amazon this morning announced new numbers detailing the rapid growth of its Alexa “app store,” which it calls the “Skills” section in its Alexa app. The company says the selection of these voice-activated apps has grown by 3x since June, and now includes over… Read More
Industrious, a WeWork competitor that offers workspace to entrepreneurs, has today announced the close of a $37 million Series B round. Riverwood Capital led the round, with participation from Outlook Ventures and Maplewood.
Industrious currently has 12 locations across the country, including cities like Atlanta, St. Louis, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Raleigh, Chicago, Austin, and… Read More
No, Auto-Trash does not mean wrappers and french fries lingering on the floor of your car. Auto-Trash is a Raspberry Pi-powered trashcan that can automatically sort items placed in it based on what they are. It works by using a Raspberry Pi module equipped with a camera to “see” each item placed on top of the can’s rotating top. Using image recognition—powered by… Read More
It’s pretty difficult to make digital marketing sexy, but crystal is going at it with both barrels. Launched in public beta today at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley, the product features beautiful dashboards, smart AI and Siri-like voice control. Its self-learning algorithms can learn when a company’s audiences are most likely to respond to marketing messaging and much more. Read More
GGV Capital, the nearly 20-year-old cross-border venture firm, with offices on both Sand Hill Road and in Beijing and Shanghai, has brought some new, interesting people into its orbit: Jason Costa, who spent the last three years as a product manager at Pinterest and the two previous years working on Twitter’s platform, has joined the outfit as an entrepreneur-in-residence;… Read More
Amazon this morning rolled out another perk for subscribers to its Amazon Prime membership program: free access to Audible’s short-form digital programming called Audible Channels, as well as a selection of free audiobooks. Amazon says members will have access to a rotating selection of over 50 audiobooks from Audible’s catalog. That’s similar to how the Kindle Lending… Read More
Native mobile advertising startup Avocarrot — which, interestingly, was in the first cohort of company builder Entrepreneur First — has been acquired by adtech company Glispa Global Group. Read More
Sourcery Technologies Inc. has raised $5 million in venture funding for software that helps restaurateurs and corporate kitchens order from vendors, keep track of their inventory and costs, and figure out the appropriate prices for different ingredients. Marker LLC led Sourcery’s new round joined by Steadfast Venture Capital and the company’s earlier backers including Palantir… Read More
GitLab, the code collaboration platform for developers based on the open source Git tool, announced a $20 million Series B round today led by August Capital. Existing investors Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator also participated. Today’s investment brings the company’s total raised to date to over $25 million. It was just about a year ago that GitLab announced its $4 million… Read More
Ontame.io, a relatively new startup from the former CTO and CEO of Graduateland (which recently acquired Tyba), is building a product to bring better analytics to recruitment. Read More
Instead of taking on debt to buy a house, Point provides equity funding. The startup can find the capital needed to finance your home and in return they get partial ownership. And now Point is getting its own funding, $8.4 million led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Bloomberg Beta and Ribbit Capital. Inspired by the venture capital model for startups, Point aims to make it… Read More
After only a few days with Apple’s wireless AirPod headphones, it’s clear that there will be a huge platform business based on the reliable, persistent availability of a contextual artificial intelligence that can talk to you and receive commands. That platform will benefit Apple first, but it will then expand — along with Siri — to developers and startup companies. Read More
With the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, Apple is going through a splitting-atoms phase with the iPhone. The company knows that the future is a camera that can see the world in 3D. It knows that the future is one without wires because wires are awful. It knows that the iPhone may be our primary computer, but its screen won’t be the primary way we interact with that computer. Read More
It’s the first day of TechCrunch Disrupt SF. We highlight one of the compnaies from Startup Battlefield, Tesla upgrades its autopilot to Version 8, Microsoft has a major CRM win, HP is buying Samsung’s printer business and eBay launches a cell phone trade-in site quick sale. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Email? IM? IM? Email? The rise of mobile messaging apps has challenged email as the primary communications channel for all things, including work — what happens when you blend them together?
That’s the approach taken by Rush, an app that combines email and messaging, but also includes your calendar and other productivity tools. Headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, but with offices… Read More
In this world, there are dogs. And also there are PCs. But dog PCs? “Ridiculous,” you say. But ladies and gentleman, I have seen the future of dog computing, and it is Dog PC. The PC for dogs. What kind of company would produce such a PC for dogs? Tesla, naturally. Not, mind you, the Tesla that makes electric cars. The one that makes T-Pai, an intelligent doghouse built into a… Read More
Life is strange sometimes. Like, sometimes you buy a $160 pair of wireless headphones, and all you want to is find a way to add another wire to the thing. $10 might be a small price to pay, if it stands between you and losing one of those precious new fully wireless AirPods that Apple announced earlier this week – far and away the largest complaint among internet pundits that… Read More
Lucy, a Bay Area startup, which was founded this January and launched its beta today, reckons it’s found an underserved not-so-niche market to target: expectant parents. The team presented on stage today here at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016, after being lifted from startup alley as the day’s wildcard battlefield company. Read More
If there’s one industry that’s consistently blowing past expectations, it’s competitive gaming. The e-sports market is expected to reach nearly a half-billion dollars this year, and gamers who take part in it are constantly trying to heighten their skills.
Mobalytics is aiming to bring visual analytics to competitive gamers so they can discover their weaknesses and make… Read More
