Snapchat has given observers another reason to suspect it might be working on hardware – the social network company joined the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) according to the Financial Times. The SIG industry association maintains the Bluetooth wireless standard, and membership is a necessary prerequisite for companies that want to employ Bluetooth in any hardware devices.… Read More
Garena, Southeast Asia’s most valuable technology startup, has closed additional funding three new investors: SeaTown Holdings International, an affiliate of Singaporean sovereign wealth fund Temasek, Indonesia’s GDP Venture, and Mistletoe, a Japan-based fund from Taizo Son, the younger brother of SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son. Read More
Northzone, a 20 year veteran of the European VC industry, has closed its 8th fund, capped at €300 million, which it will deploy to “early-stage” startups in the region. Specifically, these will be A, B and C rounds, and although investments will span the whole of Europe, there will be particular focus on key tech hubs, including the Nordics, London, and Berlin. The VC also says… Read More
One of the biggest tech deals this year — and the biggest ever in the UK — has now closed. Today, Softbank announced that it has completed its acquisition of ARM Holdings, the semiconductor firm that it said in July it would acquire for £24 billion in cash (around $32 billion in today’s currency, $31 billion at the time of the deal), in order to make a big jump into IoT. As… Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt London is happening once again this December and we have some of the most iconic entrepreneurs and thought leaders in the tech industry lined up to speak. The two-day conference runs December 5 to 6 in the Olympic Village’s Copper Box Arena and features Startup Alley and Startup Battlefield where one startup will take home £30,000. You can buy early-bird tickets… Read More
Much has been made about the business implications of recent, rapid advancements in cognitive computing — that is, the possibility of advanced analytics tools to help human knowledge workers glean actionable insight from vast and deep lakes of historical, transactional and machine-generated information. Read More
Q: If you were to pick one and only one single biggest factor that determines a startup’s success, what would it be? Why? Some say it is product-market fit (Marc Andreesen), others hold that it’s timing (Bill Gross) and yet more believe it is the team. Asked another way, what do you think is essentially different about successful startups?
If I had to pick one, I’d pick timing. Read More
You can’t swing a lightly inebriated jaguar by its tail without hitting half a dozen crowdfunding campaigns these days. Looking at some campaigns, it seems like it could be the ultimate get rich quick scheme. Running a successful Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign is a lot more complicated than that, though. In this video, we take a closer look at some of the common pitfalls. Read More
David Haase, a former employee of the beleaguered San Francisco-based firm Rothenberg Ventures Management Co. (RVM), is suing the firm and its founder, Mike Rothenberg, saying he was asked to run up more than $100,000 in business expenses on an American Express account at the direction of Rothenberg and never repaid.
In his lawsuit, filed last week in San Francisco, Haase says he joined… Read More
The real estate rental market is a highly localized, relationship-based industry driven largely by individuals living and working in their own cities, causing many to acknowledge the longstanding difficulty of streamlining disruption to this market. In recent years, however, that hasn’t stopped a multitude of innovators from seeking novel ways to improve the process’s efficiency. Read More
When you think about crowdsourced work, you probably think about Mechanical Turk and, maybe, Uber. On the one hand, an anonymous platform where people feel like mechanical parts. On the other hand, a face-to-face platform where people are rapidly obsolescing and doomed to be replaced by robots. Read More
Today concludes my fourth IFA. Or maybe my fifth. These tech conferences tend to blend together after a while. The first time I attended the show, I hadn’t really heard of the thing, to be honest. Even this year, a number of my colleagues still hadn’t. In the U.S., IFA hasn’t risen to the ranks of a CES or even an MWC, somehow. It has, however, become of show of… Read More
In Berlin, it means “world.” There’s probably something to be read into that, but I’ve been here covering IFA for several days now and quite frankly, I’m coming up short. The gadget made its debut back in CES in January and now it’s kind of, sort of ready for prime-time. Along with its appearance on the show floor, the product has just hit Kickstarter with… Read More
The most exciting part of Samsung’s IFA booth is also its most understated. Somewhere toward the middle of the huge, brightly lit hall are a series of tables showing off non-Samsung products, a perfect microcosm of the ways in which large electronics corporations are reaching beyond their own walls for inspiration. Not that these companies don’t have any connection to the… Read More
As drones increasingly fly through our cities in the coming years — delivering our latest order from Amazon or other on-demand retailers — the regulation of our airspace and the environment in which we co-exist with flying robots becomes more and more present and real. Read More
Washing machines have always felt like a sort of necessary evil. I’m wouldn’t go so far as suggesting that no one enjoys washing clothes – heck, I find doing the dishes kind of cathartic. People are weird. But most washers feel like big, dumb machines. Machines that break down, lose our unmentionables and often ruin the clothes they should be cleaning. It doesn’t seem… Read More
What if I told you that you could hide the shame of carrying around a selfie stick, protect your smartphone and have a free kickstand all in one go? How much would you pay for such a luxury? $10,000? $100,000? $8 million? Try around $40, American. The StikBox is actually a pretty solid idea that seems to work fairly well. It’s a plastic iPhone/Samsung handsets that features a slatted… Read More
It doesn’t take much. For all the bluster around the conversation about Skynet and robotic overlords, we still melt when a diminutive robot flashes the slightest hint of humanity through a small set of blinking eyes – and then does something nice for us. Sony’s Xperia Agent robotic assistant captured the tech world’s attention when it debuted at MWC in Barcelona, back… Read More
They fall off. A lot. And nothing rips you from the escapism of VR faster than having a pair of glasses constantly fall off the bridge of your nose. No sudden movement and you should be fine. I’m not saying never to the idea. I can certainly see a time in the not too distant future when such devices might become practical. For now, however, there are too many wires tethering you to… Read More
Little by little, next thing you know you’re sitting in a massage chair, wearing an Oculus Rift, acting like you’re not in the middle of a crowded German trade show floor. You can let yourself go for a few seconds at a time, and for a few seconds at a time, it kind of starts to work. You vacillate between closing your eyes and keeping them open for the full effect. You know the demo… Read More
