Startup Battlefield is back. In just a few short weeks, TechCrunch’s premiere startup competition will kick off at Disrupt SF and we’re excited to announce the judges tasked with determining which company will take up the Disrupt Cup and $50,000. This year the competition features 23 young companies vying for attention and funding. Each will have six minutes to impress their panel… Read More
Sequoia-backed kids educational startup Duck Duck Moose is heading to Khan Academy, to add preschool learning to the non-profit’s digital education offerings. The startup’s 21 mobile apps aimed at children ages two and up are now available for free as a part of the move, which is not technically being considered an “acquisition,” due to the way the deal was… Read More
mSurvey, a Kenya based startup specializing in mobile data collection, has raised seed capital as it looks to expand its survey business in partnership with retailers in sub-Saharan Africa. Safaricom, Cross Culture Ventures, and the Virgin Group’s Alpha Angels joined an investment round in the four year old business. “It’s a seed round. I can’t disclose the amount,… Read More
While many of the ideas of transhumanism are noble, the field is accused of sharing traits with eugenics. I can’t answer the many ethical, moral and existential questions raised by transhumanism. All I know is that it’s inevitable that advances in robotics, bionics, AI and genetics will affect the next phase of human evolution — we shouldn’t underestimate the ethical… Read More
Self-driving cars have a tendency to become more adorable as big tech companies iterate their design, and Baidu’s new modified Chery eQ all-electric test vehicle is no exception. It resembles Google’s updated self-driving car, the panda-like EV, but it’s got more cabin room and still uses an existing vehicle platform for the basic car body and drivetrain, fitted with a… Read More
This year’s Paris motor show will host the unveiling of Volkswagen’s first all-electric car, according to an interview with company chairman Herbert Diess in German magazine WirstschaftWoche. The car will be roughly Golf-sized, according to the chairman, but will feel as roomy as a Passat on the inside, thanks to space saved via lighter frame construction and use of the electric… Read More
Danish startup Spiri believes urban transportation is still massively inefficient, and it’s setting out to tackle the problem from a few different directions. First, it’s building an on-demand carpooling service, similar to the UberPOOL offering (and the one Lyft just shut down). Second, it’s going to use its own custom electric vehicles to do so. Finally, it’s using… Read More
WhatsApp has started pushing out its new terms and conditions. If you want to opt out of sharing your data with Facebook for ad-targeting and product-related purposes, click through the slides to see how to do it… Read More
India-based mobile wallet startup MobiKwik has landed a $40 million strategic investment from Net1, a mobile payment firm specializing in solutions for the unbanked that has been listed on the NASDAQ since 2005. Read More
When I wrote “it’s game on” after Mondo became the last of the four British challenger banks to secure a banking license earlier this month, I didn’t think competitor Starling Bank would take my words quite so literally. Read More
London-based ticketing startup Dice, which sells mobile tickets without booking fees and with a current focus on millennials wanting to discover new bands to go see live, has closed a $6 million Series A funding round. Read More
Truecaller has landed a partnership with Huawei which will see its caller ID and smart phone book app pre-loaded on the fast-growing Chinese company’s overseas smartphones. Read More
WhatsApp is sharing some user data with Facebook, Nutonomy brings self-driving cars to Singapore, Apple is rumored to be working on a Snapchat-type app, True Ventures closes its fifth fund worth $310 million, and President Obama and family are in a new VR video. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Krstic announced that Apple was launching a bug bounty program, offering $50,000 for zero-day vulnerabilities that allow malicious code exploits in the kernel, among other rewards. The thinking behind the bug bounty, according to Apple, is that discovering zero-day vulnerabilities — security problems that are unknown by a company but exploited by an attacker — has become more… Read More
TechCrunch recently took a trip down to Los Angeles for our meetup and to check in on the growing startup scene there. One of the fast-growing businesses that’s been on our radar is Thrive Market. The online Costco-meets-Whole Foods recently raised $111 million from venture firms like Greycroft and celebrities like Demi Moore and John Legend to grow their organic foods business. We… Read More
Insider threats are the biggest cybersecurity threats to firms, organizations and government agencies. This is something you hear a lot at security conference keynotes and read about in data breach reports, whitepapers and surveys — and these insider threats are becoming increasingly more difficult to detect and prevent, as well as more frequent. Read More
NASA today tossed into a pool a mock-up of their Orion spacecraft with two crash-test dummies sitting inside to simulate a return-to-Earth splashdown scenario. The test lasted all of about 10 seconds and is the ninth test of a 10-part water impact series NASA began conducting in April. For today’s test, Orion was swung like a pendulum to simulate a scenario where one of its parachutes… Read More
Dropbox is requiring users who have not changed their passwords since mid-2012 to reset their passwords this afternoon.
The action appears to be related to continued fallout over the massive hack on LinkedIn in 2012 where credentials for 117 million accounts were posted online. In recent months, treasure troves of user credentials and passwords — in addition to a large MySpace hack… Read More
A consortium of companies, including DigitalGlobe, CosmiQ Works and NVIDIA, today launched SpaceNet, an open-data initiative aimed at improving image analysis tools. The data are being hosted by Amazon Web Services as part of a partnership. With an increase in the number of CubeSats, high-resolution satellites and drones of every shape and size, we have accumulated petabytes of… Read More
There’s no shortage of portable Bluetooth speakers out there, but lord are a lot of them ugly. What I need is something that will not look amiss sitting on a stump next to me while I hew a yew in my red plaid flannel. Wait, what’s this one?! Read More
