Snapchat has decided it’s time to make money. The company recently launched a massive expansion of its advertising, as well as an API that will make it easier for advertisers to buy ads. Given Snapchat’s aspirations to go public, turning on the money spigot is a necessity. But for a company that prides itself on constantly innovating, Snapchat’s monetization plans are… Read More
Tesla’s Autopilot is set to get a major update soon, according to multiple reports, and a new one from Electrek details some of the new hardware improvements that will pave the way for its arrival. The autonomous driving assistant for Tesla vehicles will benefit from a new front-facing triple camera array, Elecktrek reports, and will also add additional radar around the car, to… Read More
Please, please let me visit the room where new Pokémon are created. I want to know exactly what was going on when the team came up with Wishiwashi, a small, sad fish that becomes a group of slightly less sad fish when it reaches a certain level. Wishiwashi is one of three entirely new Pokémon revealed today for the upcoming Pokémon Sun and Moon games for Nintendo 3DS. The other all-new… Read More
140 Proof, a company that helps advertisers target their campaigns based on social data, has been acquired by AcuityAds for up to $20 million in cash.
140 Proof co-founder and CEO Jon Elvekrog said the deal will combine his company’s strength in social media with AcuityAds’ programmatic ad-buying tech.
The 140 Proof brand and team will continue to exist within AcuityAds, Elvekrog said. Read More
Facebook recently incorporated a sneaky change to the way its ads are displayed that disguised them as ordinary content and circumvented ad blocking software in browsers. Ads crowded the streams of even the most vigilant users. But this hell on earth was not to last: two days and change later, the Adblock Plus community has found a way to block them again. Read More
Silicon Valley is already knee-deep in flattery. Between 30-under-30 lists, award shows and yearly roundups, the startup scene is pretty good at giving praise where it is (or isn’t) due. Except for one issue — most of the recognition typically goes to founders and executives. There’s nothing wrong with this — everyone knows founders are the heart and soul of… Read More
The cloud services that Google uses to power its own services are second to none. But for the longest time, the company couldn’t get a foothold in the quickly growing cloud computing business while competitors like Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft Azure were growing rapidly. To right this ship, Google brought in Diane Greene by acquiring her startup BeBop Technologies for $348 million… Read More
TechCrunch Include Office Hours are happening on August 31st! Adam Valkin, Spencer Lazar and Peter Boyce from General Catalyst in NYC, along with Pat Gallagher and Susan Hobbs from CrunchFund in SF, will join TechCrunch to provide valuable advice and feedback to startups. Launched in 2014, Include is TechCrunch’s diversity program, aimed at facilitating opportunities for… Read More
It’s no Pokemon Go, but it’s charming nonetheless, employing Google’s Cloud Vision to add a little bit of CGI dragon magic to your immediate vicinity. The “Dragon Spotting” game is free and accessible through a mobile browser designed to promote Disney’s upcoming Pete’s Dragon remake. The page offers up the player simple instructions through a series… Read More
Rumor has it that Rackspace is about to get acquired, but that isn’t stopping the company from hosting a major customer event in San Francisco today. At the event, the company announced both a few milestones around its OpenStack deployments and that it is expanding its multi-cloud security services to Microsoft’s Azure cloud. While Rackspace also offers its own hosting and… Read More
News outlets may get back some of their mojo stolen by a June Facebook feed algorithm change that preferred friends over publishers. Today Facebook will start predicting stories that are informative and highlighting them to people if they’re “related to their interests, if they engage people in broader discussions, and if they contain news”. Facebook surveyed tons of people… Read More
Want to have a wardrobe like Tay-tay’s? You can now, thanks to Craves. The company is today debuting a mobile fashion application that takes advantage of visual search technology to identify clothing and accessories as seen in photos. In particular, it’s focused on showing you what celebrities are wearing and where you can buy those items – or something similar, but… Read More
This apparently bears repeating: putting resources toward attracting and hiring diverse candidates is useless if you can’t retain them. I’m looking at you, Intel. Intel, which last year made a $300 million commitment to foster a diverse and inclusive workplace, released its mid-year diversity report yesterday, and the results are nothing to be proud about. Intel has until 2020 to… Read More
Amazon’s AWS cloud computing platform today launched Kinesis Analytics, a new service that makes it easier to analyze real-time streaming data with the help of standard SQL queries. Kinesis Analytics builds on AWS’s Kinesis real-time streaming data platform, which enables developers to ingest streaming data and use it in their applications. With Kinesis Analytics, developers… Read More
This morning at a customer event in New York City, AWS CTO Werner Vogels announced a new load balancing tool, which gives developers much more fine-grained control over how content gets distributed across servers. The AWS Application Load Balancer, as it’s called, provides a way to direct specific content to go to a certain place instead of letting the load balancer decide as has been… Read More
Sports teams and live event venues will soon be able to sell their tickets directly through SeatGeek. The company has focused on resale tickets until now — first by aggregating resale options from other sites, then by launching a marketplace where ticketbuyers can sell or transfer their tickets directly. But SeatGeek also showed its interest in “primary” ticket sales with… Read More
They’re more than just a big set of transitional lenses for buildings. For one thing, the new glass technology pioneered by a team of scientists at MIT is capable of changing shades much faster that what you’ll find on those ultra-hip eyeglasses. It also covers a broader spectrum of opacity than such photochromic substances. The material also differs from the electrochromic… Read More
Microsoft has acquired Beam, a Seattle-based interactive game streaming service that lets viewers play along with streamers as they watch. Beam’s model takes the mostly passive interaction that streaming fans may be used to from services like Twitch and YouTube, and adds the ability for viewers to interact with the streamer via crowdsourced controls. Players interacting through Beam… Read More
Marijuana use is a bit of a tricky subject in the United States. While public opinion on the matter may be shifting toward being more open to legalization — a YouGov poll released earlier this month showed that 55 percent of those surveyed supported legalizing marijuana, with more Republicans supporting legalization than not — only 25 states and Washington, D.C. have legalized… Read More
It shouldn’t come as a surprise, really, that mobile phones are becoming an increasing concern among those tasked with policing prison populations. Smuggled in cellulars are being linked to all sorts of decidedly less benign contraband, including drugs, guns and the like. As the Ministry of Justice notes in a release issued today, around 15,000 mobile phones and SIMs were recovered in… Read More
