You could make a case that Minecraft is the professional network of 10-year olds, but you’d have to work pretty hard at it. That’s not what Satya Nadella means when he uses Minecraft as an example of why LInkedIn was a great acquisition target for Microsoft, speaking to Bloomberg today in an interview reflecting on Microsoft as a company advancing in years. Here’s the key… Read More
I’m delighted to announce Andela co-founder and COO Christina Sass will be joining me on stage for a fireside chat at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco next month. Backed by Mark Zuckerberg and a slew of other Silicon Valley heavyweights, Andela is part of a wave of startups looking to increase diversity at technology companies. The team works with companies like Microsoft and IBM… Read More
Amazon’s friendly AI is continuing its brisk march across smart home services. A week after August announced Alexa functionality for its smart lock, Nucleus is doing the same for its home intercom system, a rare feat for a touchscreen device. The family focused smart intercom system, which starts shipping today, features a front-facing HD camera, a built-in microphone and speakers that… Read More
Grab, the company that rivals Uber in Southeast Asia, is in negotiations to close a new round of funding that could value it as high as $2.3 billion, multiple sources close to talks told TechCrunch. Grab was valued around $1.5 billion-$1.6 billion last August when it raised $350 million. Read More
From rising rents to online competitors, local stores and restaurants face enough challenges outside of their own doors that basic stuff like scheduling employees’ shifts and breaks should feel easy. But that process is still, too often, a mess of paperwork and data entry for them. A startup called Homebase has raised $6 million to make hourly work much easier to manage for every business… Read More
Drizly, the on-demand booze delivery startup, has today announced the close of a $15 million Series B funding round, led by Polaris Partners, with participation from existing investors.
Drizly operates in a very similar manner to Uber, providing the technology infrastructure that allows liquor retailers the opportunity to provide their own on-demand service, as well as an ecommerce platform… Read More
Walking around the neighborhood handing out CVs in the hopes of scoring shifts in a local cafe or restaurant has never been an efficient job search process. But workers in the service industry still do it. London based startup inploi is hoping to change that — it’s gunning to replace the paper CV with a mobile profile and location-based jobs platform. Read More
The official promo for Strava’s new beacon feature shows a runner attempting to outpace a giant boulder – something I suspect isn’t too common an occurrence if you’re Indiana Jones or Wile E Coyote. Still, even if you’re not a fictional adventurer or anthropomorphic desert scavenger, accidents can happen when you’re out for a long run, bike ride or other… Read More
Go-Jek, the motorbike taxi on-demand service that rivals Uber and Grab in Indonesia, has closed $550 million in new funding, a source close to the company told TechCrunch. The deal values Go-Jek at $1.3 billion and could be announced as soon as this week, we understand. Read More
Back in June on the last day of the New York Assembly’s legislative session, the state passed a bill legalizing daily fantasy sports, paving the road for the return of incumbents DraftKings and FanDuel to resume operating in the state. The next week we sat down with DraftKings CEO Jason Robins, who explained that passing the bill was so important because it not only meant his… Read More
Moon Express is the first private company to get permission from the U.S. government to go to the moon, Facebook shows us its “Area 404” hardware lab, Tesla delivers 14,402 vehicles in Q2 2016, Time Warner takes a 10% stake in Hulu, and bitcoin value drops 20 percent after $70 million worth stolen from Bitfinex. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Few things are more dreadful than dealing with airline customer service. Fortunately, there’s a startup that wants to make those calls for you. For hassle-free travel, AirHelp is raising $12 million in Series A funding from a group of investors including Khosla Ventures and Evan Williams. This is in addition to the $4.7 million in seed financing raised two years ago. AirHelp promises to… Read More
One by one, most software has succumbed to the cloud; Designers have Adobe, gamers have Steam, programmers have GitHub and now musicians have Splice. Splice is launching a rent-to-own pricing model for software synths. Starting today, musicians will be able to use Serum from Xfer Records, to their hearts content without any upfront fees. The company likes to call their service a rental,… Read More
The human microbiome — meaning all of our microbes’ genes — will reshape the consumerization of personalized medicine and diet. Following the human genome project, technological advancements have brought us much closer to acute precision in disease diagnosis and treatment. The microbiome has the potential to change the way we diagnose and treat the most critical diseases of… Read More
As interest and investment continue to pour into the online education market, startups building platforms with a lot of traction are reaping the rewards. In the latest development, a company out of China called VIPKID — which has built a popular platform connecting children aged between five and 12 years with native English speakers for one-to-one online language lessons… Read More
An Intel engineer just tweeted out a photo of a new VR sensor prototype and suggested that VR would play a large role in the company’s developer conference late this month. In the since-deleted tweet, Dimitri Diakopoulos, a senior prototyping engineer at Intel, showed off what he referred to as a depth-sensing prototype attachment for the HTC Vive. At least visually, the sensor… Read More
Speedtest has released its mid-year broadband speeds report, and there’s actually quite a bit of good news in there. Speeds are steadily increasing despite machinations within the industry, and in fact the average in the U.S. just went north of 50 megabits for the first time ever. Read More
It’s been a rough couple of months for Amazon competitors. First Canada’s Shop.ca declares bankruptcy and essentially has a fire sale, then Jet.com, which accumulated big funding and big hype pre-launch, is apparently in talks with Wal-Mart re: an acquisition. A Wal-Mart exit isn’t the upstart victory against an industry giant originally foretold in Jet’s creation… Read More
