Scopely is announcing that it has raised a $55 million Series B round of funding. The Los Angeles-based company has built tools for promoting and monetizing mobile games — some of those games are developed in-house, others are created by outside studios. “The vision is creating the most premium experiences on people’s phones across a network of developers,” co-founder… Read More
Verizon yesterday announced a landmark deal to purchase Yahoo’s core business for $4.83 billion, but judging from its just-released second quarter earnings report, the telecom giant continues to feel the pressure of declines in its legacy business. The Q2 report shows total operating revenue of $30.5 billion and earnings per share of 94 cents. That’s a miss on revenue, but a… Read More
Acalvio Technologies, a new start-up made up of cybersecurity veterans, is emerging from some two years of stealth with $17 million in combined series A and B funding and a security product which the team claims leapfrogs existing solutions. The founders believe, and indeed the company is built around the idea, that cybersecurity needs a bit of a reboot. Read More
The restaurant food delivery wars in Europe were always going to get messy and the latest casualty is Take Eat Easy. Despite celebrating its 1 millionth order last week, the Brussels-headquartered startup has ceased trading and will file for “juridical restructuring” after it failed to raise a much-needed Series C round and has run out of money. Read More
Some more movement and consolidation is afoot in the on-demand transportation industry, specifically in Europe. Today, Hailo is announcing that it has sold 60% of its company to Mercedes-Benz owner Daimler, and Hailo will merge its and rebrand its operations under MyTaxi, another on-demand ride-sharing company that was acquired by Daimler subsidiary Moovel in 2014. The merged… Read More
Today seems to be a day of e-commerce inevitabilities in India. Alongside news of Rocket Internet-backed Jabong’s sale comes the launch of Amazon Prime in the country. Read More
Finally, Rocket Internet has managed to sell Jabong, its fashion e-commerce site in India, after more than a year of speculation. Myntra, the fashion portal which itself is owned by Flipkart, has stepped up and acquired the company in a deal announced today. Read More
A few days after announcing its banking license, N26 (formerly known as Number26) is partnering with fellow German fintech startup vaamo to add a new service to its banking offering with its first investment product for German customers. vaamo manages different portfolios of risky and not-so-risky assets thanks to robo-advisors so that you don’t have to micro-manage these portfolios. Read More
Ever since it moved into the mainstream Bitcoin has had a bit of an identity crisis. Mainly because no one is really sure whether it should be considered money or property. The IRS says it’s property for tax purposes, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission says it’s a commodity, and most Bitcoin advocates like to say it’s the world’s most advanced currency.… Read More
OpenStack, the open source project that allows enterprises to run an AWS-like cloud computing service in their own data centers, added support for containers over the course of its last few releases. Running OpenStack itself on top of containers is a different problem, though. Even though CoreOS has done some work on running OpenStack in containers thanks to its oddly named… Read More
Verizon buys Yahoo for $4.83 billion, Nintendo shares plummet on announcement that Pokémon Go success won’t affect company that much, Audi starts a subsidiary to focus on self-driving, Bob Mansfield is reported to be leading Apple self-driving car efforts, DNC chair steps down after Wikileaks email release. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Singapore-based media company E27 has closed a SG$3 million (US$2.2 million) Series A round as it looks to grow its tech-focused news website and events business. Read More
There’s nothing worse than answering a call from a number you don’t recognize and getting locked into an awkward sales or marketing call. Well, those incidents may be less frequent for many after Google added spam call detection to its phone app for Android. Read More
The Rift’s best days are still ahead of it as Facebook’s virtual reality company prepares to drastically improve user experience by introducing its room-scale tracked motion Touch controllers in Q4 of this year. An update to Oculus Home is apparently prepping for Touch’s arrival by enabling users to connect multiple Oculus camera sensors to enhance movement tracking and… Read More
2-factor authentication is a great thing to have, and more and more services are making it a standard feature. But one of the go-to methods for sending 2FA notifications, SMS, is being left in the dust by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Read More
Amazon today announced that it has partnered with the U.K. government to test some of the technologies that may one day enable its Prime Air drone delivery service. In a partnership with the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), Amazon now has the permission to explore beyond-line-of-sight operations in rural and suburban areas (something the U.S.’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)… Read More
In the early 2000s, we lived in an era of expensive storage and slow connectivity. Those of us tasked with predicting the future faced a dilemma: Would processing and storage get so cheap that each and every device could store everything ever made, or would connectively become so robust and far-reaching that everything would be stored remotely. Read More
Pokémon Go has already earned one official record — most downloads on the App Store in a launch week ever. But it’s going to break a lot more records still: app analytics firm Sensor Tower estimates that it hit 50 million downloads on Google Play alone over the weekend, another record, and overall the company says that PoGo has racked up more than 75 million installs across iOS… Read More
Following a months-long bidding process, Verizon announced this morning that it’s acquiring Yahoo’s core business for $4.83 billion. The goal, it seems, is to merge Yahoo with AOL (which Verizon acquired last year) to form a single organization that can compete with digital media giants like Google and Facebook. (AOL, by the way, owns TechCrunch.) The deal is expected to close in… Read More
You may have seen some chatter here and there about the “decentralized web,” but there isn’t a really clear definition of what the term means — and really, considering its nature, it would be surprising if there were. There are, therefore, a variety of opinions, as Syracuse University’s School of Information found out when they pinged two dozen tech experts and… Read More
