Fast processing, hi-res screens, good cameras. Sure, some are certainly better than others, but even the bad ones are capable of things unthinkable on a mobile device not all that long ago. Heck, at the top of the heap, premium handsets are all starting to look the same.
Over the years, Motorola’s done a commendable job setting itself apart — and from the looks of it, the… Read More
Across 1,000 acres of cotton plants in Arkansas, Tyler McClendon is running an experiment. The seeds are the same, as are his company Oxbow Agriculture’s methods of growing them. But just ahead of planting the cotton seeds in April, Oxbow dusted them with a special microbe not usually found on its cotton plants. Their presence is expected to increase McClendon’s cotton yield by… Read More
For those keeping tabs, one more big tech company built and operating in the UK has been snapped up by another company from abroad. Today, MasterCard Inc. announced that it has agreed to acquire 92.4% of VocaLink — the tech giant behind the UK’s ATM, direct debit, and major mobile payments networks — for $1.14 billion in an all-cash deal: £700 million ($920 million)… Read More
When he was seventeen, George “geohot” Hotz became the first person to jailbreak an iPhone, back when Apple really didn’t take too kindly to such things. Three years later, he moved his unlocking efforts over to the PlayStation 3. Again, Sony wasn’t feeling it. The young hacker has since joined forces with a number of high-profile tech corporations, first at… Read More
Car and tech companies continue to partner up, but Honda and SoftBank’s newly-announced union is a little different from most. Rather than working on self-driving cars, or a more connected vehicle, Honda and SoftBank are working on making an artificial intelligence that can actually talk to and assist drivers in a way designed to foster more feelings of friendship between human and car.… Read More
Redis Labs, the company behind the open source Redis data structure store, today announced that it has raised a $14 million Series C round led by Bain Capital Ventures and Carmel Ventures. The company’s existing investors, including Silicon Valley Bank and Tamar Ventures managing partner Zohar Gilon, also participated in this round. With this round, which follows the company’s… Read More
Get ready for a new era — Tinder is about to launch Tinder Social globally. What is Tinder Social, you might ask? Well, Tinder Social is exactly the social planning app that has failed in the past, but backed by the world’s biggest young adult dating app. Tinder, the dating app to rule them all, has long teased other verticals for meeting and creating connections with the people… Read More
Since its launch in 2008, Stack Overflow has become the go-to community for discussing programming-related questions. Now the service is launching a new product that aims to harness its community to build a repository of peer-reviewed technical documentation. Stack Overflow Documentation wants to be a complement and maybe even a replacement for existing instruction manuals and… Read More
Inkbox’s two-week tattoos made waves when the company debuted its product on Kickstarter last year – Toronto-based founders Tyler and Braden Handley raised nearly $300,000 for their organic limited-time body art invention, which was a refinement of their original product offering that cut application time to just 10 minutes. A year later, they’ve raised $1 million in seed… Read More
Bay Area-based (where else?) craft beer delivery service Hopsy has employed KRUPS, the German appliance maker behind the Nespresso, to create a countertop beer tap device for the home. The company has already made a few beer-centric devices, most notably the Beertender, designed to work Heineken kegs. Hopsy’s HomeTap utilizes two-liter beer bottles that plug into the appliance, serving… Read More
Fintech companies are beginning to make a significant impact to how people live in Asia. Mywish Marketplaces, one of the more mature startups in what is admittedly a very broad sector, has raised $15 million to push its financing business into new areas. Read More
Berlin-based startup Number26 is trying to reinvent the bank. This might sound crazy, and that's why the startup has processed step by step. After partnering with Wirecard for the banking back end, attracting 200,000 users and raising tens of millions of dollars, the company now has a full banking license to operate in Europe. Read More
Elon Musk’s new master plan catapults Tesla into a new market; car-sharing. While the idea of Tesla car-sharing seems new, it is not the first time the company’s cars, coupled with autonomous technology, have come up in discussions about the sharing economy. Back in 2015, Steve Jurvetson, a partner at Uber investor DFJ, told an audience that Uber’s Travis Kalanick had… Read More
Here’s a dose of irony for you this fine day: the internet just lost its most prolific source of illegal movies after its founder was nabbed after buying something legally, on iTunes. Read More
Omise, a Bangkok-based payment enabler much like Stripe, has raised a $17.5 million Series B round to expand its reach across Southeast Asia. Read More
Brandcast, a startup allowing marketers and designers build mobile-friendly websites without having to write code, announced today that it has raised $13.9 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Shasta Ventures with participation from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Correlation Ventures. (Brandcast co-founder and CEO hayes Metzger previously worked at Salesforce, and Benioff had… Read More
Tito Hamze sits down for an interview with early Niantic investor Cyan Banister, Unilever buys Dollar Shave Club for $1 billion, Facebook Messenger hits 1 billion users, Pokemon Go launch is postponed in Japan, and Swiftkey releases an emoji prediction app. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Why did Tesla buy SolarCity? To make your solar panel roof battery power your self-driving electric pickup truck. Elon Musk just revealed the second phase of his “Master Plan” and we broke it down so you can see the future too. Read More
The Tesla “Master Plan Part Deux” published tonight by founder Elon Musk proposes quite a lot of major projects, but perhaps the most far-reaching of them all is the plan to put solar on every roof and a battery in every garage. And to do that, he not-so-subtly hints, Tesla and SolarCity will need to be more than friends. Read More
Elon Musk’s Tesla’s ‘Master Plan, Part Deux’ contains his strongest response yet to concerns around Autopilot, the subject of an ongoing National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigation. Unsurprisingly, Musk is standing by the merits Autopilot and its impact on driver safety. “According to the recently released 2015 NHTSA report, automotive… Read More
