As the number of apps and sites for buying and selling goods and services continues to grow, we’re seeing a shakeout among the companies that help make those wheels of commerce turn, with the biggest of the lot continuing to scale up and those that have failed to grow getting swallowed up.
Stripe, the startup based out of the U.S. that lets online businesses and apps quickly… Read More
A source inside Twitter told TechCrunch that the company estimates that it has around 10 million users in China. That gives us a glimpse at the potential number of people using VPN software to avoid China’s internet censorship system. Read More
There are now myriad financing options that founders can consider as they look to build their companies. Nearly 70,000 companies received funding through angel networks and 3,000 through venture capital firms annually, according to CB Insights. Read More
Silent Circle, the maker of encrypted messaging apps and a security hardened Android smartphone, called Blackphone, has discontinued its warrant canary. Read More
The Mogees Play is the latest product from London-based startup Mogees. Based on the same contact microphone and machine-learning technology first seem in the company’s original product, the Mogees Pro, it promises to turn any surface into a music and gaming input device, bridging the physical and digital worlds in new and delightfully creative ways. Read More
Circumvention Central is a resource that tests the speed and reliability of VPNs on actual websites not just servers, and on an ongoing basis. The result is that, rather than a static list of VPNs that you could plump for, Great Fire wants to provide a living, breathing ranking of those that work best. Read More
Swedish startup Instabridge, a Wi-Fi sharing community and mobile app, has picked up $1 million in new funding. Noteworthy for a European startup is that Silicon Valley investor Tim Draper’s Draper Associates has led the round, with participation from existing backer Balderton Capital. Read More
After traveling five years through the solar system, Juno has finally reached its destination and is currently in orbit around Jupiter, traveling nearly 250,000 kilometers per hour (150,000 mph). Read More
Silicon Valley leads the global technology innovation markets with the credentials and an ecosystem that is second to none. We have had contact with many of the leading technology accelerators operating out of Silicon Valley; their opening line for the conversation is often: “How are you relevant to us?” However, those of us living in the rest of the planet have to ask: “When… Read More
For some of us, hot dogs, patriotic songs and fireworks are enough. We here at TechCrunch expect more of our readers. Why be satisfied with fireworks when you could literally launch a Kickstarter into the sky. If you’re like me, you were likely quite disappointed to find out that Hamilton wasn’t about an epic duel, I mean “syndicate,” between Backstage… Read More
AR/VR continue to buzz hotly as contenders for the next wave of computing. Tech-industry pundits predict enormous future markets based on speculation that AR will replace the smartphone. The technology looks promising, but other smartphone killers haven’t panned out. Perhaps the industry is again engaged in wishful thinking, declaring AR as the future emperor and dressing it in… Read More
Happy American Independence Day, TechCrunchers. Today those of us in the U.S. celebrate the original Brexit with hot dogs, potato salad and fireworks. Americans are also in the middle of a very weird presidential election, as you may know, and Republican presumptive nominee Donald J. Trump has taken to Twitter once again today to explain why he’s not a racist — or anti-Semite, in… Read More
An unlocked gun can ruin more than one life. In fact, The Trace reports that toddlers shot an average of one person per week for the 2015 year, often injuring or killing themselves, because they were able to get on their hands on a gun. Zore, like many new products on the market, aims to change all that. Zore is a Jerusalem-based startup that has built a smart gun lock. Through a connection to… Read More
Can an app stop you from getting pregnant? In conjunction with daily input from a basal body thermometer, it can indeed. Or so says European startup Natural Cycles, which also bills itself as a fertility tracking service, and is today announcing a $6 million Series A funding round, led by Bonnier Media Growth, the venture arm of the Swedish media business. Read More
Gone are the days of the quarterly product release cycle. To meet the evolving expectations of today’s end user, software must continuously adapt. As a result, hyper-automation of the software development process has become the thing on which companies, regardless of industry, compete. From fledgling startups to enterprise heavyweights, business leaders are realizing that they need to… Read More
London-based Togethera, a startup that allowed families to share photo albums privately, is to shutter after failing to raise beyond its initial £250,000 seed round from 2014. The startup managed to garner 65,000 users for its web/mobile platform for private photos. But it would appear the audience is continuing to use other platforms, such as Apple albums or Facebook, and it struggled to… Read More
This week on the Technotopia podcast I talked to Eliot Peper, the author of the cyberpunk novel Cumulus. Peper talked about the value of science fiction as travel for the mind. He has been an entrepreneur and VC and finds that those industries are often more about checking off boxes in a spreadsheet rather than true exploration. By writing – and reading – speculative fiction… Read More
Let there be no doubt – Brexit is a tragedy. Instead of taking on challenges with its European partners, Britain is taking precisely the wrong course, injecting needless uncertainty and negativity into the economy. Tech will particularly suffer. The UK’s start-up scene, nurtured by international venture capital and skilled workers’ willingness to move here, was starting to… Read More
London-based healthcare startup Network Locum, which has built a staffing platform and workplace management software targeting the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS), has closed a £5.3 million ($7M) Series B funding round, led by U.K. fund BGF Ventures. Read More
Now calling itself an artificial intelligence (AI) service for the online publishing industry — because, why not? — Echobox, which has developed tech to help publishers share content on the likes of Twitter and Facebook in a more intelligent way, has closed $3.4 million in new funding. Read More
