TechCrunch is pleased to bring you Microsoft Accelerator’s London Demo Day on June 30th from 7:30-10:00am PT, 3:30-6pm GMT. The Microsoft Accelerator is an immersive three- to six-month program aimed at helping entrepreneurs get through the challenges of building a company, finding customers and scaling to global markets. There are seven accelerators located around the world, from… Read More
Meet Alvin, a Silicon Valley executive in his late-30s. Alvin has accounts with three banks, an online brokerage account and has borrowed from no less than nine lenders in the past five years. In today’s world, why wouldn’t he? Financially literate, technologically savvy and affluent, Alvin is a member of the overbanked. Read More
The lingo of personal finance is rapidly changing. Mint has replaced our nagging parents and significant others who think our spending is out of control. Wealthfront and Betterment took away our personal wealth managers. Heck, we don’t even have to go to a bank anymore to get a loan with SoFi or Lending Club. Since 2013, CEO Diwakar Choubey and his team have been developing MoneyLion… Read More
VR technologies are going to be requiring a shit ton of capital as they look to make the crossover from R&D phases to mass market adoption. HTC is certainly looking to do its part to make sure that the headset technologies it is building have a broader ecosystem to fall into. Today, at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Shanghai, HTC Vive announced a $10 billion initiative to put… Read More
At least one non-authorized person obtained sensitive information following the leak of global counter-terrorism database World-Check, owned by Thomson Reuters.
Chris Vickery, a security researcher at the software company MacKeeper, posted on Reddit that a copy of the World-Check database from mid-2014 had come into his possession.
“No hacking was involved in my acquisition of this… Read More
Have you ever played with a laser pointer? Those usually cap out at around 0.005 watts. This guy built a “laser bazooka” that, at 200 watts, comes in at about 40,000 times stronger than that. While YouTuber styropyro built his bazooka out of materials torn from a bunch of broken DLP projectors and “a stack of lithium batteries,” this… isn’t something you… Read More
Hillary Clinton’s campaign advisers sought to explain the student debt deferment portion of her tech agenda on a call with reporters today, after the item generated criticism that the plan would provide financial benefit to wealthy members of the tech sector. Read More
An accelerator that backed for-profit, for-good ventures, Impact Engine, is abandoning the bootcamp approach and shifting its focus to investing in these startups as a seed fund, according to CEO and Partner Jessica Droste Yagan. Based in Chicago’s 1871 startup hub, Impact Engine also closed a $10 million fund to support this pivot. The fund is its fourth, but now Impact Engine will… Read More
Google started making investments in a number of undersea cables back in 2008, but one of its largest investments was in the $300 million FASTER cable between Japan and the U.S. West Coast. Back in 2014, Google announced that it was joining a consortium of six companies, including NEC, China Mobile, China Telecom, Global Transit and KDDI, to better connect the two countries. As… Read More
ProducePay has raised $2.5 million to solve what CEO Pablo Borquez Schwarzbeck said is a major issue for farmers — getting paid in a timely manner for their crops.
Borquez Schwarzbeck explained that farmers usually have to cover the cost of not just growing the produce, but also shipping — and then they have to wait for it to get sold before they get paid themselves. And since… Read More
There’s some closure (literally and figuratively) for Move Loot, the furniture resale marketplace that we wrote earlier this month was up for sale. The startup — backed by nearly $22 million in funding from a list of top investors that included Y Combinator, GV, Index, Metamorphic and Sherpa — has shut down its business and sold access to its customer list to Handy, the… Read More
If paparazzi have a right to take photos (they do) and newspapers are allowed to print photos taken by paparazzi (they do), it stands to reason that those in the brief spotlight of an eager photographer’s flash have a right to fight back, too (they do). Anti-paparazzi clothing has been around for a while, and if you’ve ever wondered how it works, oh boy have you come to the… Read More
So much for losing its mojo.
Despite twists and turns in recent years that have sometimes rivaled those of a telenovela, and even with its most famous member, John Doerr, no longer a general partner, Kleiner Perkins has raised two new funds totaling $1.4 billion, show newly processed SEC filings.
The firm’s digital growth fund — its third — has secured $1 billion in… Read More
Shasta Ventures is raising up to $300 million for a fifth fund according to a new SEC filing that lists managing director Jason Pressman and Rob Coneybeer (Coneybeer co-founded Shasta with fellow managing directors Tod Francis and Ravi Mohan in 2004; Pressman joined the following year).
Shasta appears to be sticking with its knitting with its new fund. It saw an enormous return when its… Read More
The aptly named Ok-Google.io is the big ol’ massive list of “Ok, Google” commands that Google is too proud to build right into Android. It’s gorgeous, it’s easy to navigate, and it’s pretty much guaranteed to teach you at least one trick you didn’t know Google Now could handle. Read More
An accelerator that helps tech nonprofits develop their products and raise grant money, Fast Forward, has attracted $1.25 million in philanthropic funding of its own. Backers include big names in venture capital and tech. Omidyar Network, Google.org and BlackRock donated the largest share, along with AT&T, The Nasiri Foundation and Rita Allen Foundation. Fast Forward will use the money… Read More
A few times every month I get an email from a CEO or investor that says something like this: “We are seeking a Bridge for our company. Since we already raised our Seed and you do Post-Seed, we thought you would be ideal to speak to about this.” I have concluded there is a lot of confusion over how a post-seed round differs from a bridge round. Read More
Cognovi Labs is a new analytics startup that relies on Twitris to take a sample of social media chatter to deduce real-time, large-scale, automated sentiment about specific topics. As a real-world example of the tool’s capability, the Cognovi Labs analyzed Twitter chatter leading up to the Brexit vote and predicted that polls leaning toward the “remain” camp were incorrect… Read More
This is a guest post by Matt Clifford, co-founder and CEO of Entrepreneur First Almost no one in the UK tech ecosystem wanted Brexit. Most of us are worried about the impact on our country and the continent – but one group that’s well positioned to thrive is the UK’s startups. I’ve spent much of the last few days talking to Entrepreneur First’s portfolio and there… Read More
The ACLU has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Attorney General alleging that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is unconstitutional, and as a consequence is preventing critical research into discrimination online from being accomplished. Read More
