From fancy chocolates to jet airplanes to teeth, gold makes things better. Devialet took this to heart when they introduced their 4500 Watt Gold Phantom, a powerful speaker with gold-plated side panels and audio quality that, in the right environment, is out of this world. Devialet, as you recall is a French speaker company that has 80 patents in the realm of music reproduction. Their… Read More
It will now be easier to add “Skills” – new functionality by way of voice-activated apps to Amazon’s smart speaker Echo, and its other Alexa-powered devices, Amazon announced this morning. The company has finally given its Skills “app store” a makeover, and is introducing a means of adding new Skills by voice, too. Amazon’s Echo and other Alexa… Read More
Finland-based Internet of Things startup Haltian, which back in 2014 crowdfunded an IoT developer device aimed at lowering the barrier of entry to building connected devices, is lining up its next IoT device: a tracker phone for parents to give younger kids. Read More
MongoDB, the company behind the eponymous open source database, is launching Atlas today, its third major revenue-generating service. Atlas is MongoDB’s database-as-a-service offering that provides users with a managed database service. The service will offer pay-as-you-go pricing and will initially allow users to deploy on Amazon Web Services (AWS), with support for Microsoft Azure… Read More
Todoist is already a useful service for your personal todo lists, but the company also lets you create shared projects so that you can share lists and assign tasks to your coworkers. Todoist now plans to completely overhaul its collaboration features so that Todoist Business becomes a full-fledged task management service for enterprise users. There will be five major updates to Todoist… Read More
Confirming reports from earlier this week, Amazon announced this morning an expansion of its Dash button program – the small, push-button devices that allow consumers to place orders of specific products, ranging from paper towels to trash bags to even bubble gum and condoms, via Amazon.com. The retailer says today it’s adding over 50 new brands to the service, which now includes… Read More
The folks at Doppler Labs have come a long way in a few short years. The company, led by Noah Kraft and Fritz Lanman, first launched with a fully mechanical ear plug for concerts. Last year, they launched the Here Active Listening System, which put a tiny micro-computer in their users’ ears, letting them control which frequencies they want to hear. Today, however, all those steps… Read More
The theme of Huawei’s press conference atop One World Trade last week was clear: The company plans to make its mark in the U.S. The hardware maker has made a name for itself outside the States with a string of high-quality handsets, but, as with a number of Chinese companies, this country has thus far proven a tough nut to crack. Announced at Mobile World Congress earlier this… Read More
Need to find that one other passage or picture in a book but find it hard to do with an e-reader? Kindle readers wanting to flip back and forth and make a quick reference to materials now have an easier way to do so with a new feature called Page Flip. Kindle refers to Page Flip as a “reimagined navigation experience.” What that means is you can now “flip” pages back… Read More
A Brooklyn-based startup called Modern Meadow has raised $40 million to become a top source of leather for the world’s makers of fashion and accessories, luggage, sporting goods, upholstery and furniture. Rather than raising animals to slaughter them and take the skin off their backs in a physically and chemically intensive process, Modern Meadow “biofabricates” its leather… Read More
Twilio isn’t the only company that is banking on API-based services as the way forward for enterprises. Today, Cisco announced it plans to pay $293 million in a mix of cash and equity to acquire CloudLock, a cloud-based security provider that uses APIs to let enterprises apply and monitor security on documents and other content that they share and store in cloud-based… Read More
Smacc, which uses AI to automate accounting, has secured a 3.5 million Series A round from Cherry Ventures, Rocket Internet, Dieter von Holtzbrinck Ventures, Grazia Equity and business angels. Smacc offers small and medium-sized enterprises a platform to digitize and automate accounting and financial processes. The founding trio Uli Erxleben, Janosch Novak and Stefan Korsch came up with the… Read More
Yet more changes afoot for LendingClub — a peer-to-peer loans marketplace whose stock tanked May after its founder, CEO and chairman Renauld Laplanche resigned amid an accounting scandal. Ahead of an annual meeting being held later today, the company announced Scott Sanborn as its permanent CEO and Hans Morris as independent chairman of the board as it seeks to repair its image… Read More
A few months ago, many people learned about San Francisco-based startup Cruise Automation for the first time. After raising around $19 million and quietly building sensors for self-driving cars, the company got acquired by General Motors. So the startup must know a thing or two about the future of cars. That’s why Cruise founder and CEO Kyle Vogt will join us on stage at Disrupt SF 2016. Read More
Backblaze is still best known for its backup service, but the company has also set its sights on the fast-growing cloud storage market. While the company can’t compete with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Google when it comes to the overall feature set of its nascent cloud platform, Backblaze decided to significantly undercut its competitors pricing when it first announced its B2… Read More
Last week, we welcomed the much-anticipated Part 107 drone regulations, which will supersede the current exemption process and is estimated by the FAA to eliminate 85 percent of the present exemptions to drone piloting. Notably, the new regulations standardize visual line of sight (VLOS) flights of unmanned aircraft that weigh less than 55 lbs. (25 kg). And, in a move that’s most… Read More
Virtual reality can be used for a lot of things — and if Pygmal Technologies gets its way, you’ll be spending your office hours with a VR headset strapped to your face. It’s almost like Minority Report, except with Excel spreadsheets and TPS reports on six virtual monitors hovering in thin air in front of you. Read More
Remember when we found out billionaire investor Peter Thiel is in support of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump? At TechCrunch Shanghai 2016, Flexport CEO Ryan Peterson, who has received significant funding from Thiel, candidly spoke about his discomfort around Thiel’s backing of Trump. “I don’t know what’s going on there,” Peterson told me on stage… Read More
You might remember that I covered a $240 million growth fund from Paris-based VC firm Partech Ventures back in January 2015. As I noted at the time, it was just the first closing and other limited partners kept investing in this fund. The very same growth fund is now bigger at $440 million (€400 million). Read More
It’s no news that China’s startup scene is huge and Chinese investors and founders are keen to learn more about the Silicon Valley. And of course American investors and entrepreneurs have been working hard in China for many years. It seemed like a natural to make TechCrunch’s Disrupt SF (Sept. 12-14) more accessible to visitors from China. So we’re announcing a few… Read More
