Even in a normal year, the holidays can be an anxiety-inducing hellscape. In 2020, though — honestly, it’s hard to say what manner of climactic finale this historically rough year might have on tap. In honor of the one of the most epically rotten years on record, we’ve cobbled together a list of gifts that could go a ways toward helping folks make it triumphantly across the finish line.
Jason Green has a pretty solid reputation as venture capitalists go. The enterprise-focused firm he co-founded 17 years ago, Emergence Capital, has backed Saleforce, Box and Zoom, among many other companies, and even while every firm is now investing in software-as-a-service startups, his remains a go-to for many top founders selling business products and services. […]
3D-rendered faces are a big part of any major movie or game now, but the task of capturing and animating them in a natural way can be a tough one. Disney Research is working on ways to smooth out this process, among them a machine learning tool that makes it much easier to generate and […]
It's never been easier to build a smart home. Beyond the same Google/Amazon/Apple/etc. voice-powered assistant speakers you've probably seen on every gift guide for years, there's a world of wonderful smart home products that can delight, surprise, and maybe make your life a little easier. The following list is void of those usual suspects and features unique products that would be perfect for anyone trying to make their home just a little bit smarter. Or for you. Whatever works.
Robots are no longer the high-tech tools reserved for university labs, e-commerce giants and buzzy Silicon Valley startups. The local grocer now has access too. Tortoise, the one-year-old Silicon Valley startup known for its remote repositioning electric scooters, has taken its tech and adapted it to delivery carts. The company recently partnered with online grocery […]
France is going forward with its plan to tax big tech companies. The government has sent out notices to tech giants, as reported by the Financial Times, Reuters and AFP. There could be retaliation tariffs on French goods in the U.S. For the past couple of years, France’s Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire has been […]
As IBM makes a broad shift in strategy, Bloomberg reported this morning that the company would be cutting around 10,000 jobs in Europe. This comes on the heels of last month’s announcement that the organization will be spinning out its infrastructure services business next year. While IBM wouldn’t confirm the layoffs, a spokesperson suggested there […]
Sight tech – or more broadly, eyes-free tech – now touches every part of our lives and the devices that we depend on. And it’s not just blind and visually impaired people who are benefitting.
In the wake of insurtech unicorn Root’s IPO, it felt safe to say that the big transactions for the insurance technology startup space were done for the year. After all, 2020 had been a big one for the broad category, with insurtech marketplaces raising lots, rental insurance startup Lemonade going public, Root itself debuting even […]
Amazon Web Services is currently having an outage, taking a chunk of the internet down with it. Several AWS services were experiencing problems as of early Wednesday, according to its status page. That means any app, site or service that relies on AWS might also be down, too. (As I found out the hard way […]
News that Salesforce is interested in buying Slack, the popular workplace chat company, sent shares of the smaller firm sharply higher today. Slack shares are up just under 25% at the moment, according to Yahoo Finance data. Slack is worth $36.95 per share as of the time of writing, valuing it at around $20.8 billion. […]
The holiday season is upon us and with that comes stress, anxiety and the airing of grievances. And this year is worse. Instead of watching a yule log smolder in a warm hearth, we’re all stuck in our homes watching the world burn. Try this interactive dumpster fire instead of yelling into the void. The […]
Sure, we’re heading into a holiday weekend here in America, but that doesn’t mean that the good ship TechCrunch is going to slow down. We’re diving right back in next week with another installment in season two of Extra Crunch Live, our regular interview series with startup founders, venture capitalists and other leaders from the […]
When you launch an application in the public cloud, you usually put everything on one provider, but what if you could choose the components based on cost and technology and have your database one place and your storage another? That’s what Cast.ai says that it can provide, and today it announced a healthy $7.7 million […]
European Union lawmakers have laid out a major legislative proposal today to encourage the reuse of industrial data across the Single Market by creating a standardized framework of trusted tools and techniques to ensure what they describe as “secure and privacy-compliant conditions” for sharing data. Enabling a network of trusted and neutral data intermediaries, and […]
As we head into the biggest shopping period of the year — which this year may well have an even stronger online component than usual because of COVID-19 — Amazon has launched its latest effort to combat the sale of counterfeit goods on its site. The e-commerce giant today announced that its IP Accelerator is […]
Unacademy, an online learning platform in India, has added two more marquee investors to its cap table. The Bangalore-based startup, which focuses on K-12 online education, said on Wednesday it has raised new funds from Tiger Global Management and Dragoneer Investment Group. The funding round, which is between $75 million to $100 million in size […]
Just a few months after launching margin trading on Coinbase Pro, the company is disabling the feature. Margin trading lets you trade on leverage. But it works both ways — margin trading lets you multiply your gains and your losses. Starting on November 25, at 2 p.m. PT, users won’t be able to place new […]
WeGift, the London-based startup that has built an “incentive marketing” platform that lets businesses easily issue e-gift cards and other digital rewards to customers, has raised $8 million in new funding. Dubbed a Series A extension, the round is led by AlbionVC . Existing investors, including Stride.vc, SAP.iO fund and Unilever Ventures, also followed on. […]
With COVID-19 making commuters switch to bikes, and cities wanting cleaner air, the e-bike revolution is only just getting started. Further evidence of this is the news that today British e-bike manufacturer FuroSystems has closed its first institutional venture funding round of £750,000 with participation by TSP Ventures and European impact investment bank ClearlySo, as […]
