TechCrunch

Although wireless charging is still relatively new to the market, the benefits are beginning to become glaringly self-evident.

Facebook is preparing to adjust its News Feed to de-emphasize political posts and current events, but news reader Flipboard is instead rolling out an update that puts users in control of their own feeds. The company announced this morning the launch of a new controller on the cover of its own main newsfeed, aka the […]

If you’re in India, the Philippines, Russia or Vietnam, Amazon Prime and Gorillas are probably not that much use to you. Comparable to DoorDash Drive or Lalamove (Malaysia), Dostavista is a “crowdsourced” same-day delivery service. Founded in Russia, the startup initially figured out a way to appeal to gig economy workers in countries such as […]

The company views its market as a new technology category. Databricks calls the technology a data “lakehouse,” a mashup of data lake and data warehouse.

Following a spate of leaks, Bose this morning announced the latest addition to its well-loved over-ear headphones. The QuietComfort 45 (which replace the 35 II) sport improved noise cancellation and 24 hours of battery on a charge, per Bose’s metrics. The air travel mainstays run $330 — coming in $20 cheaper than the QC 35’s […]

Tech employees build amazing consumer-facing apps for the world. But for their internal communications, they are stuck using applications that don’t play well with one another. This is a problem, as most employees at a mid-sized or large-sized firm spend a fourth to a third of their days on internal communication applications. Now a San […]

The voices on Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant and others still lack the rhythms and intonation that make speech human. NVIDIA has unveiled new tools that can capture those natural speech qualities.

Octane, a metered SaaS billing system, helps vendors create a plan, monitor usage and charge in a similar way to Snowflake and AWS.

Microsoft offered a broad “Holiday 2021” release date when it announced Windows 11 back in June. Of course, it didn’t specify precisely which holiday. Perhaps the company was aiming for World Teachers’ Day, a belated Sukkot or an extremely early Halloween. After strongly implying a late-October release a few months back (with some pointing to […]

Quip is focused on growth, innovation and community building among its over 7.5 million customers in 100 countries.

Walnut's a no-code platform enables customers to create customized product demonstrations, integrate them into their sales and marketing processes and then generate insights from the demos.

Spotify today is officially rolling out its shared playlist feature called Blend to global users, with a few changes. Earlier this summer, Spotify had first launched the new shared playlist experience into beta testing. The feature, which allows two people to combine their favorite songs into one shared playlist, uses the same music mixing technology […]

More major consolidation underway in the world of payments: Prosus — the Dutch tech giant that bundles together Naspers’ fintech, e-commerce and other international investments and businesses outside of South Africa (including a big stake in Tencent) — today announced that it would pay $4.7 billion to acquire BillDesk, a payments provider based in India. […]

German startup Dance is launching its subscription service in its hometown Berlin. For a flat monthly fee of €79 (around $93 at today’s exchange rate), users will get a custom-designed electric bike as well as access to an on-demand repair and maintenance service. Founded by the former founders of SoundCloud and Jimdo, the company managed […]

More than 15 years ago, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, which was acquired by Nasdaq in 2008, and another since-sold exchange called HedgeStreet, both announced they intended to offer something called event contracts to investors. The idea was to allow people to bet “yes” or “no” on questions about future events that were structured as all-or-nothing […]

Coral Capital, a Tokyo-based venture capital firm, announced today that it has closed its third fund, Coral Capital III, raising $128 million (14 billion yen). Coral Capital’s total assets under management (AUM) is now $275 million. Limited partners in the vehicle include Mizuho Bank, Mitsubishi Estate, Shinsei Bank, Pavilion Capital, Founders Fund, Dai-ichi Life Insurance, […]

Doctor Anywhere, a startup that takes an “omnichannel” approach to healthcare, announced today it has raised $88 million SGD (about $65.7 million USD) in Series C funding. The round was led by Asia Partners, with participation from Novo Holdings, Philips and OSK-SBI Partners. It also included returning investors EDBI, Square Peg, IHH Healthcare, Kamet Capital […]

Few robotics categories are poised to benefit more from the events of the past year than construction. It’s a booming field that could benefit massively from automaton, a fact that’s only been amplified as the pandemic brought many nonessential businesses to a standstill. We’ve seen a number of players in the category raise notable rounds […]

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Square’s popular free invoicing software is becoming the company’s next big subscription service. The company is poised to announce a paid subscription offering called Invoices Plus, which will offer sellers a set of advanced features, including some that had previously been available with the free service. The service itself had been quietly introduced to individual […]