Microsoft today reported earnings for its first fiscal quarter of 2017 (because fiscal quarters don’t have to correlate with the all-governing force of time). Long story short: Azure and other office-based products are fueling revenue growth, as Microsoft mostly gives up on mobile. Also of note: Shares popped to above $60 in after-hour trading on news of strong growth in the cloud… Read More
PayPal reported third quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday. The global payments company reported an 18% increase in revenue at $2.67 billion, when analysts were expecting $2.65 billion. Adjusted earnings per share stood at 35 cents, in line with Wall Street expectations.
However, some investors were disappointed to see that PayPal missed on total payment volume, a metric of total… Read More
Well, damn. Henrik Fisker just took to Twitter and gave a lesson on teasing upcoming products. According to his tweet, the upcoming reborn Fisker EV will have wild butterfly doors — you know, the type of doors kids will put on their hand-me-down Honda Accords. He says in the tweet the crazy doors are for easier ingress and egress, but really he’s just throwing down with Elon Musk… Read More
Supercars are called super for a reason: these are not everyday sedans. They’re more powerful, more strikingly designed, and more expensive than the cars we usually drive to work. But there are some things you probably don’t know about supercars. I’ll use the 2017 McLaren 570GT to illustrate. You can’t just get in and out. Here’s how to enter and exit a supercar… Read More
Color me disappointed. I mean, congratulations to the winners and all, but a big part of me was sincerely hoping that ZTE’s CSX project would open the door to the creation of a truly bizarre device completely outside of the mobile company’s wheelhouse. There was that probably dangerous diving mask with AR functionality built in to make swimming pools more interesting and the… Read More
If you can’t get enough presidential election news – that is, you’re some kind of glutton for punishment – there’s now a new way to get automated updates with the latest poll numbers, along with other election news via Facebook Messenger. The New York Times has launched a new elections news service via its NYT Politics Bot for Messenger that will text you… Read More
Today, Udacity announced partnerships with an additional ten companies to help graduates of its new self-driving car nanodegree program find jobs. The program, launched on the stage of TechCrunch Disrupt last month, aims to bring together a large community of students interested in learning, and eventually contributing, to the front lines of autonomous car development. As one… Read More
Peter Thiel’s support of Donald Trump has been the subject of speculation and condemnation since rumors of his speech at the Republican National Convention first began to fly, and has only increased since Thiel agreed to donate $1.25 million to the Trump campaign. Thiel plans to address the controversy, a spokesperson said, in an Oct. 31 speech in Washington, D.C. It will be the first… Read More
Peter Thiel, a very high-profile tech investor, has started to face some backlash about reportedly planning to donate $1.25 million in support of the Trump campaign. This has put a lot in the tech community in a very precarious situation. Thiel currently sits of Facebook’s board, and the tech community is largely outspoken against Donald Trump. However, many executives —… Read More
Amazon today officially launched the updated version of its $40 Fire TV Stick, which now includes the power of Alexa, thanks to the included voice-controlled remote. This is the most notable addition to the new streaming TV dongle, which also sports upgraded internals, like a quad-core processor and faster Wi-Fi. With Alexa built-in, you can search across not only Amazon’s own video… Read More
Slack is still growing fast, about 33% in daily users and paid seats in the last 5 months. But not as fast as before, when it saw 50% DAU growth and 63% paid seat growth in the 5.5 months from December 15th to May 25th. This aligns with rumors TechCrunch has heard about a slight dip in customer retention at Slack, as the casual, GIF-filled workplace chat app can get noisy and distracting… Read More
As we approach the coming robot apocalypse it helps to know your enemy. In most cases our enemies will be made by other robots and their alien engineering will be very difficult to understand. But if they use the Husarion Core 2 at least we’ll vaguely understand what we’re up against. The Polish-made Husarion Core 2 is basically a brain for a robot. It has connectors for sensors… Read More
Network effects in venture capital are no joke. Sure, people want to close rounds with brand name funds like Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz because they validate startups. But perhaps more importantly, companies become more likely to succeed after closing high profile rounds because of their newfound access to the friends and connections of prominent investors. Alex Mittal, CEO of… Read More
Health tech startup Cardiogram has raised $2 million in a seed round led by the a16z Bio Fund for an app that screens users’ cardio health and gives them help improving or maintaining it. The company started out with an Apple Watch integrated app, initially. But it is ultimately planning to be a “device agnostic” business, and to make its app utilizable with all manner… Read More
Salesforce has a history of staying close to the cutting edge of technology, so it shouldn’t be surprising that it announced an artificial intelligence initiative recently, it dubbed Einstein.
We caught up with some key members of the Einstein team at Dreamforce earlier this month and asked them to explain the new technology for us.
Einstein isn’t a product so much as a set of… Read More
With a women’s fertility declining just as they enter the full flush of their careers alongside their male counterparts (usually from the mid 20s to 30s) egg freezing has been on the rise. In 2014 only 6,200 women in the US opted to freeze their eggs to preserve their fertility. It took Apple’s and Facebook’s announcements of egg-freezing benefits — and perhaps a few… Read More
CRISPR is like graphene. It’s one of those exciting new technologies science nerds will invariably invoke as a sort of game changer for every industry imaginable. And indeed, the gene-editing tool has already been unleashed on an impressive range of life-altering tasks, from the removal of malaria from mosquitos to a potential treatment for HIV. But there’s one job even those… Read More
Thanks to the Childrens’ Internet Protection Act, schools in the U.S. that provide internet access to their students must also generally use web filtering systems that block them from accessing obscene or harmful content online. The law, enacted originally in 2000 and updated in 2011, left school districts’ IT departments scrambling to adapt enterprise solutions that were built… Read More
We first learned that Nintendo was working on a new console (codenamed “NX”) over a year and a half ago. Since then, though, they’ve said pretty much nothing.
Nintendo broke their silence this morning with a 3 minute preview trailer packed with details. In 3 minutes, we went from knowing nothing to knowing a whole friggin’ lot.
Here’s everything we now know. Read More
