Are you an undergrad or graduate student looking to take part in the best startup conference in Europe? Student tickets to Disrupt London 2016 are still available at the deeply discounted rate of just £100 plus VAT. These tickets were previously only available to students currently enrolled in school, but we’re now expanding their availability to all of the recent graduates out there.… Read More
French startup Payfit wants to modernize the good old paychecks in France. After just a few months, the company just raised $5.6 million (€5 million) from Otium Venture and Xavier Niel. Payfit officially started in April 2016. And it looks like many companies were waiting for a product like this one given today’s funding round. Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, Jean-Daniel Guyot, Oleg… Read More
Exoplanets are the talk of the solar system this year, but as exciting as they are, their existence (as is often the case in astronomy) is more inference than direct observation. A new private effort known as Project Blue hopes to change that with a satellite built for a single purpose: to directly image an exoplanet in the Alpha Centauri system. Read More
Greylock Partners is getting another $1 billion to invest in startups. The long-time venture capital firm is announcing its 15th fund, bringing the total to $3.5 billion currently under management. With 50 years of investing in the books, Greylock has backed industry leaders in the enterprise IT and consumer internet categories, including LinkedIn, Dropbox, Facebook and Airbnb. Their… Read More
Zymergen, a Bay Area startup creating all sorts of materials from genetically altered microbes, just raised $130 million in Series B funding from Softbank. For those unfamiliar, the company makes crazy new materials out of genetically altered microbes. It was busy buying up a bunch of robots to make these microbes for mass production of various materials during its last round of funding. CEO… Read More
iOS 10 is now on two-thirds of all active devices, the Barnacle is the newest police tool since the boot, a German report calls Tesla Autopilot feature a hazard, Samsung is adjusting its Note 7 production and Facebook launches Workplace. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Watch out, Navdy. Here comes Anker. The Chinese consumer electronic brand is about to release an in-vehicle heads-up display that appears to be similar in design and execution to the Navdy. The product is called Roav, and like the Navdy, the device appears to take information from a user’s phone and display it on a transparent screen positioned in front of the driver. The product images… Read More
Partner Fund Management (PFM), a San Francisco-based hedge fund that reportedly wrote out a $96 million check to Theranos back in 2014, is now suing the blood-testing startup and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, saying it was duped into its investment “through a series of lies, material misstatements, and omissions,” and accusing the firm of engaging in “securities fraud… Read More
Category leaders usually capture 70-80 percent of the profits in their market, which is why venture funds need to find them to gain the outsized returns they must generate in order to return their fund. In our latest interview with Mike Maples, founding partner at Floodgate, we discover the characteristics of these category kings and how they change consumer behavior. Read More
The race to rule the autonomous car market is on. Google, Ford and now Uber have stepped up to the challenge, each with their own vision and ambitions as to what a driverless world will look like. What’s clear is that technology is playing an ever-increasing role — where cities and existing modes of transit have stumbled — allowing us to completely rethink the mobility landscape. Read More
Even more fascinating than the idea of a digital currency are those who dedicate their lives to it. A network of miners all across the world, many of whom are in China, run the system. They not only process every Bitcoin transaction, but they also play a large role in governing the platform, for better or for worse. Episode two looks at where these Bitcoin mines are developing and who is… Read More
A lot of startups are talking about the possibilities of chatbots, but Duolingo recently launched one of the most interesting uses so far — practicing a new language. The Duolingo chatbots allow users to hold text message conversations in French, Spanish or German, with the chatbots taking on different personas to discuss different topics. You probably won’t mistake them for… Read More
It seemed unlikely we would make it through the end of the day without some more big news out of Samsung. And now, just after the close of business hours here on the East Coast, we’ve got something straight from the company itself. After a string of statements regarding investigations around the safety of replacement Galaxy Note 7 devices, the company is officially calling on carrier… Read More
We have a new series launching this week called Trust Disrupted: Bitcoin and the Blockchain. The six-episode series examines the rise of Bitcoin and the tech that allows it to operate. The first episode will answer all your questions about the Bitcoin platform and how it works. Why did futurists want to create a totally digital currency? How would it work? What will the effects of Bitcoin and… Read More
Recognizing the central role that technology plays in the global economy, the WEF is establishing a new center in San Francisco to connect tech companies and policymakers in the heart of the world’s tech industry. The new facility will focus on bringing government officials and tech companies together to create frameworks for more productive legislative policies that can be… Read More
XPRIZE, the incentivized prize competition for breakthrough science and technology, has announced three new prizes. Among them — ALS, avatars and Deloitte’s Cancer XPRIZE. Deloitte is working in conjunction with the National Cancer Institute and Vice President Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot initiative to bring some of the best and brightest minds together to rid the world of what… Read More
Venture capital does many great things for the United States. Importantly, it fuels the innovation economy, churning out disruptive products, companies and entire new industries. Indeed, venture is extreme capitalism. Creative destruction rolls over incumbents, and society is usually better off as a result. But a good society requires more than just a robust economy. Read More
If I’m Samsung, I’m looking for the next big product to capture the public’s attention while my public relations wing is attempting to put out a whole lot of proverbial fires (to go along with the literal variety). This isn’t that. In fact, Samsung just kind of let this one loose into the world without any real fanfare. And it’s got a name to match.
The… Read More
One of the several things that makes brain surgery so difficult is that the brain isn’t transparent. So if you want to get at something deep inside, you either have to peel off a few layers or make an educated guess based on other imagery. But augmented reality may offer a third way. Read More
Facebook’s latest trick to earn more revenue without drowning the News Feed is to serve ads to the 1 billion users of its Groups feature. After people reported seeing notices that “We’re testing ads in Groups,” TechCrunch inquired and Facebook confirmed that mobile and desktop versions of Groups in Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand are part of the trial.… Read More
