TechCrunch

 “The issue is being hugely overblown. Marketers do not care about it, and it has zero impact on spend.” That’s the response of Jason Stein, founder and CEO of 250-employee social marketing agency Laundry Service, to a Wall Street Journal report strongly criticizing an error in Facebook’s “average duration of video viewed” metric. The paper called the… Read More

 Maluuba launched its first Siri-like personal assistant at TC Disrupt San Francisco four years ago. Since then, the company has raised $11 million and has licensed its technology to a number of handset manufacturers that now use it to power their own personal-assistant features. As Maluuba’s head of product Mo Musbah told me, the company spent the last two years doubling down on how… Read More

 This week, Yahoo came clean about a 2014 hack, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan announced a huge investment to cure disease, rumors swirled around possible car tech acquisitions for Apple and the AI startup space continued to heat up with a few chat bot acquisitions. These are the top stories of the week. Read More

 Snapchat’s current geofilter product is a nightmare for event managers, brands, and any commercial business because anyone can coat-tail or hijack the space. Let’s say you’re holding a political rally at City Hall, and you want to buy a geofilter for the augmented Snapchat space at the event. When you go to purchase it from Snapchat, your plan gets rejected. Why? Someone… Read More

 Skateboarders make great startup investors, according to Rob Dyrdek and Tony Hawk. The legendary skaters spoke to us about a mindset that helps them be on the lookout for the next big thing. “The skater mentality is you’re always looking at what’s next,” said Dyrdek. He also spoke of the “NBD” or “never been done” philosophy when it comes to… Read More

 Uber is rolling out a new selfie security measure which will eventually cover the entire U.S. It’s a selfie system for drivers designed to help prevent driver fraud, so that you can more reliably count on the person who picks you up being the one whose picture you see in your app. The system is actually called Real-Time ID Check, and it uses Microsoft machine learning to compare a… Read More

 Meet Henri, the middle malshi (a maltese/shih-tzu mix, apparently) who shares a Manhattan apartment with our Senior Video Producer, Veanne. Being the urbane, city dwelling sort, Henri agreed to test out the latest offering from mattress-maker/podcast funder, Casper. Some background on Henri from (I’m told) the pup himself, “After [dog] decades of chasing squirrels, my joints… Read More

 Screening for language disorders is best done early and often, but it’s not always easy to get the equipment and staff to every kid in a timely fashion. At least a basic level of screening, however, may soon be able to be automated or done at home, if research out of MIT proves reliable. Read More

 SpaceX has a few answers about what might have caused the explosion of one of its Falcon 9 rockets on September 1. The rocket blew up while going through pre-launch prep on a landing pad, and no one was injured, but SpaceX has had some difficulty figuring out the cause, and shared very little info before now. Read More

 Cuff, the smart jewelry maker that promised a line of fashion wearables capable of sending emergency alerts to trusted family and friends, shut down earlier this year leaving a number of customer orders unfilled and vendors unpaid. Now, the company is being named in a bankruptcy suit filed by five of its manufacturing partners. Read More

 As we romp further into this silly and messy political season it’s come to light that Palmer Luckey, creator of the Oculus Rift and the boy who was last seen floating in a tropical paradise on the cover of time magazine, was the money man behind a group of Trump supporters calling themselves Nimble America. They dedicated the non-profit to proving “that shitposting is powerful and… Read More

 Drones might one day blanket cities dropping off Amazon goods, but in the short-term, there’s plenty of opportunity for them to help out in limited engagements, where delivery via other means would be difficult, impossible or just not quite expedient enough. UPS kicked off trials of deliveries of that kind this week, with a pilot flight to drop a small package (containing a… Read More

 Bing, the search engine Microsoft pays you to use, is jumping on the AMP bandwagon. The open source AMP format is essentially Google’s version of Facebook’s Instant Articles and its stripped down format, which in some ways goes back to the early days of the web, ensures that mobile pages load extremely fast. Just like Google now highlights a variety of AMP pages in its mobile… Read More

 With iOS 10, Apple firmly planted its flag in the smart home world. After a few years of laying the groundwork with Homekit functionality for third-party products, the company finally offered up a centralized hub in the form of the simply-named Home App, a baked in offering designed to bring myriad devices to a centralized control panel, where users can monitor and interact with smart… Read More

 In just over a week, Apple’s iMessage App Store has grown to over 1,650 applications and sticker packs – more than the original iPhone had at launch as well as the 1,000 total that were ready for iPad at the time of its debut, but far less than the 3,500+ the Watch App Store arrived with last year. According to a new report from Sensor Tower, the most popular type of mini… Read More

 Don’t say we never gave you anything, startup fans. We wanted to give you one more week to get deeply-discounted tickets to Disrupt London 2016, so you now have until next Friday, September 30 to get your hands on extra early-bird tickets to the hottest startup show in Europe. Read More

 When racing cars have only hundredths of seconds between them, in a race where the time to change a tire means the difference between winning and losing (and the impact on millions of dollars in sponsorship), a company gets good at technology. Fast. The data from drivers, cars and engines has to be parsed and acted upon literally in real-time. That’s why the racing industry’s… Read More

 At some point, it’ll probably be commonplace, but as of its 2017 model year, Smart will be the only big car brand that can truthfully claim to offer both an electric drive and a gas-powered option across all of its vehicle offerings. The Daimler-owned maker of pint-sized urban cars will offer an EV version of its Fortwo, Fortwo Cabrio and Forfour in 2017, and each one will use a brand… Read More

 At its minimalist worst, the Balldur is a cool looking lamp. Smooth wood and ceramic with a bulb that would make Thomas Edison proud, the Balldur (whatever that means) feels like an artifact from a Terry Gilliam movie—and that my friends is a good thing. In some ways, it is also reminiscent of boutique guitar amplifiers. In short, it is nice looking. Read More

 Twitter continues to inch its way to a sale process, and the latest developments come in the form of alleged bids from potential buyers. Today CNBC is reporting, and we have also independently heard, that both Google and Salesforce are interested in buying the company. We have additionally heard that Microsoft and Verizon have also been knocking, although right now Verizon (which also… Read More