TechCrunch

 Twilio, which is currently hosting the European version of its Signal conference in London, today announced its first acquisition after its successful IPO in June. This one is a bit complicated, but bear with me. Twilio is acquiring the proprietary WebRTC media processing technologies developed by the same team that also originally built the Kurento open source WebRTC media server. Twilio… Read More

 Opera has become the first browser maker to ship a desktop internet browser that includes an unlimited VPN service baked-in. Read More

 French food delivery startup FoodChéri, which operates an online only restaurant along the lines of EatFirst in the UK or Munchery’s original model in the US, has raised €6 million in Series A funding led by 360 Capital Partners, and Breega Capital. Read More

 French startup StarOfService just raised another $10 million for its European Thumbtack alternative. Andrea Piccioni and Silvio Pagliani, ENERN Investments and Point Nine Capital participated in today’s round, as well as various business angels. When I first covered StarOfService, the company didn’t even try to hide from me that it was a Thumbtack copycat. The main difference is… Read More

 Chevrolet’s new Bolt EV is a vehicle that Wired has dubbed “Tesla-walloping,” and its pricing seems like a direct shot at Tesla’s lineup, including the forthcoming Model 3, which is set to be the dedicated electric carmaker’s more “affordable” option. Chevrolet revealed specific pricing and trim details for the base model Bolt EV LT, which begins at… Read More

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 At the Photokina trade show, Sony launched a long-awaited followup to its aging flagship SLR camera. The Sony A99 II sports high-resolution sensors, 5-axis image stabilization, a raft of high-end video features and a hefty price-tag to match. The camera is putting its proverbial foot down as a force to be reckoned with in the high-end SLR market that has historically been dominated by Canon… Read More

 AdStage announced today that it has raised an additional $2 million from Verizon Ventures. The company offers tools for businesses to manage their ad campaigns across Facebook, Google, Bing and elsewhere, and it says it’s currently managing $100 million in quarterly ad spend. CEO Sahil Jain recently told me that his goal is to create a broader marketing platform including content… Read More

 Grab, the largest company rivaling Uber in Southeast Asia, has confirmed that it has raised $750 million in fresh capital. This is the company’s Series F round, and it was led by existing investor SoftBank with participation from undisclosed existing and new backers, Grab said. Read More

 Since its advent in 2009, bitcoin’s decentralized, broker-less and secure mechanism to send money across the world has steadily risen in popularity and adoption. Of equal — if not greater — importance is the blockchain, the technology that supports the cryptocurrency, the distributed ledger which enables trustless, peer-to-peer exchange of data. Every day, new companies… Read More

 The U.S. government revealed its much-anticipated Federal Automated Vehicles policy on Monday evening, detailing its 15-point Safety Assessment to be rolled out fully on Tuesday, which is designed to give manufacturers hoping to build and ship self-driving vehicles proper expectations around what will work for regulators in terms of meeting safety requirements. The Obama… Read More

 Google just sent out invites for an event in San Francisco on October 4th. Rumor has it that the company will reveal its next smartphones at the event. While the invite itself only features Google’s own logo, the company also just posted a teaser video and site that both strongly hint at a new phone. The URL for the teaser site is madeby.google.com, and unless something has… Read More

Insider, a unified online marketing platform out of Turkey, has secured a $2.2 million Series A round of financing, bringing its total funding since launching in 2012 to $3.3 million. That may not sound a lot, but it’s a lot for the region and considering it’s targeting a global market, especially emerging markets outside the US. Assuming its product is competitive, it can… Read More

 Airbnb is facing a further squeeze on its activities in Barcelona, the Catalonian capital that’s hugely popular with tourists — ramping up tension with local communities dealing with inflating rents and rowdy behavior by visitors facilitated by the rapid rise of sharing-economy platforms. Read More

 Investors are valuing seed-stage startups at the highest levels ever, according to a new report published by the private deals database Pitchbook. According to its analysis, the pre-money valuation for a seed-stage company reached $5.9 million in the first half of this year, an 11 percent increase from the end of 2015 and a whopping 84 percent increase from 2010 figures. At the same time,… Read More

 When Apple launched its iBeacon protocol at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in 2013 it laid the foundation for an entire new industry — the proximity industry. Three years later, close to 500 proximity companies operate globally, and between 6 and 7 million beacons are deployed in commercial settings with the latest forecasts pointing to a total of 500 million beacons by the end… Read More

 It was announced on the second day of the month, and, well, here it is: The wireless version of Bower & Wilkins’ P7 headphones. Well, how are they? As great as I’d hoped, but there are some changes that were made that seem out of place. But rest assured: Despite being tailored to the mid and high frequencies, they still have those warm, roomy lows for bass. Price as… Read More

 Google has just disclosed that it has snatched up the team behind API.AI. API.AI provides tools to developers to help them build conversational, Siri-esque bots. As humans, we’re pretty good at communication. If someone says “the girl saw a man with the binoculars,” we can generally use contextual clues to figure out if they meant that the girl saw the man by using binoculars,… Read More

 It’s not just gigantic search engines that are looking to acquire tech and talent around emerging areas like speech recognition. Even design and craft marketplaces can use a little machine learning and artificial intelligence to make their wheels turn a little better. Today, the popular handmade-goods site Etsy announced it has acquired a startup called Blackbird Technologies,… Read More

 Chatbots were meh. Sure, they’ll get better. But the upcoming innovation in chat is about being more human, not less. With the proliferation of adequate speech recognition, AI assistants and wireless headphones, the tech is ready to unlock the potential of our most basic form of communication. Soon, we’ll talk and listen to our messaging apps when it’s more convenient than… Read More