Chatbots offer the promise of frictionless access to goods, services and information, but creating effective bots can be deceptively tricky. The flip side of the opportunity to interact with users in a seamless, natural way is that user expectations can be prohibitively high. Bots need to be smart and provide greater convenience than apps. Read More
In what amounts to a very detailed and very heartfelt whitepaper on building and shutting down a business, John Gruber has written about shutting down Vesper, his iOS notes app and syncing service. Vesper was one of the most elegant and usable pieces of software I’ve used. Sadly, it was too easy to abandon once syncing came to nearly everything in iOS and, although the product had a… Read More
“Identity-as-a-service” startup Auth0 (pronounced “auth zero”) has raised $15 million in Series B funding.
CEO Jon Gelsey said that for many website and mobile app developers, integrating with different login systems can turn into a big headache — and also create security risks. So the company helps those developers manage identity and authentication, whether… Read More
In January, GM did something somewhat unusual for a company founded in 1908 – it began a car sharing operation, offering customers a fleet of new vehicles on-demand, for use in exchange for an hourly fee. The car sharing company GM started, Maven, began in earnest in earlier this year as a 40 person operation, tiny relative to GM’s overall 216,000 employee organization, but in… Read More
Some days, life just throws you a giggle. Today is one of those days. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (aka North Korea) has announced a new Netflix-style on-demand streaming service. It’s called Manbang. In Korean, ‘manbang’ means ‘everything.’ In English-speaking countries, it has some different connotations. Obviously. The service is being… Read More
A fresh chapter of the crypto wars looks to be opening up in Europe, after the French and German interior ministers took to a podium yesterday to lobby for a law change that would enable courts to demand that Internet companies decrypt data to help further criminal investigations. Read More
A San Francisco-based startup called DroneDeploy has raised $20 million in Series B funding to grow their drone data management platform. The drone tech startup closed its Series B deal just before the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is scheduled to implement new rules governing commercial and industrial drone use. The Part 107 rules, announced by the FAA in June this year, will take… Read More
Attention, startup fans in the U.K. and around the world. While December may seem like a long way away, TechCrunch Disrupt London will be here before you know it, so it’s time to start thinking about getting your tickets to the best startup show in Europe. Tickets to Disrupt London are available now through September 19 for the extra early-bird price point of just £800, a full £400 of… Read More
Art filter app sensation Prisma, which has revved up from nothing to an incredible 55 million+ downloads for its iOS and Android apps in just two months this summer, has now added an offline mode. Read More
Today, Beijing-based PowerVision made its ovoid camera drone, the PowerEgg, available to international customers via pre-order on the company’s website for $1,288.
Customers who pre-order a PowerEgg will also get a backpack designed to fit the drone, its charging station, decorative stand and remote controls along with their orders. The company says the backpack is valued at… Read More
Stratasys has one of those classic founder stories. According to the company, inventor S. Scott Crump got the bright idea to make a toy frog for his daughter using a hot glue gun full of plastic and candle wax. That goofy little experiment marked both the birth of the company and the creation of FDM — fused deposition modeling – the technology that forms the basis of most… Read More
VR makes the most sense when you don’t have to learn the controls and stuff just works.
Today, Leap Motion dropped an early access beta version of their Interaction Engine which makes it easier for developers to build VR environments can adroitly manipulate with their hands. In a blog post, the company calls the engine “a layer that exists between the Unity game engine and… Read More
The world’s most prestigious startup school launched 48 companies today at part 2 of its Summer 2016 Demo Day. Nanoparticle analytics and delivery robots were amongst the products revealed in the B2B, biotech, enterprise, edtech, fintech, and hardware verticals. You can check out our write-ups of all 44 startups that launched yesterday, and TechCrunch’s picks for the top 7 from… Read More
The past 15 months has created a lot of confusion around where the technology sector is going. I’m constantly being asked by entrepreneurs if the timing is right to start a new business and would I invest in these current markets? Yes and yes. Read More
TechCrunch has a new podcast, and it’s TCBC, a show where I speak to a different writer on staff each week about their beat, the stories they’re following, and the tech news that’s most important to them right now. It’s something new we’re trying, and hopefully it helps bring home the stories we cover here at TechCrunch, giving you additional context that can be… Read More
SMS is terrible, yet it’s still the way more than half of video gets shared on mobile. Meanwhile, Facebook is trying to turn everyone into famous broadcasters when most people just want to show close friends what they’re up to. That’s why Facebook’s product manager for Live, Vadim Lavrusik, defected from the social network to start his own video streaming iOS app… Read More
Tableau Software‘s shares soared 13 percent on Tuesday following the announcement that the data analytics provider has partnered with Narrative Science, a Chicago-based company that develops natural language generation (NLG) tools. The result of the partnership is Narratives for Tableau, a free Chrome extension that automatically creates written explanations for Tableau… Read More
The country faces a plethora of issues that affect millions of people every day. Although there has been some progress as a society around pro-LGBTQ legislation and healthcare, there is a lot left to be done around poverty, criminal justice reform, federal statistics around LGBTQ people, youth solutions, mental health, the environment, education and inclusion in tech. Today at the White… Read More
The FBI is reportedly looking into hacking attempts against U.S. journalists that may have been orchestrated by Russian intelligence services. New York Times journalists were among those targeted, CNN and the AP report. The New York Times confirmed that its Moscow bureau was targeted, but said the paper has no reason to believe the attack was successful. It’s not yet clear why the… Read More
