Back in June on the last day of the New York Assembly’s legislative session, the state passed a bill legalizing daily fantasy sports, paving the road for the return of incumbents DraftKings and FanDuel to resume operating in the state. The next week we sat down with DraftKings CEO Jason Robins, who explained that passing the bill was so important because it not only meant his… Read More
Moon Express is the first private company to get permission from the U.S. government to go to the moon, Facebook shows us its “Area 404” hardware lab, Tesla delivers 14,402 vehicles in Q2 2016, Time Warner takes a 10% stake in Hulu, and bitcoin value drops 20 percent after $70 million worth stolen from Bitfinex. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Few things are more dreadful than dealing with airline customer service. Fortunately, there’s a startup that wants to make those calls for you. For hassle-free travel, AirHelp is raising $12 million in Series A funding from a group of investors including Khosla Ventures and Evan Williams. This is in addition to the $4.7 million in seed financing raised two years ago. AirHelp promises to… Read More
One by one, most software has succumbed to the cloud; Designers have Adobe, gamers have Steam, programmers have GitHub and now musicians have Splice. Splice is launching a rent-to-own pricing model for software synths. Starting today, musicians will be able to use Serum from Xfer Records, to their hearts content without any upfront fees. The company likes to call their service a rental,… Read More
The human microbiome — meaning all of our microbes’ genes — will reshape the consumerization of personalized medicine and diet. Following the human genome project, technological advancements have brought us much closer to acute precision in disease diagnosis and treatment. The microbiome has the potential to change the way we diagnose and treat the most critical diseases of… Read More
As interest and investment continue to pour into the online education market, startups building platforms with a lot of traction are reaping the rewards. In the latest development, a company out of China called VIPKID — which has built a popular platform connecting children aged between five and 12 years with native English speakers for one-to-one online language lessons… Read More
An Intel engineer just tweeted out a photo of a new VR sensor prototype and suggested that VR would play a large role in the company’s developer conference late this month. In the since-deleted tweet, Dimitri Diakopoulos, a senior prototyping engineer at Intel, showed off what he referred to as a depth-sensing prototype attachment for the HTC Vive. At least visually, the sensor… Read More
Speedtest has released its mid-year broadband speeds report, and there’s actually quite a bit of good news in there. Speeds are steadily increasing despite machinations within the industry, and in fact the average in the U.S. just went north of 50 megabits for the first time ever. Read More
It’s been a rough couple of months for Amazon competitors. First Canada’s Shop.ca declares bankruptcy and essentially has a fire sale, then Jet.com, which accumulated big funding and big hype pre-launch, is apparently in talks with Wal-Mart re: an acquisition. A Wal-Mart exit isn’t the upstart victory against an industry giant originally foretold in Jet’s creation… Read More
In light of Dollar Shave Club’s recent sale, I started thinking about other industries that haven’t yet rethought the customer relationship by leveraging the cloud. A significant majority of FDA-approved medical devices — and their associated business models — should be rethought around the idea that the cloud is a core feature of the product. Read More
Tesla missed its Q2 earnings targets today in a report released after the close of the market. Tesla executives are not wavering on yearly targets, despite a slower than expected quarter. All of this comes amidst a seemingly never-ending wave of Tesla headlines dominating Silicon Valley over the last few weeks. The energy company born out of an automobile company reported non-GAAP Q2 revenue… Read More
Jack Dorsey really needs a hit. After Twitter’s weak second-quarter showing, and both stocks not performing well in the past year, Dorsey — as the lead of both companies — needs to show investors his strategies are working (and that he can run both companies).
Well, he certainly got one today. Square reported its second-quarter earnings, where it brought in $439 million in… Read More
Basis Peak, a fitness watch tracking your health and sleep habits, is now being recalled by the company after reports of overheating. The Intel subsidiary first sent a statement about the overheating issues in mid-June and is now asking customers to stop wearing their watches and is shutting down service “immediately.” “We had hoped to update the software on… Read More
The field of artificial intelligence is so huge, and the potential applications so numerous, that it would be folly to try to explain it all in one — no, wait, IBM just did. Read More
Lyft is seeing record ridership, including an all-time high of 13.9 million rides during July, first reported by Recode and confirmed by TechCrunch via sources familiar with the matter. In addition to the total ride increase, along with a new record for monthly active riders of over 3 million, Lyft also saw significant growth in the use of its Concierge service, a bulk booking service similar… Read More
Owlchemy Labs wants you to reach out and grab VR content with your hands. The Austin-based VR studio just secured a $5 million Series A led by Qualcomm Ventures with participation in the round also coming from HTC, The VR Fund, Colopl Next and Capital Factory. Right now the studio, founded in 2010, is best known among those in the VR community for building the game Job Simulator, which was… Read More
Many American Olympic athletes are using cutting-edge technology like motion tracking systems, wearable jump monitors and Doppler radar to help them jump higher and go farther before hitting Rio this August 5 for the Summer Games — and so can you!
So fasten your joggers and come along as we take a look at the technology our Olympians are using to help them go for the gold. Read More
After a relatively short beta, Microsoft today announced that the Excel API — a way for developers to programmatically use Excel for Office 365 for doing calculations, building dashboards and more — is now generally available. Read More
Finding life beyond Earth means combing through an incredibly vast array of potential planetary candidates, but one new study from a team of researchers led by San Francisco State University astronomer Dr. Stephen R. Kane hopes to add some additional specificity to the search. The international group of scientists behind the study examined the over 4,000 planets outside of our solar… Read More
