The big accounting firms are under pressure from digital disruption just like every industry these days, but PwC is trying a proactive approach with a digital accelerator program designed to train employees for the next generation of jobs. To do this, PwC is not just providing some additional training resources and calling it a day. […]

Prosthetic limbs have come a long way from the heavy, solid hands and legs of yesteryear, but it’s still difficult to pack a range of motion into them without complex or bulky machinery. But new research out of Cornell uses a cleverly designed 3D-printed mechanism to achieve speed and strength with simple construction — and […]

It’s been four months since Facebook launched IGTV, with the goal of creating a destination for longer-form Instagram videos. Is it shaping up to be a high-profile flop, or could this be the company’s next multi-billion-dollar business? IGTV, which features videos up to 60 minutes versus Instagram’s normal 60-second limit, hasn’t made much of a […]

HTML5 almost ruined Facebook when baking in the mobile web standard to speed up development slowed down the performance of the social network’s main iOS and Android apps. For a brief moment in 2011, Facebook even tried to build an HTML5 gaming platform codenamed Sparta to escape the taxes of Apple and Google’s mobile operating […]

The world’s first hit reality show “The Real World” is being reimagined for Facebook Watch 26 years after it debuted on cable. Come Spring 2019, fans will get a chance to vote on who’ll join as the final cast member and connect with the housemates through Facebook Watch Party’s synchronized viewing chat rooms as they […]

London-based startup Applied has bagged £1.5M (~$2M) in seed funding for a fresh, diversity-sensitive approach to recruitment that deconstructs and reworks the traditional CV-bound process, drawing on behavioural science to level the playing field and help employers fill vacancies with skilled candidates they might otherwise have overlooked. Fairer hiring is the pitch. “If you’re hiring for […]

Those of you familiar with the incredible rise of Twilio, which came along to utterly disrupt the communications world, will be interested to hear that another player plans to do the same, but this time in the staid and tricky area of emerging markets. Unifonic, which has been dubbed “the Twilio of emerging markets” has […]

Memory, a startup out of Norway and maker of time tracking app Timely, has raised $5 million in further funding. Leading the round is Concentric, and Investinor, with participation from existing investor SNÖ Ventures. The company had previously raised $1 million in 2016 from 500 Startups, and SNÖ. Founded by Mathias Mikkelsen, a designer by […]

Samsung Electronics is betting that acquiring Zhilabs, a real-time networks analytics startup based in Barcelona, will ease its transition from 4G to 5G technologies. Financial details of the deal, which was announced today, have not been disclosed. Zhilabs will be fully owned by Samsung, but it will continue to operate independently under its own management. […]

Shahin Farshchi Contributor Shahin Farshchi is a partner at Lux Capital. More posts by this contributor Investing in frontier technology is (and isn’t) cleantech all over again The dos and don’ts of crafting frontier-tech companies Many entrepreneurs assume that an invention carries intrinsic value, but that assumption is a fallacy. Here, the examples of the […]

French startup Alan wants to be a bit better than your good old health insurance. That’s why the company is trying something new and now covers part of your Petit Bambou subscription. Petit Bambou is a popular meditation app. It’s a sort of Headspace, but with French content. You download an app, put your earphones, […]

Image: Getty Images/smartboy10/DigitalVision Jessica Santana and Evin Robinson were riding the subway home from a college leadership conference when they realized they were getting off at the same stop.  It turned out, they had grown up in the same neighborhood, no more than 5 blocks apart. Years later, both Santana and Robinson were working six-figure jobs […]

Fintech startup N26 is growing quite rapidly. Building a startup is hard, but building a startup that manages your bank account is even harder given the increased scrutiny. German weekly magazine Wirtschaftswoche published an article that questioned N26’s identification processes. According to Wirtschaftswoche, it’s quite easy to create an account with a fake ID document. […]

With Gartner estimating that there will be 150 billion connected devices by 2030 — many of them mission critical, such as powering major national infrastructure — the risk and realisation that these devices aren’t secured properly is leading some cyber security experts to predict that there is a large-scale disaster waiting to happen. And the […]

After a disappointing second quarter, Netflix is back in Wall Street’s good graces. The company just released its third-quarter earnings report, and as of 5:30pm East Coast time, the stock is up 12 percent in after-hours trading. The most important number here is subscriber growth, and that’s where Netflix came in way ahead of expectations, […]

For the longest time, GitHub was all about storing source code and sharing it either with the rest of the world or your colleagues. Today, the company, which is in the process of being acquired by Microsoft, is taking a step in a different but related direction by launching GitHub Actions. Actions allow developers to […]

A mysterious product called “Ripley” appeared hidden beside Facebook’s new Portal smart displays in Facebook for Android’s code. Dug up by frequent TechCrunch tipster Jane Manchun Wong a week ago, Ripley’s name squared with Facebook’s VP of Portal Rafa Camargo telling us that “we’re already investing in expanding the product line with more products we want […]

Leave your smartwatch on the counter because Timex is back with its first automatic watch in decades. Called the Marlin, this 21-jewel timepiece that hearkens back to the days of “Takes a licking, keeps on ticking.” The Marlins cost $249 and come in multiple styles. This particular model, in a rich burgundy, looks like something […]

In this fun video the Boston Dynamics Spot dances, wiggles, and shimmies right into our hearts. This little four-legged robot – a smaller sibling to the massive Big Dog – is surprisingly agile and the team at Boston Robotics have taught the little robot to dance to Bruno Mars which means that robots could soon […]

Facebook is demoting trashy news publishers and other websites that illicitly scrape and republish content from other sources with little or no modification. Today it exclusively told TechCrunch that it will show links less prominently in the News Feed if they have a combination of this new signal about content authenticity along with either clickbait […]

It’s going to be harder for trolls to disrupt Periscope broadcasts. The Twitter-owned live-streaming app has offered chat moderation capabilities for years, but it has so far relied on group moderation. That means when users flagged a comment as abuse, spam or harassment, Periscope would randomly select a few other viewers to take a look […]

Twitter users on iOS were hit with a strange bug today. Instead of receiving notifications that included the tweet itself, they received a string of alphanumeric characters. The issue only affected iOS users, we confirmed with the company, and has since been resolved. Twitter was quick to address the problem, following complaints from Twitter users […]

Twitter today inserts activity-based tweets into your timeline, alerting you to things like the popular tweets liked by people you follow, or those Twitter accounts that a lot of people in your network have just started to follow. These alerts can be useful, but their timing is sporadic and they can be easily missed. Plus, […]

Facebook has announced it rolled out a system of checks on political ads run on its platform in the UK which requires advertisers to verify their identity and location to try to make it harder for foreign actors to meddle in domestic elections and referenda. This follows similar rollouts of political ad transparency tools in […]

Amazon announced today that it has invested $10 million in Closed Loop Fund, which finances the creation of recycling infrastructure and services in U.S. cities. In a statement, the e-commerce behemoth claimed that its investment will keep one million tons of recyclable material out of landfills and “eliminate the equivalent of two million metric tons of […]

JobUFO, the Berlin-based startup that has built a video focussed app to help facilitate better job applications, has raised €2 million in seed funding. Leading the round is IBB and Hevella Capital, with the investment to be used for growth. Claiming to re-invent the way companies handle the application process, JobUFO has developed an online/mobile […]

Syncron, a Stockholm-headquartered company that offers a SaaS to help equipment and other product manufacturers move to a service model, has raised $67 million, its first ever funding round despite being over 15 years old. Leading the round is growth equity firm Summit Partners, while a source close to Syncron pegs the post-money valuation at […]

Many doubted The Civil Media Company‘s ambitious plan to sell $8 million worth of its cryptocurrency, called CVL.  The skeptics, as it turns out, were right. Civil’s initial coin offering, meant to fund the company’s effort to create a new economy for journalism using the blockchain, failed to attract sufficient interest. The company announced today […]

Doug Pepper Contributor Doug Pepper is a managing director at Shasta Ventures. More posts by this contributor A New Revolution Modernizes The Revenue Supply Chain With Adobe’s acquisition of Marketo, I have been reflecting on what an amazing and pioneering company Marketo has been since it was founded in 2006. There are very few tech […]

“Conversational marketing” is a phrase that I hear a lot, but when the team at AdLingo uses it, they mean something specific — namely, bringing chatbots and other conversational assistants into online advertising. The startup is part of Google’s Area 120 incubator, and co-founder and general manager Vic Fatnani said he’s worked on advertising at Google […]

Thirty Madison, the healthcare startup behind the hair loss brand Keeps, has brought in a $15.25 million Series A co-led by Maveron and Northzone. The company provides a subscription-based online marketplace for men’s hair loss prevention medications Finasteride and Minoxidil. Keeps sells these drugs direct-to-consumer, working with manufacturers to keep the costs low. On Keeps, a […]

Devoted Health, a Waltham, Mass.-based insurance startup, has raised a $300 million Series B and is enrolling to its Medicare Advantage plan members in eight Florida counties. The company, which helps Medicare beneficiaries access care through its network of physicians and tech-enabled healthcare platform, has raised the funds from lead investor Andreessen Horowitz, Premji Invest and […]

Some tech companies might have a problem taking money from the Department of Defense, but Amazon isn’t one of them, as CEO Jeff Bezos made clear today at the Wired25 conference. Just last week, Google pulled out of the running for the Pentagon’s $10 billion, 10-year JEDI cloud contract, but Bezos suggested that he was happy […]

Twilio, the ubiquitous communications platform, today announced its plan to acquire the API-centric email platform SendGrid for about $2 billion in an all-stock transaction. That’s Twilio’s largest acquisition to date, but also one that makes a lot of sense given that both companies aim to make building communications platforms easier for developers. “The two companies […]

Celonis has been helping companies analyze and improve their internal processes using machine learning. Today the company announced it was providing that same solution as a cloud service with a few nifty improvements you won’t find on prem. The new approach, called Celonis Intelligent Business Cloud, allows customers to analyze a workflow, find inefficiencies and […]

Truphone — a UK startup that provides global mobile voice and data services by way of an eSIM model for phones, tablets and IoT devices — said that it has raised another £18 million ($23.7 million) in funding; plus it said it has secured £36 million ($47 million) more “on a conditional basis” to expand […]

Casio released the first G-Shock watch in 1983. The original set the bar for tough watches with incredible shock resistance to protect the quartz module. It’s a classic and still available for purchase in several forms in 2018. Recently, Casio released an all-metal version of the watch that features the iconic design but with modern […]

I hate STEM toys. I have three kids and ultimately every “educational” toy they’ve used – from LittleBits to Nintendo Labo – has ended up in a corner somewhere, ignored for more exciting fare. This happens for a few reasons but the primary one is that the toys require too much attention and have no […]

Connected car startup Vinli aims to connect vehicles to the cloud and is today announcing a change in its business model as it partners with the largest fleet operator in Europe, ALD Automotive. Vinli launched in 2014 as a direct consumer company that allowed owners to add cloud services to automobiles. It was a clever […]

Hacked Facebook users still don’t know which 15 recent searches and 10 latest checkins were exposed in the company’s massive breach it detailed last week. The company merely noted that those were amongst the data sets stolen by the attackers. That creates uncertainty about how sensitive or embarrassing the scraped data is, and whether it […]

Only six months ago Barcelona-based TravelPerk bagged a $21 million Series B, off the back of strong momentum for a software as a service platform designed to take a Slack-like chunk out of the administrative tedium of arranging and expensing work trips. Today the founders’ smiles are firmly back in place: TravelPerk has announced a $44 […]

A new technology from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University will add sound and vibration awareness to create truly context-aware computing. The system, called Ubicoustics, adds additional bits of context to smart device interaction, allowing a smart speaker to know it’s in a kitchen or a smart sensor to know you’re in a tunnel versus on […]

Y Combinator has released the results of a survey, completed in partnership with its portfolio company Callisto, highlighting the pervasive role of sexual harassment in venture capital and technology startups. Callisto, a sexual misconduct reporting software built for victims, is a graduate of YC’s winter 2018 class. The company sent a survey to 125 of YC’s […]

Grin, an electric scooter startup backed by Y Combinator, has raised a $45.7 million Series A to operate shared, electric scooters in Latin America. Grin, which is based in Mexico City, had previously raised funding from Sinai Ventures, Liquid2 Ventures, 500 Startups, Monashees, Base10 Partners and others. Currently, Grin only operates in Mexico City, but […]

Penta, the German fintech startup that offers a digital bank account targeting SMEs, has raised €7 million in Series A funding. Backing the company once again is Inception Capital, with total funding now at €10 million since Penta was founded in May 2016. Launched in Germany in December, and powered by Banking-as-a-Platform solarisBank (rather than […]

There’s no shortage of interesting electronics kits out there to occupy an idle Sunday, but with this one you get a phone out of the bargain. The MakerPhone is a kit looking for funds on Kickstarter that lets you assemble a working mobile phone from a number of boards and pieces, and the end result […]

TechCrunch: Hey Portal, dial Mark Portal: Do you mean Mark Zuckerberg? TC: Yes Portal: Dialling Mark… TC: Hi Mark! Nice choice of grey t-shirt. MZ: Uh, new phone who dis? — oh, hi, er, TechCrunch… TC: Thanks for agreeing to this entirely fictional interview, Mark! MZ: Sure — anytime. But you don’t mind if I […]

In a video that similar to those videos where humans push around ATLAS, researchers at Delft University of Technology have created a system that will let a quadrotor drone keep flying even if one of the propellers is broken. The video above – which is, arguably, pretty boring – shows the drone fighting against both […]

It’s 8:00 PM on Friday night and you’re home alone and already drunk. Oh, is that just me? Well no matter. Snapchat has made lenses for your cat now. Yes, that’s right. Your cat! This is what the internet is made for, friends. Not all that fake news and trolling. Not having to read tweets […]

In April, TechCrunch broke the news that some of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook messages were deleted from recipients’ inboxes in what some saw as a violation of user trust and abuse of power since Facebook Messenger doesn’t have an Unsend button. The next morning, Facebook suddenly announced that it would actually build this Unsend functionality for […]

Facebook has announced a relatively small but significant purge of bad actors from the platform: 810 pages and accounts that have “consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.” It may not seem like a lot, but it sounds like the company is erring on the side of disclosure even if the news […]

Are you one of the 30 million users hit by Facebook’s access token breach announced two weeks ago? Here’s how to find out. Facebook breach saw 15M users’ names & contact info accessed, 14M’s bios too Visit this Facebook Help center link while logged in: https://www.facebook.com/help/securitynotice?ref=sec. Scroll down to the section “Is my Facebook account impacted by […]

Facebook has now detailed what data was scraped and stolen in the breach it revealed two weeks ago. 30 million users, not 50 million as it initially estimated, had their access tokens stolen by hackers. Users can check Facebook’s Help Center to find out if their information was accessed, and Facebook will send customized alerts to […]

Walmart continues to beef up its portfolio of digital brands, announcing on Friday that it had acquired Bare Necessities, an online retailer of lingerie, swimwear, hosiery and other intimates. Walmart declined to disclose the terms of the deal. The lingerie company, founded in 1998, will operate independently of Walmart. Over time, the e-commerce giant says […]

You might think that Anaplan CEO, Frank Calderoni would have had a few sleepless nights this week. His company picked a bad week to go public as market instability rocked tech stocks. Still he wasn’t worried, and today the company had by any measure a successful debut with the stock soaring up over 42 percent. […]

The app for hiking enthusiasts just secured a big round of capital that will help it map more trails worldwide. AllTrails has raised $75 million, led by Spectrum Equity, which has taken a majority stake in the company in the process. Founded in 2010, AllTrails raised a small amount of capital years ago from investors, including […]

Researchers at Indiana University have confirmed that stringent password policies – aside from being really annoying – actually work. The research, led by Ph.D. student Jacob Abbott, IU CIO Daniel Calarco, and professor L. Jean Camp. They published their findings in a paper entitled “Factors Influencing Password Reuse: A Case Study.” “Our paper shows that […]

AI-powered photo management app Zyl is going back to the drawing board with a streamlined, more efficient redesign. The app is now focused on one thing only — resurfacing your old memories. Taking photos on a smartphone is now a daily habit. But what about looking back at photos you took one year, three years […]

Brothers Evan and Emery Huang, founders of Batu Capital Restaurateur and raconteur Eddie Huang is the best known of the three “Fresh off the Boat” brothers (it was his memoir that inspired the ABC sitcom), but his younger brothers Emery and Evan remain relatively mysterious even to its most loyal viewers. Though the two’s namesake […]

Mobile ticketing app TodayTix is getting into the show production business with the launch of a new program called TodayTix Presents. While TodayTix is sometimes described as the mobile version of the TKTS booth where you can pick up last-minute tickets to Broadway shows, CEO Brian Fenty said that he sees the service’s real competitors […]

This clever – if expensive – product is called the BoxLock and it is a keyless padlock that lets your package delivery person scan and drop off your packages into a locked box. The system essentially watches for a shipping event and then waits for the right barcode before opening. Once the delivery person scans […]