Category: Tech news

 Google announced in July that it’d be taking its self-driving car test on the road…to beautiful Austin. It has done just that, and the company looks to be expanding the tests it’s doing as well. Texas is the fifth state to legalize the self-driving technology. According to Google, the tests are now involving those little tiny two-seat “Google Cars” and this time… Read More

Robots need better PR agents. They’re often portrayed as hard-edged, cold automatons that are just waiting to kill you in your sleep. Buddy, a family robot currently available for pre-order on Indiegogo, seems to be a lot nicer. Indeed, the second that Buddy rolled into the office, everybody was quick to rush over to ooh and aww as they snapped selfies with the cute little guy. Buddy… Read More

 Google+ Collections, the company’s effort at establishing its Google+ social network as more of a Pinterest competitor (since taking on Facebook didn’t go so well), has launched today in the iOS version of the Google+ app. The idea with this newer feature is to allow users to congregate around their shared interests, like video games or cooking, for example. With Collections, any… Read More

 What do you get when you put a Casares, a Popper, and a Lee on stage? Some Bitcoin madness, that’s what. Join us at Disrupt in San Francisco next month where we’ll talk to some of the biggest names in cryptocurrency – entrepreneur Wences Casares, New York Times writer Nathaniel Popper, and China’s bitcoin king, Bobbie Lee – about what’s next for BTC. These… Read More

 Apple playing nicely with enterprise companies is a sight for sore eyes. The edict that Microsoft has enterprise on lockdown is dissipating. Huge enterprise player Cisco and Apple announced a “Fast Lane” for iOS enterprise users, which promises a more streamlined and optimized experience for those enterprise customers using Cisco networks and products. There aren’t a lot… Read More

 Disrupt San Francisco is a few weeks away, and to celebrate we’re giving away a pair of tickets to one lucky TechCrunch reader (a $5,990 value). You can earn extra entries to the contest by sharing the giveaway link with friends and following our social accounts. The contest starts today, and ends next Monday. If you are unfamiliar with Disrupt, here’s a quick rundown:

Disrupt… Read More

 Jailbreaking your iPhone has its downsides. In what’s being called the “largest known Apple account theft caused by malware,” security specialists Palo Alto Networks on Sunday released a report detailing a new form of iOS malware it’s calling “KeyRaider,” which is responsible for stealing the account information from over 225,000 Apple customers. The… Read More

 Ad spending on the mobile web doubled in the first half of 2015 (compared to the same period last year), according to a new report from Smaato. Specifically, Smaato saw its total ad spend split between 62 percent on apps and 38 percent on the mobile web. So the mobile web is still pretty far behind, but it’s doing better than it was in 2014, when the breakdown was 72 percent… Read More

 One of the lesser-known features of Google Drive has always been its ability to host basic web sites for free. If you only found out about this from the preceding sentence, you now have one year to enjoy this tool. Google today announced that it will deprecate the web hosting service starting today and will turn it off completely on August 31, 2016. Read More

 Less than a week after it responded to anti-competitive claims laid down by the EU, so Google is under-fire again for its business practices. This time in India. Read More

 Remember the Tamagotchi? Those little monsters were great. A new iOS app called Tep created a Tamagotchi-like app for your phone to help you stay motivated when it comes to working out. Move around if you want to feed your giraffe. Read More

 Dubsmash, a roughly two-year-old, 15-person, Berlin-based startup whose video messaging app lets users create and share dubbed “selfie” videos (you choose a famous audio clip, then record yourself lip-syncing the words or lyrics), has just raised $5.5 million in Series A funding.
Index Ventures led the round, with firm cofounder Danny Rimer joining the… Read More

 TCBTC, TechCrunch’s bitcoin podcast is back this week, on video, with a special guest, and no John Biggs. All that is fun, aside from the lack of Biggs. Jason Rowley, the person who actually got me into bitcoin originally was on hand, taking us through a meeting that he and I had with a member of the Chinese mining community about the future of bitcoin. All told, we had a fun time. If… Read More

 Meet Issara, a new e-commerce player focused on selling leather goods, cutting the middleman and fairly compensating workers. In many ways, Issara is reminiscent of Everlane, a clothing startup that has inspired many entrepreneurs. Read More

 Sling TV, the Dish-owned live TV service aimed at cord cutters – or those who never wanted to sign up for a traditional cable or satellite TV subscription in the first place – is today available on Amazon Kindle Fire tablets, including the Amazon Fire HD and HDX devices. This rounds out Sling’s already extensive device footprint, which also includes support for Amazon Fire TV… Read More