Category: Tech news

  Can Peter Thiel see the future? You’d be forgiven for thinking so considering he invested early in Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, and Stripe. His strategy with Founders Fund and Mithril Capital is to fund ideas that sound crazy to most people, but have the potential to radically change the world. Exponential innovation > linear innovation. But how does Thiel tell the crack-pot… Read More

 With Vinli, cars are about to get apps. And not just cars made in the future. The system works with nearly any car made after 1996 and is compatible with Android and iOS devices. The company just launched on the Disrupt SF 2014 stage and announced that the Vinli device is available for pre-order. Vinli plugs into a car’s ODB II port — a data interface equipped standard on cars… Read More

 Tel Aviv and Brooklyn-based Tailor Brands launches publicly on the Disrupt Battlefield today with the goal to democratize design. Founders Yali Saar, Tom Lahat and Nadav Shatz say they can help any small, local business feel like they have an in-house designer with a special algorithm system that helps customers think like a designer.
Companies with deeper pockets are able to add to the… Read More

 Meet Gem, a new bitcoin startup with a different take and a focus on developer tools. Gem provides a highly available, scalable API for bitcoin developers to abstract the bitcoin storing layer. In other words, Gem will store, encrypt and backup your users’ bitcoins so you don’t have to take care of this cumbersome aspect. The startup is launching today in private beta at… Read More

 Mobile dating company Tinder has settled a lawsuit with early employee Whitney Wolfe, who claimed sexual harassment and sexual discrimination on the part of former CMO Justin Mateen. The settlement puts to bed an ugly “he said, she said” conflict that has loomed over the ultra-hot subsidiary of IAC since June.
A spokesman for IAC said that “the lawsuit was settled with no… Read More

 Investment bankers Bill Hambrecht and Clayon Christensen took to the Disrupt SF stage today to defend the concepts of disruption and to address the ways the Valley predicted the future of financial services and technology. Christensen is the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and a lauded professor at the Harvard Business School. His writing on “disruption,” a concept he says… Read More

Remember that “suspicious activity” that Home Depot was looking into last week? Six days later, the company has at last publicly confirmed that the “suspicious activity” was a breach of its payments system. Credit card data was exposed, though Home Depot is quick to note that PINs were not. If you used a credit card at Home Depot in the past 4-5 months, you should… Read More

 Kanzee is a social network and accompanying app that allows people to share and swap clothes with each other. It’s a simple concept and that’s why I like it. It also solves a problem that many a fashionista have encountered (myself not included) — how to get new outfits or accoutrements for specific events without purchasing them. Read More

 Liam Casey is best known as “Mr. China,” the founder and CEO of PCH, which sources, designs and manufacturers custom hardware for Fortune 500 companies and startups in Shenzhen. Before founding PCH in 1996, however, he spent 10 years in the fashion business. Now Casey is excited to see a “renaissance in prototyping” that makes creating hardware prototypes almost as easy… Read More

 Over the last year, the tech press has been filled with stories of high-flying startups struggling with issues of gender discrimination and harassment, sometimes with those issues coming from the founders themselves. At TechCrunch Disrupt SF today, investors from some of the Valley’s top firms discussed how startups are attempting to create a more inclusive environment, especially for… Read More

 Nearly a year after PayPal acquired it in an all-cash $800 million deal, online and mobile payments platform Braintree is unveiling one-touch payments and is integrating Bitcoin.
Bill Ready, who led the company through its sale, says that mobile conversion rates are still far off from where they are on the desktop web. That’s partially because it’s a lot more tedious to enter or… Read More

 Another acquisition today from Yahoo to beef up its advertising and media business. It is buying Luminate, a startup founded by LiveOps, Netscape and Yahoo alums that has created a platform for interactive, tagged images — or, as we have called it in the past, an AdSense for images.
Terms of the deal, which was announced on Luminate’s homepage, have not been disclosed. Read More

 Happy pre-Disrupt Friday, everyone, I hope you are well rested for next week’s fun. Today on CrunchWeek Sarah Buhr, Jordan Crook, and myself sat around the white table to dig into the biggest stories of the week: Samsung’s raft of new hardware, the issues with cloud security and iCloud itself, and, of course, Sarah’s recent expedition to the desert. Read More

 Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant run by Jack Ma, has submitted F-1 paperwork to the SEC with the expectation that it will go public on September 8 under the NYSE symbol BABA. The filing appeared on SEC.gov today. 20.1 million shares will be on offer. Japanese investor Softbank currently owns 34 percent of the company while Yahoo owns 22 percent. The initial price is expected to hit at… Read More

 The Libertarian-leaning Republican leader of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist went back to Washington, D.C. this week after his first visit to Burning Man. The two of us were able to catch up this week and decompress  – a word burners use to describe how they adjust back into life after experiencing Black Rock City. This was both our first time at Burning Man. This is our… Read More