Category: Tech news

 The Evoke is the latest electronic vaporizer to grace the industry with its presence, and I sincerely mean that. From the looks of things, the Evoke (from LotoLabs) is one of the first vaporizers I’ve seen that looks to the past for design inspiration, with a wooden, hefty look to it not unlike the tobacco pipes of the olden days. The company touts that its induction-based vaporizer… Read More

 Today after the close of regular trading, eBay announced its second-quarter financial performance, including revenue of $4.366 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.69.
Its revenue tally for the period was up 13 percent year-over-year. eBay’s second-quarter GAAP earnings totaled $676 million. It’s non-GAAP earnings were much higher at $868 million. Read More

 Real estate site Zillow today announced that it has acquired Retsly, a Vancouver, B.C.-based startup that helps developers access real-estate data from multiple listing services (MLS). The service takes the data from these sites and normalizes it so developers can more easily use the data in their own applications. The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. Read More

 Y Combinator’s president Sam Altman dropped some big stats about his prestigious startup accelerator today. But there’s a few he left out that can be estimated based on his announcement that the combined market cap of all YC companies exceeds $30 billion. Specifically, you can use that number to approximate how much YC’s stake is worth. The ballpark answer? Around $1.05 billion. Read More

 Pond5, Shutterstock’s rival in the digital media and video world, has today announced that the company has closed a $61 million round of funding led by Accel Partners and Stripes Group. Read More

 You scream, I scream, we all transform an off-the-shelf Cuisinart soft-serve maker to extrude super-cooled and 3D-printed shells of ice cream! Three students at MIT, Kyle Hounsell, Kristine Bunker, and David Donghyun Kim, have created a homemade ice cream printer that extrudes soft serve and immediately freezes it so that it can be layered on a cooled plate. The system is a proof-of-concept… Read More

 Google is planning a big advertising campaign for its Android One initiative in India this fall, according to several recent reports. While the figures don’t line up, the news itself makes a lot of sense. Read More

 The Senate passed a bill that that legalized phone unlocking, which allows consumers to switch carriers with the same phone once a their contract is up. Read More

 Telling your senator how to vote is as easy as “liking” a Facebook picture, thanks to a new app from the creators of TV streaming service SideReel. Countable, available for iOS and coming to Android soon, presents a succinct summary of each piece of legislation Congress is considering, along with a short one-sentence argument in favor of the bill or against it. You are then able… Read More

 Apple has reached an agreement with 33 states to pay as much as $400 million to consumers to settle the antitrust suit over e-book pricing. Including attorneys’ fees and payments to states, the company could pay a total of $450 million. However, the payment could be reduced, or eliminated entirely, depending on the results of Apple’s ongoing appeal. While a federal judge ruled… Read More

It’s a super-sedan that marries straight-line performance with unexpected utility at a price that undercuts its similarly power-mad German competitors.

Yes, it’s a keyboard for iOS that plugs into your iPhone or iPad via a meter-long cable. How is this the future? Why go back to being shackled?

 We’ve written about several attempts to rethink PR for startups, including PressFriendly (which offers customers a virtual “pitch builder”) and AirPR (which created a marketplace connecting startups and PR). A new firm called Publicize may not embrace a self-serve, tech-centric model quite as a fully, but it does have a pretty appealing price tag — its standard price… Read More

 The Techcrunch London Summer Meetup rolled into town this week as part of our Summer Tour to promote TechCrunch Disrupt in London on October 20-21. We had a bunch of brand new startups apply.
The pitch-off was judged by TechCrunch writers Ingrid Lunden and Natasha Lomas and myself, with Andy Chung of AngelList and James Governor of Shoreditch Works, our hosts. We were kindly supported by… Read More

 You can watch the World Cup final game on ESPN or Univision, but Snapchat is transporting all its users to Brazil today through clips of people celebrating in the streets or cheering from the stadium. With this bold test of its new collaborative Our Story feature, people in Rio De Janeiro can submit snaps to Riolive2014 which are curated by Snapchat into a feed anyone around the world can… Read More