Category: Tech news

 Military-style fixed-wing drones are easy to launch, but difficult to land; DARPA aims to change that with SideArm, a portable drone-grabbing system that snatches the fast-moving craft right out of the air. Read More

 Google today is rolling out a change to its AMP integration in Google Search that will let you view, copy and share the publisher’s own link to the webpage in question, instead of the AMP URL. The decision to make this change follows some backlash from publishers who believed Google was stealing their traffic by changing their own URLs to those that had “Google” in… Read More

 Fintech is rapidly being adopted in China and is spurring consumption, both domestically in China and internationally. I interviewed the CEOs of three companies in China that are using fintech to boost purchases, ranging from daily necessities to international real estate transactions. Read More

 Sous vide Kickstarter darling Anova announced over the weekend that Swedish appliance giant Electrolux has agreed to purchase the cooking hardware startup for $250 million. The Anova brand will remain intact under the deal, retaining its name and the leadership of co-founder and CEO Stephan Svajian, existing as a part of the larger Electrolux umbrella. “With Electrolux, we’ll have… Read More

 Late last month, Samsung continued its prolonged Note 7 apology tour with a global press conference detailing months of internal and third-party research, coupled withplans to increase its safety measures moving forward. While all of that self-humbling seems to have gone a ways toward appeasing a portion of the smartphone-buying public, the company’s home country of South Korea (which… Read More

Travis Kalanick quits the Trump advisory board, Domino’s updates its Facebook Messenger bot in time for the Super Bowl, GoPro and Amazon have a rough day on Wall Street and Medium plans to monetize. All this on Crunch Report. Read More

 President Trump’s executive order banning travelers from seven countries could be over just one chaotic week after its hasty introduction. That’s because a federal judge from Seattle has obtained a restraining order which looks set to overrule the order with nationwide effect. The ruling came after U.S. states Washington and Minnesota filed legal action against the order on… Read More

 It began shortly after lunch. The texts appeared, first a trickle. It wasn’t long before the deluge began in earnest. “A friend* added you on ChitChat,” they said. “Tap here … to get it,” they said. WTF is chitchat? — Willis F Jackson III (@wfjackson3) February 4, 2017 What ChitChat is I’m not prepared to say, as I refuse to download it.… Read More

 After failing to secure another round of funding and shutting down my startup, Katch, I’ve been thinking about candor. While failure isn’t a unique story in our industry, talking about it is. Of course, I don’t advocate dwelling on one’s failures as a key to success, but paradoxically I found the quickest path to moving forward from my startup’s demise was to… Read More

 Connections between the Obama administration and Silicon Valley abound, but particularly for Josh Kushner. The latest? Kushner’s venture firm Thrive Capital just hired Josh Miller, a member of the White House Office of Digital Strategy under President Barack Obama.
Miller, just 24 when he left Facebook to serve as the White House director of product, starts Monday at Thrive and… Read More

 The FCC giveth, and the FCC taketh away… from itself. Chairman Ajit Pai has ordered the revocation of several papers and findings issued by the commission before the turnover to the new administration. Spiking investigations into zero-rating practices by telecoms is the most serious about-face, but it’s worth noting the other items going down the memory hole, unannounced, on a… Read More

 Make way for one more pivot from Jawbone. The fitness band maker that originally started out in headsets and later made speakers, has abandoned selling and supporting consumer hardware following a deluge poor reviews and media reports that it has run out of money. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Jawbone is preparing to shift its business yet again — moving from a focus… Read More

 Greenlight, a three-year-old, Atlanta, Ga.-based startup, is trying to solve a problem that any parent of an elementary or junior high school student can well understand: how to give kids money without worrying that they’ll lose it or spend it on something they shouldn’t.
It isn’t the first reloadable, prepaid card. MasterCard, Visa and American Express each offer… Read More

 There’s a new FCC in town and it isn’t wasting any time. Mobile carriers can rest easy today knowing that the Federal Communications Commission is no longer pursuing an investigation into mobile plans that don’t count services like streaming video or music against a user’s data consumption. The practice is more commonly known as zero-rating. Providers putting… Read More

 Ford opened a location that it’s calling the FordHub in the Westfield World Trade Center mall this week — but you won’t be able to buy any cars there. Instead, the location includes a large screen highlighting different ways (bike, subway and otherwise) to reach New York City landmarks, a ramp-and-marble model that illustrates the idea of traffic congestion and another… Read More