Category: Tech news

 Remember 2012, when we called it the “Twitter Election” due to Obama’s skill in exploiting the fledgling platform? It seems almost quaint now. 2016 will be remembered as the election where the power of Twitter was revealed in full as a platform that can enable an individual with little formal organization to bypass media institutions and speak directly to a populace all the… Read More

 The latest in soft robotics and shrinking sensors enables limbs and digits with ever-increasing levels of sensation and realism. At the same time, 3D printing is making it possible to bring sophisticated designs to the underprivileged and geographically isolated. Po is a company pursuing the latter goal, making custom prostheses for people who might otherwise have never gotten anything at all. Read More

 Google today announced that it has acquired Qwiklabs, a hands-on learning platform for those who want to become more familiar with operating cloud environments and writing applications that run on them. Qwiklabs, which launched in 2012, has only focused on teaching skills for Amazon’s AWS platform so far. Given AWS’ dominance in the marketplace, that made perfect sense. Amazon… Read More

 On-demand food delivery startup Munchery has a new chief executive officer. James Beriker, the former CEO of Simply Hired, is taking the place of Munchery co-founder Tri Tran, who is now the company’s chief strategy officer, the company announced today. The appointment comes on the same day Bloomberg reported that Munchery has struggled to improve its margins, makes more food than it… Read More

 Just from patterns of motion, your smart devices know when you’re walking, when you’re riding a bike and when you lift your wrist to check the time. But it turns out they can also tell when you snap or make a fist, or whether you’re holding a smartphone or steering wheel. All they have to do is listen a little harder — well, about 100 times harder, actually. Read More

 RapidAPI, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based startup that enables developers to find, test, and manage many of the APIs they want to integrate into their apps, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by Martin Casado at Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from FundersClub, SV Angel, Green Bay Advisors, and 500 Startups, whose accelerator program it recently passed… Read More

 Theranos competitor Genalyte just announced it has raised an equity round of $36 million in funding led by Khosla Ventures and Redmile Group. The San Diego-based startup leverages lab-on-a-chip technology it says can run through up to 128 different tests on a single finger prick of blood in under 15 minutes using what it calls its Maverick Detection Platform. Genalyte’s proprietary… Read More

 Moms are some of the greatest, smartest and kindest people in the world. (Trust me: I’m a mom. ) And if you are thinking of showing your appreciation for the moms in your life this holiday season with a gift, have we got the gift guide for you, mother lovers! Read More

 President-elect Trump has made it clear that he is more than a little hostile towards the FCC’s implementation of net neutrality, both in his own words and, today, the appointment of two long-time adversaries of the policy to his transition team. Read More

 More people are cutting the cord with pay TV in favor of streaming services, but finding something to watch is growing more difficult – not only because of rights deals which see content coming and going, but also because there’s now a wider array of services to choose from. A startup called Reelgood wants to help, and is today launching a centralized platform for web users,… Read More

 BuzzFeed just announced that it has raised another $200 million from NBCUniversal. That might sound a little familiar, since the company raised a round of the same size last year. Plus, Recode reported last month that NBCUniversal was doubling down, and the news seemed to be confirmed by a Delaware filing. The funding release points to past collaborations between the two companies, like… Read More

 For those with hearing issues, simple dinner table group conversations can be pretty painful to stay on top of. Ava is aiming to bring deaf and hard-of-hearing people back into group conversations with their threaded speech-to-text application that gives people with hearing issues an easy way to stay on top of a conversation. The app, formerly known as Transcence, starts with each participant… Read More

 Tech and politics need a translator — at least according to Jamie Corley and Christyn Lansing, founders of The Bridge. Corley and Lansing have worked in both worlds — each of them, for example, has served as press secretary for a US senator (Bob Corker and Rob Portman, respectively), while Lansing was also communications director at Politico. They told me they got the idea for… Read More

 Welcome to the 2016 TechCrunch Holiday Gift Guide! We’ll be rolling out a bunch of guides leading up to Christmas, hopefully making your holiday shopping a little easier. Your dad is great. Your dad is smart. The one thing he probably isn’t, however, is easy to shop for. Yeah, yeah, you could get him another tie or a gift card to Home Depot or something and call it a day …… Read More

 Livestreaming doesn’t have to be a big performance or a one-on-one video call. Just ask the one million people who spend 20 million minutes hanging out each day on group video chat app Houseparty, the latest teen app phenomenon.
Built from the ashes of Meerkat, Houseparty is leading the charge for a new kind of synchronous social networking. It’s the closest thing to being with… Read More