Category: Tech news

 Adobe today showed off a new experimental tool, Project VoCo, at its annual MAX conference in San Diego. Project VoCo lets you edit speech as easily as text — and you can’t just edit existing text, you can even use the same voice model to create completely new recordings, too. Here is how this works: Project VoCo needs about 20 minutes of voice samples from a given speaker. It… Read More

 The 2016 Mercedes-Benz C350e plug-in hybrid sedan is not a Tesla fighter. It’s not even much of a Chevy Volt fighter. It is a very comfortable, very refined plug-in-hybrid mid-range Mercedes. So if that’s your jam, this is your car.
The C350e has a 2-liter gasoline engine and a 60-kW electric motor, for a combined 275 hp and 443 lb-ft of torque, which means quick merging on the… Read More

 There’s no shortage of competition in the housing space, but Apartment List is making a dent in rentals.
With more than 5 percent of America’s listings already on the site, the startup is raising $30 million in a round led by Canaan Partners to take the business to the next level.
“Our goal was to bring as much inventory to consumers as possible,” CEO John Kobs told… Read More

 Expectations were already incredibly low for GoPro this go around and yet somehow the company managed to eclipse even the worst fears of analysts. The company’s stock trading was halted prior to the release of results that missed revenue expectations by 23 percent and nearly $75 million. When trading began again, shares were down 22 percent. This means that, in a matter of minutes,… Read More

 Zarget announced yesterday that it has raised $6 million in Series A funding. Co-founder and CEO Arvind Parthiban said Zarget’s goal is to build a full suite of products for small businesses to track and optimize websites — one that could be used by “a tech-savvy marketer like me, without any coding skills.” The product’s capabilities include A/B testing,… Read More

 More than 90 percent of all phishing emails are now ransomware. The average amount paid via ransomware has grown from $40 in 2009 to $1,000 in 2016. This amount will grow even faster as ransomware moves to enterprise. Read More

 TechCrunch Include Office Hours are happening in SF on November 15th! Vanessa Larco, Pete Sonsini and Rick Yang of NEA will join TechCrunch to provide advice and feedback to startups. Launched in 2014, Include is TechCrunch’s diversity program, aimed at facilitating opportunities for underrepresented groups in tech to take their startups to the next level. The Office Hours program is… Read More

 In many ways, virtual reality is still a moonshot. The $2 billion acquisition of Oculus by Facebook in 2014 lent the neo-futurist hobby a decidedly shortened timeline for consumer adoption. To the tech titans operating alongside it, the purchase was a signal. Mobile’s most prominent success story was setting its eyes on what could possibly be the next platform shift. To the… Read More

 Fish oil. Protein shakes. Vitamin D pills. The packages look alike. Does it matter which you buy? It certainly does, according to Labdoor, a four-year-old, South San Francisco-based startup that tests about 50 supplements and energy drinks each month that it buys off retail shelves, then ranks for consumers. What it finds might intrigue you. Vitamin C degrades in water, for example, so… Read More

 Mark Zuckerberg’s drive to “put video first” is also putting money in Facebook’s pockets. The more organic videos Facebook users watch, the more high-priced video ads Facebook can slip into the feed. Now Facebook’s strategy around auto-play video, paying Live content producers and offering more creative tools is helping to propel its massive revenue growth. Read More

 Amazon’s investment in its own private label products has been paying off, according to a new report out today. The retailer now competes with vendors via its own products in over a dozen categories, including computer accessories, home goods, pet supplies, grocery items, and more. In some categories, Amazon has even established itself as the online category leader, the report indicates.… Read More

 Senator Al Franken has some questions for Uber and Lyft about racial discrimination following the recently released study that says some of those companies’ respective drivers racially discriminate against passengers. The study, conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that black people have to wait longer for rides in Seattle. In Boston, the study revealed that… Read More

 Google has now formally responded to two antitrust charges brought against it by Europe’s Competition Commission, rebutting charges of exploiting the popularity of its search engine to boost its price comparison service, Google Shopping, and its ad placement service, AdSense. Read More

 CoreOS introduced a new container management concept today known as Operators, which they say will advance the Kubernetes project by offering more automated container management. What’s more, they are open sourcing the technology. “We are introducing the concept of an ‘Operator.’ It’s a concept for taking a lot of the knowledge an engineer [or developer] has inside… Read More

 Been a while since we’ve heard much about the Gear S3. Since it was first shown off back in August at IFA, Apple has announced and released their own new offering and, of course, Samsung’s been slightly preoccupied with other things. But fear not, the super-sized smartwatch will be arriving in time for the holidays. Pre-orders start November 6 and the device will be hitting… Read More