Category: Tech news

 Virtual reality can deliver on its promise to bring new and immersive experiences to the masses, but the current iteration of hardware will need to evolve first. Read More

 A company called Laugh.ly wants to make streaming sets from the best comedians as easy as streaming music on Pandora. Though not yet available to the public, Laugh.ly’s iOS application will allow users to follow both big-name comedians like Louis C.K., Kevin Hart, Aziz Ansari and Amy Schumer, among others, as well as emerging stand-up comics looking for a way to grow and monetize their… Read More

 A month before Disrupt, Yu Zhou sent us an email titled, “We want to help solve the Flint water problem.” WaterO’s CEO wasn’t claiming to have the catchall solution to the lead problem plaguing the Michigan city, but his company was in a unique position to lend a hand. Since then, the Los Angeles-based startup announced it has teamed up with the charity WATERisLIFE to… Read More

 Most businesses live or die on Google search rankings. If you can’t crack the top few results, it’s almost impossible to consistently drive organic traffic to your site. But how does Google decide which sites appear at the top of the results list? It uses Googlebot, a proprietary automated software script to “crawl” every website on the Internet and create an index… Read More

 Artveoli is a biotech startup that’s building an air purifying device that aims to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen in indoor environments by harnessing the photosynthetic properties of algae. The startup is officially launching at TechCrunch Disrupt New York. Read More

 OverNest, a startup that was launched just over a year ago by several technology industry veterans, announced its first product, called GitZero, today at the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield competition in Brooklyn, NY — and it’s a pretty exciting product that makes encrypted code searchable. It’s widely known that you should be encrypting your data. It prevents prying… Read More

 We’re heading into summer, but the chilly relationship between government bodies and private tech businesses is growing frostier by the day. In the latest development, it has emerged that Twitter requested one of its key B2B partners, Dataminr — a service that offers advanced social media analytics and early detection of major events like terrorist attacks or natural… Read More

 As self-driving cars are not quite ready yet, bike accidents are still a thing, unfortunately. Sometimes, stupid monkey brains can’t see someone riding a bike. Lumenus wants to fix that with smart clothes and accessories for runners, cyclists and motorcyclists. The company is taking part in our Startup Battlefield competition at TechCrunch Disrupt NY. Read More

 Facebook says it’s against the company’s curation policy to suppress or prioritize specific political views in its Trending topics, and that it has guidelines in place to preserve consistency and neutrality there. This would imply that blame for any deviation from these guidelines would belong to the contractors paid to curate the trends it shows, though there might not have… Read More

 Today, Uber and Lyft took their ride-hailing services offline in Austin, Texas, leaving drivers scrambling for other means of making income, and riders stranded or seeking another mode of transportation.
Here’s why: this week, Austin voters upheld a rule that would require Uber, Lyft and other transportation network companies there to do fingerprint-based background checks of their… Read More

 There’s no shortage of ways to get a satisfactory caffeine fix these days, and some of them are mighty high-tech. Spinn Coffee’s new machine, demonstrated on stage at Disrupt NY today, claims one of the most high-tech of all — but this elaborate centrifugal brewing method may be the most versatile as well. Read More

 Halo Neuroscience wants to build a new category of wearable. Not for passively tracking human activity, as so many existing wearables are, but for actively and positively influencing physical abilities — or that’s the claim — using an existing neurostimulation technique called transcranial direct current stimulation. The team demoed their wearable on stage today, here at… Read More

 What if finding a job were as easy as playing a game? Scoutible thinks its smartphone games have what it takes to assess the aptitude and traits required for certain professions. The company launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York on Monday. With work experience at the White House, Goldman Sachs and a JD/MBA from Harvard under her belt, Scoutible CEO Angela Antony thinks she has what it… Read More

 Practically everyone who has ever considered a tattoo knows the old parental refrain of “you’ll have it forever.” It’s a fairly stark warning tinged with the regret of a generation covered in inked relics of disco and popular culture past. Some temporary solutions do exist, including the relatively recent phenomenon of the two-week tattoo (along with some other… Read More

 Jeet Raut’s mom was told she no longer had breast cancer. But it turned out to be a false diagnosis and she had to undergo further treatment. She’s okay now, but that medical mistake could have cost her life — and it gave Raut the idea to build a better way to catch medical abnormalities in the body. He and his co-founder Peter Wakahiu Njenga created Behold.ai to expedite… Read More