Category: Tech news

 I’m a Soylent believer. If you know me personally, this may be hard for you to understand, given that my favorite foods are bread and cheese and that I feel Seamless should always win Best Overall Startup at the Crunchies every year until eternity. My love for Soylent — credited to both the taste and to the overall affect it has on my mental and physical energy — should be… Read More

 I want to play again. My arms are sore from shooting a virtual bow-and-arrow and slashing robots with a lightsaber. My heart is racing from dodging drone missiles and defending my teammate. And my mind is spinning from the possibilities. I want to play again. And I won’t be the only one. The game is called Raw Data by virtual reality startup Survios. It’s perhaps the most… Read More

 Back in October of 2015, Apple released a long awaited hardware update to the Apple TV — and with it, a shiny new Apple TV remote. You could speak to the remote to issue voice commands (“Siri, play Pitch Perfect 2. Yes, again. Don’t judge me, Siri. You don’t know me.”) and flick around a built-in trackpad for quick navigation. But long-time Apple TV users… Read More

 According to both The Hollywood Reporter, Beats co-founder and Apple executive Dr. Dre will be starring in and producing his own six-show original series called Vital Signs. The semi-autobiographical storyline is rumored to be distributed via Apple Music, includes other celebrities like Sam Rockwell and Mo McCrae, and contains “an orgy scene”. Read More

 Rocket Lab, the venture capital-backed space startup, is constructing the first private launch range in the world. The company told TechCrunch that they have secured Spire as its next customer for a launch later this year. While Rocket Lab has yet to fly its first commercial mission, Spire has made an agreement with the launch provider for an impressive 12 launches over the next 18 months once… Read More

 This week, Twitter rolled out its new algorithmic timeline, Tesla confirmed the price of its next car, Zenefits CEO Parker Conrad exited the company and on the science front, gravitational waves were detected in space. TechCrunch held the 9th Annual Crunchies awards show, which you can watch in full here. Or, you can just read about the winners. These are the top tech stories of the week to… Read More

 It hasn’t made sense for Google to continue to invest in two separate photo storage and sharing applications, as it has been doing with the newer Google Photos and the dated software Picasa. And now the company is finally going to do something about that: Google announced this morning that it will no longer support the Picasa desktop application as of March 16, 2016. In addition, it… Read More

 AWS attempted to enhance its high performance computing offering today when it purchased NICE, an Italian software and services company for an undisclosed price.
NICE provides a set of tools and technologies that were attractive to AWS, and brings with it an international clientele, which should help AWS expand its market with a set of customers who have high-end compute… Read More

 Life360, the mobile application designed for families, announced today that it has acquired the private messaging application and Y Combinator grad Couple (formerly known as Pair), based in Mountain View. Not a pure talent acquisition, Life360 sees Couple as being a potential initial entry point into its larger platform, which now counts over 55 million families using its location tracker… Read More

 When John Kim and his team were working on a community-based application called Smile Mom — which was designed to connect nearby moms — they ran into a problem: They wanted to integrate messaging, but couldn’t find an off-the-shelf solution they liked. Read More

 YouTube wants to win the love of musicians by solving their biggest problem: how to turn popularity into cash. So today it announced it’s acquired BandPage, a startup that helps artists show off and sell concert tickets, merchandise, and exclusive fan experiences. [Update: According to a source familiar with what BandPage shareholders were sent about the terms of the deal, the… Read More

 As the world’s big messaging apps add more features to keep their users locked in for longer, other apps are tapping into messaging features in the hopes of creating more stickiness of their own. In the latest development, Flipagram, the app that lets you sew together pictures and video snippets with one minute of music to create packaged stories, has added a direct messaging feature. Read More

 To many startups, search engine optimization (SEO) is a task that sits on their company’s back burner. With features to launch and customers to support, the idea of spending time fiddling with your title tags can seem like a fool’s errand. That’s especially true when there’s no guarantee that your hard work will result in a single additional visitor from Google. Read More

 Even Microsoft’s new image recognition app has no idea what kind of dog I have. Oh well! If you don’t own a mixed-breed mutt saved from the kill shelter, however, you might have fun with the company’s latest Microsoft Garage project: Fetch!, a new iPhone app that looks at photos of dogs to identify its breed. Or, in the case when it can’t make an exact match, the app… Read More

 While Google continues facing multiple antitrust probes at the European level, the company will be cheered today by a U.K. High Court decision that has ruled in its favor on a specific anticompetitive complaint. Read More