Category: Tech news

 I am a big fan of watching old stuff work again and video takes the proverbial IBM cake. The PS/2 Model 30 came out in the early 1990s and was one of the first machines with an Intel 286 CPU, a 10Mhz monster that could run Sierra games like a champ. And here it is springing to life as if Toad The Wet Sprocket was still big. The important thing is that this is a new-old-stock unit which means… Read More

 The European Union’s competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, has fired a warning shot about the competition risks posed by dominant tech platforms that harvest vast amounts of personal data, suggesting big data operators such as Google might in future be considered in breach of the region’s competition rules based on their data holdings. Vestager was giving a speech at… Read More

 As we head into the presidential primaries, there is no question big data and analytics will play a major role in targeting voters, driving contributions and ultimately determining who will be the next president. As we have transformed into a data-driven society and economy, this is to be expected. Read More

 Wahanda, the European hair and beauty marketplace that Japan’s Recruit Holdings majority acquired last year for $117 million (at a $240 million pre-money valuation), is getting a makeover of its own. Today the company has rebranded to Treatwell. The name comes from an acquisition made in June 2015 to expand its services in Holland, Germany and Belgium. The name change and brand… Read More

 Fred Destin on the main reasons startups fail and founders get fired; how he analyzes the VC/Founder relationship (with what he calls ‘founder intimacy’); his experience as a board member and investor at rocketship, Deliveroo, and why most VCs are assholes. Read More

 Owning a car is expensive. Gas, insurance, and other miscellaneous car-related costs add up, and mean that in some cities it’s already cheaper to replace your car with ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft. One startup, Wrapify, is trying to buck this trend by putting money back into the pocket of car owners. The 6 month old-old startup pairs drivers willing to wrap their car… Read More

 The battle between London’s black cabs and upstart incomer Uber has been a relatively subdued affair thus far — aside from the odd scuffle and some roadblocking demonstrations last year. Not for Brits the violent displays of anger seen over the channel in France last summer. Read More

 Netflix is now in Africa. In one fell swoop, CEO Reed Hastings took the company’s presence from 0 to 54 countries on the continent with his CES global expansion announcement.
The move was a surprise to Africa and its nascent video-on-demand (VOD) markets. Previous Netflix statements had only indicated South Africa as a maiden entry point. Read More

 Today at the DLD conference in Munich, Germany, the CEO of Facebook-owned WhatsApp made a couple of big announcements about how the messaging app plans to evolve to its next phase as it approaches 1 billion users: the company plans to drop its $0.99 annual subscription fee, and it will start to test out more commercial services — specifically a B2C business for companies to… Read More

 Alibaba isn’t the only e-commerce service in China with a financial services arm capable of raising large amounts of external funding. While Alibaba’s Ant Financial raised an undisclosed round last summer at a colossal $45-$50 billion valuation, its rival e-commerce giant JD.com’s money-focused unit is also in the money after it took in RMB 6.65 billion from a clutch of… Read More

 In late spring last year,  the Netherlands-based aerospace and defense giant Airbus Group announced a $150 million corporate venture capital fund. Today, that fund, Airbus Ventures, announced its first bet, on an eight-year-old, Phoenix-based company called Local Motors that uses 3D printing to make appliances and road-ready vehicles. Our interest piqued, we talked earlier today… Read More

 After some of our staff spent the past week at CES, TechCrunch is back reporting the hottest tech stories. This week, the U.S. government got serious about self-driving cars, Apple rolled out new software betas, and we uncovered evidence that Facebook has built a Messenger for Mac desktop app. These are our best stories. Read More

 Earlier this week I benefitted from a drop in Uber Pool pricing, noting my ride was a whole Starbucks medium-size latte less than Lyft Line. Lyft, fresh with a new billion dollars in funding, is now doing the same. Uber announced a reduction in price in more than 100 cities in the U.S. and Canada last week, most likely prompting Lyft to figure out the measures it would have to take to not lose… Read More

 Today was not a good day for tech stocks. Universally tech stocks crashed today alongside everything else, erasing billions in value across the board, as part of a bad day overall for the market. There’s not a whole lot of confidence throughout the market, but tech — even bellwethers like Apple — weren’t safe today. That being said, some stocks got particularly… Read More

 We’re super pleased to say that Emily Calandrelli has joined up with TechCrunch to cover space, science and everything STEM related. Emily, known as The Space Gal on Twitter, has an authoritative and entertaining voice in the space arena, something I’ve been wanting more of on TC for a while now. Emily is also a producer and the host of FOX’s Xploration Outer Space, a… Read More