Category: Tech news

 ZeeMee, a platform that wants to help students bring their college applications to life, told TechCrunch exclusively Thursday it had raised a Series A round of $5.8 million led by BlueRun Ventures. Prospective college students today have been on social media for most of their adolescence. ZeeMee wants to help those students use the medium they know so well to showcase talents and interests… Read More

 Last week at Disrupt SF 2015, I ran into the folks behind Sereneti Kitchen, a company that I’ve known since it launched at our Hardware Battlefield in Vegas earlier this year. Then, its technology had promise, but less polish. In the interim, the firm went through the Highway1 accelerator and wanted to show off what it has been up to. Read More

 Uber has over 5,000 drivers and 500,000 users since launching in Brazil a year ago, and aggression by politicians and taxi drivers alike has been mounting in lockstep with its growth. Read More

 As consumers, we can probably agree that bank profits are, well, gross. In the second quarter of this year alone, U.S. lenders wrung a record $43 billion from their customers. It’s the kind of stat that a small but growing two-year-old, L.A.-based investment company called Aspiration is increasingly using to gain new customers. In the words of cofounder and CEO Andrei Cherney,… Read More

 Sad news for those who like free stuff – Klout Perks, the swag offered by social media scoring platform Klout, has quietly shut down. Lithium Technologies, the company that bought Klout more than a year ago confirmed it ended the Perks program in a statement to TechCrunch today. “Klout’s real strengths lie in its algorithm and wealth of social data,” wrote… Read More

 When a new technology comes out, people are generally good at seeing through the hype that is associated with it. Many technological inventions, after all, are not immediately revolutionary — despite what clever marketers might want you to believe. However, people are often bad about seeing through the outsized claims from another type of clever marketer: professional privacy advocates… Read More

 Does the idea of a transforming vegetables into noodles sound weird but kind of appetizing? Well, that’s what a startup called Hungryroot is offering, and now it’s expanding. The company launched earlier this year with operations in New York’s Long Island City. Co-founder and CEO Ben McKean told me Hungryroot recently opened a similar facility in San Francisco — so it… Read More

 Imagine the Snapchat selfie Lens above branded with Iron Man 4. How much would Marvel pay to let Snapchatters Iron Man themselves and send these pics and videos to friends the weekend the movie opens? Apparently as much as $750,000 for one peak day like a holiday, according to a report of an upcoming new Snapchat ad format from the Financial Times. And imagine how much more Marvel would pay… Read More

 Can we lobby for the future? Garrett Johnson, the founder of the conservative think tank Lincoln Labs, thinks that we should. Read More

 When members of the Congressional Black Caucus visited Silicon Valley in early August, their message to tech companies was crystal clear: Hire more African-Americans and diversify their boards of directors. Well, it looks like Apple was listening. Earlier today, the company announced the addition of James Bell, former CFO and president of The Boeing Company, to its board of directors. Bell,… Read More

 In a anti-competitive move that bumps up against one of Amazon’s core principles – “customer obsession” – the online retailer confirmed today that it would no longer allow the sales of some competing media players, including Apple TV and Chromecast, on its shopping site. Specifically, the company informed its marketplace sellers by way of email that no new… Read More

 Imagine a reality where surgeons practice difficult procedures on virtual renditions of their patients before walking into the operating room, and professional athletes review their exact muscle movements on a 3D game tape after they walk off the field.
Now that BioDigital, a 3D human body modeling startup, is releasing its API to the public, this is possible. Read More

 Six years ago, Paul Niehaus and Michael Faye were two Harvard-trained development economists who began a small, private experiment in East Africa. Instead of donating food, bedding or medical care or offering high-interest micro-finance loans, their model was just to give families cash. They gave families unconditional, cash grants of about $1,000 — or the equivalent of a… Read More

 When Microsoft settled its patent lawsuits with Google yesterday, it ended a long battle with the search giant, but it wasn’t an isolated action. It was part of a continuing pattern of serving its customers instead of its corporate ego. Whether it’s evolving agreements with Apple, Salesforce or Box or putting an end to senseless lawsuits, Microsoft is attempting to… Read More

 When YouTube first launched its dedicated “Kids” app earlier this year, parents welcomed the opportunity to be able to keep their children away from the more adult content found on the larger YouTube network, thanks to the new app’s curated selection of kid-friendly videos. But the app soon came under fire from consumer watchdog groups who claimed YouTube was not doing enough… Read More