Category: Tech news

 Virtual reality’s breakthrough moment might not be gaming. Claude Zellweger from HTC, Dr. Richard Marks from Sony, Paul Raphaël from Felix and Paul Studios took the stage with our own Drew Olanoff at Disrupt SF to talk about virtual reality. These VR experts had a lot of things to say about the content that should hit your favorite VR headset in the coming years. Read More

 Stitch, a central messaging hub for healthcare providers, is launching today on stage at Disrupt to cut down on the $11 billion that U.S. hospitals waste each year due to breakdowns in communication. You can think of Stitch as Slack for healthcare, except channels are organized around individual patients instead of teams or departments. When a patient checks in, the front desk can set up a… Read More

 Hardware startups are really cool and Brady Forrest has brought more of them to market than anyone we know. Now he and Dave McClure are the stars of Bazillion Dollar Club, a new show on SyFy that is showing exactly what it’s like to living inside a high-pressure startup. Forrest and McClure are the Jason and Thetis of the startup straits and are doing a bang-up job. I sat down with… Read More

 Rise made its name in the world of health apps as a platform for people to connect with human coaches, to help them tailor their lifestyle and eating choices to lose weight. Now, Rise is adding in a new feature that it hopes will help it scale to a much bigger audience. Today, the company is taking the wraps off of CoachLine, a new real-time personal assistant that will let anyone… Read More

 Independent retailers often have a hard time finding and retaining qualified employees. TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield participant Staffly, a startup created by husband and wife team Bjorn and Marissa Ovick, wants to make it easy for them to fill their staffing needs. Staffly has created a digital temp agency of sorts in which retailers find staff, employees find work and Staffly runs… Read More

 Most startups struggle when it comes to understanding the underlying financial metrics that typically determine the success or failure of their business. At the same time, they are often keeping the books in online tools with easily accessible data. Leap Financial,  a startup participating in the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield competition this week, wants to make it easy to connect to… Read More

 Tech has changed almost every aspect of our lives, from shopping to transportation. But despite the enormous amount of money Americans spend on healthcare, many treatments are decades old. In an onstage conversation with TechCrunch’s Sarah Buhr at Disrupt today, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers partner Beth Seidenberg said “healthcare is really the last industry to be… Read More

 Virtual reality company Felix & Paul Studios announced Monday onstage at Disrupt SF the launch of a separate division focused on 3D, 360-degree sound mixing. Led by Jean-Pascal Beaudoin, Headspace Studios will bring the sound editing technology and innovation used in Felix & Paul productions to other leading VR companies. The studio is the first to focus only on 3D sound for VR… Read More

 Good things are coming this month, and I don’t just mean our Disrupt San Francisco event. That’s because Google just pulled the trigger on invites to a press event later this month which could see it unveil its next Nexus device, among other things. Read More

Hard to believe that Disrupt SF is just around the corner! TechCrunch has partnered with an amazing array of sponsors who promise to make your experience at the conference better and better. Party with TechCrunch and Cheetah Mobile: Join us on Monday for the Official After Party at Mighty, sponsored by our friends at Cheetah Mobile. Party with TechCrunch and Intuit: Join us on Tuesday for… Read More

 Hello fellow disrupters, and welcome to another episode of CrunchWeek, TechCrunch’s weekly roundup show where we talk the biggest things in tech. This week we’re chatting about iOS 9 landing, WatchOS2 not, Facebook’s working on a not-dislike emoji button and people are rainbow barfing all over Snapchat. Also, we invite Ahmed to join us in the TechCrunch studio the next time… Read More

 As Bill Gurley (General Partner at Benchmark Capital and board member of Uber) notes, Uber will be the dominant player in the ride-hailing business. Why? Because Uber’s business model is predicated on localized marketplaces of supply and demand for drivers. These localized marketplaces create strong network effects and “winner-take-most” markets. Read More

 On Wednesday night, at an event in San Francisco, Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg answered a wide range of questions in conversation with one of the earliest investors in the company, Tony Conrad of True Ventures. (Conrad is also the cofounder and CEO of the self-expression platform About.me.)
One of the most interesting aspects of the talk touched on the future of an internal… Read More

 Microsoft released a new Windows 10 build to the ‘fast ring’ of its operating system testing community today. The new code, dubbed build 10547, has quite a lot to it, including improvements to the Start Menu, better Cortana coverage, and a number of app updates. In short, if you are the testing sort, there will be ample material present for you to dig into. Read More

 Another move by a large company to up its stakes in the world of open source technologies: Payments giant First Data Corporation has acquired Spree Commerce, an open source storefront platform originally based on Ruby on Rails. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed — we are trying to find out — but Spree’s CEO Sean Schofield says in a blog post confirming the deal that… Read More