Category: Tech news

 Magazine publisher Condé Nast is hiring a new vice president to run its emerging products group — Arlie Sisson, who’s joining from Starwood Hotels and Resorts.
Sisson led Starwood’s strategy for native apps on mobile, and before that, worked at mobile startup Silver Chalice New Media. Read More

 We first met the folks at MarkForged at CES where they showed us their printer that could create nearly unbreakable objects. By weaving carbon fiber between layers of plastic, the team made some of the coolest 3D printed objects we’ve ever seen. I went to Boston where we met MarkForged’s founder Greg Mark who walked us through his workshop from start to finish. There we saw… Read More

 Damn. We see a lot of really cool DIY projects pass through these parts, but this one is probably the coolest I’ve seen in a long while. The Apple Watch is coming out in a few days. You knew that — you read TechCrunch/have the Internet/don’t live under a rock/etc. Looking to wrap something a bit more unique around his wrist, Instructables user Aleator777 put together a watch… Read More

 If you’re big on YouTube or Vine or whatever, a startup called FanBread aims to help you make money — specifically by building and monetizing a website of your very own. The company is only emerging from stealth mode today, but founder and CEO Karl House told me he’s done something similar before, when he served as head of sales and business development at YouTube network… Read More

 Andy Jassy, senior vice president at Amazon Web Services, announced a new machine learning platform today at the AWS Summit in San Francisco.
The Amazon Machine Learning service is designed to give developers without machine learning background the tools to build smart, data-driven applications that can not only analyze what’s happening in real time or what happened in the past, but… Read More

 We’ve been stuck in stereo for too long. Ambisonics is the future of audio, where sound can come from any direction in a 3D space. But there are few places to listen to this type of music, and it’s even harder for artists to create it. That’s why a team of top-notch engineers are Kickstarting ‘Envelop’, an open source ambisonic music composition platform, and… Read More

 Today we’re pleased to announce that Chris Dixon, a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz, will be joining us at Disrupt NY. This is great news, and let me tell you why. Usually venture capitalists are pretty boring. They generally wear khakis while on the hunt for whatever the next Uber-for-X or Airbnb-for-Y will be. They know what all the hot new messaging apps are, and have… Read More

 When Cyclone Pam hit Vanuatu, it struck a very vulnerable target. The Pacific nation is considered one of the world’s poorest and is ranked by the United Nations’ WorldRiskIndex as the most disaster-prone country. Yet for a storm significantly stronger than Hurricane Katrina, Cyclone Pam resulted in a relatively low number of casualties. Early warnings helped save scores of… Read More

 With Disrupt NY 2015 only a month away, we thought it’d be fun to look back at the winner of the Disrupt NY 2014 Hackathon to see what they’ve been up to in the last year. As you may recall, the virtual reality app Vrban took home the grand prize.
So, where is last year’s Hackathon winner now? Read More

 Fantasy sports is big business. Fantasy esports is a smaller, but quickly growing younger sibling. Vulcun, currently boasting a multi-million-dollar prize pool, wants to make fantasy esports the next big thing, and now has the cash on hand to pull off its dream: A host of venture capital firms and angels just participated in a $12 million Series A round of capital for the company. I spoke… Read More

 At its AWS Summit in San Francisco, Amazon today announced the launch of the Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), a new storage service that provides a common file system for multiple EC2 virtual machines on AWS through the standard NFSv4 protocol. This new service will launch into preview in the “near future.” Read More

 The clock is counting down to Disrupt New York (May 4 – May 6, if we’re getting specific) and that means early bird pricing for tickets is about to expire.
The window closes on Friday and once it does, prices will go up by $1,000 so consider this fair warning. Get out ahead of this.
Disrupt New York is set to be TechCrunch’s best conference yet, with a speakers list that… Read More

 Apple Watch buyers will have to queue virtually in order to buy the device, at least initially. A press release this morning from the company reveals that the first batch of Apple Watch orders will only be collected via the Apple Store application for iOS devices and the online Apple store site. Apple head of retail Angela Ahrendts confirmed this plan in the press release announcing pre-sales… Read More

 Saavn, the India-focused music streaming service, has launched a big update for its mobile apps today that adds a raft of new social and sharing features.
The service, which Saavn told TechCrunch is nearing 13 million monthly active users, now allows people to follow friends’ profiles, playlists and activity; users can also follow general playlists for updates, as well as artists and… Read More

 The Google Cultural Institute offers an impressive online library of art from museums from all over the world. While the project’s website has long featured the ability to use Street View to browse museums, all of the actual art, including statues, was only represented through high-resolution photographs. Starting today, however, Google will also feature almost 300 3D scans of objects… Read More