Category: Tech news

 Dart is not coming to Chrome, Google announced today. The lingua franca of the web is JavaScript, but with Dart, Google launched a project that effectively aimed to replace JavaScript. In Google’s view, Dart offered advantages like static typing and other features that made it a better choice for developers. The idea was for Google and other browser vendors to integrate Dart right into… Read More

Okay, I’ll admit it: I don’t cook much, and when I do, it’s usually something simple like eggs or pasta. I’d like to be more adventurous, I swear, but every time I try to follow a fancy recipe, I always end up covered in sweat and/or tears. That’s why I’m eager to try out recipes from a new startup called Kitchenbowl, which is announcing today that it has… Read More

 At its F8 developer conference, Facebook today announced the launch of ComponentKit, a new Objective-C library the company built to improve the performance of its iOS app. As Facebook notes, ComponentKit uses a functional and declarative approach to building user interfaces that focuses on one-way data flow from immutable models. As Facebook engineer Daria Stroganova noted in a session at… Read More

 Transcriptic, the cloud-based biotech lab that tests for experimental drugs automation and robotics, has become a key platform for many biotech companies in Silicon Valley. The platform has been particularly useful for many of the biotech companies now coming out of Y Combinator. These startups don’t have the deep pockets of big pharma and need a low-cost solution that produces… Read More

 The MLB’s streaming arm, MLB Advanced Media, was founded in 2000 and has been streaming live video to the web longer than anyone. MLBAM got so good at live that it’s been tapped by HBO, Sony, ESPN and many others to handle their streaming efforts. That’s why we’re happy to announce that Bob Bowman, president of Business & Media for MLB, will be coming to Disrupt NY… Read More

 mDrawBots, a Kickstarter project from MakeBlock, are very reminiscent of old-timey Erector sets with one interesting difference: These robots can actually do cool stuff. Designed to be customizable, the kits allow you to build robots that will draw on walls and floors, and even draw sassy little faces on eggs. The robot moves around each surface like an ink plotter, laying down a line here… Read More

 The all-American ‘rags to riches’ story is one that many can identify with or find inspiration from — going from sleeping in your car to owning more than you hate to admit, or coming from humble beginnings only to reach fame and fortune. Entrepreneurship is the vehicle of this story, where we have the power to make something from nothing. Read More

 This week, Chris Velazco joins us to discuss the HTC One M9, which he got to review over at Engadget. The company’s new smartphone looks pretty similar to last year’s model on the outside, but HTC also revamped the camera. I’d argue that this is hardly the time for modest upgrades for HTC, but Chris gives us some insight into what they were thinking. We then leap logically… Read More

 The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published a comment today pushing against a rising media narrative that it may have gone too easy on Google during its multi-year antitrust probe on the search company’s ranking of results to benefit its own products. In the end, Google agreed to change some of its business practices, and the FTC closed its investigation. Read More

 Today marked the first day of F8, Facebook’s annual developer conference, and the company announced a ton of stuff!
Some of it is bigger than others, though — so we’ve wrapped up all the most important stuff from today in one easy-to-digest list. Enjoy! Read More

 Amazon’s Angie’s List competitor, called “Amazon Local Services,” has been rebranded as “Amazon Home Services” ahead of a larger launch happening Monday, sources familiar with the plans tell TechCrunch. The site, which previously featured only a limited number of service offerings in a handful of select markets, has also recently expanded to include a… Read More

 Flirting can be hard, especially through a screen. But these guys never had a chance, considering they were chatting with other heterosexual male users as part of a clever technological ruse. A hack on Tinder isn’t anything new. More tech-savvy folks have actually dug into the app to automatically swipe right on every potential match, and then there are all the marketers that are… Read More

 Y Combinator unveiled one of its most impressive startup batches to date yesterday, featuring big ideas in medicine, finance, and marketplaces. After carefully watching the demos, speaking with founders in the class, and querying prestigious investors about their favorites, TechCrunch has compiled this list of the top 10 startups of the 47 that launched at Winter 2015 YC Demo Day 2. Here they… Read More

 We demystified it last month, but Facebook’s $18 billion acquisition of WhatsApp should begin to make more sense to people today after the company announced that its Messenger service will become a platform for third parties — as TechCrunch first reported last week.
The Messenger Platform will allow developers to deeplink their apps into Messenger, and it will also become a… Read More

 Parse, the platform-as-a-service company Facebook acquired in 2013, today revealed a couple of new features at Facebook’s F8 developer conference in San Francisco: Parse for IoT, Enhanced Sessions to improve app security, support for React and a new debugging tool. Out of these, the IoT announcement would have come as quite a surprise if Facebook hadn’t spoiled its own… Read More