Category: Tech news

 Nextdoor just became the latest private tech company to join the swelling ranks of the billion-dollar valuation club.
The San Francisco startup, which runs a social network for people to interact with others who live in their physical neighborhoods, announced today it has raised $110 million in new funding. Nextdoor has confirmed that the raise was conducted at a $1.11 billion post-money… Read More

 Smartbike startup Vanhawks, part of the Y Combinator Winter 2015 class, has raised $1.6 million from Real Ventures, Olympic triathlon gold medallist Simon Whitfield, Brenda Irwin of Relentless Pursuit partners and various angels. The company will use the funding to help deliver its Valour smartbike, which raised over $820,000 on Kickstarter last year, to its first customers starting this spring. Read More

 This is common and one of the chief concerns Garmin is addressing with the Fenix 3. It looks and works like a normal watch. Just don’t call it a smartwatch. It sports some basic smartwatch functionality, but it’s mainly a glorified activity tracker. And I like it. After two weeks, I’m still wearing it, which is one of the biggest endorsements I can give a product. Basics… Read More

 Samsung and Oculus have been treating Gear VR and the Oculus Rift in a similar manner, meaning both pieces of hardware are clearly labeled as developer or enthusiast devices, and not meant for the general public. Oculus CTO John Carmack said Gear VR will get a proper, full consumer launch with Samsung’s next hardware cycle, however. This was Samsung’s desire with the most recent… Read More

 Xbox head Phil Spencer is at GDC today to give a talk on the future of gaming and game development on the Windows and Xbox platforms. Read More

 Google is launching the first public beta of Cloud Pub/Sub today, its backend messaging service that makes it easier for developers to pass messages between machines and to gather data from smart devices. It’s basically a scalable messaging middleware service in the cloud that allows developers to quickly pass information between applications, no matter where they’re hosted.… Read More

 This new gadget is called simply the Nvidia Shield, which means the company probably wants it to lead the lineup that also includes the Shield Tablet and Shield Portable, and it’s powered by the new Tegra X1 processor Nvidia debuted at CES this year. More important than all that, however, is that it’s a delivery mechanism for Grid, the streaming game service introduced by Nvidia… Read More

 Modern medicine has seen some amazing technological advances. Heart surgeries that used to be all day open-heart procedures requiring long hospital stays can now be performed as arthroscopic outpatient procedures in a few hours. Tattoos can monitor vital signs, and contact lenses can monitor glucose levels. In a third-world country, you can get the results of an AIDS test in minutes at the cost… Read More

 Each week on Tuesday, John Biggs and I are lucky enough to get the opportunity to take over an hour of radio time on Sirius XM. We discuss the latest in tech news, chat with important people in the industry, and then get into the best part of all: The TechCrunch Radio Pitch-Off. Here’s how it works: After going through a quick application process, five companies are selected to… Read More

 Instagram never allowed URLs to open until now. It wanted people browsing photos, not the web. But Instagram says its advertisers demanded more vivid ways to influence people who “lead to meaningful results for their businesses.” Brands want measurable impact, not to be breezed by. Meanwhile, Instagram new ads court e-commerce companies that need people to click-through and buy,… Read More

 “I’ve been doing this for fifteen years,” I told HTC’s mild-mannered demo wrangler at MWC today. “And this is the first time I’ve been actually excited about a technology in five.” He had just walked me through one of the best demos I had ever seen. It was the HTC Vive, a sensor-studded helmet with dual hand controllers that allowed me to enter almost… Read More

 Sysomos was among the earliest players in the enterprise social media monitoring and analytics space (together with the likes of Radian6, which was later acquired by Salesforce). Five years ago, the Toronto-based company was acquired by Marketwire, and while it continued to win big clients, things remained rather quiet around the company. Surprisingly, Sysomos regained its independence last… Read More

 Yesterday, Google announced a well overdue revamp of its Google Contacts service which introduced a redesign and a handful of new features, and today Yahoo is following up with some contacts-related news of its own. The company is now rolling out new “Contacts Cards” in Yahoo Mail, which are small cards that pop up when you hover over a person’s name in a message, showing… Read More

 Mobile messaging app Kik has added native video capture to its service as it lays the groundwork to offer more interactive content options for its 200 million registered users. Read More

 SuperAwesome, the ad network and marketing platform for kids and teens, continues to be on a mini-shopping spree. The London-headquartered company is acquiring Spanish startup Ad4Kids, a platform for mobile app developers to cross-promote their ‘kid-safe’ apps, in an all-cash, otherwise undisclosed, deal. It adds to a spew of recent acquisitions and acqui-hires by SuperAwesome… Read More