Category: Tech news

 Actor David Cross is foregoing the usual indie film distribution model for his darkly satirical film HITS. He’s letting the public pay whatever they want to download it on BitTorrent for the first two weeks, starting this Friday, February 13. But is this really the best way to distribute something that the film’s producers have worked so hard on? Cross and his producers said… Read More

The most talented and ambitious entrepreneurs in West Africa are being encouraged to join a new hackathon program this month in Accra, Ghana, which hopes to spin out a wave of new tech startups geared to African needs.
The Hack for Big Choices is a non-profit which hopes to impact the fast-developing West African economies by helping to create what it calls ‘sustainable start-ups’. Read More

 Editor’s Note: Brian Ascher joined Venrock in 1998 as a Kauffman Fellow and is currently a Partner based in Venrock’s Palo Alto office. Though people have turned on them lately, I love using Uber. From the very first time (September 28, 2010 to be exact) I saw the little town car icon crawling across the map coming towards my little green dot, I knew taxi cabs, airport car… Read More

 Update: The launch is now postponed until tomorrow evening due to recurring radar tracking issues. We’ll be sure to keep you up to date with when you can catch it then.
SpaceX is aiming to launch the Deep Space Climate Observatory, also known by the acronym DSCOVR, today during a launch window that kicks off at 6:10 PM ET (and you can watch live above). The NASA-contracted mission is… Read More

 Despite the Silicon Valley echo chamber, starting a company remains easily among the most risky career moves for workers. The stress of the job can easily lead to burnout or long-lasting mental health issues. Failures, despite being lauded in some corners, still too often harm a founder’s future career prospects.
But the greatest risk of building a new company is almost certainly financial. Read More

 This year, California will allow the testing of autonomous vehicles on public roads. Driverless cars will log thousands of miles this year – an Audi A7 already made a safe 550-mile trip from Silicon Valley to the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. However, it’s only a matter of time before a driverless car gets into a fender bender. Read More

 As the number of connected devices — aka the Internet of Things, aka the sensornet — proliferates so too does the number of devices leaning on voice recognition technology as an interface to allow for hands free control. But the potential privacy intrusion of voice-activated services is massive. Read More

 Google may be soon adding more offline and private sharing features to its Google+ Photos service. It has acquired Odysee, an iOS and Android app that let users automatically back up photos and videos taken on their cameras or tablets to their home computers. It also let users set up private, automatic sharing with other people, and it had an API for integrating the service with other… Read More

Hey Los Angeles! A TechCrunch writer (me) is visiting your fair city and is ready to uncover some startups. Come pitch me tomorrow, Sunday (8th Feb) at Alfred Coffee (in the alley) on 8509 Melrose Avenue, West Hollywood, 90069 between 3pm and 5pm. I’ll take real short pitches and can follow-up later. Who knows, you may end up on TechCrunch. Fill out this form so we can email you if… Read More

 Virtual reality is poised to fundamentally transform personal entertainment as we know it, potentially delivering a long-term impact that may exceed today’s most “disruptive” new technologies. Strapping on a VR headset will catapult the user into a new realm of lifelike entertainment experiences that will seem believable — and very real, within seconds of putting them on. Read More

 Yhat founders Greg Lamp and Austin Ogilvie were working with a team of data scientists at OnDeck, a successful small business loan startup, when they noticed a problem.
The data science team was coming up with cool ideas, but the engineers couldn’t implement these applications, as fast as they could produce them, simply because they lacked the tools to do it. That’s when they… Read More

If you have not already heard, we hosted the Crunchies awards show at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall last Thursday. Some elements of the show have been criticized for being inappropriate.
If you were present, or watching the livestream, you might have been startled, if not offended, by some of the remarks that the host, standup comedian T.J. Miller made on stage. It’s also… Read More

 Before I quit ghostwriting, I wrote for publications like Forbes, Inc., The Next Web, and even TechCrunch. I worked as a behind-the-scenes magician, penning content that helped CEO’s and companies gain internet fame and glory, all the while wondering how much I was selling out by giving away my byline. Read More

 The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, David Sifry, and Steve Gillmor. Topics include Crunchies, @handle, continued Microsoft spending spree on email and calendar, an @dannysullivan snap master class on search, an update on Robert Scoble. Plus, the latest G3 below on Women who Code, or should they?
@stevegillmor, @dannysullivan, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks, @dsifry Read More

 When Yahoo started, it was just a flat hierarchical directory of new sites on the web – “Cool Site of the Day!” was actually a thing. But the web quickly outstripped the ability of that structure to keep up to date: the Cool Site of the Day would have to be site of the hour, or minute, or second, as the number grew exponentially. Read More