Category: Tech news

 Kakao Corp and Daum announced today that they will merge through an equity swap, creating a company with a 3.4 trillion won (about $2.9 billion) market capitalization. Kakao is the maker of KakaoTalk, South Korea’s top messaging service, while Daum is one of the country’s largest Internet portals. If the deal goes through, the combined company will be listed in October. Kakao… Read More

 ‘R.o.W. With Butch’ is a weekly column about tech outside Silicon Valley, in the Rest Of the World. This week it comes from Sarajevo, Bosnia.
At the height of the Bosnian War between 1992 and 1995, some 8,000 grenades a day would rain down on the capital city of Sarajevo, while snipers plied their deadly trade from the hills above the city.
The internecine warfare between… Read More

 Here’s an idea crazy enough that it just might work: Pave the streets with solar-powered panels that have their own built-in heat and LED lights. That’s what Scott and Julie Brusaw hope to accomplish with their ongoing Solar Roadways project, which they just funded through a hugely popular crowdfunding campaign. The husband-and-wife team has spent the better part of the last… Read More

 Earlier this year, I wrote about Casper, a Lerer Ventures-backed startup that says it’s trying to reinvent how mattresses are built and sold. Since then, the company actually launched its first product, so I decided to swing by Casper’s office in the Noho neighborhood of New York to try the mattress out for myself. In the video above, you can see the mattress, the material… Read More

 To listen to Guy Goldstein, the CEO of Check (formerly Pageonce), tell the story, you’d think he never sweats under pressure.
Six years ago, Goldstein helped found what is now Check, a mobile payment company that helps people track their finances and do payments, moving about $500m in payments a year. But, the path to get here wasn’t linear and required a big, make-or-break bet. Read More

 Editor’s Note: The author of this essay is Jocelyn Voo, a nomadic photographer, writer and social media strategist. Her furniture lives in New York City. All likenesses to people in her real life are coincidence. Unless they’re not – in which case, Whatsapp her! Over the years, I’ve run my passport ragged, each foreign visa and customs stamp an inked reminder of… Read More

 For years, people in the tech industry have worked to persuade more young people in the United States to become interested in studying computer science. It now looks like they’ve finally gotten the message.
Demand for computer science classes and programs is booming at universities across the U.S., according to data presented this past week at the NCWIT summit for Women in IT by Ed… Read More

 Twitter closed out regular trading this afternoon at $30.50 per share. That’s its lowest end-of-day tally yet in its history as a public company. The company traded below the $30 mark earlier this month, but managed to end May 7th at $30.66.
The decline of Twitter’s value is impressive. The company ‘s 52 week high — it hasn’t been public that long, keep in mind… Read More

 Is Jawbone in play? That’s a question that has been bounced around the rumor mill lately, likely driven by a few other huge recent acquisitions in the hardware space. Over the last few days, the TechCrunch tips line has lit up with anonymous notes about Jawbone being acquired by Google in a multi-billion dollar deal. (For what it’s worth, we’ve heard we’re not the only… Read More

 The 2014 World Cup begins next month in Brazil and will feature something truly amazing: the plan is for a paralyzed, non-ambulatory Brazilian teenager to stand up and kick the first ball of the first game using a motorized exoskeleton and special 3D-printed helmet. Created by an international team of designers and engineers, the video shows Colorado State University’s design for the… Read More

 Who here wouldn’t like to live life like Darth Vader? And wield political power at the same time? Look, just go with it. For this is what a local politician in the Ukraine likes to do. A lot. Darth Vader (of the Ukrainian brand of the family at least) is, (almost) quite literally, a candidate for mayor of Kiev and Odessa, and has even had a crack at running for the presidency. He has his… Read More

 This week our inimitable boss Alexia Tsotsis took to the Round Table with Kyle Russell, one of our latest hires, and your humble servant to dig into the intersection of technology and the personal. Secret, an application that recently expanded to Android and the whole world, is controversial given its consistent dose of public vitriol it fosters. Alexia isn’t leaving TechCrunch. Our… Read More

 Priori Data, an app store data and analytics provider, has secured $1 million in seed financing to build a kind of Bloomberg-style platform for mobile industry professionals and analysts. The cash was raised from unnamed sources but, says the company, includes the Berlin angel investor community, private individuals from New York private equity and hedge fund circles. It has a large database… Read More

 Amazon.com appears to be flexing its muscle against publishers once again. The New York Times reported this morning that Amazon had removed preorder options for upcoming titles from publisher Hachette (which owns the imprints Grand Central Publishing, Little Brown, Orbit, and others), a move that affected books, including The Silkworm, the latest mystery by J.K. Rowling (writing under the pen… Read More

 Betaworks-style ‘startup studio’ Dream Industries – based in Moscow – has raised a $3 million Series A round from retail giant Ulmart (in Russia) to develop its subscription-based social reading service Bookmate. They plan to take the startup international out of Moscow, starting with Turkey, Scandinavia and Latin America. The funding is part of a $6.5 million package… Read More