Category: Tech news

 Fresh on the heels of TC Disrupt NY, we’re already thinking about our next events.

Austin and Seattle, are you ready to get down with TechCrunch? Our tour will take place the week of June 10, but we want to open up applications to the Pitch-Off as soon as possible. What is the pitch-off, you ask? Read More

 Once upon a time, in the days of yore — meaning, in hyper-fast-forward Silicon Valley, five years ago — there were things you could count on, evident truths on which you could rely, cornerstones on which you could construct your mental model of the world; and high on any such list would have been “Google will provide you with relevant search results.”

Yeah, well, that was then, this is now. Read More

 Facebook’s website is down for many. The voluminous reports on Twitter, and corroborating evidence, are pretty plain: For many, Facebook is not working at the moment. Young services are infamous for having extensive outages. Twitter, for one, when small, was down chronically.  Facebook going down, given how mature it is as a platform and public company, is a larger issue. Developers take… Read More

 While discussions about tech bubbles have been heated, few commentators seem to be targeting their invective at the real underlying bubble: the World Wide Web itself is crumbling. Like any outmoded technology, the Web is rapidly losing users as it fails to adapt to disruption from mobile apps and continues to perform poorly – despite incredible optimization efforts – due to a bloated… Read More

 Account management startup Manilla says that it will be shutting down on July 1. We received several tips about the shutdown today, then when I visited the site and tried to sign up, I was directed to this announcement, which says that the service will continue to operate as normal until June 30. After that, users will no longer be able to upload new documents, and it will not retrieve any new… Read More

 Ten U.S. Senators, including Sens. Wyden, Warren, Franken, and Booker, today published a letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler in opposition to his proposed rules-changes to net neutrality that would create so-called Internet ‘fast lanes.’ As we’ve covered a half-dozen times, the proposal cuts at the heart of net neutrality’s bent on non-discrimination, by allowing by… Read More

In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, Google Ventures’ Rich Miner joined us in the studio to talk about Android’s massive growth, and more. Miner, who was the co-founder of Android and helped lead the development of the Android platform and ecosystem at Google following the acquisition, talked about his view on “alternative” Android outgrowths, app discovery, and much… Read More

 Oyster, a startup that offers offers unlimited access to its collection of e-books for $9.99 per month, has crossed a nice milestone — it says its library now includes 500,000 books, compared to 100,000 when it launched in September of last year. The company also said it recently expanded its partnership with HarperCollins, bringing 10,000 more of the publisher’s titles (including Beautiful… Read More

 Dror Sharon, the CEO of ConsumerPhysics, was showing off a prototype of his handheld “food scanner” at TechCrunch Disrupt NY’s Hardware Alley this week, called the SCiO. The device is a pocket-sized spectrometer that analyzes the molecular structure of an object by first shining a light on the item in question, then identifying the food based on its unique wavelength’s signature. What makes the… Read More

 This could be Apple’s largest acquisition to date. According to the Financial Times, Apple is close to a deal to acquire Beats Electronics. Beats is the maker of the popular Beats headphones, as well as the music service, Beats Music. If it closes, the deal should be announced next week, the FT reports. The two companies have yet to agree on some financial details. The most surprising thing… Read More

SuperSummit, a London-based startup, today launched its platform for online live video interviews with experts out of beta after testing the service for a few months in Italy. During the beta, the company built a community of about 50,000 members and created over 300 hours of video interviews in English and Italian with the likes of Brad Fed, Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin. All of this content can… Read More

 We’re hearing that BitPay, a platform that processes payments in bitcoin for merchants, is raising the field’s biggest round yet. The company is raising $30 million on a roughly $160 million valuation in a round led by Index Ventures, with Richard Branson and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang participating. BitPay declined to comment. With BitPay’s previous funding round, the… Read More

 Police arrested a 27-year-old university official from Kawasaki City, Yoshitomo Imura, after he posted a video of himself firing a 3D-printed six shooter called the Zig Zag revolver. Imura was employed at the Shonan Institute of Technology and owned a $500 home 3D printer. Read More

 In TechCrunch Disrupt NY’s Startup Alley this week, we came across Roger Obando and Louis Huynh, co-founders of Kamino, a new mobile app offering crowdsourced city guides. Unlike the recommendations found in professional guidebooks, Kamino instead offers what they call “urban hikes” — guides created by locals and plotted on a map that help to introduce visitors to the best their neighborhoods… Read More

 Brady Forrest’s Highway1 is looking for a few good hardware startups. The accelerator that brought us LittleBits and the Metawatch are working on their Fall 2014 program and they’ve increased their seed investment amount from $20,000 to $50,000. We first spoke to Highway1 in 2013 when they opened a new headquarters in San Francisco and thus far they’ve sent almost a dozen solid hardware startups… Read More