Category: Tech news

HBO’s drug-addled teen drama forces viewers to reckon with a lot of bad habits.

James Clark Maxwell’s equations are a big deal in physics, explaining the fundamentals of electricity and magnetism. Here’s the gist of how they work.

Shouting out to all the fierce female founders. Have you applied to participate in the All Raise “ask me anything” (AMA) sessions at Disrupt SF 2019? No? Women, it’s time to act. Apply for an AMA session by the August 30 deadline and you could win a free Expo Only Pass.

You heard that right. We have 30 free Expo Only passes, and we’ll give them away at random to women founders who get accepted to the All Raise program at Disrupt SF 2019.

All Raise, a startup nonprofit committed to accelerating female founder success, will host a day-long AMA event in a dedicated area in Startup Alley (aka the Disrupt expo floor). They’ll schedule a series of 30-minute sessions throughout the day for roughly 100 women founders.

Each session consists of three founders and one of the All Raise community’s leading VCs. You’ll have the opportunity to ask in-depth questions about the next raise, key hires, the competition or any other business issues that keep you up at night. You can learn plenty from experienced, successful investors like these:

• Dayna Grayson, NEA
• Susan Lyne, BBG
• Shauntel Garvey, Reach Capital
• Eurie Kim, Forerunner
• Jess Lee, Sequoia
• Kara Nortman, Upfront
• Sara Guo, Greylock,
• Anarghya Vardhana, Maveron
• Eva Ho, Fika Ventures
• Sarah Smith, Bain Capital Ventures
• Jess Lin, Work-Bench

If you’re a U.S.-based woman founder — and you’ve raised at least $250,000 in a seed, A or B round — you can apply for an AMA session. All Raise gives special consideration to founders from underrepresented groups (e.g. Black, Latinx or LGBTQIA women).

All Raise will review the applications and notify the founders. Acceptance is based on availability for session spots, investor fit with industry sector and company stage, as well as demand for certain categories.

If All Raise selects you to participate — and you don’t happen to win a free Expo Only pass — simply buy any pass to Disrupt SF (including Expo Only). All Raise will send an email to let you know what time they’ve scheduled your session.

Don’t miss this rare opportunity to get answers and advice from some of the best investors around. Free admission to Disrupt SF 2019 and free investor advice — that’s a potent combination. Beat the August 30 deadline and apply for an All Raise AMA session today!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

The yet-to-launch tech journalism site The Markup has had a bumpy 2019 — co-founder and editor-in-chief Julia Angwin was fired, prompting the departure of the majority of the editorial staff. Soon after, The Markup’s other founders (whose disputes with Angwin apparently led to her ouster) left the company themselves.

Now things may be back on track, with Angwin returning to the EIC role, and the six staffers who’d quit in protest returning, as well.

In fact, a New York Times story about Angwin’s reinstatement suggests that there’s been a surprising amount of continuity behind the scenes, with The Markup continuing to pay Angwin and her staff while they continued to work on articles and meet in Angwin’s living room.

In addition to announcing Angwin’s return, The Markup says it has hired former BuzzFeed vice president and associate general counsel Nabiha Syed to serve as president, along with Evelyn Larrubia, who will become managing editor for investigations.

“Technology is shaping our world faster than most people can keep up, before we can digest the implications of any of it,” Angwin said in the announcement. “We believe our data-driven approach to tech accountability journalism will bring facts to this emotional debate. And I can’t think of two more accomplished leaders in their fields than Nabiha and Evelyn to join me in the venture.”

The plan is for Angwin and Syed to report to a not-yet-appointed independent board of directors, and for the site to start publishing by the end of 2019.

When The Markup made a splash with its kickoff last year, it wasn’t just for the involvement of Angwin (a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter from The Wall Street Journal and ProPublica), but also because its funding included a $20 million donation from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark.

The recent controversy prompted the site’s backers to declare that it had become “necessary to reassess our support,” but today’s announcement closes with this note: “The Markup remains supported by a coalition of major foundations, including Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Edwin Barbey Charitable Trust, the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative, and the Open Society Foundations.”

If you’re browsing Google Image search results today, you might notice a new interface element: A sticky side panel that displays any images you click on, providing a closer look at the specific image you want to see, including related images, additional info like ratings, price and in-stock status, ingredients and cooking times, depending on whether you’re searching for products, recipes or something else.

The new sidebar replaces a full-width, in-column interface element, with the advantage that the new interface allows you to continue to browse the image result thumbnails returned on the left. Clicking on any other images will replace the one in the sidebar, but you can easily navigate back and forth with your browser’s built-in navigation features, or you can page through the results in sequence using the right and left arrow keys.

These work already for a lot of existing results and products, but developers who want to ensure their product image results likewise provide this info in a way that means Google’s search engine will pick them up can reference this developer documentation to find out how.

Overall, even though this is not a massive change from what came before, it feels directionally like a big deal: Google has been iterating in a very Pinterest-like direction with image search in general, but this feels functionally like a mature product aimed squarely at comparison shopping, hobbyist cooks, decorators and designers. It’s a very different product from what Images used to be, and that probably affords Google a lot more opportunity in terms of how it monetizes image search in the future.

Tired of Netflix’s algorithms telling you what to watch? HBO has a solution for you.

Synchronize your Fitbits, people. You have 72 hours left to get your fiscal fitness on. Three days to save $100 on tickets to TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019 in San Francisco on September 5. Buy your early-bird ticket by August 9 at 11:59 p.m. (PT) and then go back to counting your steps.

We say with confidence that no tech category’s more competitive than enterprise software. The gigantic, $500 billion market generates a constant flow of multibillion-dollar acquisitions every year. And it takes a special kind of fierce early-stage enterprise startup to jump in, invent new services and shake up old-school incumbents.

More than 1,000 attendees will be in the house to explore this rich, complex topic, TechCrunch-style. Our editors will interview top titans in the enterprise world — like SAP CEO, Bill McDermott; Atlassian co-founder, Scott Farquhar; and Jocelyn Goldfein, managing director at Zetta Venture Partners. They’ll also tap rising founders of upstart startups.

The enterprise just can’t get enough of AI, but large companies face a huge challenge: packaging all that data in machine learning models — a necessary element for using AI to automate processes. That’s why we’re especially excited that Bindu Reddy, co-founder and CEO at RealityEngines, will join us onstage.

Her company aims to create research-driven cloud services to reduce some of the inherent complexity of working with AI tools. Reddy, along with investor Jocelyn Goldfein, a managing director at Zetta Venture Partners, and others will talk about the growing role of AI in the enterprise.

That’s just the tip of the Enterprise iceberg. More than 20 interviews, panel discussions, Q&As and breakout sessions will cover a wide range of technologies, including intelligent marketing automation, the cloud, Kubernetes and even quantum and blockchain. Peruse the agenda to see what else we have in store for you.

Early-bird pricing for TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019 ends in just 72 hours. Buy your ticket by August 9 at 11:59 p.m. (PT) and you’ll save $100. But wait, there’s more — for every ticket you buy, we’ll register you for a free Expo-only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019. Now that’s fiscal fitness.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Enterprise? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

At this year’s Defcon Medical Device Village, hackers will attack real medical devices at a pretend hospital.

At its annual Signal developer conference, Twilio today announced a couple of new features for developers on its core messaging platform and users of its recently acquired SendGrid email service. The new Twilio tools now allow developers to create multi-channel messaging tools and to get real-time streams of conversations in order to run them through transcription services, a translation tool or other machine learning models.

The company’s $3 billion acquisition of SendGrid closed less than half a year ago, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that Twilio would use its biggest event of the year to showcase the service to its developer community.

It’s a bit of an odd one, though. See, SendGrid already announced the beta of SendGrid Ads back in November 2018. As best as I can tell, Twilio SendGrid Ads, which is now launching in beta, is the same product, but a Twilio representative tells me that the ads product is now more deeply integrated into SendGrid Marketing Campaigns, and also got a bit of a redesign. A form of this integration already existed in the previous version, though.

The general idea here is to allow SendGrid users to run multichannel display ad campaigns on Facebook, Instagram and Google from their SendGrid accounts. The advantage of this, the company argues, is that marketers will be able to use data from their email campaigns and website data to then retarget users on other channels. Similarly, they can use lead ads on Facebook to get potential customers to sign up for their SendGrid mailing list.

SendGrid Ads will cost $50 per month, plus the cost of the ads. SendGrid will also take its own cut of 5% of any media cost over $500.

The new developer tools are pretty straightforward. Twilio Conversations, now in public beta, is a new API that allows developers to create solutions that integrate various messaging channels like SMS, WhatsApp and other chat tools.

“Over the last two decades, we’ve watched businesses evolve their communications with customers from the phone call, to website chat, to native mobile apps,” said Chee Chew, chief product officer at Twilio. “Leading companies have figured out that the next evolution of great customer experience is through messaging. Twilio Conversations empowers businesses to build personal, long-lived connections with their customers on the channels they prefer.”

Twilio Media Streams does exactly what it promises to do. Previously, you could get a recording of a call after it was finished. Now, you can tap into the real-time call to analyze that stream in real time. That’s useful for all kinds of AI tools that aim to help call center agents, for example. This service is now also in public beta and will cost $0.004 per minute, in addition to the rest of the fees associated with the call.

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1. Apple rolls out Apple Card Preview to select users

Matthew Panzarino has been using Apple’s new credit card for a few days, making purchases and payments and trying out other features like rewards. His verdict? It works.

And even if you’re not part of the preview, you shouldn’t have to wait long — a full rollout of Apple Card will come later in August.

2. Snap looks to raise $1 billion in private debt offering

The debt offering will be used to cover the cost of general operating expenditures, Snap says, but also potentially to “acquire complementary businesses, products, services or technologies.” It also could be used for future stock repurchase plans, though the company says no such plans exist currently.

3. Squad, the ‘anti-bro startup,’ is creating a safe space for teenage girls online

The app allows you to video chat and share your phone screen with a friend in real time.

4. Optimus Ride’s Brooklyn self-driving shuttles begin picking up passengers this week

Optimus Ride will become the first startup to operate a commercial self-driving service in the state of New York — specifically shuttle services within the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a 300-acre private commercial development.

5. Google is shutting down its Trips app

Google says much of the functionality from the service will be incorporated into its Maps app and Search features.

6. Ticket marketplace TickPick raises $40M in its first institutional funding

The core of TickPick’s identity is the elimination of all hidden fees.

7. 6 steps to reduce churn for high-volume subscription companies

This article outlines how to intercept customers who show intent to cancel, then use their feedback to take action, build better experiences and ultimately retain subscribers. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

Nissan and EVgo said Tuesday they will install another 200 DC fast chargers in the United States to support the growing number of consumers who are buying electric vehicles, including the new Nissan Leaf e+ that came to market earlier this year.

The 100 kilowatt DC fast-charging stations will have both CHAdeMO and CCS connectors, making them accessible to more EV drivers. The inclusion of both charger connectors is logical; it’s also notable for Nissan, once the primary advocates for CHAdeMO chargers.

The announcement builds off of the companies’ six-year partnership, which included building out a corridor of EV chargers along Interstate 95 on the East Coast, as well as between Monterey, Calif., and Lake Tahoe.

Nissan says it has installed more than 2,000 quick-charge connectors across the country since 2010.

Plans to add another 200 fast chargers follows the launch of the 2019 Nissan Leaf e+. The Nissan Leaf e+, which came to the U.S. and Canada this spring, has a range of 226 miles and fast-charging capability.

This new version of the Leaf all-electric hatchback has 40% more range than other versions thanks to a 62 kilowatt-hour battery pack. That 226-mile range puts the Leaf e+ just under the Chevy Bolt EV, which has a 238-mile range, the Kia Niro EV with 239 miles and the Tesla Model 3 standard range plus with 240 miles.

“Given the tremendous driver response to the 2019 long-range all-electric LEAF, Nissan and EVgo will accelerate fast charging by committing to a multi-year charger construction program that will continue to expand fast-charging options for EV drivers across the country,” Aditya Jairaj, director, EV Sales and Marketing, Nissan North America said in a statement.

The companies also plan to partner on a marketing campaign to sell consumers on the benefits of EVs, and for Nissan, hopefully persuade more to buy its Nissan Leaf Plus. Nissan’s July sales figures were down compared to the same month last year, a slump that has affected the Leaf, as well.

Zupagrafika’s new book captures modernist and brutalist architecture in Germany, Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia.

Apple revives the original name of its software subsidiary, which it abandoned in 1998. The rebranded Claris also is acquiring an Italian software company.

Scientists believe Antarctica’s massive Thwaites Glacier is teetering on the brink of collapse, though just how fast that could happen remains an open question.

Kodiak Robotics will begin commercial service between Dallas and Houston, though a host of other self-driving startups have already been testing in the state.