Category: Tech news

 Learning braille is a skill that, like most, is best learned at an early age by those who need it. But toddlers with vision impairment often have few or no options to do so, leaving them behind their peers academically and socially. BecDot is a toy created by the parents facing that challenge that teaches kids braille in a fun, simple way, and is both robust and affordable. Read More

 SoftBank’s $1.2 billion primary direct investment deal has officially closed, according to Uber itself, which confirmed the deal closure and provided the following statement to TechCrunch via a spokesperson:
We’re proud to have SoftBank, Dragoneer and the entire consortium in the Uber family. This is a great outcome for our shareholders, employees and customers, strengthening… Read More

 Tech.co, an online platform and events organizer for startups, announced today that it has been acquired by digital marketing firm MVF. The deal’s terms were undisclosed. Read More

 Ten years ago today, Steve Jobs triumphantly held up a manilla interoffice mail envelope to a round of applause at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. It was a silly gimmick, but it got the point across. A year after introducing the Macworld crowd to the iPhone, the company was about to add another cornerstone product to its repertoire. Ten years and seven generations later,… Read More

 Another CES is in the books. The country’s biggest consumer electronics show featured some 3,900 exhibitors spread out over 2.75 million square feet, making it the largest floor in the show’s history, according to the CTA. Our bodies and brains are exhausted from all the new gadgets, but before we cast off the show for good, let’s take a look at some of the best things we saw… Read More

 We have even more information about messaging app Telegram’s plans for cashing in on its popularity within the crypto community with the massive ICO for its proposed Telegram Open Network (TON) project (that we first reported), after obtaining the whitepaper and investor prospectuses in full. From the documents, it is clear that Telegram isn’t content with sitting on a platform… Read More

 The world is full of web programmers, but there’s a real paucity of cryptocurrency developers, and the chasm between the two fields is hard to cross. So I thought I’d take what I’d learned from architecting and building out our own Ethereum-based projects, and turn it into an open-sourced tutorial for web devs, in the hopes of encouraging a little more actual development… Read More

 There are a number of reasons why one may take issue with White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders using the official @PressSec Twitter to register a personal complaint about a consumer product in her household, as she recently did with a tweet about Amazon Alexa and Echo speakers. But the one issue we’re going to mention here on TechCrunch is that she’s incorrectly characterizing… Read More

A growing set of direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies like BabyGlimpse are aimed at new, expecting, and aspiring parents. But beware their claims.

 It was a tumultuous year for the technology industry, with sexual harassment, pay gaps and under-representation of women often dominating the headlines. And while sexism was not born in Silicon Valley, sexual harassment is proving to be toxic for business. As part of our larger Q4 and 2017 coverage, let’s see how the venture industry invested in women last year. Read More

 Researchers Neil Gandal, JT Hamrick, Tyler Moore, and Tali Oberman have written a fascinating paper on Bitcoin price manipulation. Entitled “Price Manipulation in the Bitcoin Ecosystem” and appearing in the recent issue of the Journal of Monetary Economics the paper describes to what degree the Bitcoin ecosystem is controlled by bad actors. To many it’s been obvious that… Read More

 Toyota has been a holdout from CarPlay, Apple’s in-dash infotainment system that works with your iPhone. The automaker and its luxury brand Lexus have yet to offer it in any models, despite most other car companies giving in on at least a few vehicles (which tends to later to broader rollout thereafter). The new 2019 Toyota Avalon will have CarPlay on board, however. The vehicle was… Read More

 Vitalik Buterin, the high-profile co-founder of Ethereum, has quietly left China-based investment firm Fenbushi Capital, TechCrunch understands. Fenbushi was founded in 2015 and its $50 million fund was one of the first to actively put capital into blockchain companies through seed investments and participation in ICOs. As one of the most visible funds, it picked up stakes in dozens of firms… Read More

 Monty Barlow works at Cambridge Consultants and his company’s recent work involves teaching a computer to discern between British and American accents. The project, which Barlow sees as part of a suite of machine-learning solutions that will grow to encompass “true” AI, appeared at CES last week. Barlow said that AI revolutions tended to come and go, appearing on the horizon… Read More

 Nissan has a brand new concept vehicle it unveiled at CES this year, called the ‘Xmotion.’ The crossover SUV concept vehicle features sleek exterior lines with sharp angles to accentuate details like the headlights, and inside blends touchscreen displays, innovative control mechanisms and spare accents to provide a look that’s both futuristic, and strangely rural and… Read More