Category: Tech news

 Native Deodorant, a San Francisco-based natural deodorant brand, just sold to Procter & Gamble for $100 million cash. Native, which positioned itself as an online distributor of deodorant, had received just $500,000 from Azure Capital Partners. With over a million customers since launching 2.5 years ago, Native was able to use profits from the business to reinvest in growth. Read More

 Pixel Buds are a valiant effort to stand out while embracing a trend adopted by just about every name in the field, resulting in a product that’s sometimes inspiring, sometimes baffling and mostly just okay. They’re the kind of product you really want to like — but they’re just not there yet. Read More

 Tesla has opened new Supercharger stations in California, the largest it has built to date. These are a new kind of Supercharger for the automaker, with not only the most stalls of any Supercharger station to date, at 40 per station, but also a dedicated “customer lounge” at one of the new locations. Read More

 Marketing email company SendGrid had a decent first day on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday. After pricing shares at $16, the company closed at $18.03, or up almost 13%. The Denver-based company had raised $131 million after pricing its IPO at $16, above the expected range of $13.50 to $15.50. SendGrid also upsized its IPO, selling 8.2 million shares, instead of 7.7 million.… Read More

 At age 17, Michael Sayman was Facebook’s youngest employee ever. Having already launched 5 apps, he wowed Mark Zuckerberg, earned a demo spot on stage at Facebook F8 conference, and scored a full-time engineering gig as the social network’s go-to teen. Over the past three years, he helped Facebook try to crack the middle school market with apps like the now defunct Lifestage. But… Read More

 A bit of sad news for the maker community today: TechShop is shutting down nationwide. TechShop was pretty much heaven for the adventurous do-it-yourself’er. Imagine a big building filled with everything from sewing machines to laser cutters to woodworking equipment to welding rigs. The general philosophy was “Don’t try it at home — try it here!” Read More

 Meet Zyl, a smart photo app to view, manage and share all your photos. Formerly called Comet, the French startup is now using deep learning to go beyond the endless grid of photos and replace the default Photos app on your phone. While Zyl started as an app to create collaborative photo albums, the app has expanded beyond this simple social feature to take care of everything you’d do… Read More

 A new report from App Annie predicts that time spent doing mobile shopping via apps will grow 45 percent in the U.S. during the week of Black Friday, compared to the same time two years ago. The firm also expects revenue generated through apps to break new records this season, and says consumers will spend over 6 million hours shopping in the top 5 digital-first apps on Black Friday alone.… Read More

 In order for Google Assistant to be a real contender against the likes of Alexa, it needs third party app support. In order to get more developers on-board, the company needs to add a lot more features to incentivize development, even as Amazon’s home AI continues to dominate marketshare. This morning Google took a key step toward making Assistant a more compelling experience, announcing… Read More

 Research conducted by a group of data scientists looking at how information was diffused on Twitter around the June 2016 EU referendum vote suggests more than 150,000 Russian accounts were involved in tweeting about #Brexit. Read More

 Facebook is no stranger when it comes to open sourcing its computing knowledge. Over the years, it has consistently created software and hardware internally, then transferred that wisdom to the open source community to let them have it. Today, it announced it was open sourcing its modular network routing software called Open/R, as the tradition continues. Facebook obviously has unique scale… Read More

 Amazon is blaming the U.S. Postal Service for having to shut down Fresh in some areas, Recode reports. Internally, sources told Recode that Amazon is saying the USPS was responsible for making the deliveries in most of the affected areas. As the story goes, Amazon is throwing shade at the USPS, telling food brands the USPS wasn’t reliable in delivering the food on time or at all. Read More

“I would say if this is all confirmed, it does mean Face ID is less secure than Touch ID.”

 The paperwork’s done! The long-anticipated SoftBank Group investment into Uber has been agreed upon, a spokesperson confirms to TechCrunch. We’ve been provided the following statement. “We’ve entered into an agreement with a consortium led by SoftBank and Dragoneer on a potential investment. We believe this agreement is a strong vote of confidence in Uber’s… Read More

 After months of talks, SoftBank Group is close to finalizing its investment in Uber. Multiple sources tell TechCrunch that the deal is expected to be signed later in the day on Sunday. SoftBank plans to lead a $1 billion investment directly in the company alongside Dragoneer Investment Group. The joint venture will also buy up to $9 billion of shares from eligible existing shareholders in a… Read More