Starling, the U.K. challenger bank that offers a mobile-only current account, continues to execute on its marketplace banking strategy. Following the required regulatory approval, the Starling Marketplace is adding a number of financial services integrations, spanning pensions, … | Continue reading
Despite the controversy surrounding YouTube celebrity Logan Paul (thanks to a string of videos exploiting an apparent suicide and tasering a rat), the young media personality hasn’t done anything to warrant being kicked off of the platform that made him a star. That’s according … | Continue reading
Finnish fintech startup Zervant, which provides online invoicing software for small business and entrepreneurs across Europe, has raised €6 million in funding. The round was led by Tesi, with participation from Northzone, NFT Ventures, and Conor Venture Partners. Read More | Continue reading
YouTube Red will expand its subscription service to as many as 100 countries, according to YouTube chief executive Susan Wojcicki . Speaking at Recode’s Code Media conference in Huntington Beach, Calif., Wojcicki said that YouTube will be looking to expand its Red service “to ma … | Continue reading
The fallout from the year’s biggest cryptocurrency hack to date continues. On Monday, Reuters reported that 10 traders who used the Tokyo-based exchange Coincheck are preparing to file a lawsuit with Tokyo’s District Court on Thursday. The plaintiffs will be represented by Hirom … | Continue reading
Apple Music is expanding its subscription music service to 82 new markets — or nearly all of the countries where the service is available, according to people with knowledge of the company’s plans. 79 markets launched today and an additional three markets will go live February 2 … | Continue reading
Facebook is going to create a new news section in its video streaming platform Facebook Watch to feature breaking news stories. The move, which Campbell Brown, the company’s year-old head of news partnerships, announced onstage at the Code Media conference in Huntington Beach, i … | Continue reading
Foxconn, AKA Hon Hai Precision Industry, AKA the company that made your iPhone, is working with digital cinema pioneer RED to create affordable 8K cameras, the company announced. Chairman Terry Gou told reporters in Taipei, the Nikkei’s among them, that the goal is to reduce bot … | Continue reading
Facebook will begin allowing news publishers to run paywalls inside Facebook’s iOS app starting March 1st. Faceobok first started testing paywalls on Android in October, but at the time it couldn’t come to an agreement with Apple about how subscription revenue would be taxed. To … | Continue reading
As Lydia Polgreen sees it, society is currently divided into media haves and have nots, and it’s important for HuffPost to remain mostly free for its readers so that it can serve a group that mostly consumes content for free. Read More | Continue reading
Overwatch wasn’t what you’d call a “surprise” hit — everyone knew it was going to wipe the floor with its immediate competition. But unlike a lot of games, it still costs money. If you’ve been meaning to give it a shot but don’t feel like shelling out the $40, this weekend the g … | Continue reading
Homebrew is announcing the close of its third fund. This time they’ve raised $90 million, an increase from $50 million in 2015 and $35 million for its debut fund in 2013. Led by Hunter Walk and Satya Patel, the seed stage venture firm has spent the past five years investing in U … | Continue reading
We knew this day would come sooner or later. Like the cloned velociraptors before it, Boston Dynamics’ newly redesigned Spot Mini has figured out how to open doors — with either its arm or face, depending on how you look at it. The team behind the Big Dog proves that it’s still … | Continue reading
Chalk one up to the power of media exposure. The team responsible for building Target’s online registry saw Honeyfund appear on “Shark Tank,” and thought it would be cool to integrate the honeymoon registry service into Target’s own. Today, that integration has gone live across … | Continue reading
According to serial entrepreneur Jeff Cavins, more than 35 million people each year look to rent an RV — 38 percent of them so-called millennials. Yet they often walk away from the experience empty-handed. The reason, he says: there are fewer than 100,000 commercial owned vehicl … | Continue reading
Essential knew it had a hard road ahead of it. Andy Rubin and company acknowledged as much when they launched a handset aimed at taking on the likes of Apple and Samsung. Given that the company hasn’t issued anything in the way of official numbers thus far, a new batch of number … | Continue reading
You know that feeling of awe and wonder you had when you were a kid and you saw something huge and amazing? My blackened heart hasn’t felt it in years. Turns out all it needed was going to see an historic rocket launch. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launch last week was an exhilarating … | Continue reading
Science fiction no more — In an article out today in Nature Biotechnology, scientists were able to show tiny autonomous bots have the potential to function as intelligent delivery vehicles to cure cancer in mice. These DNA nanorobots do so by seeking out and injecting cancerous … | Continue reading
Over the weekend, a little piece of malware was hard at work mining cryptocurrency on government computers. Security researcher Scott Helme first noticed the malware, which he believes was running on more than 4,000 sites, including the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ic … | Continue reading
According to a new report from Bloomberg, Apple is switching things up for this year’s major updates. Instead of meeting a tight deadline and ticking all the boxes on the checklist, development teams will be able to push back some features if they’re not polished enough. Axios a … | Continue reading
The Super Bowl is over and the stadiums across the country that once held thousands of fans on any given Sunday will be mostly empty in the off-season, but Tom Brady is still at work. The quarterback who will undeniably go down in NFL history as one of the greatest of all time, … | Continue reading
The Information has a report this morning that Amazon is working on building AI chips for the Echo, which would allow Alexa to more quickly parse information and get those answers. Getting those answers much more quickly to the user, even by a few seconds, might seem like a move … | Continue reading
The world’s largest phone show is set for Barcelona later this month, and it’s shaping up to be an interesting one — particularly in the wake of what amounted to an extremely lackluster CES last month. We’re still a couple of weeks out from the actual event, but the rumors have … | Continue reading
In a rare move for the online retail giant, Amazon is laying off hundreds of corporate workers in its Seattle headquarters and elsewhere, according to a Seattle Times report. The corporate cuts come after an eight-year hiring spree, taking the company from 5,000 in 2010 to 40,00 … | Continue reading
The obscure Italian coin exchange BitGrail looks to be the latest cryptocurrency cautionary tale. On Friday, the site posted a notice to users informing them that hackers had made off with 17 million units of Nano (XRB), the coin formerly known as RaiBlocks. While Nano was worth … | Continue reading
Onavo Protect, the VPN client from the data-security app maker acquired by Facebook back in 2013, has now popped up in the Facebook app itself, under the banner “Protect” in the navigation menu. Clicking through on “Protect” will redirect Facebook users to the “Onavo Protect – V … | Continue reading
While a part of the fintech world remains abuzz with crypo-talk, a startup that’s built a business around the more traditional world of payments has raised a significant round of funding as it vies to take on the likes of PayPal, Stripe, Adyen and Dwolla. YapStone, which provide … | Continue reading
The Google Kubernetes Engine (previously known as the Google Container Engine and GKE) now allows all developers to attach Nvidia GPUs to their containers. GPUs on GKE (an acronym Google used to be quite fond of, but seems to be deemphasizing now) have been available in closed a … | Continue reading
Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), the company’s custom chips for running machine learning workloads written for its TensorFlow framework, are now available to developers. The promise of these Google-designed chips is that they can run specific machine learning workflows s … | Continue reading
The controversial subscription service for movie-goers, MoviePass, is still chasing new customers as it attempts to rapidly grow its user base before its funding runs out. After growing from 1.5 million to 2 million users in less than a month’s time, the company has now teamed u … | Continue reading
Consumer goods giant Unilever, a maker of branded soaps, foodstuffs and personal care items and also one of the world’s biggest online advertisers, has fired a warning shot across the bows of social media giants by threatening to pull ads from digital platforms if they don’t do … | Continue reading
Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason are a couple of seasoned billionaire investors, who know a bad deal when they see it, and they definitely don’t like the $6.1 billion deal announced last month to combine Fuji with Xerox. In a blog post published today, they are urging fellow shareho … | Continue reading
Despite plenty of uncertainty swirling around Instacart and its complex relationship with Whole Foods — now owned by Amazon — investors still seem to not be too worried, and are pouring a fresh big round of financing into the startup that values it at $4.2 billion. Instacart sai … | Continue reading
Stash, the micro-investing app that’s been a hit with first-time investors, announced today it has raised an additional $37.5 million in Series D funding in a round led by Union Square Ventures. Existing investors Breyer Capital, Coatue Management, Entree Capital, Goodwater Capi … | Continue reading
Normally, I wouldn’t be writing about a car seat for for TechCrunch but as I’ve been in the market for such an item lately (and have been hit up for all things baby tech as my due date nears) the high-tech Cybex Sirona M with SensorSafe 2.0 stood out. Cybex is manufactured in Ge … | Continue reading
Amazon acquired Blink late last year, a maker of affordable, easy to use security cameras powered by AA batteries. The acquisition was reportedly worth around $90 million to Amazon, according to a new report from Reuters, though the terms of the deal were not disclosed by Amazon … | Continue reading
XebiaLabs, the Boston-based software startup that helps companies automate DevOps functions, announced a healthy $100 million Series B investment led by Susquehanna Growth Equity and Accel. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $121.5 million. Derek Langone, Xebia’s CEO … | Continue reading
Quitting smoking is one of the most difficult things a person can do. But despite the products out there to help, from nicotine patches and gum to ecigarettes to scary PSAs and government programs, few of these products actually get people to the point where they feel confident … | Continue reading
nOCD, an app created to help people treat obsessive-compulsive disorder, will launch an Android version and add more features after raising a $1 million seed round from early-stage healthcare investment firm 7wire Ventures. Read More | Continue reading
The “endless runner” genre of games seems inherently stress-generating to me, since it implies running, without end. But Alto’s Adventure, the 2015 game from Toronto developer Snowman, provided an endless runner that was actively and profoundly relaxing, thanks to a mellow, imme … | Continue reading
As a fan of both meat and fire, the Traeger Timberline 850 hits right in my rib zone. This powerful – and expensive – smoking grill is more like an outdoor oven than the chintzy charcoal or gas grill you’ve been using and the unique pellet system adds flavor, sear, and smoke to … | Continue reading
In 2011, WeWork ran an accelerator-type program called WeWork Labs. That program was a bit neglected as the company began to focus on other initiatives, such as international expansion, Powered By We, and acquisitions. But today, WeWork is relaunching WeWork Labs, with 27 spaces … | Continue reading
Investors in Indonesia have started a new project aimed at digitizing the kiosk shops that adorn the street of capital city Jakarta. Warung Pintar — ‘smart kiosk store’ — helps street vendors revamp their store with a bright and colorful design, and a range of tech that includes … | Continue reading
In this episode of Technotopia I talk to Jeremy Ring, a former Florida state senator and author of We Were Yahoo!, a meditation on his career as one of the first employees at Yahoo. Ring has a lot to say about the search giant – including plenty of complaints about how things we … | Continue reading
Quietly, Apple has been bringing together a number of moving parts in its strategy around virtual and augmented reality hardware; and now one more element of that has come to light. eMagin, a maker of OLED miniature displays, says that Apple, along with LG, Valve, VR entertainme … | Continue reading
Alibaba Group’s entertainment unit has signed a major licensing deal to show many of Disney’s animated series and movies on Youku, its streaming video service, and other platforms it selects. The agreement covers more than 1,000 episodes from Disney series, as well as many of it … | Continue reading
Last fall at Oracle OpenWorld, chairman Larry Ellison showed he was a man of the people by comparing the company’s new autonomous database service to auto-pilot on his private plane. Regardless, those autonomous capabilities were pretty advanced, providing customers with a self- … | Continue reading
The Snap Map is a feature that received a mixed response when it landed in the Snapchat app, since it basically let you see where all your friends on the platform were at any given time – provided they were okay with sharing that info. Now, there’s a version of Snap Map availabl … | Continue reading