The digital landscape is evolving so fast that one’s four-year degree can hardly keep up with the myriad platforms and APIs emerging every day. That’s why Skills Union wants to connect tech startup workers looking to level up with an array of field-specific experts over live video. Online professional training isn’t new; it’s not uncommon
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Here’s one of those questions you’ve probably never considered, but probably should: What goes on your fruit? Not out in the field — though obviously that’s something worth considering too — rather in that period between the picking and purchasing? Turns out pesticides aren’t just the stuff that gets sprayed out the back of a
The electric everything revolution is here, and with it an unprecedented demand for critical battery materials. The most precious of all? Lithium, the crucial ingredient in the lithium-ion batteries that will power everything from your Tesla to your iPhone. The problem is, extracting lithium is expensive, time-consuming, labor intensive and takes a serious toll on
Seems we may not be getting a surprise October Apple event, after all. The company just dropped what will, no doubt, be one of its last major hardware updates for the calendar year. The iPad Pro is getting a spec refresh revolving around an upgrade for the M1 to M2 chip. The new chip sports
Hartbeat Ventures is taking in its first institutional investment from J.P. Morgan, comedian and entrepreneur Kevin Hart announced today at TechCrunch Disrupt. He made the announcement alongside J.P. Morgan’s head of digital investment banking and digital private markets Michael Elanjian and Hartbeat Ventures’ president and co-founder Robert Roman. Hartbeat Ventures, an early-stage VC firm with
Nexta, an Egyptian startup that plans to launch its banking app in the coming months, has secured a $3 million investment from eFinance Group, a state-owned provider of digital payments solutions. This news follows the $2 million pre-seed round Nexta announced this March, which Egyptian early-stage VC Disruptech led. Last year, Nexta obtained a provisional
Last year, MaxAB, the food and grocery B2B e-commerce and distribution platform serving a network of traditional retailers across Egypt and Morocco, raised its $55 million Series A in two tranches; the latter accompanied its acquisition of the Morocco-based and YC-backed WaysToCap. The moves signaled MaxAB’s ambition to dominate Egypt’s and North Africa’s B2B retail
In 2018, Neil D’Souza, a software engineer by trade and previously the VP of product development at Thinkstep, came to the realization that his ten-plus-year effort to solve enterprise product challenges in the areas of sustainability, compliance and risk were having little impact. The way he saw it, they took too long, which minimized their
Munich-based software and services vacation rental startup, Holidu, has topped up its coffers with an oversubscribed €104 million (~$102M) Series E funding round of equity and debt, led by existing investor 83North, after seeing its year-over-year revenue grew 100% in 2021. The round saw a mix of other existing and new investors chipping in, including
Apple released a new version of its entry-level iPad that Apple simply calls “the iPad.” It’s a dramatic refresh as Apple is swapping the familiar design with rounded edges and a home button. Instead, the iPad now looks more like the iPad Air and iPad Pro. But there are some compromises. The new iPad starts
At TechCrunch Disrupt, Netflix VP of Gaming Mike Verdu dropped two bits of news about the streaming giant’s foray into games. Verdu said that Netflix is “seriously exploring a cloud gaming offering.” The company will also open a new gaming studio in Southern California. “It’s a value add. We’re not asking you to subscribe as
Chief co-founders Carolyn Childers and Lindsay Kaplan started the company because they had experienced first-hand being women executives without a ton of support. They created a community of female leaders that is now 20,000 strong, with 60,000 sitting on waitlists, but just don’t call these women ‘girl bosses.’ The two women appeared at TechCrunch Disrupt
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Quantified health activity is all around us these days, as scores of people use mobile sensing technologies to keep an eye on their well-being by tracking their steps, workouts and even how long and deep they sleep — so why shouldn’t women who cycle (as in menstrual cycle) track monthly changes to their hormone levels?
More doom and gloom for smartphone manufacturers, as global smartphone shipments experience the third consecutive decline this year. Per numbers from Canalys, shipments dropped a lowly 9% last quarter, marking the worst Q3 for the category since 2014. Apple is a rare bright spot among the numbers, with some positive growth as the rest of
Chri Besenbruch, CEO of Deep Render, sees many problems with the way video compression standards are developed today. He thinks they aren’t advancing quickly enough, bemoans the fact that they’re plagued with legal uncertainty and decries their reliance on specialized hardware for acceleration. “The codec development process is broken,” Besenbruch said in an interview with
After a whirlwind month of spewing racism, antisemitism and just straight oddities, Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, announced his intention to buy right-wing extremist “free speech” platform Parler. Coincidentally, we’re sure, the app’s CEO is George Farmer, who is the husband of Kanye’s new best friend, conservative political pundit Candace Owens. In
Meet NXgenPort, a Saint Paul, Minnesota-based startup that’s looking to remotely monitor cancer patients in between doctor visits using a port catheter. NXgenPort, which presented today at TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield, is building an implantable chemo port that features added sensors and remote connectivity functions. The port combines chemo-port efficacy with sensor technology to measure
The European Commission is facing fresh calls to make good on its 2017 antitrust decision against Google Shopping by banning Google from displaying its own shopping comparison ads units in search results — boxes which Google populates with revenue-generating ads — as they argue the self-preferencing units constitute an ongoing competition abuse by the adtech
Continuity Camera was one of the odder additions that arrived in the last round of Apple operating system updates. It seemed like an awkward fix to a longstanding issue with Mac webcams, clipping your iPhone to the top of your laptop lid, but I’ve come to appreciate it in my recent travels. Today, Belkin announced
Meet Omneky, a startup that leverages OpenAI’s DALLE-2 and GPT-3 models to generate visuals and text that can be used in ads for social platforms. The company wants to make online ads both cheaper and more effective thanks to recent innovations in artificial intelligence and computer vision. Omneky is participating in Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch
From one perspective, DoorDash is a bargain today. The same goes for Coinbase, UiPath, AppLovin, Oscar Health, Bumble and Qualtrics. Indeed, if you pick nearly any 2021 technology IPO and compare its debut price to where it trades today, you will find that the market is offering yesteryear’s standouts at a massive discount. So much
Verlinvest, a family-backed, “evergreen”, growth fund investor, that has previously funded a few well-known consumer brands like Oatly, Vita Coco, Tony’s Chocolonely, Who Gives A Crap, Pedego, Chewy.com, Hint & others, is getting into the venture game. After putting around €50m into VC initiatives globally, it’s now embarking on being the kick-starter LP in a
Meet Revyze, a French startup that is developing a mobile app for iOS and Android at the intersection of education and social. In many ways, Revyze looks just like TikTok. But it is focused specifically on educational content for teenagers. “We talked with kids attending 30 or 35 different high schools,” co-founder Florent Sciberras told
Emily Chang speaks with Mark Gurman about Apple’s shift to the lightning charging port and how this pivot brings them closer to a wireless-first future. ——– Like this video? Subscribe to Bloomberg Technology on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrM7B7SL_g1edFOnmj-SDKg Watch the latest full episodes of “Bloomberg Technology” with Emily Chang here: Get the latest in tech from Silicon
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Greetings from the TechCrunch office! Yes, it turns out we have an office, even though we haven’t seen the inside of it for a good long stretch. We are here doing some
After a rough year in the public markets, you might take today’s brilliant trading as good news. Any positive price movement is a win, right? Kinda. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index rose 3.4% today, while other major U.S. indices jumped smaller amounts in a hall-of-fame start to the trading week. (That the markets are turning
Netflix announced today that it has launched “Profile Transfer,” a feature that lets a member on an existing account switch to a brand-new account without rebuilding their profile. This prevents their personal data from being erased like customized recommendations, viewing history, list of favorite shows/movies, and other settings that could be annoying to lose and
Tipping in the U.S. is a critical part of how the wheels turn in the service economy. One service area that’s been very overlooked, however, is the world of last-mile delivery — a service job that falls between the cracks when it comes to tipping because those who deliver products typically don’t work for the
Stability AI, the company funding the development of open source music- and image-generating systems like Dance Diffusion and Stable Diffusion, today announced that it raised $101 million in a funding round led by Coatue and Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from O’Shaughnessy Ventures LLC. The tranche values the company at $1 billion post-money, according to