Fifteen years ago this week on August 25, 2006, AWS turned on the very first beta instance of EC2, its cloud-based virtual computers. Today cloud computing, and more specifically infrastructure as a service, is a staple of how businesses use computing, but at that moment it wasn’t a well known or widely understood concept. The
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Aug.25 — Ark Investment Management founder and CEO Cathie Wood says she is “without a doubt” still bullish on Tesla amid what she sees as a “massive transformation” toward electric vehicles. She speaks during an interview with Bloomberg’s Carol Massar.
Evan Fisher Contributor Founder of Unicorn Capital and Minimal Capital, Evan Fisher‘s pitching and investor strategy has helped startups raise more than $2.5 billion. More posts by this contributor Don’t send VC a cold deck ever again: Start sending video pitches Most founders fall into an extremely common trap: Just because you produced outstanding results
“Voice skins” have become a very popular feature for AI-based voice assistants, to help personalize some of the more anodyne aspects of helpful, yet also kind of bland and robotic, speaking voices you get on services like Alexa. Now a startup that is building voice skins for different companies to use across their services, and
Since 2017, Microsoft has offered its Office suite to Chromebook users via the Google Play store, but that is set to come to an end in a few short weeks. As of September 18, Microsoft is discontinuing support for Office (which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook) on Chromebook. Microsoft is not, however, abandoning
Ilyes Kacher Contributor Ilyes Kacher is a data scientist at autoRetouch, an AI-powered platform for bulk-editing product images online. I’m a native French data scientist who cut his teeth as a research engineer in computer vision in Japan and later in my home country. Yet I’m writing from an unlikely computer vision hub: Stuttgart, Germany.
Forget what you’ve heard: There are many shortcuts to success. Tapping into someone else’s experience is a tried-and-true method, which is why two-time Y Combinator participant Chris Morton wrote a guest post for Extra Crunch with advice for founders hoping to be accepted by the famed accelerator. Morton, who has also reviewed thousands of YC
What a busy week in the world of media liquidity. That’s a sentence you don’t get to write often. Regardless, news broke this week that Axel Springer is buying U.S. political journalism outfit POLITICO. The transaction was expected, but the eye-popping roughly $1 billion price tag still has tongues wagging. We even got on the
With more than 270,000 stickers, Stipop’s library of colorful, character-driven expressions has a little something for everyone. The company offers keyboard and social app stickers through ad-supported mobile apps on iOS and Android, but it’s recently focused more on providing stickers to developers, creators and other online businesses. “We were able to gather so many
Linux is set for a big release this Sunday August 29, setting the stage for enterprise and cloud applications for months to come. The 5.14 kernel update will include security and performance improvements. A particular area of interest for both enterprise and cloud users is always security and to that end, Linux 5.14 will help
The design space has undergone major changes in the last decade. What once was dominated by a single player in Adobe has now become a burgeoning software landscape, with a handful of major players answering the needs of designers across every industry. One such player is Canva, the startup valued at over $15 billion. The
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Natasha and Alex and Grace and Chris were joined by none other than TechCrunch’s own Mary Ann Azevedo, in her first-ever appearance on the show. She’s pretty much the best person and we’re stoked to have her on the pod. And it was good that
Twitter users in Canada and parts of the U.S. appear to be having trouble accessing the social media platform on Friday morning. Reports from third-party web monitoring service Downdetector indicate the issue is impacting users across Canada and mainly the eastern parts of the U.S. near the Canadian border, though users from more states continue
Stonehenge Technology Labs wants consumer packaged goods companies to gain meaningful use from all of the data they collect. It announced $2 million in seed funding for its STOPWATCH commerce enhancement software. The round was led by Irish Angels, with participation from Bread and Butter Ventures, Gaingels, Angeles Investors, Bonfire Ventures and Red Tail Venture
With so much startup activity in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) space it can be a challenge for businesses to figure out which of these SaaS (SaaSes?) are actually useful and worth continuing to shell out for. Well, Cologne-based startup Sastrify is here to help — offering what it describes as a “highly automated” platform (covering some
There’s a lot of advice out there on how to grab people’s attention, but there’s one aspect of marketing that Robert Katai thinks isn’t talked about as often: maintaining their attention. The solution, he says, is a combination of content strategy and positioning. Based in Romania, Katai is known for his podcasts and speeches covering
Picsart announced this morning that it has raised a $130 million round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2. The new capital infusion pushes the company’s valuation north of the $1 billion mark, though it declined to get more specific. Per PitchBook data, the company’s preceding round of capital, in 2019, valued the company at around
Facebook is looking to create a standalone advisory committee for election-related policy decisions, according to a new report from The New York Times. The company has reportedly approached a number of policy experts and academics it is interested in recruiting for the group, which could give the company cover for some of its most consequential
Wildfires are burning in countries all around the world. California is dealing with some of the worst wildfires in its history (a superlative that I use essentially every year now) with the Caldor fire and others blazing in the state’s north. Meanwhile, Greece and other Mediterranean nations have been fighting fires for weeks to bring
Finding the right learning platform can be difficult, especially as companies look to upskill and reskill their talent to meet demand for certain technological capabilities, like data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence roles. Workera.ai’s approach is to personalize learning plans with targeted resources — both technical and nontechnical roles — based on the current
Netflix today announced it will begin testing mobile games inside its Android app for its members in Poland. At launch, paying subscribers will be able to try out two games, “Stranger Things: 1984” and “Stranger Things 3” — titles that have been previously available on the Apple App Store, Google Play and, in the case
Christopher Morton Contributor Christopher Morton is COO of Cognito. The Y Combinator application season is upon us. I have been through YC a couple of times and have reviewed thousands of applications as a volunteer in later years. Typically, you hear advice focused on ways to improve your YC application so it gets accepted. Here
The Equity crew felt that there was enough media news out recently that we simply had no choice but to fire up a Twitter Space and have a chat. The above episode is a discussion of a few things, in a loose and relaxed manner, so don’t take any of the Verizon jokes too seriously,
Twitter announced today that some hosts on Spaces, its live audio feature, will now be able to sell access to Ticketed Spaces. Applications for Ticketed Spaces first opened in June for users who are over 18, hosted three Spaces in the last 30 days, and have at least 1,000 followers. “We’re continuing to work closely
Cruise, the self-driving car company under General Motors, has launched a new initiative called Farm to Fleet that will allow the company to source solar power from farms in California’s Central Valley. The San Francisco Chronicle was the first to report the news that Cruise is directly purchasing renewable energy credits from Sundale Vineyards and
Konrad Sanders Contributor Which terms come to mind when you think about SaaS? “Solutions,” “cutting-edge,” “scalable” and “innovative” are just a sample of the overused jargon lurking around every corner of the techverse, with SaaS marketers the world over seemingly singing from the same hymn book. Sadly for them, new research has proven that such
Meet Shares, a new European startup that wants to add a social twist to financial investment — in that case, the company means ‘social’ as in ‘social network’. The startup has been developing its product under the radar for a few months already. It is also moving at a fast pace. It has assembled a team
When it comes to e-paper devices, the Kindle is of course the first brand people think of, though I’ve done my best to spread the Kobo and reMarkable gospel as well. Chinese e-reader maker Boox is a relatively new entrant to the space, and its devices are experimental but useful options in the niche market
A new startup called Popcorn wants to make work communication more fun and personal by offering a way for users to record short video messages, or “pops,” that can be used for any number of purposes in place of longer emails, texts, Slack messages, or Zoom calls. While there are plenty of other places to
Good news, TechCrunch family, Techstars’ Saba Karim is coming to Disrupt (September 21-23) this year. With a great vantage point from his perspective as Global Startup Pipeline Manager at Techstars, Karim will be hosting a session on the Extra Crunch stage discussing how to craft a pitch deck that cannot be ignored. It’s a popular