The tech world has a lot to offer those with disabilities, but it can be hard to get investors excited about the accessibility space. That’s why Microsoft’s AI for Accessibility grants are so welcome: equity-free Azure credits and cash for companies looking to adapt AI to the needs of those with disabilities. The company just
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Pendo, the late stage startup that helps companies understand how customers are interacting with their apps, announced a $100 million Series E investment today on a valuation of $1 billion. The round was led by Sapphire Ventures . Also participating were new investors General Atlantic and Tiger Global, and existing investors Battery Ventures, Meritech Capital,
Rocket Lab has added another successful commercial launch to its track record: The rocket startup’s ‘As The Crow Flies’ mission took off today from its LC-1 launch site in New Zealand as planned. The rocket took off at 9:22 PM ET (6:22 PM PT), during its second launch opportunity of the day after the first
Pensando, an edge computing startup founded by former Cisco engineers, came out of stealth mode today with an announcement that it has raised a $145 million Series C. The company’s software and hardware technology, created to give data centers more of the flexibility of cloud computing servers, is being positioned as a competitor to Amazon
In Washington today, Amazon announced a series of initiatives and issued a call for companies to reduce their carbon emissions 10 years ahead of the goals set forth in the Paris Agreement as part of a sweeping effort to reduce its own environmental footprint. “We’re done being in the middle of the herd on this
A controversial UK government scheme to introduce mandatary age checks for accessing online pornography has been dropped — for now. Introduction of the measure, which was intended to protect children from accessing inappropriate content online, had already been delayed by several months this year, most recently after a bureaucratic oversight. The technical and regulatory challenges
Very few modern tech companies have executed on their mission as consistently, and at such a high level of quality as Analogue. Analogue’s obsessively engineered modern consoles for old-school physical cartridge video games are museum-quality hardware design, housing specially tuned processors that offer pitch- and pixel-perfect play of all NES, Sega Genesis, SNES and other
Google ended today’s hardware event by going deep on the photo technology in its new Pixel 4, and brought out someone who’s actually been using the camera — legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz. The company announced that it’s working with Leibovitz back in October 2018. Today, she spoke about the experience of working with the Pixel 3
Instagram is slowly rolling out a new feature that will help better protect your personal data from being accessed by your long discarded, third-party applications — that is, any app you had once authorized to access your Instagram profile over the years. This may include websites you used for printing your Instagram photos, various dating apps,
Autify, a platform that makes testing web application as easy as clicking a few buttons, has raised a $2.5 million seed round from Global Brain, Salesforce Ventures, Archetype Ventures and several angels. The company, which recently graduated from the Alchemist accelerator program for enterprise startups, splits its base between the U.S., where it keeps an
DoNotPay helps you get out of parking tickets, cancel forgotten subscriptions, and now it can call you when it’s your turn in a customer service phone queue. The app today is launching “Skip Waiting On Hold”. Just type in the company you need to talk to, and DoNotPay calls for you using tricks to get
One of the major challenges facing engineers as they develop more agile robots is helping them move through space while avoiding collisions, especially in a dynamic environment. RealTime Robotics, a Boston-based startup announced an $11.7 million Series A investment to help solve this problem. SPARX Asset Management led the round with participation from some strategic
In our oceans the scale of disasters is measured in millions, billions, and trillions, while solutions amount to single digits: individuals or institutions working to impact a chosen issue with approaches often both brilliant and quixotic. Putting such individuals in close contact with both whales and billionaires is the strange alchemy being attempted by the
Uber wants to become a super app by providing multiple services in a single app. That’s why the company is announcing an integration with French startup Cityscoot. Cityscoot is a free-floating electric scooter service (moped scooters). Just like other free-floating mobility services, you can open an app, locate the nearest vehicle around you, unlock it
The FrankOne coffee maker, fresh off a successful crowdfunding campaign, is now available for purchase, and I got a chance to test out one of the first run of these funky little gadgets. While it won’t replace my normal pourover or a larger coffee machine, it’s a clever, quick, and portable way to make a
YouTube is partnering with Merchbar on a new integration that will allow artists to sell their official merchandise to their worldwide fans from a shelf just below the video. The addition is the latest deal focused on helping video creators make more money from their videos, beyond the revenue brought in through advertisements and subscriptions.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. LinkedIn gets physical, debuts Events hub for people to plan in-person networking events LinkedIn is bringing its professional networking features into
&Open is a startup with an unusual name, and one that fills an unusual niche in the business world. It has built a gift giving platform, so that businesses can reward loyalty with a small token of appreciation. The gift depends on the business and the circumstances, but it could be something like a book
Dozens of impeccably dressed women outfitted in jumpsuits and Rothy’s gathered at the Greylock offices last week for a “structured networking” session hosted by All Raise, an 18-month-old nonprofit organization that seeks to amplify the voices of and support women in tech. The organization, active in the Bay Area and New York City, is announcing
Booqed, a Hong Kong-based platform for booking short-term work spaces, announced today that it has raised $1.675 million in seed funding. Participants included Colliers International, the commercial real-estate management company, Techstars and Lazard Korea. The company participated in Proptech Accelerator, the Toronto-based accelerator program for property and real estate startups run by Colliers and Techstars,
Google today announced its largest package of renewable energy deals yet. Worth a total of 1,600-megawatts, the package includes 18 deals in the U.S., Chile and Europe. This brings Google’s current set of wind and solar agreements to about 5,500 megawatts (MW) and the company’s number of total renewables projects it’s involved in to 52.
Europe has ordered chipmaker Broadcom to stop applying exclusivity clauses in agreements with six of its major customers — imposing so called ‘interim measures’ based on preliminary findings from an ongoing antitrust investigation. The move follows a formal statement of objections issued by the Competition Commission in June. At the time the regulator said it would
The Pixel 4 and Pixel XL smartphones, that Google just unveiled at a press conference in New York, won’t launch in India, one of the company’s key overseas markets, the Android-maker said on Tuesday. The bottleneck lies in the headline feature Project Soli, a radar-based motion-sensing chip baked into the new Pixel smartphones that relies
Live Caption, Google’s automatic captioning system first introduced at its I/O developer conference this May, is now officially available, alongside the launch of the new Pixel 4. But unlike some of the other technologies highlighted at the company’s Pixel hardware event yesterday, Live Caption won’t be limited to Google’s new smartphone alone. After the initial
As TikTok continues its rapid U.S. growth, the company is being challenged to better explain its content moderation choices. Why, for example, is the short-form video app censoring the Hong Kong protests but not U.S. political content? Why is it banning political ads, but supports hashtags like #trump2020 and #maga, each with millions, or even
Databricks, the big data analytics service founded by the original developers of Apache Spark, today announced that it is bringing its Delta Lake open-source project for building data lakes to the Linux Foundation and under an open governance model. The company announced the launch of Delta Lake earlier this year and even though it’s still
Days out of Y Combinator, venture capitalists valued ZeroDown, a financial and real estate technology startup, at $150 million. The company had the perfect match of experienced founders and eye-popping ambitions to carve a new path to home ownership. “I think we will be known as a company that makes it easier to buy a
Thimble, which offers flexible, short-term insurance to small businesses and freelancers, is announcing that it has raised $22 million in a Series A funding round led by IAC. Until today, the startup was known as Verifly, a name tied to the company’s initial aim of providing insurance to drone pilots. However, founder and CEO Jay
How do you attract the attention of a prince? Aside from being Meghan Markle, of course. One answer came recently in the form of Prince Harry’s backing of a new initiative designed to make offsetting the carbon from your airline flights a properly mainstream idea. For Harry, the initiative had a double whammy. It might
Google’s new Pixel 4 camera offers a ton of new tricks to improve its photographic chops, and to emphasize the point, it had Professor Mark Levoy, who leads camera technology development at Google Research, up on stage to talk about the Pixel 4’s many improvements, including its new telephoto lens, updated Super Res Zoom technology