Software will eat the world, as the saying goes, but in doing so, some developers are likely to get a little indigestion. That is to say, building products requires working with disparate and distributed teams, and while developers may have an ever-growing array of algorithms, APIs and technology at their disposal to do this, ironically
Splice is blowing up like a hit song. The audio sample marketplace has doubled revenue and user count in a year, and now reaches 3 million musicians. 70% of those visit weekly to hunt down the freshest and trendiest sounds that give their tracks that special something, and many pay $7.99 for unlimited access. But
“We’re giving away money to strangers on the internet” is a pretty cavalier pitch for a new startup. But the more I learned about Placement, the smarter it sounded. In exchange for 10% of your income for 18 to 36 months, Placement will find you a much higher paying job, prep you for the interview
Wonderbly, the personalised book publisher backed by Google Ventures and best known for the breakout hit “Lost My Name,” is unveiling Wonderbly Studios in a bid to make it easier for other brands to offer personalised and bespoke printed books on-demand. Initially, Wonderfully Studios will work with select partners to provide access to its personalisation
Amazon may have stopped selling its Dash buttons for consumers, but it’s not done with dedicated Dash hardware: The company is launching its new Amazon Dash Smart Shelf today. Aimed at small businesses rather than individuals, the Dash Smart Shelf is also even more automated than the Dash buttons, as it uses a built-in scale
Twitter’s radical “Hide Replies” feature, one of the biggest changes to how Twitter works since the invention of the Retweet, is now available to Twitter’s global user base. The company says the feature will roll out to all Twitter users across platforms by today, with only one slight tweak since earlier tests. Designed to balance
More than $1 trillion is spent by enterprises annually on “digital transformation” — the investments that organizations make to update their IT systems to get more out of them and reduce costs — and today one of the bigger startups that’s built a platform to help get the ball rolling is announcing a huge round
Kleiner Perkins has joined a $24.5 million Series A funding round for Bison Trails, a provider of blockchain protocols, which was led by Blockchain Capital to develop the firm’s infrastructure services. Other participants included Coinbase Ventures, ConsenSys, A Capital, Collaborative Fund and Sound Ventures as new investors. Galaxy Digital and Initialized, as early backers, joined
When you think about artificial intelligence, chances are you think about anthropomorphic robots that can make decisions on their own. But artificial intelligence already has huge impacts in the insurance space. That’s why I’m excited to announce that omni:us founder and CEO Sofie Quidenus-Wahlforss is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin. omni:us is an AI-driven
Apple just released the iPhone 11 Pro’s battery case and it comes with surprise: a button for the camera. This is a minor, but welcomed addition to an otherwise standard battery case. The button is clever. It’s located on the bottom half of the case is not a soft button that presses something on the
Robert Wahbe Contributor Robert Wahbe is the co-founder and CEO of Highspot, the sales enablement platform that reps love. Slack makes customer acquisition look easy. The day we acquired our first Highspot customer, it was raining hard in Seattle. I was on my way to a startup event when I answered my cell phone and
TechCrunch covers a lot of bases in the tech startup world, but none is more important than supporting founders — especially early-stage founders. That’s what our new event series, TechCrunch Early Stage, is all about. These single-day events debuting next year will be highly interactive opportunities for founders to tap experts in the core startup
PayPal announced today it has agreed to acquire Honey Science Corporation, the makers of a deal-finding browser add-on and mobile application, for $4 billion, mostly cash. The acquisition, which is PayPal’s largest to date, will give the payments giant a foothold earlier in the customer’s shopping journey. Instead of only competing on the checkout page
After a year of testing out environmental technologies for a private company, co-founder Patricia Ayma developed a process for bioplastic production using bacteria. The system turns organic matter, such as food waste, into a product that can be used as a biodegradable alternative to single-use plastics. “I realized that it was a simple technology for
Circ, the Berlin-based e-scooter rentals — or so-called micro-mobility — company founded by Lukasz Gadowski of Delivery Hero fame, has made a number of layoff, TechCrunch has learned. This has seen a reduction in headcount in its HQ and other regional operations. The exact number isn’t clear, although once source placed it at around 50
Sonos revealed during its quarterly earnings report that it has acquired voice assistant startup Snips in a $37 million cash deal, Variety reported on Wednesday. Snips, which had been developing dedicated smart device assistants that can operate primarily locally, instead of relying on consistently round-tripping voice data to the cloud, could help Sonos set up
If you wander into the Bandit coffee shop in Midtown New York, you won’t be able to just walk up to the counter and order something. Instead, you’ll need to download a mobile app. I experienced it for myself yesterday afternoon, when I — along with several other customers — pulled my phone out, downloaded
Google Cloud today announced the launch of a new bare metal service, dubbed the Bare Metal Solution. We aren’t talking about bare metal servers offered directly by Google Cloud here, though. Instead, we’re talking about a solution that enterprises can use to run their specialized workloads on certified hardware that’s co-located in the Google Cloud
Front, the company that lets you manage your inboxes as a team, acquired Meetingbird last year. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Front is about to roll out its own calendar. This way, you can manage meetings within Front and find time that works for everyone. Integrating emails with your calendar makes a
Cheq, a startup focused on preventing ad fraud and ensuring that ads run in brand-safe environments, has raised $16 million in Series B funding. When the company raised its $5 million Series A last year, CEO Guy Tytunovich contrasted Cheq’s approach with what he called “first generation solutions for ad verification” — rather than identifying
Ubiquiti, the company behind popular UniFi Wi-Fi access points and networking equipment, is releasing a new router for consumers — the AmpliFi Alien. Today’s new device is an all-in-one networking device. It features a router (the “brain” of your local network), four Gigait Ethernet ports and Wi-Fi capabilities. And yes, it is a Wi-Fi 6
Spark, the popular email app from Readdle, has been redesigned on iOS and Android. The interface has always been a bit busy in the mobile app. That’s why the updated app now features a cleaner design and a handful of new features. On the design front, Spark now uses simple headers to separate smart sections,
Facebook announced its plans for its F8 annual developer conference, which is where the company shows off its latest technology, apps and its vision for the future. The company says the next event will take place on May 5-6, 2020 at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, CA. Interested attendees can sign up at www.f8.com
Deep learning is all the rage these days in enterprise circles, and it isn’t hard to understand why. Whether it is optimizing ad spend, finding new drugs to cure cancer, or just offering better, more intelligent products to customers, machine learning — and particularly deep learning models — have the potential to massively improve a
It is approaching a year since TechCrunch broke news that Robinhood was stealthily recruiting for a London office ahead of plans to expand to the U.K. And in August the U.S.-based company, which pioneered “commission-free” stock-trading states-side, announced it had received regulatory approval to operate this side of the pond, signalling that a U.K. launch
Peyton Carr Contributor Peyton Carr is a Financial Adviser to founders, entrepreneurs and their families, helping them with planning and investing. He is a Managing Director of Keystone Global Partners. Whether you’re a founder, an early employee or an executive, the possibility of an exit offers extraordinary financial possibilities. However, I see plenty of founders
Dream Games, a Turkish mobile gaming company founded by former Peak Games employees who worked together on hit puzzle games Toy Blast and Toon Blast, has raised $7.5 million in seed funding. Leading the round is Makers Fund, with co-investment from London’s Balderton Capital. The funding will be used to increase headcount within the Dream
Helping out a friend in need online can be surprisingly difficult. While giving cash is easy enough, that’s often not what people need most — so Give InKind aims to be the platform where you can do a lot more than write a check. The idea is such a natural one that the company tripled
Eden, the workplace management platform that connects office managers with service providers, today announced the close of a $25 million Series B round led by Reshape. Participants in the round also include Fifth Wall Ventures, Mitsui Fudosan, RXR Realty, Thor Equities, Bessemer Venture Partners, Alate Partners, Quiet Capital, S28 Capital, Canvas Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Upshift
Lucence Diagnostics, a genomic medicine startup that develops non-invasive tests for cancer screening, announced today that it has raised a $20 million Series A led by IHH Healthcare, one of the world’s largest integrated private healthcare groups. Other participants included SGInnovate and returning investors Heliconia Capital (a subsidiary of Temasek Holdings), Lim Kaling and Koh