March 14, 2014
Smart Sparrow Lands $10M To Help Teachers Make Online Learning More Adaptive And Interactive
For most students, learning within the traditional confines of the educational system has been something to be endured, rather than something that’s just as fun as it is rewarding. Every…
If You Look At One Picture Of 3D-Printed Chicken Today, Make It This One
You like chicken. You like 3D printed stuff. Why not slam them together to make the ultimate in 3D printable model food? How does that sound? Cool, right? I thought…
Potcoin, A New Cryptocurrency To Help Ease The War On Drugs
It started with one evocative name shouted into the phone from one developer to another: “Potcoin!” The Founding Fathers had to work for years to craft a Constitution that would…
Bill Gates: It’s OK If Half Of Silicon Valley Startups Are “Silly”
Microsoft Founder Bill Gates doesn’t worry that Silicon Valley is the home of billion-dollar texting apps and farming games. “Innovation in California is at its absolute peak right now. Sure,…
Firm You Haven’t Heard Of With $13M In 2013 Revenue IPO’d Today, Spiking To Valuation North Of $3B
So you are a company. You’re about six years old. You’ve raised $181 million dollars to date, including a Box-esque $100 million Series D bloc. The tough bit is that…
Sina Weibo, China’s Answer To Facebook And Twitter, Files For $500M IPO In The U.S.
Sina Weibo, the microblogging and social media service that’s often called China’s answer to Twitter and Facebook, has filed documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to raise up…
Not many companies in the Y Combinator stable have executives who’ve spent time at both Tom Ford’s fashion powerhouse and the Korean online ticketing platform TicketMonster. I’m betting Memebox is…
CrunchWeek: Uber Beefs Up On Insurance, Secret’s New Funding, More Trouble At Clinkle
You know what goes great with your TGIF beverage of choice? A brand new episode of CrunchWeek, the show that brings three TechCrunch writers together to chat about the most…
The “Stolen” Mt.Gox Data Contained Malware That Robbed Users Of Bitcoin
Security researchers at Securelist have found that the data “stolen” from Mark Karpeles’ computer actually contained a BTC-stealing Trojan that masqueraded as a back-end app for managing Mt.Gox trades. The…
Update: Two days after this article was published, another group of developers re-released Popcorn Time. The details are here. Hollywood won. The open source project called Popcorn Time is dead…
Today In Dystopian War Robots That Will Harvest Us For Our Organs…
Sure, Babar was a pretty cool elephant, but what happens when he becomes a cyborg bent on the destruction of the mustache man who stole his crown in Babar Loses…
It seems that school children are not the only ones who aren’t able to handle the power of anonymous social applications appropriately. Secret, the San Francisco-based (and now, newly funded)…
Mozilla Cancels Firefox For Metro, Cites Fewer Than 1,000 Daily Active Users
Mozilla today announced that it will halt development of its Firefox for Windows 8 Metro browser after about a year-and-a-half of development. According to Mozilla’s Firefox VP Jonathan Nightingale, the…
GoDaddy Preps For IPO Fewer Than 3 Years After Its $2.25B Sale To Private Equity Groups
GoDaddy, the well-known domain and hosting company, is preparing to go public. The company was sold for $2.25 billion in the summer of 2011 to a mixture of private money,…
Ask A VC: TransLink Capital’s Jay Eum On Expanding To Asian Markets
In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, we hosted TransLink Capital’s Jay Eum visited the studio to talk about expansion to markets in Asia and more.
AOL Lays Off “Double Digit” Number Of Employees
AOL had a round of layoffs today affecting a “double digit” number of employees, according to a source with knowledge of the company. We reported on larger AOL layoffs (with…
How Telecom Company Free Nearly Disrupted The French Mobile Landscape All Over Again
Last week, everything was very different in the mobile landscape in France. France’s disruptive telecom company Free was about to make the best strategic move I had ever seen. Yet,…
Report: Changing Tax Rules For Tech Giants Would Mean $89 Billion For U.S. Gov
Tech giants, including Google to Apple, are notorious fans of offshore tax havens, which saves them billions of dollars. A new report from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism finds that…
Bill Gates Says Snowden Is No Hero
When Edward Snowden starts his official fanclub, he shouldn’t expect Bill Gates to sign up. The richest man in the world isn’t much of a fan at all, it turns…
I’m Going To Interview Vine Co-Founder And GM Colin Kroll At Disrupt NY, And Then Vine It
It’s been just over a year since Vine launched into the world, catapulted by parent company Twitter to bring mobile video creation to the masses. A lot has happened in…
Gridspace Uses Natural Language Processing To Make Your Meetings More Efficient
Gridspace has created an application based on technology that automatically saves and indexes meeting conversations. But the big breakthrough is that, though the magic of machine learning and natural language…
Foundation: Secret’s David Byttow Talks Privacy, Security, and Company Origins
Today is an exciting day for Secret, one of the most talked about new startups in Silicon Valley which just raised another round of funding. I sat down with Secret’s…
Dyson has a new line of its ‘Cool’ bladeless fans out, and as you might expect from the UK-based appliance maker, they’re basically the best-looking fans you can buy. I got…
When we visited Barcelona during MWC we met a very energetic team of programmers who created an app called dondeEsta, a “live indicator” that tells you exactly where your kids…
Facebook’s Secret New “Business Manager” Could Compete With Developer Partners For Marketing Dollars
TechCrunch has discovered a big, unannounced marketing tool from Facebook called Business Manager that lets teams at enterprises and agencies manage multiple ad campaigns and Pages in one interface. There’s…
Tesla Evaluating ‘Judicial Remedies’ To Oppose Direct Sales Ban In New Jersey
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has taken to the company blog today to oppose a ruling by the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission that it would no longer be able…
HoverChat For Android Lets You Message Your Friends Without Switching Screens
HoverChat, the first Egyptian Y Combinator startup and makers of an SMS replacement application currently available for Android smartphones, is focused on making messaging more of a multi-tasking experience. The…
Expa, a self-described “startup studio” created by StumbleUpon and Uber founder Garrett Camp, is announcing that it has raised $50 million in funding from some big names, including Virgin founder…
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: SXSW Adventures, Neil Young’s MP3, And The Next-Gen HTC One
Friday! Along with the weekend, and hopes for good weather, Friday also brings along with it the TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast. It’s been a long week, what with SXSW, but we’re…
Over the last three years, we’ve seen an increasing number of tech IPOs – many from consumer facing companies that we’ve long known were headed for an IPO. I’m talking…
