March 2016
Your favorite accelerator programs, ranked
For the fifth year in a row, biz school professors Yael Hochberg of Rice University and Susan Cohen of the University of Richmond have ranked the many accelerator programs now up and…
13 TechCrunch stories you don’t want to miss this week
This week, Facebook made a selfie filter app acquisition, Google surprised us with the Android N preview, and we ate bugs. Yeah, seriously. Silicon Valley is eating bugs now. These…
NASA announced that it will send its next lander to Mars, known as the InSight Mars lander, in May of 2018. The mission was originally on schedule to launch later…
Amazon Alexa can now pay your Capital One bill
Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa, embedded in devices like the Echo speaker and Fire TV, is today taking on a new role: she’s now a banking assistant, too. Capital One announced…
4 factors that will jumpstart the Boston tech party revolution
Boston’s tech scene should shake off its inferiority complex: The “Boston Tech Party” revolution is starting to unfold. After many years of under-the-radar growth and profitable companies, the arrival of…
Kodak tries its hand at social with new “Kodak Moments” storytelling app
The saying “Kodak Moment” is a holdover from another era where camera owners had to be thoughtful about which snapshots deserved to be taken, due to the limitations involved with…
Amazon eyes up education, plans a free platform for learning materials
Back in 2013, Amazon acquired (and continued to operate) online math instruction company TenMarks to gain a foothold in the online education space. Now it looks like Amazon is taking those learnings to…
GM buys self-driving car kit startup Cruise, plans to use tech to make driverless cars
General Motors (GM) announced today it plans to snap up Cruise Automation, a San Francisco-based startup making sensors that turn regular vehicles into ones that can drive themselves, for an…
Crowdsourced project aims to add text-to-speech to Wikipedia
An open source project hopes to draw on crowdsourced contributions to make Wikipedia more accessible by adding text to speech synthesis that will enable users of the online encyclopedia to…
New app Tagly bets on connecting consumers with brand content
Tagly claims to be the first social platform dedicated to exclusively showcase content created by brands. Its goal is to allow users to discover, share, and collect the branded content…
U.S. Attorney General defends FBI case against Apple on Stephen Colbert’s show
As the iPhone unlocking case becomes more heated, United States Attorney General Loretta Lynch went on late night television to defend the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s stance.
[tc_aol_on code=”519566810″] With all the hoopla surrounding the FBI-Apple controversy, it may surprise you how easy it is to hack into an iPhone. In this video, Skycure CEO Adi Sharabani…
Ending patent wars will be a huge boon to the tech industry
Because of these patent wars and patent trolls, technology companies are divesting huge resources to defend themselves rather than advancing their innovations. This is the equivalent of nuclear arms race…
Sources: India’s Flipkart in talks to raise up to $1B, likely in a down round
After years of raising hundreds of millions of dollars to tap into the burgeoning e-commerce market in India, one of the country’s biggest tech companies is facing a markdown in…
Apple and the Justice Department enter the ‘open hostilities’ phase of iPhone unlocking case
A 43-page rebuttal from the Justice Department today characterized Apple’s earlier response to an iPhone unlocking request as “corrosive.” Shortly thereafter, an Apple press conference attended by TechCrunch provided a…
New law changes the liquidity game for tech company founders, workers and investors
Late last year, Congress passed legislation that substantially improved the legal landscape for startups, early-stage companies and the stakeholders in the ecosystem. You might have read about, for example, Congress…
HPE’s Haven OnDemand developer platform hits commercial availability
Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Haven OnDemand machine learning-centric developer platform has been around since late 2014, but it’s only coming out of beta and becoming commercially available today. Haven OnDemand, which is…
My Uber driver apparently moonlights as an underground electronics dealer
Have you ever been riding in an Uber and become suddenly overtaken by the immediate need for a new Android tablet or a Dell Latitude E6420? Yeah, me neither.
SPLT is bringing ridesharing to the corporate world. Instead of pairing you up with strangers who happen to be heading the same way, SPLT is targeted at large organizations to…
Wikipedia’s new iOS app focuses on discovery, personalization
Wikipedia today launched an upgraded version of its iOS application aimed at helping users better discover content matching their own interests, including both articles and images. In addition, the app…
Fred Wilson is a name that needs no introduction, but we’re going to do it anyway. TechCrunch is excited to announce that Fred Wilson will be speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt…
Yext sees $88.8 million revenue, 48% growth for location data
New York-based Yext, which helps businesses manage their listings for store locations, is announcing $88.8 million in revenue for its fiscal 2016 year. The company says this is a 48…
Apple sends out invites for March 21 event, likely for new iPad and smaller iPhone
Apple has just issued for its next press event on Apple Campus in Cupertino. The event is going to happen on March 21. As usual, Apple wrote a cryptic message…
UK surveillance powers bill could force startups to bake in backdoors
While the Apple vs FBI court battle has drawn all eyes to the question of what should be considered ‘reasonable assistance’ for companies to provide law enforcement agencies, over in…
On-demand massage startup Soothe raises $35 million
Soothe, the on-demand massage service, just closed a $35 million Series B round from its pre-existing investors. This brings its total funding to $47.7 million. This puts Soothe even further…
Crowdsourced weather app, Sunshine, now lets users train it to their temperature tastes
In a bid to stand out in the bustling weather app crowd, crowdsourced app Sunshine is adding a new personalization feature — giving users the ability to specify how hot…
Prosper Marketplace relaunches its BillGuard app under the Prosper brand
Prosper Marketplace, the marketplace lender focused on refinancing and credit rehabilitation, has re-launched its BillGuard app (acquired last September) under its own brand as Prosper Daily. With the rebranding, the former BillGuard becomes…
With SQL Server 2016, Microsoft focuses on speed, security and luring customers away from Oracle
A few days ago, Microsoft shocked us when it announced that it would soon bring its SQL Server database to Linux. It’ll take until 2017 before SQL Server will be…
Now you can get on the standby list with concert subscription service Jukely
Here’s a simple-but-handy-sounding update to Jukely — a standby list. For those of you who haven’t tried it, Jukely offers access to an unlimited number of concerts for $25 per…
Cola launches its app for smarter, more interactive text messages
Do you sometimes get the feeling that you’re having a looooooong text conversation to accomplish some fairly simple planning? I’ve certainly had tedious back-and-forths where I’m trying to figure out…
