Oct 28th
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The Latest
Enterprise
RapidMiner Adds Streams To Bring Real Time To Its Big Data Processing
2:00 am PST • December 17, 2014
RapidMiner announced their new Streams service today to enable customers to capture streams of data and process it in real time. RapidMiner president Michele Chambers explained this could be particularly useful when…
OnePlus Is The Latest Smartphone Maker To Get Hit With A Sales Ban In India
1:44 am PST • December 17, 2014
Hot on the heels of Xiaomi’s sales ban last week, OnePlus is the latest smartphone upstart to be hit with a sales ban in India.
Startups
Lendable Raises £2.5M As P2P Lending Market Shows No Signs Of Cooling
1:00 am PST • December 17, 2014
Perhaps riding the wave of U.S.-based Lending Club’s recent $5.4 billion IPO, the UK’s Lendable, which also offers a peer-to-peer lending platform for personal loans, has raised a £2.5 million…
Startups
Social Influence Startup PeerIndex Acquired By Brandwatch in Cash/Shares Deal
12:35 am PST • December 17, 2014
After raising $22 million in May this year, UK-based social media monitoring startup Brandwatch has clearly been hunting around for arrows to add to its quiver. Its gaze has alighted on…
Biotech & Health
Sean Parker Pledges $24 Million Toward A Stanford Allergy Research Center In His Name
12:01 am PST • December 17, 2014
Well-known tech billionaire Sean Parker suffers from asthma and allergies so severe that he doesn’t know how many times he’s landed in the emergency room just for accidentally eating something…
Startups
Chinese Search Engine Baidu Confirms Strategic Investment In Uber, Will Add Ride Requests
9:57 pm PST • December 16, 2014
It’s official: Chinese Internet giant Baidu has confirmed that it is Uber’s latest investor, as TechCrunch reported last week.
Startups
Snapchat Plans Music Feature, Acquired QR Scan.me For $50M And Vergence Eyeglass Cam For $15M
7:02 pm PST • December 16, 2014
Leaked emails from the Sony Pictures hack have uncovered several acquisitions made by Snapchat, as well as plans for a music feature and meetings to discuss partnerships with Twitter. According…
Pay TV Disruption Doesn’t End With Unbundling
5:00 pm PST • December 16, 2014
Which would you rather do: pay for all available content or only the content you consume? At first blush, this would seem like a simple cost issue: why not cancel…
Google Takes Play Music’s Songza-Powered Playlists Abroad, First Stop UK
4:12 pm PST • December 16, 2014
With catalogues of unlimited music on streaming services so extensive these days that we never quite know what to listen to first, playlists have become one of the key ways that music…
Security
Sony Hackers Threaten “9/11-Style” Attack On Movie Theaters
3:31 pm PST • December 16, 2014
A threatening message from the Guardians of Peace, the group responsible for hacking into and releasing more than a terabyte of Sony’s internal data so far, is alleging an attack…
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The Sony hack has taught us so much. It’s taught us to send corporate email as if everyone is reading those emails. It’s taught us that people in Hollywood are…
Media & Entertainment
Twitch COO Kevin Lin On The Importance Of Live Stadium Events For E-Sports
2:30 pm PST • December 16, 2014
As TechCrunch went full e-sports at the Intel Extreme Masters in San Jose, we managed to snag a quick interview with Twitch COO Kevin Lin.
A Wave Crests: Silicon Valley, Postsecondary Education And A Half-Trillion Dollars
2:00 pm PST • December 16, 2014
It’s easy to forget that these are early days for the Internet. We still have different ideas on what it is or how it should work. The web is governed…
“If I had my druthers, I’d write about AI, and supercomputers, and fusion energy. I don’t really care about who’s fucking whom,” new Valleywag editor Dan Lyons tells me, signaling a…
Startups
NowThis Media Raises Another $6M To Deliver Video News Stories In Less Than A Minute
12:38 pm PST • December 16, 2014
NowThis Media, which covers the news with videos that are usually around 15 or 30 seconds long, is announcing that it has raised $6 million in Series C funding. NowThis…
Zenefits is taking the Utah Insurance Department ruling to stop offering free services to task. Utah Insurance Commissioner Todd Kiser issued a ruling last month that would ban Zenefits from giving away its cloud-based HR…
A popular service like Gmail inevitably becomes a target for hackers. Over the years, Google has made quite a few security improvements, such as requiring HTTPS connections to prevent others…
Media & Entertainment
Ebay Expands Local Pilot Program Offering Same-Day Delivery, In-store Pickup In Brooklyn
12:05 pm PST • December 16, 2014
Ebay’s testing of “last-mile” delivery hasn’t been totally shelved, it seems. The company, distancing itself from its earlier eBay Now initiative, announced today that it’s expanding its eBay Local pilot…
Media & Entertainment
Facebook Starts Auto-Enhancing Photos Because Algorithms Are Better At Filters Than You
12:02 pm PST • December 16, 2014
We’re not ace photographers, but we all take photos. Most could use a little help with light and shadow. So rather than making you manually filter them, Facebook tells me…
American Re-Urbanization Drives More On-Demand Innovation
12:00 pm PST • December 16, 2014
The generational shift occurring as millennials come of age and baby boomers just keep aging has massive implications for both technology and society. As mobile devices become magic wands for…
