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What it’s like to ship yourself overnight on Cabin’s sleep pod bus
Last weekend, I traveled from San Francisco to Los Angeles roundtrip on Cabin. When I arrived to the bus pickup location in San Francisco, a smiley attendant greeted me. She then proceeded to check me in and stow away my bag. Upon entering the bus, I saw the social lounge, where people can chit chat and hang out if they don’t want to go to sleep right away. I bypassed that area and… Read More
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Playbuzz unveils a new editor for writing articles chock full of interactive content
Playbuzz helps online publishers make their content more interactive by adding elements like polls and galleries. Until recently, those elements have taken the form of widgets that publishers can embed into their stories, but that’s changing with the launch of Playbuzz’s new Storytelling platform, where writers are creating entire articles, not just one-off widgets. Read More
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SF city attorney seeks court order to force Lyft and Uber to hand over driver data
San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera is seeking a court order to force both Uber and Lyft to share records on driver safety, disability access and other operations, in compliance with the city attorney’s subpoenas from last month. Read More
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Playkey raises $2.8M to fund its US expansion
Playkey, a game streaming service we saw earlier this year at Disrupt NY, has just closed an additional $2.8 million round of funding from Russia’s Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF). Created at the suggestion of Vladimir Putin in 2013, the IIDF has invested in 293 companies to-date with the objective to strengthen infrastructure for Russian businesses. However, the investment… Read More
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Silent Echo lets you chat with Alexa over Slack
Want to chat with Alexa via Slack? A new bot called Silent Echo now makes that possible. The idea is that there are times when you want to interact with Amazon’s virtual assistant, Alexa, but you don’t want to do it by voice. For example, if things are too noisy in the room for Alexa to properly hear you, or, alternately, if you need things to be very quiet. The service… Read More
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Dropbox CTO Aditya Agarwal is leaving
Aditya Agarwal, who came to Dropbox via its acquisition of Cove way back in 2012 and was given the CTO role last year, will be leaving the company. Agarwal held the CTO role for about 9 months and was previously the VP of engineering. Agarwal is leaving the company as it begins to aggressively tout its success as a business. Read More
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AngelList co-founder Babak Nivi out ‘for my own reasons’
“Mr. Nivi has no role at the company” AngelList COO Graham Jenkin told TechCrunch in response to questions regarding the curious absence of the investment platform’s co-founder. It’s atypical for the creator of such a high-profile company to seemingly disappear without any form of announcement. Read More
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Crunch Network
The very first question to answer when taking on new investors
Fundraising is a stressful process. You do all you can to impress prospective investors by honing the story, optimizing key metrics and making your company look as attractive as possible. But before you decide the amount of money you raise and the type of investor you want on board, you must decide the kind of relationship you intend to have with your new partner. Read More
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Uber’s SVP of leadership and strategy says she hasn’t seen any toxicity
Uber SVP of Leadership and Strategy Frances Frei is optimistic about the future of Uber, despite the allegations of sexual harassment, greyballing and an executive accessing a rider’s medical records. In fact, Frei wears an Uber t-shirt every day and plans to wear one every day until every single one of Uber’s 15,000 employees feels proud about wearing one. Read More
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Cargo wants to put a vending machine in every Uber
How many times have you been in an Uber or Lyft and wanted a few Advil, or a 5-hour Energy? While some enterprising ridesharing drivers occasionally try to sell essentials (or non-essentials like tablets and digital cameras), there really isn’t a structured way to facilitate this… until now. Enter Cargo, a startup that wants to turn drivers’ vehicles into little mobile shops. Read More
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Anti-drone radio wave startup SkySafe secures $11.5M from Andreessen
Drones are a threat to both military and public safety, whether flown by a terrorist or just a reckless pilot. SkySafe’s radio wave technology can detect and stop rogue drones from entering unauthorized areas like military bases, stadiums, prisons and airports. Read More
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Slidebean picks up $850K and launches a new version of its presentation-building tool
Slidebean, the app that wants to take on Prezi and PowerPoint, is launching version 3.0 of the service on the heels of an $850K seed round from CaraoV. The idea behind Slidebean is relatively simple. Presentations/decks are a fact of life for many professionals, but creating those presentations isn’t as simple as inputting the information you want. More often than not, professional… Read More
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D-ID’s tech protects your privacy by confounding face recognition algorithms
Unless you literally wear a mask all the time, it is almost impossible to completely avoid cameras and face recognition technology. Not only is this a privacy concern, but it also presents a potential liability for companies that need to protect personal data. D-ID, a startup currently taking part in Y Combinator, wants to solve the problem with tools that process images to make them… Read More
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PebblePost raises $47M as it uses online data to fuel direct mail marketing
PebblePost, a startup that uses online data to target consumers with printed mail, has raised $47 million in a combination of equity and debt. That includes the $15 million, RRE Ventures-led Series B that the company announced in February. The equity portion of the funding has been expanded to $20 million, with another $27 million coming from a loan facility from Horizon Technology Finance, plus… Read More
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Luma launches a home tech support service for $5 a month
The Luma was a compelling product when it was announced back in late-2015 — we even went so far as declaring the WiFi-extending home mesh system, “fun.” That descriptor doesn’t really apply the startup’s new offering, and indeed, Luma Guardian feels a bit out of left field for the networking hardware-maker. The system is a lot of things rolled into one: a… Read More
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Crunch Network
Mighty Networks founder Gina Bianchini on building a business in Silicon Valley
In episode two of Founder’s Corner, Gina Bianchini, the founder and CEO of Mighty Networks, joins host and Omidyar Network partner Shripriya Mahesh to discuss her mission of empowering people to connect around their passions, and pulls back the curtain on how she runs the business and manages her days as CEO. Read More
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The final 75 tickets are now available for the TechCrunch Summer Party at August Capital
The TechCrunch Summer Party is a thing of tradition and we hope you can make it out this year. As in years past we’ll gather on the spacious grounds of August Capital in Menlo Park and enjoy an evening of cocktails and the spirit of entrepreneurship. The deck around August Capital’s office is large but cannot hold all of Silicon Valley, so tickets are very limited and released on… Read More
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Run your startup the Toyota way
Toyota is known for its manufacturing efficiency. We’ve probably all heard that if a worker on the Camry line sees a problem, they have the authority to stop the line and address it. At the end of the day, teams meet to discuss what went wrong and what fixes actually fixed things. It’s called the Toyota Production System — but it also can work for a startup. Read More
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Billionaires make it rain on Plenty, the indoor farming startup
SoftBank Vision Fund, the huge tech-investment vehicle helmed by Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, has led a $200 million investment into indoor farming startup Plenty. Joining Son are notable tech billionaires Eric Schmidt and Jeff Bezos. Plenty farms can grow anything except tree fruit and root vegetables, and produce crops at yields 530x greater than a typical field. Read More
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