As part of its rather bizarre news dump before its flagship Build developer conference next week, Microsoft today announced a slew of new pre-built machine learning models for its Cognitive Services platform. These include an API for building personalization features, a form recognizer for automating data entry, a handwriting recognition API and an enhanced speech…
You probably haven’t heard of Checkout, a digital payments processing company that was founded in 2012 in London. Apparently, however, investors have been keeping tabs on the low-flying company and like what they see. Today, Checkout announced that it has raised $230 million in Series A funding at a valuation just shy of $2 billion…
For the first time after a video of an exploding Dragon capsule leaked in late April, SpaceX confirmed the spacecraft’s destruction during testing. In statements made today, SpaceX’s vice president of mission assurance Hans Koenigsmann provided a little insight on the mysterious ground test gone wrong. As CNBC reports, Koenigsmann said during a press event…
Another tech giant is under investigation in Europe for potential privacy breaches of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), TechCrunch has learnt. The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), which is the lead data protection regulator for most multinational tech giants in Europe, has opened a formal probe into Quantcast’s business — adding +1 to the…
After Square issued weak guidance in Q4, all eyes were on the payments company to see what kind of growth it really had in Q1. Results reported today underscored some of the challenges the company is facing. Square’s adjusted revenues were $489 million, up 59% year-on-year, with adjusted earnings per share of $0.11. Both figures beat analysts’ estimates.…
Epic Games is in the process of acquiring the studio behind one of the most popular cross-platform games out there, Rocket League. The studio behind Fortnite is buying Psyonix for an undisclosed sum and bringing its 132 employees onboard. There doesn’t appear to be a ton changing at the San Diego game studio; Epic says…
During last year’s F8 developer conference, Facebook announced the 1.0 launch of PyTorch, the company’s open source deep learning platform. At this year’s F8, the company launched version 1.1. The small increase in version numbers belies the importance of this release, which focuses on making the tool more appropriate for production usage, including improvements to…
The changes continue to roll at Honestbee. Fresh from pausing operations in four countries and announcing plans to lay off 10 percent of staff, the Singapore-based online grocery startup has let CEO Joel Sng go, two sources with knowledge of his exit told TechCrunch. Sng, who co-founded Honestbee back in 2015 and previously served as…
Spot.IM announced today that it has raised $25 million in Series D funding. We’ve written about the company’s commenting platform before, but CEO Nadav Shoval said it’s now building a broader “community platform.” That means going beyond commenting and moderation to also include community pages and other ways to highlight and monetize user-generated content. The…
Matt Miesnieks Contributor More posts by this contributor Why the YouTube of AR won’t be YouTube The product design challenges of AR on smartphones The martial arts actor Jet Li turned down a role in the Matrix and has been invisible on our screens because he does not want his fighting moves 3D-captured and owned by…
