Valve is throwing a little bit of a “screw you” to Oculus this morning, announcing the specs of their high-end VR headset the Valve Index, just before Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced some minor updates to the Rift. The Valve Index is a high-end headset with few compromises. It’s $999 for the whole system but…
Asia Pacific grocery delivery startup Honestbee has confirmed it is suspending business in half of the eight markets it operates in and laying off 10 percent of its 1,000 staff. The cost-cutting appears to be part of belt-tightening ahead of a planned new injection of funding, TechCrunch has come to learn. According to a statement…
Mobile marketing company ManyChat has raised $18 million in Series A funding. The startup, co-founded by CEO Mikael Yang, is currently focused on Facebook Messenger. It offers tools for creating a bot on Messenger while also supporting live human chatting (ManyChat says its approach is a “smart blend of automation and personal outreach”), and additional…
Twitter is unveiling a number of new content deals and renewals tonight at its NewFronts event for digital advertisers. It’s only been two years since Twitter first joined the NewFronts. At the time, coverage suggested that executives saw the company’s video strategy as a crucial part of turning things around, but since then, the spotlight has…
Facebook has been accused of blocking the ability of independent researchers to effectively study how political disinformation flows across its ad platform. Adverts that the social network’s business is designed to monetize have — at very least — the potential to influence people and push voters’ buttons, as the Cambridge Anaytica Facebook data misuse scandal…
Tray.io, the startup that wants to put automated workflows within reach of line of business users, announced a $37 million Series B investment today. Spark Capital led the round with help from Meritech Capital, along with existing investors GGV Capital, True Ventures and Mosaic Ventures. Under the terms of the deal Spark’s Alex Clayton will…
“Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” It seems darkly funny, now, that anyone ever dared to dream that tech would be different. But we did, once. We would build new companies in new ways, was the thinking, not like the amoral industrial behemoths of old. The corporate villains of 90s cyberpunk were fresh in…
Most of us don’t know what a geometric modeling kernel or solid modeling kernel is, but every CAD or design application uses one to create shapes. It’s the underlying infrastructure that allows someone to do the math of CAD design. Just putting a hole in an object or blending lines or removing a corner requires…
Last week we held our third annual robotics event at UC Berkeley. It’s my favorite TechCrunch event, and this year’s was our best show to date. We had some amazing conversations with a number of the top names in robotics and artificial intelligent, demoed some incredible robots and broke some exciting news about the future…
On the one hand, you’ve got Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey lamenting the “like” button’s existence, and threatening to just kill the thing off entirely for incentivizing the wrong kind of behavior. On the other hand, you have twttr — Twitter’s prototype app where the company is testing new concepts including, most recently, a way to…
