Bad news for home gardeners: criminals might have your credit card data. AeroGrow, the maker of the at-home garden kit AeroGarden, said in a letter to customers that its website had credit card scraping malware for more than four months. The company said anyone who bought something through its website between October 29, 2018 and…
Snap is unlocking a new revenue stream while giving you something to do between chats and Stories. Today Snapchat debuts its Snap Games platform that lets you play real-time, multiplayer games while texting and talking with your friends. The platform is based on Snap’s secret late-2017 acquisition of PrettyGreat, an Australian game studio with talent…
As we saw from our recent TechCrunch Battlefield in Africa last year, the continent is producing bigger and bigger tech players, and one can see this in the consolidation in the market. Today Jiji, one of the largest marketplaces for classifieds in Africa, has acquired their main competitor on the African market, OLX, and their…
Welcome to this week’s transcribed edition of This is Your Life in Silicon Valley. We’re running an experiment for Extra Crunch members that puts This is Your Life in Silicon Valley in words – so you can read from wherever you are. This is your Life in Silicon Valley was originally started by Sunil Rajaraman and…
Amazon is officially joining the race to create a network of satellites in low earth orbit that will provide high-speed terrestrial internet services. The company has filed its first papers with the U.S. government for approval to launch a network of 3,236 satellites through a subsidiary called Kuiper Systems LLC, according to a report in GeekWire. …
Less than a decade ago IPOs, acquisitions, and global expansion by African startups were more possibility than reality. March saw all three from the continent’s tech scene. Pan-African e-commerce company Jumia filed for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, per SEC documents and confirmation from chief executive Sacha Poignonnec. In an updated filing,…
When it comes to representing yourself on social media, who you actually portray yourself as has always been a bit of a caricature. That thinking has always made it a little interesting to examine how a company like Facebook approaches avatar design for services like their VR avatar system. Oculus Avatars have undergone a number…
The days when you could simply grow a basil plant from a seed by placing it on your windowsill and watering it regularly are gone — there’s no point now that machine learning-optimized hydroponic “cyber-agriculture” has produced a superior plant with more robust flavors. The future of pesto is here. This research didn’t come out…
Bye bye, Altaba . The Yahoo spinout created to house Yahoo’s lucrative stake in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, announced today that it will sell its lucrative stake in Alibaba and shut up shop. The entity has long existed as a proxy to Alibaba — some might argue Yahoo was the same in its final years…
That’s it for Google+, Google’s failed social network that once tried to take on Facebook and Twitter. As scheduled, the company has now started deleting user accounts and their data. Chances are you’re not going to feel all that sad about the end of Google+ since you probably haven’t used it for years. But if…
