Apple this week lowered the price on a number key hardware lines in China, including AirPods, Macs, iPads and, most notably, the iPhone. The move, noted by CNBC, is believed to be the direct results of a 3 percent tax cut that took effect in the country yesterday. In many cases, however, the impacted products…
While the public is asking, “When are we going to ride in autonomous cars?” Technology companies have been moving apace to test them on designated roads. In China’s capital city Beijing, eight firms drove a total of 153,600 kilometers (95442.6 miles) through their autonomous fleets in 2018, and Baidu, the country’s largest search engine service…
Mswipe, an Indian fintech company that develops point-of-sale terminals for merchants, has pulled $30 million in new funding as it bids to triple its reach to 1.5 million merchants over the next year. The company’s previous funding as a Series D in 2017 that ended up at just over $40 million, thanks to a $10…
Just since months after raising $7 million in Series A funding, German SME banking provider Penta has been acquired by Finleap. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although I understand that the acquisition sees Finleap and Penta’s co-founders becoming the challenger bank’s sole owners, with all other shareholders exiting. Launched in late 2014 by Hitfox…
Radio ads broadcast a message to listeners, but Pandora’s new voice ads will allow listeners to respond by speaking aloud – either to get more information about the product being advertised, or to skip the ad if it’s not of interest. The company confirmed it has an agreement to test interactive voice ads where listeners…
A quiet little update from Microsoft overnight, as the company bumped up a key spec on its 13.5-inch Surface Book 2. The 2017 two-in-one powerhouse is getting a nice little boost to Intel’s 8th gen quad-core i5 chip. That model run $1,499 and includes 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM. Bumping up to the…
Calling all hackathon fans across Europe and beyond. It’s time once again to put your creative coding skills to the test at the TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech 2019, which returns to Paris on May 17-18. Brush up on your parlez-vous français, stock up on RedBull and get ready to compete against some of the best…
How’s your weekend going? Good, good. Now, here, have a billionaire’s super autotuned rap track about a famous deceased gorilla: Tesla/Space X/Boring Company guy, Elon Musk has apparently uploaded a SoundCloud track titled “RIP Harambe,” about the 17-year-old Western lowland gorilla who was shot to death at a Cincinnati zoo in 2016 after a three-year-old…
Welcome back to this week’s transcribed edition of Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast that unpacks the numbers behind the headlines. We’re running an experiment for Extra Crunch members that puts the words of our wildly popular venture capital podcast, Equity, in your eyes instead of your ears. This week, Kate Clark and Alex Wilhelm recorded…
Lyft completed its long-awaited IPO this week, trading 21 percent higher Friday than its initial offering price of $72 per share. It closed its first day of trading at about $78 per share, up roughly 9 percent. I spoke to IPO guru Brian Hamilton, the CEO of banking software company Sageworks, about Lyft’s offering to…
