Nobody wants to be a third wheel. Unless you’re a British spy. Two of the most senior officials at British eavesdropping agency GCHQ say one way that law enforcement could access encrypted messages is to simply add themselves to your conversations. “It’s relatively easy for a service provider to silently add a law enforcement participant to…
Thirteen companies took the stage today at Disrupt Berlin, delivering six-minute pitches and demos, then answering free-for-all questions from expert judges. Now that the judges have given us their feedback, we’ve chosen five finalists. These finalists will all take the stage again tomorrow afternoon to present in front of a new set of judges, who…
Since 2015, AWS has had a team of solution architects working with customers to make sure they are using AWS services in a way that meets best practices around a set of defined criteria. Today, the company announced a new Well Architected tool that helps customers do this themselves in an automated way without the…
Cruise Automation, the self-driving car subsidiary of GM, is getting a new CEO. The autonomous vehicle company, which was acquired by GM in 2016 and became subsidiary GM Cruise, has tapped Dan Ammann as CEO. Ammann will step down as GM’s president, a role he’s held since January 2014. Kyle Vogt, a Cruise co-founder who…
Data is king. But if there isn’t a way to capture, sort and use it, then there it sits — an untapped resource. V2X Network, a German-based startup presenting onstage Thursday during Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin, sees opportunity in all the data produced in the modern car. And it’s a hefty sum. A…
Chinese video streaming service iQiyi is raising new cash as it feels the squeeze from surging content costs. The video business, which is owned by China’s online search giant Baidu, said on Wednesday that it will issue $500 million in convertible senior notes. Proceeds from the offering will go towards content and technology investments as…
I’ll admit that I’ve warmed up pretty quickly to the Osmo Pocket. The original post from earlier today is pretty skeptical, owing in no small part to the price point. And while I stand by the earlier assessment that $349 is prohibitively expensive for the consumer market the company appears to be going after, I’ve…
AWS is not content to cede any part of any market to any company. When it comes to machine learning chips, names like Nvidia or Google come to mind, but today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company announced a new dedicated machine learning chip of its own called Inferentia. “Inferentia will be a very…
Second Home, the “creative workspace” company co-founded by Rohan Silva, a former tech and startup policy advisor for then British Prime Minister David Cameron, is closing in on a new funding round, TechCrunch has learned. According to sources, the London startup has secured £20 million in investment from Boston-based investor Gerald Chan, who owns Hang…
Amazon has launched a new service that uses machine learning to extract key data from patient records and can potentially help healthcare providers and researchers save money, make treatment decisions, and manage clinical trials. The company announced the service, called Amazon Comprehend Medical, on Tuesday, shortly after the Wall Street Journal reported on it. The…
