For the past few months, Facebook has been testing something it calls “Watch Party”. It’s a feature that would let Facebook Groups host shared video streaming sessions, with everyone in the group being able to see/comment on the same videos at the same time. Take the Facebook Live concept and swap in a queue of…
PicsArt, the company behind the photo-editing app of the same name, has hired Tammy Nam as its first chief operating officer. Nam was most recently the CEO of Viki, the Rakuten-acquired video streaming service, and before that served as a marketing executive at Viki, Scribd and Slide. PicsArt said Nam will report to founder and…
The promises of VR are heavily focused on the idea that users can grow more enveloped in the digital environments they explore, but also central to the experience is that they become more connected with their virtual representations. BinaryVR’s central focus has been on a system of computer vision face-tracking particularly focused on the mouth…
Last month, Uber hit 10 billion completed trips across rides and deliveries, the company announced today. This comes about one year after Uber hit five billion trips. Lyft, Uber’s main competitor in the U.S., hit half a billion rides last October. Uber officially hit the milestone on June 10, 2018 when 173 trips and deliveries simultaneously…
League founder and CEO Michael Serbinis League, an online platform that wants to reduce the strain of managing health benefits for companies and employees alike, announced today that it has raised a $62 million Series B. The round was led by TELUS Ventures, with participation from Wittington Ventures and returning investors OMERS, Infinite Potential Group,…
The title could just as easily be “Sweet Justice.” The U.K.-based publishing house Little, Brown has agreed to publish a new book about Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who famously settled a 2008 lawsuit against their former Harvard classmate Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook’s earliest days, then made a much larger fortune with their settlement money by…
San Francisco is one of the most beautiful, diverse cities in the world. If you’re planning a trip to San Francisco this September during Labor Day week, maybe for some sightseeing, maybe for TechCrunch Disrupt SF, then you’ll want to make sure you take advantage of these killer hotel deals TechCrunch has negotiated. These discounts…
The latest robots out of MIT are small enough to float “indefinitely” in the air. Researchers accomplished the feat by attaching 2D electronics to colloids — tiny particles measuring around one-billionth to one-millionth of a meter. All told, the devices are roughly the size of a human egg cell. What’s more, the addition of photodiode…
WARR Hyperloop has done it again. The engineering students from the Technical University of Munich won SpaceX’s hyperloop pod competition on Sunday for the third time. This year, WARR Hyperloop pulled off the win when their self-propelled pod reached a top speed of more than 290 miles per hour, a new record for the competition.…
For the nearly 20 percent of Americans who experience severe online harassment, there’s a new company launching in the latest batch of Y Combinator called Tall Poppy that’s giving them the tools to fight back. Co-founded by Leigh Honeywell and Logan Dean, Tall Poppy grew out of the work that Honeywell, a security specialist, had…
