Last week we did a deep dive on how Pokémon GO’s new (and long overdue) player-versus-player battle system would work. The only thing we didn’t know at the time was when, exactly, it would actually start rolling out. The answer: tonight. Just a few days ago, Niantic started shipping an update to the app that…
Lucasfilm has released an initial cast list for “The Mandalorian,” the live-action Star Wars series that Jon Favreau is creating for the upcoming streaming service Disney+. Pedro Pascal, who had a brief-but-glorious run on “Game of Thrones” as Oberyn Martell, will star in the title role — Lucasfilm describes his character as “a lone Mandalorian…
Bloomberg today updated its earlier reporting on Apple’s plans for a news and magazine subscription service. Earlier this year, the outlet said Apple would relaunch the digital newsstand business Texture, which it acquired this spring, as part of the Apple News app. Now, Bloomberg confirms the launch time frame could be “as soon as this…
As companies compete for talent, a startup that has built a platform to help ensure that the talent — once it’s working for you — doesn’t get bogged down by IT frustration, has raised a significant round of funding. Lausanne, Switzerland-based Nexthink has nailed down $85 million in funding led by Index Ventures (which has…
When Dell voted to buy back the VMware tracking stock and go public again this morning, you had to be wondering what exactly the strategy was behind these moves. While it’s clearly about gaining financial flexibility, the $67 billion EMC deal has always been about setting up the company for a hybrid and private cloud…
Two years ago, a couple of VCs from Shea Ventures, a 50-year-old, L.A. -based investment firm, banded together to create a Pasadena, Ca.-based early stage venture firm called Calibrate Ventures. Investors clearly like what they’re building, too. Firm founders Kevin Dunlap and Jason Schoettler are today announcing that they have closed their debut effort with…
TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa just finished in Lagos, Nigeria, where 15 companies took the stage for the chance of winning the $25,000 equity-free grand prize, a trip for two to TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019 and the coveted title of “Africa’s Favorite Startup.” The winner of the event was M-SCAN from Uganda, which develops portable…
Southeast Asia is a growing digital marketplace and increasingly a focus for startups across the world but there haven’t been many exits. So it’s notable, then, that struggling Chinese discount e-commerce service LightInTheBox has closed its acquisition of Singapore-based Ezbuy, which operates a cross-border selling service in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Pakistan. The all-stock deal was…
The race to replace the mouse and keyboard has yielded a lot of weird tech, but as various hardware startups try to find the missing link between what we have now and some sort of embedded brain chip, we’re seeing some fascinating solutions surface. New York-based CTRL-labs just announced its first developer kit that’s aiming to…
SoftBank continues to invest in the future of transportation — this time in ParkJockey, a startup that has built a technology platform aimed at monetizing parking lots. And ParkJockey, which was founded in 2013, is already using that capital to scale up. Along with the SoftBank investment news, ParkJockey also announced that it was acquiring two…
