After last year’s stellar turn out of almost 1,000 Silicon Valley shakers and movers at our inaugural Winter Party, TechCrunch is returning with the 2nd Annual Winter Party in San Francisco on February 8. The party will feature tasty cocktails and canapés, party games and activities, plenty of photo ops, giveaways and some fun surprises.…
M17, the Taiwanese streaming company that controversially priced on the NYSE but didn’t list, has returned to the private markets after it raised a $25 million funding round. The round was led by Terry Tsang — CEO of Hong Kong-based games company Madhead — with participation from Pavilion Capital, Stonebridge Ventures and existing investors. This new investment follows a $35…
It’s official: Google is killing off Allo. The messaging app was only launched in September 2016 but it was pretty much flawed from the word go with limited usage. Google was, once again, painfully late to the messaging game. The company said it had ceased work on the service earlier this year, and now it has announced…
Video won’t start rolling on Meg Whitman and Jeffrey Katzenberg’s new bite-sized streaming service with the billion-dollar backing until the end of 2019, but talent keeps signing up to come along for their ride into the future of serialization. The latest marquee director to sign on the dotted line with Quibi is Catherine Hardwicke, who…
A UK parliamentary committee has published the cache of Facebook documents it dramatically seized last week. The documents were obtained by a legal discovery process by a startup that’s suing the social network in a California court in a case related to Facebook changing data access permissions back in 2014/15. The court had sealed the documents…
Google contract workers, internally referred to as Temporary, Vendor and Contractors (TVCs, are seeking better, equal treatment. That entails better pay and access to benefits, as well as better access to company-wide information. In a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, they allege Google “routinely denies TVCs access to information that is relevant to our jobs…
Consumer credit giant Experian is continuing to back Asian fintech startups after it led a $10 million investment in Southeast Asia’s Jirnexu . Jirnexu, which is headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, operates financial comparison services in Malaysia and Indonesia. Those services aggregate offerings and deals from banks and financial services companies, effectively acting as a user acquisition…
If you’ve been on an electric scooter from Bird, Lime, Lyft, JUMP via Uber, Skip, Scoot or others, you’re probably familiar with that feeling of impending doom. Superpedestrian, makers of the Copenhagen Wheel, is today emerging with a sturdier, safer and smarter electric scooter. But instead of operating a shared electric scooter network, the plan…
Flutter, Google’s UI toolkit for building mobile Android and iOS applications, hit its version 1.0 release today. In addition, Google also today announced a set of new third-party integrations with the likes of Square and others, as well as a couple of new features that make it easier to integrate Flutter with existing applications. The…
Audi, the Germany luxury automaker under VW Group, said Tuesday it will invest 14 billion euros ($15.95 billion) over the next five years on future transportation technologies such as electric mobility, autonomous driving and digital services. These investments, made through 2023, will include spending on property, factories and equipment as well as research and development.…
