TechCrunch

Here Be Dragons bet big on VR filmmaking

What happens if we live to be 150?

Humans have lived for approximately 8,000 generations, but only in the past four has life expectancy taken dramatic leaps upward thanks mostly to societies addressing some of the most basic life issues, including infant mortality, heart disease, homicide and influenza. In 1907, the average human …

Facebook Launches Marketplace | Crunch Report

WhatsApp races to internationalize Snapchat’s overlaid creative tools

Every member of the Facebook family of apps is racing to bring Snapchat’s best features to international audiences before it blows up abroad. There was the Facebook Camera Feed, Instagram Stories, Messenger Day, and now WhatsApp is copying Snapchat’s creative tools.<p>Now you’ll be able to add …

Rover announces $40M round for pet sitting and dog walking

Last month, we reported that Rover was closing a $40 million round. Looks like the deal has closed — the pet-sitting startup announced today that it has raised, yep, $40 million in Series E in funding.<p>The round was led by Foundry Group and Menlo Ventures, with participation from Foundry Group — all …

The entrepreneurs behind the new drone economy

The FAA released some staggering numbers as it welcomed Part 107, otherwise known as the rules governing — or perhaps creating — the commercial drone industry in the U.S.: Within one year, the FAA estimates that 600,000 drones will be active in commerce in the United States.<p>Even if you assume every …

Police complaints drop 93 percent after deploying body cameras

A study from Cambridge University documents an immense drop in complaints against police officers when their departments began using body cameras. But even more surprising is that the data suggests everyone is on their best behavior whether the cameras are present or not.<p>The data was collected in …

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield on fixing real problems

At a panel today at SXSL in Washington, D.C., Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, Transmedia Capital Managing Partner Chris Redlitz, EpiBone CEO Nina Tandon, Coalition for Queens founder Jukay Hsu and Jenna Wortham of The New York Times Magazine discussed technology’s role in solving some of the …

Doug tests out a dog selfie tool

To beef up in marketing tech, Salesforce is buying Krux for $340M in cash and stock, potentially $750M overall

Salesforce has made yet another acquisition, once again to build out its footprint in marketing and ad tech. The company has just confirmed that it is buying Krux, a company that tracks traffic (“data signatures”) across multiple devices –desktop, mobile, tablet, set-top — and channels — display, …

How to feed the world– with sensors, data and local production

Today, food and agriculture entrepreneurs took the stage at the White House lawn for SXSL 2016 to discuss the potential and limits of technology to feed a burgeoning world population.<p>According to the most recent available estimates from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 793 …

Spoken Editions go live on iTunes so you can listen to your favorite websites

As we reported in September, iTunes has today launched a new section called “Spoken Editions,” which will feature narrated content from a number of online publishers in the form of audio-only podcasts. These Spoken Editions are available both in the iTunes storefront, as well as in Apple’s Podcasts …

Amazon bans incentivized reviews tied to free or discounted products

Amazon is making a significant change to its Community Guidelines, announced today, which will eliminate any incentivized reviews, except for those that emerge from within its own Amazon Vine program. This program allows Amazon – not the seller or vendor – to identify trusted reviewers, and has a …

StubHub launches the first ticketing app for Apple TV

Apple TV is getting its first ticketing application today with the launch of StubHub, which will allow owners of the fourth-generation Apple TV device to search for concert tickets, and even see what the view from a given section of seats would look like. However, when it comes time to actually …

Google gets more time to respond to EU antitrust charges

Alphabet (né Google) has been given yet another extension to file its respond to charges in Europe that it has misused the dominance of its Android mobile platform to lock out competition by promoting its own services over and above others.<p>Reuters reported the extension today, which gives the …

Mophie’s modular case brings everything but a headphone jack to the iPhone 7

Of late, Mophie seems to be intent on letting the world know that it’s more than just charging cases – but hey, at the end of the day, there are worse things to be than virtually synonymous with a given space. And hey, when Apple unveiled its first proprietary charging case a year or so back, …

White House’s SXSL shows what it’s like to be in the criminal justice system

The criminal justice system in our country is broken. Just imagine if technologists put their resources and knowledge toward solving some of our country’s biggest issues, instead of toward the next dating app. Today at South by South Lawn, the White House’s first-ever festival of art, ideas and …

The Apple Watch’s unlock feature could turn the smartwatch tides

Pull on your commenting pants because I’m going to offer up some wild speculation coupled with real-world experience to come to a conclusion that some of you might find ludicrous and others will find just weird. Here we go: I think the Apple Watch’s Mac unlock feature is one of the most compelling …

CRISPR will have to wait for that Nobel prize

A bunch of Nobel awards went out to recipients today, but the inventors of the gene-editing breakthrough CRISPR were not among them.<p>The mechanism to snip out unwanted genes seemed the discovery of the century and two of the scientists behind this breakthrough, Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna and her …

Google Docs for life sciences startup Benchling raises $7 million in growth capital from Thrive, A16z and others

Benchling, a biotech company out of Y Combinator providing cloud-based software for researchers, tells TechCrunch it has raised $7 million in growth funding to continue creating tools to help the science community access research from big pharma and other leaders in the space.<p>You might think of …

Shopify acquires product design firm Boltmade to boost Shopify Plus

Shopify has acquired Waterloo-based Boltmade, the company announced, bringing the digital consulting and product development firm in-house. The acquisition will add Boltmade’s 21-person team, which mostly consists of engineers and designers, to its operations in Waterloo, focusing on Shopify …

Faraday Future partners with Chevy Bolt-supplier LG Chem on batteries

How do you prove you’re serious about making electric cars? A partnership with one of the suppliers currently producing batteries at scale for shipping vehicles is a good start. Faraday Future announced such a union today, with a new agreement with LG Chem, the lithium-ion cell manufacturer that …

WalmartLabs open sources the application platform that powers Walmart.com

Walmart probably isn’t the first company that comes to mind when you think about open-source software (or the second or third, really), but WalmartLabs, Walmart’s innovation-focused tech division, has already launched a number of open-source projects into the wild. The most interesting of these so …

Dohop lets you book flights without worrying about price changes

Dohop (as in “Do hop on a plane and bring those human transplant organs with you, would you, dear?”) is a newly reorganized flight, hotel, and rental car search service that was launched in 2005 but relaunched worldwide a few years ago.<p>The service now offers FLYR Fare Protection, as well, which …

What to expect from Google’s October 4 Pixel and hardware event

Google’s big October event is tomorrow, and rumors suggest we’ll see a ton of new hardware unveiled, including new Pixel smartphones running stock Android (replacing the Nexus lineup of devices). The event will also tell us more about Google Home, the Amazon Echo competitor that Google previewed at …

Heek is a chatbot that can build you a website

A startup called Heek wants to make building websites as simple as chatting over text and answering a few questions. Using a conversational interface, the bot asks you questions about yourself, your business and your site, then lets you click to see different designs you can customize to meet your …

Chrevolet’s Colorado ZH2 fuel cell Army test truck is made for modular power

Chevrolet continues work on zero emission hydrogen fuel cell tech, and it’s now providing a just-revealed Colorado ZH2 fuel cell vehicle to the U.S. Army for design, to find out if the unique advantages of fuel cell tech are viable in actual real-world military mission situations.<p>The ZH2 is a …

Baidu’s new TalkType keyboard app emphasizes voice input over typing

Typing on small screens can still be challenging, but today’s keyboard apps still focus on text entry over speech, despite the advances in voice-based computing and the increasing accuracy of speech recognition technology. Baidu wants to change that, with a new keyboard app called TalkType that …

Facebook launches Marketplace, a friendlier Craigslist

450 million people already visit “buy and sell” Groups on Facebook each month, and now the company is launching a whole tab in its app dedicated to peer-to-peer shipping.<p>Facebook Marketplace lets you browse a relevancy-sorted feed of things to buy from people who live nearby, and quickly list your …

Telegram levels up its bot platform with competitive games that live inside chats

The messaging wars are really a battle for attention. It’s all about which comms app giant can embed the stickiest and most addictive features into their platform to keep users inside their own well-tended garden, rather than peering over the wall at rivals’ plots.<p>In Facebook’s case today, that …