TechCrunch

SoftBank’s massive Vision Fund raises $93 billion in its first close

SoftBank’s huge $100 billion investment fund — the largest tech fund in history — announced its first close today… and it’s huge.<p>The Japanese telecom giant revealed that its VisionFund has closed an initial commitment of $93 billion from a bevy of high profile backers. They include Apple, Qualcomm, …

Bitcoin just surged past $2,000 for the first time

The world’s most popular cryptocurrency is now worth over $2,000 per coin. That’s according to a range of bitcoin exchanges, including Coinbase and Kraken. That valuation puts the total market cap of bitcoin — the total number of coins in circulation — at $32.92 billion.<p>Bitcoin has been on a tear …

The bizarre naming trends that modern startups follow

Startups put great effort into finding the perfect name. Ideally, it should be short, memorable, descriptive, and easy to pronounce.<p>Names that meet all the criteria are commonly taken, however, so most founders find a compromise. They settle on a creative misspelling, add a word or just string …

Face DJ builds instant 3D models from a selfie

Doug drinks the world's strongest coffee (twice)

WythMe for personalized restaurant discounts

Project recreates cities in rich 3D from images harvested online

People are taking photos and videos all over major cities, all the time, from every angle. Theoretically, with enough of them, you could map every street and building — wait, did I say theoretically? I meant in practice, as the VarCity project has demonstrated with Zurich, Switzerland.<p>This …

Deep Algo offers simple code visualization for people who don’t know how to code

Deep Algo was one of the more fascinating companies on display in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt this week. The French team aims to make coding languages more accessible for the masses with SaaS (software as a service) offering that promises to do for languages like C++, C Sharp and Javascript …

Make music in VR with Lyravr

Parking Kitty makes parking in Portland adorable

Portland, Oregon, continued to keep it weird (and cute) this week when it rolled out Parking Kitty, a new app that lets you pay for metered parking. The app is based on Passport, one of the largest parking payment vendors in the United States. “We didn’t make a lot of changes,” said Malisa …

Salesforce marches steadily toward $10B run rate goal

Salesforce is on a steady climb toward a $10 billion revenue run rate. And while it’s not quite there yet, its recent, nearly $2.4 billion quarter puts it squarely in the neighborhood.<p>According to the company’s CEO, Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s revenue growth results give it “the fastest growth of …

These are the arguments against net neutrality — and why they’re wrong

The next few months will be full of bitter dissent regarding the FCC’s net neutrality rules, how they should be enforced, and indeed whether they should exist at all.<p>Several primary arguments against the rules as they stand have appeared as talking points or recurring themes; they are worth …

Twitter says Vine users’ emails and phone numbers were exposed for a day, but weren’t misused

Twitter is alerting Vine users of a bug that exposed their email addresses and, in some cases, phone numbers to third parties. It’s also advising affected users to be cautious about any emails from unknown senders as a result. The company says the bug was only active for 24 hours before being …

Uber threatened to fire engineer at center of Waymo trade secret lawsuit

Uber has issued a sternly worded letter to Anthony Levandowski, the engineer at the center of a lawsuit alleging theft of trade secrets from Google parent Alphabet’s self-driving technology unit Waymo. The gist? Comply with the court’s orders or risk being terminated.<p>Levandowski is the former …

A federal appeals court shoots down the FAA’s drone registry requirement

The FAA’s drone database hit a major snag this week, courtesy of a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling. The D.C.-based court sided with drone hobbyist John Taylor, who argued that the Federal Aviation Administration doesn’t have jurisdiction over what the law classifies as model aircraft.<p>“Taylor does not …

Horble gray, Burf pink: This neural network’s attempts to name colors are inexplicably hilarious

There’s hardly anything that we haven’t tried putting machine learning to work at, and usually they take to it like a duck to water. That’s not the case here, with a neural network attempting to learn how to give paint colors those fancy names like “spring rain” and “harbor mist.” How would you …

Facebook rolls out a new “Order Food” option in its main navigation

Facebook is now making it easier for you to order food from your favorite restaurants directly within its app, without having to navigate away to a delivery service or restaurant’s own app or website. In the main Facebook navigation on both web and mobile, a new option called “Order Food” is …

Away nears 100K stylish suitcases sold as it raises $20M

What do people actually want in luggage? A phone charger, unbreakable exterior, and maximum packing space at a resonable price is what Away discovered. So it built a line of sleek but expansive polycarbonite suitcases equipped with battery packs, and sold them direct-to-consumer.<p>Now after selling …

A new era for startup investing in Latin America

Startups in Latin America are using creative solutions to address not just local but also global problems. For investors outside the region, the prospect of working with these startups can appear attractive, yet complicated. Investing in early-stage startups in Latin America can present challenges; …

Weekly Roundup: WannaCry ransomware attack, Google I/O, RecordGram wins Startup Battlefield

This week the TechCrunch team threw another successful Disrupt conference, this time in New York City. 20 companies took the stage at TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield, where they presented their products and took questions from our expert judges. The judges narrowed the competition down to five …

Facebook takes on Twitch with new live-streaming deal for esports

In addition to Facebook’s announcement of a new partnership with the MLB to live stream a number of regular season games, the social network this week also signed a deal with global esports company ESL to bring over 5,550 hours of esports events and other original content to Facebook, including …

Judah vs the Machines | Trailer

Naval Ravikant hints at future plans for Product Hunt and adding secondary trading to AngelList

Earlier this week, at TechCrunch’s Disrupt event in New York, we sat down with AngelList cofounder and CEO Naval Ravikant to talk primarily about the platform’s new Angel Funds product, wherein a select number of proven “angel-operators” is being provided capital from AngelList and outside VCs to …

Deep Algo is visualizing coding languages to make them accessible to all

3D printing soft legs can help a robot walk across rough and rocky terrain

A team of engineers at the University of California San Diego have applied the biologically inspired principles of soft robotics in order to develop a robot capable of navigating uneven terrain like rocks and sand.<p>The soft and pliable materials mean the robot’s four legs are capable of conforming …

Immotor's high-tech scooter can also charge your laptop

Twitter is down for some users

Twitter seems to be having some technical difficulties this morning, with the network going down for some folks.<p>Down Detector’s live outage map shows Twitter suffering outages in Japan, the UK, and now parts of the East Coast in the United States.<p>Around 2am ET, Twitter’s Support account tweeted …

Equity podcast: Instagram copies Snap again and Greycroft’s Ellie Wheeler on self-driving cars

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Equity, TechCrunch’s weekly podcast focusing on all things venture and capital.<p>This week we pulled off our very first live episode, taping the session during the last day of TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017. For our inaugural public show, Ellie Wheeler of …

Ford to add Android Auto and CarPlay to 2016 Ford SYNC 3 cars via update

Ford is updating a large number of 2016 model year cars equipped with SYNC 3 infotainment software, adding Android Auto and CarPlay to the vehicles with a free, over-the-air update via Wi-Fi, or using either USB or going through their dealer. The upgrade will be available for around 800,000 …

Menlo Ventures raises new $450M fund to back early consumer, enterprise and ‘frontier technologies’

Silicon Valley VC Menlo Ventures has closed a new $450 million fund to invest primarily in early-stage “consumer, enterprise and frontier technologies”. The funding brings the firm’s total capital to more than $5 billion under management, while Menlo Ventures says the fund was oversubscribed with …