Technology news

This year has been a rough one for Sphero. The Colorado-based toy robotics startup kicked off the year with dozens of layoffs, a result of tepid interest in its line of Disney-branded consumer products.Here’s a little good news, however. The company has raised another $12 million, bringing its total up to around $119 million, according to Crunchbase. The latest round will go into helping shape the BB-8 maker into an education-first company.“The recent round of funding has currently r

Jaguar’s first all-electric car, the I-Pace, will go on sale a little later this year. But thanks to Roadshow, which is among the press currently attending a “first drive” junket for the I-Pace in Portugal, we now know what the I-Pace sounds like.Picture this. You’re cruising up the Pacific Coast Highway in your shiny new I-Pace on the way to some fancy cliffside restaurant, but you wind up caught behind some mope spewing toxic fumes out the back of some gas-guzzling bea

For months, police across the country have been using a device called a GrayKey to unlock dormant iPhones, using an undisclosed technique to sidestep Apple’s default disk encryption. The devices are currently in use in at least five states and five federal agencies, seen as a breakthrough in collecting evidence from encrypted devices.
But according to a new Reuters report, Apple is planning to release a new feature to iOS that would make those devices useless in the majority of cases, pot

Indiecade always offers a nice respite from the wall of undulating human flesh and heat that is the rest of the E3 show floor. The loose confederation of independent developers often produces compelling and bizarre gaming experiences outside of the big studio system.
TendAR is the most compelling example of this out of this year’s batch. It is, simply put, a pet fish that feeds on human emotions through augmented reality. I can’t really explain why this is a thing, but it is. It&rsqu

Comcastmade good on its plans to make an offer for 21st Century Fox’s film and TV assets today, with a cash bid of $65 billion, or $35 per share.
That’s 19 percent more than the $52.4 billion that Disney agreed to pay in December.
This follows yesterday’s U.S. court approval of the merger of AT&T and Time Warner, which was widely expected to lead Comcast to make a new bid for Fox and, in the long-term, set the stage for broader consolidation between ISPs and media companies

On Mars, NASA’s Opportunity rover has run out of so much power it can’t communicate with Earth anymore — but that doesn’t mean the vehicle is dead yet. The robot is in a deep sleep, thanks to a particularly nasty dust storm that’s blocking sunlight from hitting its solar panels. NASA engineers are optimistic that the rover will be able to wake up and do science again once the storm has cleared up. But they’re still worried.
“It’s like you have a l

Comcast has ended its practice of throttling heavy internet users that are congesting the network, the cable company said in a Monday announcement. It said that its network is now strong enough to handle congestion, without needing to purposefully slow down speeds.The news coincides with the Monday deadline for net neutrality rules to be rolled back. Under FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s Restoring Internet Freedom Order, companies may have more freedom to throttle, block traffic, or offer premium

After weeks of signaling it would do so, Comcast is making a play at 21st Century Fox’s TV and film assets. Hoping to derail Disney’s pending, stock-based $52.4 billion deal with Fox, Comcast is stepping in with a higher, all-cash offer for $35 per share, which totals approximately $65 billion. The move is likely to trigger an intense battle between Comcast and Disney as 21st Century Fox and the Murdoch empire weigh which is the better option. Fox’s board of directors is sched

Researchers have recorded a strange new sound that started coming from a volcano in Ecuador after it erupted in the fall of 2015 — and the sound is incredibly soothing. It sounds like a napping volcano is slowly inhaling and exhaling.Basically, it’s volcanic ASMR — which sounds like an oxymoron since volcanoes can destroy homes, kill people, and cause chaos. But this volcano, called Cotopaxi, breathed even when it wasn’t spewing ash into the air. It’s just a new no

Yesterday, Nintendo announced the immediate availability of free-to-play megahit Fortnite for its Switch console. And in under 24 hours, the game has been downloaded more than 2 million times, according to Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé. Speaking with Polygon today, Fils-Aimé said the metric speaks to a lot of pent-up demand for the game on a console like the Switch, because of its inherent portability and the ability to sync your Epic account across multiple platf

As primaries ramp up in states across the U.S., concerns about election cybersecurity are mounting too. This week, a group of Democratic senators introduced a bill to mitigate some of the well-established risks that the nation’s uneven mix of voting machines and election systems poses.
The new bill, known as the Protecting American Votes and Elections Act, proposes two significant measures. First, because not all digital voting systems produce a paper trail, it would require all state and

The Chinese government is readying a program that will make it possible to track citizens’ cars using RFID chips, according to The Wall Street Journal. The program, which will be voluntary at first but mandatory for new vehicles starting in 2019, starts rolling out on July 1st.The program is being put in place by China’s Ministry of Public Security, and the ministry’s Traffic Management Research Institute. By installing RFID chips on the windshields of new cars, and reading de

There was a lot to get excited about during Nintendo’s E3 presentation this week, but one game was conspicuously absent: Metroid Prime 4. Nintendo announced the game at E3 last year with no details beyond the title, and many fans were hoping to hear more about it at the company’s presentation on Tuesday. According to Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé, there’s a very specific reason why the company announced Metroid last year, even though it was still so ear

This week at E3, Nintendo and Epic revealed that the biggest game of the moment — Fortnite — would be coming to the Switch. While it was exciting news for fans of the battle royale game, it also represented something of a trend; multi-platform games that launch on the Switch often do so long after they’ve already been available on other platforms.
Fortnite first hit other consoles back in July, for instance, while Bethesda’s Wolfenstein II originally came out last Octobe

Netflix denies a report that it’s entering the gaming market, but says it is expanding its lineup to include a new game-related, “interactive” narrative series called “Minecraft: Story Mode.” The new series will be the latest addition to its growing collection of interactive stories, which include kid-friendly titles like “Stretch Armstrong: The Breakout,” “Puss in Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale,” and “Buddy Thunderstruck: The Maybe Pile

Creating a salad-making robot is pretty good, as far as tech company hooks go, but Chowbotics is looking to expand. The Bay Area company just raised $11 million in a “Series A-1” led by the Foundry Group and Techstars.The big plan for the money largely involves extending the company’s selection of foodstuffs beyond leafy greens, where Sally the Salad Robot has made its mint. At the top of the list are grain bowls, breakfast bowls, poke bowls, açai bowls and yogurt bowls.

Uberhas brought on Daniel Dankerto serve as a senior director and head of driver product. Prior to joining Uber, he was a product director at Facebook responsible for video and FacebookLive.
“Drivers are the heart of the Uber experience, and Daniel’s passion for our mission and deep product knowledge will ensure we continue to improve and innovate on their behalf,” Uber Head of Product Manik Gupta said in a statement to TechCrunch.
Uber has been without a head of driver pr

While many celebrities try to invest in the world of tech, very few do so successfully. And no one has proved their worth as celebrity-turned-VC more than Ashton Kutcher .
That’s why we’re absolutely thrilled to host Ashton Kutcher and Sound Venturespartner Effie Epstein at TC Disrupt SF in September.
Kutcher first got into investing in 2011 with the launch of A-Grade Investments. The firm invested in big-name companies like DuoLingo, FlexPort, ProductHunt, Airbnb, and Uber. In 2014,

While many celebrities try to invest in the world of tech, very few do so successfully. And no one has proved their worth as celebrity-turned-VC more than Ashton Kutcher .
That’s why we’re absolutely thrilled to host Ashton Kutcher and Sound Venturespartner Effie Epstein at TC Disrupt SF in September.
Kutcher first got into investing in 2011 with the launch of A-Grade Investments. The firm invested in big-name companies like DuoLingo, FlexPort, ProductHunt, Airbnb, and Uber. In 2014,

This month, an online service that prescribes and delivers birth control methods called The Pill Club announced that it’s now available to residents in New York, in addition to Arizona, California, and other seven US states. A few other companies in the US like HeyDoctor, Lemonaid, and Nurx provide online prescriptions for contraceptives like the pill, the patch, or the ring — without the need to see a doctor. But why would anyone want to order contraceptives online?
For one thing,

For all of the beautiful photo-realistic titles shown off at E3 this year, for all the mind-bending storylines and beautiful art styles, it seems that nobody can stop thinking about Fortnite.
The battle royale title has picked up users at break-neck speeds, announcing yesterday that it now has 125 million active users logging in and dropping into battle. The Epic Gamestitle is available across a wide variety of platforms — it just launched a version for the Nintendo Switch yesterday, succe

Musical.lyis merging the functionality from its two-year old live-streaming platform Live.ly into its main app, and has disabled Live.ly’s standalone app as part of the transition process. The Live.ly app will eventually be pulled from the App Store and Google Play, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. Instead of being able to go live, Live.ly users are presented with a message about the changes, informing them that live streaming has now moved over to Musical.ly.This change is also confir

Fintech startup N26 is updating its N26Metal product and launching it tomorrow. You might remember that the company first announced its premium card at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin in December 2017. Shortly after the conference, the card was available in early access for existing N26 Black customers.
But the company had to go back to the drawing board and update the card design. N26 Metal customers had some complaints about the design of the card in particular.
While the original metal card was pri

Whole Foods co-founder and CEO John Mackey alluded to recurring tensions between the supermarket chain and parent company Amazon during a company-wide meeting on Tuesday. Business Insider obtained audio of his remarks. Mackey seemed thrilled with Whole Foods’ growth under Amazon, saying “it’s been an incredible year.” But he also revealed that friction and discord between himself and Amazon’s high-ranking executives has been something of a regular occurrence.&ldquo

Three-month-old Elph wants to make it easier for you to find and use blockchain-based apps. How? Through a portal that’s promising to enable users to click through to see how their crypto holdings are faring, to buy and sell CryptoKitties or to find and use other decentralized apps.
Its co-founder and CEO, Ritik Malhotra, says it will eventually be the “Netscape for crypto.”
If it sounds outlandish, that’s partly because there are still so few blockchain apps from which t

Last year, we reported that Netflix was expanding into episodic, interactive content aimed at kids, starting with Puss in Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale — a series that took Shrek’s Puss in Boots and dropped him into an adventure where he’s attempting to escape from a storybook — and Buddy Thunderstruck, which showcases the hijinks of the eponymous Buddy, a truck-racing dog. Apparently these initial efforts were successful: As the technology news site TechRadar reports to

Apple is continuing to flesh out its lineup of TV series for its upcoming streaming service and Netflix competitor, assumed to be offered sometime next year as part of a subscription bundle with Apple Music. The company’s latest addition is a dramatic mystery series, currently known as the untitled Hilde Lysiak project. The show is inspired by the real-life story of the 11-year-old investigate reporter who scooped local news outlets by being the first to expose a murder in her hometown of&

When Dockerburst on the scene in 2013, it brought the idea of containers to a broad audience. Since then Kubernetes has emerged as a way to orchestrate the delivery of those containerized apps, but Docker saw a gap that wasn’t being addressed beyond pure container deployment that they are trying to address with the next release of Docker Enterprise Edition. Docker made the announcement today at DockerCon in San Francisco.
Scott Johnston, chief product officer at Docker says that Docker Ent

Index Ventures— a firm with investments in companies like recent IPO Dropbox, a series of successful gaming companies like King, and others including Slack and coming IPO Zuora — has seen a lot of moves in the past few months.
There was the departure of partner Ilya Fushman earlier this year, but the firm also brought on Sarah Cannon from CapitalG as one of their recent big hires. Index has also promoted former Dropboxer Mark Goldberg to partner. Prior to joining Index, Cannon l

If you’ve tried selling your old smartphone on a refurbishment website, chances are you ended up with a dozen browser tabs comparing prices. French startup Back Market is taking advantage of this fragmented industry to create a marketplace and aggregate all refurbishers on a single online platform.
The startup just raised $48 million (€41 million). Groupe Arnault, Eurazeo, Aglaé Ventures and Daphni participated in today’s funding round.
Back in May, the company told me th

Maingear has refreshed its Pulse 15 gaming laptop, adding it to the ranks of six-core gaming laptops with Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 graphics cards. This new model starts at $1,399, which gets you a six-core Intel Core i7-8750H processor, 8GB of DDR4 RAM (with an option for up to 32GB), a discrete GPU, and a 1TB 7,200rpm traditional hard drive (up to an optional 2TB Samsung SSD). Image: Maingear
Overall, it seems like the Pulse 15 is for the user who wants to spend less than $1,500 on some gaming

Brace yourself for laptops with 128GB of RAM because they’re coming. Today, Lenovo announced its ThinkPad P52, which, along with that massive amount of memory, also features up to 6TB of storage, up to a 4K, 15.6-inch display, an eighth-gen Intel hexacore processor, and an Nvidia Quadro P3200 graphics card.
The ThinkPad also includes two Thunderbolt three ports, HDMI 2.0, a mini DisplayPort, three USB Type-A ports, a headphone jack, and an Ethernet port. The company hasn’t announced

Comedy Central has greenlit a pilot from Reductress co-creators Beth Newell and Sarah Pappalardo for a late-night show adaptation of their women’s media satire site, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Saturday Night Live’s Abby Elliott will serve as the show’s in-character host. The Reductress Hour will aim to translate the withering social commentary that has made the site so beloved by Women Online™ in recent years.The Reductress website, launched in 2013 and often d

Three years ago, the US Food and Drug Administration approved Addyi, a so-called “female Viagra” pill intended to increase a woman’s libido. The decision was controversial, and Addyi didn’t sell well, partly due to problems with its manufacturer. Now, Addyi has been relaunched. It’s half the price and easily available online — two moves that make it likely this ill-advised pill will be even more harmful. When it comes to issues of sexual desire, expanding acc

A third party audit of a controversial patient data-sharing arrangement between a London NHSTrust and Google DeepMind appears to have skirted over the core issues that generated the controversy in the first place.
The audit (full report here) — conducted by law firm Linklaters — of the Royal Free NHS Foundation Trust’s acute kidney injury detection app system, Streams, which was co-developed with Google-DeepMind (using an existing NHS algorithm for early detectio

There were a lot of great features announced last week at Apple’s WWDC, but the one that’s going to have the biggest effect on my day-to-day life is the overhaul to how notifications are managed in iOS 12.Back in April, I detailed four things that Android does better than the iPhone when it comes to notifications. With iOS 12, Apple has taken care of three of them. Notifications can be grouped, it’s easier to make them silently appear, and, most importantly, you can directly m

When Nintendo unveiled Smash Bros. Ultimate at E3 on June 12th, the Japanese developer promised a bevy of smaller tweaks to the platform brawler. According to Smash Bros. director Masahiro Sakurai, some fighters are more expressive now, while others feature new voice acting and sound effects. What wasn’t announced: the anatomical proportions of some characters have mysteriously changed, too.
Smash Bros. Ultimate sees the return of Solid Snake, the protagonist of Hideo Kojima’s steal