Technology news

Popular messaging app Kikis, indeed, “here to stay” following an acquisition by the Los Angeles-based multimedia holding company, MediaLab.
It echoes the same message from Kik’s chief executive Tim Livingston last week when he rebuffed earlier reports that the company would shut down amid an ongoing battle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Livingston had tweeted that Kik had signed a letter-of-intent with a “great company,” but that it was &ldqu

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support, and the money that flows through it all.
The app industry in 2018 saw 194 billion downloads and more than $100 billion in purchases. Just in the past quarter, consumer spending exceeded $23 billion and installs topped 31 billion. It’s a fact: we spend more time on our phones than we do watching TV.
This week, Chinese censorship is still a b

Late last night the Financial Times reported that HuffPost, arguably one of the crown jewels of Verizon Media Group’s remaining network of media properties (which includes TechCrunch), is up for sale.
Verizon has been shedding media properties in a retreat from the strategy that it had begun to execute with the acquisition of AOLfor $4.4 billion back in 2015. Through the AOL deal, then-chief executive Tim Armstrongbecame the architect of the telecommunications company’s media and adv

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a bit old-fashioned when it comes to phones. Everyone scoffs at my iPhone SE, but the truth is it’s the best phone Apple ever made — a beautiful, well designed object in just about every way. But damn is the iPhone 11 Pro ugly. And so are the newest phones from Samsung and Google, while we’re at it.
Let’s just get right to why the new iPhones are ugly, front and back. And sideways. We can start with the notch. Obviously it&r

Mercedes-Benz car owners have said that the app they used to remotely locate, unlock and start their cars was displaying other people’s account and vehicle information.
TechCrunch spoke to two customers who said the Mercedes-Benz’ connected car app was pulling in information from other accounts and not their own, allowing them to see other car owners’ names, recent activity, phone numbers, and more.
The apparent security lapse happened late-Friday before the app went offline &l

The crowdfunded Pebble smartwatch officially died last June, but a group of dedicated Pebble fans are giving Pebbles second lives, as detailed in this great article on iFixit that you should go read.
The Pebble launched to a record-breaking Kickstarter in 2012 because it looked like it had the potential to be the first good smartwatch. Part of the appeal was that it seemed ahead of its time — it could do things like show you notifications and help you control your phone’s music, whic

Whatever you might say about HTC (and believe me, there’s plenty to say), at least the company takes some fascinating chance. As newly minted CEO Yves Maitre admitted to me at Disrupt a couple of weeks back, the once mighty smartphone giant has lost the thread in recent years. But if nothing else, the Exodus project marks a glimpse at some potential smartphone future.With this weekend’s launch of the Exodus 1s at Berlin’s Lightning conference, HTC aims to make it clear that the

Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy news pertaining to startups and venture capital. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about Revel, a recent graduate of Y Combinator that’s raised a small seed round.
Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to [email protected] or on Twitter @KateClarkTweets. If you don’t subscribe to Startups Weekl

Our robot colleague Satoshi Nakaboto writes about Bitcoin every fucking day. Welcome to another edition of Bitcoin Today, where I, Satoshi Nakaboto, tell you what’s been going on with Bitcoin in the past 24 hours. As Sloterdijk used to say: Intelligence is in the eye of the beholder! Bitcoin Price We closed the day, October 18 2019, at a price of $7,973. That’s a minor 1.57 percent decline in 24 hours, or -$127.72. It was the lowest closing price in one hundred and twenty-eight days

Life is the last thing you would associate with the eternally dark craters of the lunar poles. But these craters could hold the key to explaining how complex, multi-cellular organisms evolved on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago, affording unimaginable insights into our planet’s biological past. That’s because huge asteroid impacts, such as the one believed to have killed the dinosaurs, happen frequently and launch thousands of tons of the Earth’s material into space &nd

This article was originally published by Super Jump Magazine, an independent publication all about celebrating great video games and their creators through carefully-crafted, in-depth featured produced by a diverse team of games journalists, designers, and enthusiasts. Death Stranding, the long-awaited first game from Hideo Kojima after his split from Konami, is on its way. And with each new trailer, we see that Stranding will include the same crazy bullshit we&rsq

The gaming industry suffered a schism earlier this year as multiple PC storefronts triggered the Store Wars, an escalating battle for exclusive games. Gamers were divided over the benefits of this, and the debate over it continues as more games come out as “exclusive” to a store. TNW got the chance to speak to Raph Koster, a legend in the industry, about the state of gaming. Koster’s previous credits include Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. Koster recently

In a rare instance of bipartisanship overcoming the rancorous discord that’s been the hallmark of the U.S. Congress, senators and sepresentatives issued a scathing rebuke to Applefor its decision to take down an app at the request of the Chinese government.
Signed by Senators Ron Wyden,Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Congressional Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mike Gallagher and Tom Malinowski, the letter was written to “express… strong concern about Apple&r

Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, an outspoken tech industry figure who is apparently not afraid to criticize other business leaders, spent all week bashing Facebook over the company’s refusal to moderate certain content on its platform, like political ads that contain lies. He’s on tour promoting his book, Trailblazer, and is understandably generating headlines and free promotion as a result. But one peculiar call to action that Beniof

Machine learning and AI may be deployed on such grand tasks as finding exoplanets and creating photorealistic people, but the same techniques also have some surprising applications in academia: DeepMind has created an AI system that helps scholars understand and recreate fragmentary ancient Greek texts on broken stone tablets.
These clay, stone or metal tablets, inscribed as much as 2,700 years ago, are invaluable primary sources for history, literature and anthropology. They’re covered in

Capcom might be looking to revive some of the older franchises it hasn’t touched in a while. Gamers are happy to give them ideas because they’re nothing if not wildly nostagic — even if some of these franchises have gone decades without signs of life. The company’s annual report describes Capcom’s success with recent franchise entries like Devil May Cry 5, Resident Evil 2 Remake, and Monster Hunter World. One of its strategies for maintaini

WeWork co-founder Adam Neumanndidn’t plan for his family’s control of WeWork to end at his death but instead expected to pass that control to future generations of Neumanns, too, says Business Insider.
The outlet reports that in a speech Neumann gave to employees in January of this year, footage of which it says it has viewed, Neumann is seen saying that WeWork isn’t “just controlled — we’re generationally controlled.” He reportedly goes on to say that w