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21-Year-Old Thiel Fellow Raises Three-Point-Eight Million Dollars For Figma
Jun 27, 1:14AM
Children are our future, and VCs are giving them the cash to make it happen. Dylan Field, one of Peter Thiel's 20-Under-20 fellows, just raised $3.8 million for his startup Figma according to an SEC filing. Field declined to talk with me about Figma, but the Thiel Fellowship site says "Dylan is building a browser based photo editing tool."Drew Houston And Bryan Schreier On Dropbox's Early Days and Stealth Code Name
Jun 26, 10:00PM
As we mentioned earlier this week, Dropbox founder and CEO Drew Houston and Sequoia Capital partner Bryan Schreier joined us in the TechCrunch TV studio for a special three-part series on how Houston and Schreier work together on recruiting, growing as a CEO, and building the company.John Zimmer Says Lyft Will Work With Sidecar, Uber To Fight Regulators In Wake Of LA Cease & Desist
Jun 26, 9:54PM
Lyft co-founder John Zimmer says the company is trying to work with other ride sharing companies to fight regulators after Los Angeles served Lyft, Uber, and Sidecar with cease and desist letters yesterday. "We'd love to work together with Sidecar and Uber on this front and have initiated multiple meetings to do just that," Zimmer wrote.3D Systems Invests In Asteroid Miners Planetary Resources, Opens Up New Seed-Stage Venture Arm
Jun 26, 9:20PM
Planetary Resources' plan to scour the heavens and find asteroids to mine may seem a little out there as far as startup ideas go, but that hasn't stopped some big names from backing the company. Today, that list just got a little bigger -- 3D printing giant 3D Systems announced that it has invested in Planetary Resources, and that it will aid in the development of the startup's ARKYD series space telescopes by fabricating components for them.Zuck's Adorable Sheepdog Beast Is Now A Facebook Messages Sticker Pack
Jun 26, 8:59PM
Now you and Facebook's CEO can unwind in the same way: playing with Beast. The billionaire's Puli dog just got his own Facebook Stickers pack, which lets you forgo typing and instead send friends animated images of Beast playing, begging, or wearing the cone of shame. Before you ask "why does this matter?", see that this is part of Facebook's quest to help you communicate complex emotions.Microsoft Confirms IE11 Will Support Google's SPDY Protocol
Jun 26, 8:50PM
In a press briefing this afternoon, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 11 will support SPDY, the Google-backed protocol for speeding up download speeds for web sites. Microsoft only briefly talked about this in its briefing and didn't even mention it in its announcement, but this is actually a major step for SPDY, which is now supported in all of the mainstream browsers.Windows 8.1′s Start Button Isn't A Start Button
Jun 26, 8:16PM
The headlines are loud and clear today. Microsoft brings back the Start Button in Windows 8! Huzzah! ZONG! But don't believe the hype. We've been duped. Windows 8.1's Start Button isn't the Start Button of old. The classic multi-step application launcher is still missing. Windows 8.1's Start Button is more of a shortcut to the Start Menu -- you know, the screen with the little colorful icons.Google Removes All The Clouds From Google Maps And Earth
Jun 26, 8:10PM
Ready for your regular reminder that technology is magic? Google has just rid the earth of clouds. Well, Google Earth, at least*. They've just pushed an update to the satellite imagery found in Google Earth and Google Maps, offering a higher-res (and now cloud free) view of the earth than ever before.Ranku Launches Comparison Shopping Site For Legit Online Universities
Jun 26, 7:29PM
Scummy for-profit schools like University of Phoenix spend big bucks to rope students into mediocre educations. So Ranku launches today to help students find a reputable online university. Its site lets you browse different programs, and compare their price, online interface, and performance of graduates. The TechStars-backed Ranku wants to bring transparency to the sketchy business of choosing a digital education. Here’s the problem. Lots of people want to go to school online so they can get a more affordable education from home, even if they’re on a tight schedule. 16 million students were enrolled this year. That’s spawned a rapidly growing ecosystem of online schools. There’s traditional, legitimate, non-profit private, public, and state schools like Stanford, Georgetown, and University Of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. There are only 100 non-profit schools operating at scale online now, and they account for just 1 million of the 16 million students. That’s because there are for-profit schools like University Of Phoenix Online, Kaplan, Everest, and Art Institutes which studies have shown produce graduates who earn less, are more likely to be unemployed, and have higher debt. But since for-profit schools can make so much money from each student, they’ve developed aggressive online marketing tactics to sucker people in. They’ll pay sky-high prices for ads on education-related content, and even split tuition with any site that delivers them an enrollee. There are whole networks of sites devoted to funneling people into for-profit schools. That makes it tough to find an online university without getting scammed. Everyone’s trying to sell you to the highest bidder. A Yelp For Universities Ranku solves this by barring all for-profit schools from its online education comparison shopping site. It only features non-profit schools. Through curation and Facebook login-based personalization, its goal is to show you the best and most relevant universities. There’s no massive open online classes (MOOCs) or places to dabble in learning. Just schools where you can get a full-fledged online degree that’s an equivalent of what you could get on a campus. You can search for a specific school or type of program, or browse top universities. Each school’s Ranku page includes info on descriptions of available degrees, price, minimum GPA, application due date, if you get to walk at a physical graduation ceremony, faculty profiles, student testimonials, and links to apply. To let you “know-before-you-go”, Ranku breaks down the features of each school’s online education interface, such as mobileNew Microsoft Visual Studio Features Show Importance Of Windows Azure, Developing For Connected Devices
Jun 26, 7:21PM
Microsoft showed the new Visual Studio 2013 at the Build conference today. The new integrated development environment (IDE) features include performance tools for power consumption, asynchronous calls for debugging and an overall focus on the connected app.No Mailbox? No Problem. Boomerang For Android Brings Gesture-Based Email Management To Gmail Users
Jun 26, 7:15PM
Baydin, the startup behind a suite of productivity add-ons for Gmail, Outlook, and Google Calendar, is today bringing its inbox management solution Boomerang for Gmail to the mobile platform. With a new app called Boomerang for Android, the company is iterating on its previously web-only application in order to offer non-iPhone users their own gesture-based, email scheduling and snoozing application, similar in some ways to the iOS app Mailbox.Nvidia's Project Shield Release Gets Pushed Back To July Due To "Mechanical Issue"
Jun 26, 7:13PM
The Nvidia Project Shield, a handheld gaming device from the graphics card-maker that was set to debut Thursday, will be delayed until July, the company revealed today. In a statement provided to TechCrunch, Nvidia explained that it had to delay the release after discovering a mechanical issue tied to a piece supplied by a third-party company. The full statement is below.Maker Studios Co-Founder Danny Zappin Sues The Company Over His Ouster
Jun 26, 6:59PM
It was only a few months ago that Maker Studios co-founder Danny Zappin stepped down from the CEO role, replaced by Endemol veteran Ynon Kreiz. Well it turns out that he didn't "step down," so much as he was "pushed out." And now he's taking the company to court over his ouster.Facebook Updates Its Ad Manager Reports With More Customizable, Real-Time Data
Jun 26, 6:07PM
Facebook's effort to simplify its ad products continues: Today it's announcing an update to Ad Manager Reports (a product whose name pretty much explains what it does — helps advertisers track and manage their campaigns on Facebook). The goal of the changes, according to Product Manager David Baser, is to give advertisers tools that are "simpler, easier-to-use, and more flexible." A lot of that seems to involve giving those advertisers more control over the data that they receive.CrunchGov Essential: How The Internet Helped Gay America Come Out Of The Closet
Jun 26, 5:51PM
The U.S. has always included a sizable population of gay citizens. Without a way to coordinate their latent collective powers, discrimination and isolation forced them into the shadows. As the U.S. slowly inched its way toward tolerance, the Internet, as a soapbox for young liberals, became a powerful platform to expose otherwise oblivious Americans to their gay neighbors, backed by the full force of unrelenting digital activism.Microsoft Opens Up Bing As A Platform For Developers
Jun 26, 5:47PM
At its Build developer conference today, Microsoft announced that it is opening up quite a bit of Bing‘s advanced functionality to developers. As Microsoft corporate VP Gurdeep Singh Pall noted, developers are already using Bing APIs, of course, but apps can now use Bing’s entities and knowledge, natural user interfaces, optical character recognition and new mapping and visualization capabilities, including Microsoft’s just-announced 3-D imagery for maps. As Singh Pall noted, Microsoft has been using all of these capabilities privately already, of course, but he thinks that “if we can do something with an API that is good, third parties can do something that is dynamite.” Bing, he said, “is not just a great search engine, but the team has built some great capabilities.” Bing, after all, is pretty good at understanding user intent, unstructured content on the web and other queries and data types that are not trivial for a developer to implement. The team, he said, always believed that Bing could do a lot of things that can “actually be very valuable outside of the search box. For a long time, we’ve now thought that you could use these capabilities to create some great experiences.” Developers will get access to much of Bing’s data, including its web index and relevance engine, as well as its knowledge base and understanding of entities. The Bing team has also worked on lots of natural user interface technologies, including voice recognition, which will also be available for developers to add to their apps. Here is a full list of the new capabilities for developers: Bringing the World's Knowledge to Your Apps Understanding the World: We think knowledge is more than just a "graph". It requires combining the web's deep sets of information with insights derived from understanding the people, places, things, and actions in the real world. The Bing Entity API allows developers to create applications using this understanding to build scenarios that augment users' abilities to discover and interact with their world faster and more easily than they can do today. Natural and Intuitive User Experiences The Gift of Sight: Giving machines the ability to see and understand is a long-held science fiction dream. TheBing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Control enables developers to integrate Microsoft's robust cloud-based visual recognition capabilities into their applications. Write Once, Read Anywhere: The world is shrinking and information is increasingly more global. The Bing Translator Control lets apps detect text and delivers automatic machine translation into aMicrosoft Will Bring 3D Imagery To Bing Maps For Windows 8.1, Will Launch With 100 Cities
Jun 26, 5:37PM
Microsoft just announced that the Bing Maps app for Windows 8.1 will offer 3D imagery, just like Google Maps and Apple Maps. This previously unannounced feature, Microsoft’s corporate VP Gurdeep Singh Pall said while demonstrating some new capabilities of Bing for developers, will launch with Windows 8.1, though it’s not in the preview version yet. Microsoft, he said, developed its own cameras to create these 3D images. As the company told me, all of this imagery for the 3D imagery is captured exclusively for this feature. Microsoft is not repurposing any of its previously captured aerial photographs for this. It’s not clear what kind of coverage these 3D maps will provide, but the word on the street is that it will launch with about 100 cities at first. The company also plans to integrate the next version of PhotoSynth deeply into the new Maps app. Developers will be able to use all of this imagery in their own apps, too. The demo Microsoft showed today was actually quite impressive and at least on par — if not better — with what its competitors are currently doing. The fact that all of its competitors had already added 3D imagery to their maps did make Bing Maps look somewhat behind the times, but it looks like Microsoft is starting to catch up again.Revel Systems Raises $10.1M To Help It Grow iPad Point-Of-Sale Business Internationally
Jun 26, 5:32PM
Revel Systems, purveyor of iPad-based point-of-sale systems for restaurant, retail and other customer-service facing businesses, announced its $10.1 million Series B funding round today. The new investment comes from Tim Tighe, former CEO of Hungry Jack's and SVP of McDonald's Southeast Asia, and Sean Tomlinson, serial entrepreneur. Both are private investors based in Asia, and the source of the funding reflects Revel's larger goals.Google Play Edition Samsung Galaxy S4 And HTC One Now Available, Will Start Shipping By July 9
Jun 26, 5:27PM
Despite plenty of rumors that attested to the contrary, Google didn't show off any new Nexus phones at its I/O developer conference -- instead it trotted out a version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 that ran an untouched version of Android 4.2, and Google SVP Sundar Pichai followed up with a similar announcement about an unfettered HTC One. The announcements left Android fans slobbering in anticipation, the wait is over -- the so-called Google Play edition S4 and One are available in the Google Play Store for $649 and $599 respectively, and Google says they'll start shipping on July 9.With Windows 8.1, Microsoft Wants To Own The Kitchen, As Well As The Living Room And The Office
Jun 26, 5:07PM
Microsoft is adding a bunch of new things to Windows 8.1, as the first part of its "rapid release" plan for its desktop OS. One aspect of the update is the new Food and Drink app for Windows 8, which is all about those two things, as you might've guessed. It's a small addition, but one that uses a fairly ingenious interface gimmick to really make using it in the kitchen environment easier.If at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to feeds_feedburner_com_techcrunch+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
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