Wanda Sykes, the host of Ring Nation. | Image: MGM Television Amazon and MGM are marketing Ring Nation, their upcoming reality TV show hosted by comedian and former NSA agent Wanda Sykes, as “a new twist on the popular clip show genre.” But over 40 different civil rights organizations are now speaking out against the … Read more
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If you’re having trouble tracking your work and personal life as it spreads over 20 different apps and productivity suites, to the point where you have a meeting in 5 minutes you don’t even remember making, you’re not alone. We can’t all have a PA to keep track for us, but Augment hopes that a … Read more
Spotify is launching audiobooks within the app. | Image: Spotify There is a lot happening today, so I won’t dally. Spotify is finally launching its audiobooks feature, Adnan Syed of Serial is free, and we are opening up the Hot Pod Summit lottery. Spotify launches audiobooks in the US Spotify is bringing audiobooks to its … Read more
Spotify is today launching support for audiobooks on its streaming service, offering a third type of audio content for its customers beyond music and podcasts. Initially, audiobooks will be made available to U.S. users who will be able to access a selection of some 300,000+ titles, recommended by Spotify editors. But over time, the company … Read more
TrovaTrip, a travel planning and booking platform that lets creators host adventures with their communities, has raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Madrona. Founded in 2017, the Portland-based company makes it easy for creators to sell and host multi-day experiences around the world. TrovaTrip offers more than 150 experiences in 48 countries. … Read more
As fintechs become more efficient, so too do fraudsters. “Faster instant payments mean faster fraud,” Sardine CEO and co-founder Soups Ranjan told TechCrunch. That’s the thesis behind his startup, which uses behavioral, financial and device-specific user data to detect fraud on behalf of its clients in the crypto and fintech industries. Those conditions also mean … Read more
The first of the Ryzen 7000 series | Image: AMD AMD has announced its new “Mendocino” Ryzen 7020 and Athlon 7020 series of mobile processors. The chips, competing with the likes of Intel’s Core i3, are meant to power lower-cost and lower-powered devices — in the words of AMD’s presentation, “the everyday laptop.” These are … Read more
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Fintech startup Revolut has confirmed it was hit by a highly targeted cyberattack that allowed hackers to access the personal details of tens of thousands of customers. Revolut spokesperson Michael Bodansky told TechCrunch that an “unauthorized third party obtained access to the details of a small percentage (0.16%) of our customers for a short period … Read more
A non-binding opinion issued today by an influential advisor to the Europe Union’s top court could foreshadow a major regional development at the intersection of privacy and competition regulation — or ‘privacy vs competition’ as it’s sometimes narrowly framed. The opinion follows a referral to the Court of Justice (CJEU) related to an appeal by … Read more
There is no secret that both viewers and creators are confused by the puzzle that is YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. Now, a new study by Mozilla suggests that users’ recommendations don’t change a lot when they use options like ‘dislike’ and ‘not interested’ to stop YouTube from suggesting similar videos. The organization’s study observed that YouTube … Read more
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Iconic New York venture capital firm Lerer Hippeau announced $230 million in additional funding across two new funds: LH Seed VIII, which focuses on pre-seed and seed-stage companies, and LH Select IV, which invests in companies from Series A to C. The new funds come about two years following unannounced sixth seed and third Select … Read more
Monese, the London-based fintech that provides digital banking and remittance services to consumers and businesses across Europe, has raised $35 million from global banking giant HSBC. Founded in 2013, Monese is one of several so-called “challenger” banks to emerge from the U.K. capital, serving customers with a range of online-only services including standard cash accounts, savings, … Read more
Slack has succeeded in large part in the enterprise by allowing people to communicate in a number of ways while integrating with many common enterprise applications. This lets you stay in Slack to get your work done without dreaded task switching. But what Slack has lacked until now was a way to share information about … Read more
Scratchpay, the Pasadena, Calif.-based petcare financier turned healthcare financier, closed a new round of funding amounting to $35 million. It’s a sign that investors are still looking at growing the fintech scene despite the markets’ downturn and an acknowledgment from investors that there is a slowdown in investments. 8 investors discuss fintech’s potential despite the … Read more
The ultimate goal of pulling customer data together into a customer data platform (CDP) is building more meaningful customer experiences in real time. Up until now, that’s been more aspirational than real, but Salesforce is announcing Genie, a real time data integration platform, today at the Dreamforce customer conference that aims to make that dream … Read more
Tres, a financial “data lake” for web3 companies, has raised $7.6 million in a seed round led by boldstart ventures, its founder and CEO Tal Zackon, exclusively shared with TechCrunch. Investors include F2, The Chainsmokers’ venture fund Mantis, New Form Capital, Kenetic Capital, Blockdaemon Ventures and Alchemy. As well as angel investors like Fireblocks CEO … Read more
A canvas is a document that lives inside — and works with — Slack. | Image: Slack Slack is becoming a document editor. The Salesforce-owned company announced today at its developer conference that it is building a new feature, called Canvas, that will let users create and edit full docs from within the Slack interface. … Read more
Adobe is under fire for removing features from it’s services. | Photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Adobe has come under fire by Sebastiaan de With, co-founder of popular iOS camera app Halide, for removing Apple’s ubiquitous AirDrop sharing feature from Photoshop and disrupting his workflow. De With expressed his frustrations on … Read more
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Despite representing 10% of the world’s GDP, the tourism industry has been one of the last to embrace big data and analytics. Darren Dunn and Jay Kinghorn experienced this firsthand — Dunn as a sales executive at various travel companies including FarePortal.com and Jay as an associate managing director at Utah’s office of tourism. “Destinations … Read more
Data privacy regulations like GDPR, the CCPA and HIPAA present a challenge to training AI systems on sensitive data, like financial transactions, patient health records and user device logs. Historical data is what “teaches” AI systems to identify patterns and make predictions, but there are technical hurdles to using it without compromising a person’s identity. … Read more