The Urban-X investors showcase is a closed-door event that shows off eight different incubated startups to potential investors and press. I stopped by earlier this week to see what the fuss was about. Of the eight companies in Urban-X’s 02 cohort, I picked four that tackled problems relating to pollution, the visually impaired, urban deliveries and maintaining public cleanliness:… Read More
http://ift.tt/2qOfXek Urban-X’s investors showcase features high-tech face masks, navigation for the blind and more http://ift.tt/2p7SgBv
Language learning service Babbel is one of Berlin’s quiet startup success stories. While it was once on the brink of shutting down, today it’s a thriving company with hundreds of employees who work in a sprawling office in the middle of Berlin — and it’s the market leader in large parts of Europe. Unlike competitors like Duolingo, though, Babbel is a paid service. 
With titanium 3D printers, electrostatic charge tables, and a giant slide, Playground Global lives up to it’s a name. Here we take you on a tour of Android operating system inventor Andy Rubin’s hardware startup incubator that’s backed by a $300 million fund. Check out how the whimsical space lets scrappy hackers compete with Facebook and Google to recruit top talent. If… 
After drones became available to private citizens around the world, bad actors found ways to use them for nefarious purposes like spying on corporations, carrying contraband across borders and into prison yards, and sadly, turning the aerial robots into weapons. Drone crashes also put people and property in harm’s way. Provo, Utah-based Fortem Technologies Inc. has raised $5.5 million in… 
Becoming a parent brings drastic change in the household budget. As such, new and expectant parents are a favored demographic among marketers. Startup founders and their backers have also taken an interest, applying technology and business model innovation to the increasingly tech-intensive art of watching, feeding, entertaining and transporting tiny humans. 
Made in Space Inc. is known as the company behind the 3D printers on board the International Space Station. Astronauts have used the startup’s AMF, or Additive Manufacturing Facility on the ISS, to churn out everything from finger splints to tools, sculptures and even other printer parts. Now, the company is revealing a video rendering of its larger Archinaut system, a factory in the… 
Facebook is rolling out a new feature called “Latest Conversations” in its search results which will show the most recent public posts about timely topics that a lot of people across its network are discussing. The unit gives you a wider view of what people are saying about a news story or other subject, by exposing you to sentiments being expressed outside your social circle.… 
Just six months into its life, Growlabs, a startup using machine intelligence to support outbound sales teams, has raised a $2.2 million seed round. Founded by Ben Raffi, the creator of ticketing app Universe, Growlabs helps businesses reduce their customer acquisition costs by enabling smalls sales teams to do more with less. From his past work with Universe, Raffi knows how difficult it… 
Spotify has taken a tip from Snapchat with its new feature for sharing music via scannable images. The new Spotify Codes feature creates a unique barcode and album cover image for every song, artist, and playlist. Scan these Spotify Codes with new camera in the Spotify app’s search bar to instantly play that music. Spotify Codes could make it easier for friends to share music with… 
There are a number of great deals to be had on Amazon, but finding them across the retailer’s vast array of products is still a challenge. That’s where a new app called Nugget comes in. The app scours Amazon for higher-quality products at lower prices, and then curates them into categories you can browse from your phone. All its deals are sourced from Amazon, so you don’t… 
Welcome back to another episode of Equity, TechCrunch’s weekly podcast that works to put the ‘fun’ in ‘venture capital.’ This week from our SoMa studio, Katie Roof, Matthew Lynley and Alex Wilhelm were joined by Sequoia’s Roelof Botha. Sequoia, as you might know, was an early backer of companies like Google and Apple. Celebrating the continuing… 
Facebook gets a lot of flack for just reinforcing your world views in its News Feed echo chamber instead of challenging your opinions. That’s because you choose exactly which friends and Pages to follow, so liberals might skip Fox News or Breitbart while conservatives avoid The Atlantic and Huffington Post. But Facebook’s newest feature could bring a wider range of sources to your… 
Earlier this week, Docker made the surprise announcement that its long-time CEO Ben Golub was stepping down and that former Concur CEO Steve Singh was stepping into his shoes. While this move surely came as a surprise to many, it was actually in the making for a while. 
A report by MoffettNathanson found that the pay cable industry lost 762,000 subscribers in Q1 2017, the worst drop ever. To compare last year’s Q1 saw a mere 141,000 subscribers lost. Analyst Craig Moffett said that the “Pay TV subscriber universe [shrank] at its worst ever annual rate of decline (-2.4%)” and there have been 6.5 million cord-cutter (and the new… 
It’s May and that means the window for locking down internships at tech companies is rapidly closing. In reflection of the 2017 recruiting season, Glassdoor took some time to analyze its anonymized salary data, producing a report of the highest paying internships for 2017. We went ahead and pulled the tech companies from the list, and among large tech companies, Facebook leads the… 
Picture a day where you flip through your memories like you would Facebook or Instagram or you get a chip sewn into your brain to help you learn languages twice as fast and communicate your thoughts in an instant to millions of people. Such are the promises of so-called brain hacking technologies and for the past couple years, everyone from Elon Musk to DARPA scientists has been studying… 
Smartphone users are spending more time in apps than in years past, and now access over 30 apps on a monthly basis, according to a new report from App Annie out this week. These 30 apps work out to being roughly one-third to one-half of the apps users have installed on their smartphones. And using those apps is a daily habit, as people now launch an average of at least 9 apps per day, the… 
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