{rss:content:encoded} The curious case of the LG V30S ThinQ http://ift.tt/2GHkhnD http://ift.tt/2FurSqj February 25, 2018 at 02:00AM 
Welcome to LG’s new smartphone strategy. A new flagship every year, followed by an incremental upgrade six months later. It’s a strange approach that’s sure to annoy early adopters, but LG’s certainly not the first to adopt the strategy — it’s in-line with the sort of thing OnePlus, among others, have been doing for a while now. The first such handset from… Read More
Welcome to LG’s new smartphone strategy. A new flagship every year, followed by an incremental upgrade six months later. It’s a strange approach that’s sure to annoy early adopters, but LG’s certainly not the first to adopt the strategy — it’s in-line with the sort of thing OnePlus, among others, have been doing for a while now. The first such handset from… Read More
And this year is all about business. While the Samsung Galaxy S9 is going to be announced tomorrow at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Slashleaks shared the official promo video for the Samsung’s upcoming flagship device. It’s a polished 3-minute video packed with information about the new phone. First, just like rumors said, it looks just like the Galaxy S8. There are some… 
Some founders toil for years to secure a meager seed round. Others seem to go from launch to a massive fundraise in no time. Why is that, and how does one get into that second group? There’s no single formula, of course. But data indicates it helps to be famous, involved in a hot technology sector or working to cure cancer. 
According to a number of reports today, the next version of Android would include a “dark mode” – something that’s been a long-time feature request from those who prefer the dark-themed and power saving option that’s already available in apps like YouTube and Twitter. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. News that Android was getting its own dark mode… 
Long gone are the days when Africa was disparagingly regarded as the White Man’s Burden. Today, Africa is the continent with the youngest demographic in the world, on the brink of a technical renaissance — yet the world’s tech titans are floundering to understand and gain a foothold in this market. 
Eden, the office management and tech support platform, has today announced the acquisition of OrgOrg, a social network for office managers to recommend, discuss, and review vendors and products. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Eden founder and CEO Joe DuBey explained to TechCrunch that a growing number of on-boarding clients said that they had originally heard about Eden from… 
After Microsoft signed a deal to test Windows 10 on Xiaomi devices in 2015 and then Xiaomi bought a trove of patents to help run other Microsoft services on its devices in 2016, today the two companies announced another chapter in its collaboration. Xiaomi and Microsoft have signed a Strategic Framework Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to work more closely in the areas of cloud computing,… 
Tesla expects to sell 100,000 electric vehicles in 2018. But electric vehicles don’t make much sense unless chargers are easily accessible and convenient. That’s why Tesla is introducing the Workplace Charging program. It will allow offices and business to apply for a Wall Connector to be installed in the company garage or parking lot. And, except for the actual electricity used… 
WeChat is far and away the biggest messaging platform in China at the moment, and that is helping to drive a push among the smaller players to get together for better scale. Today, Momo, the Chinese location-based social networking app that has more recently made a big push into dating services and is traded on Nasdaq with a market cap of around $6 billion, announced that it has… 
Split announced this morning that it’s raised $17 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Accel Partners and new investor Harmony Partners. Split has now raised a total of $26.8 million. The startup allows companies to test out new features and deliver them in a targeted way to select groups of users. Co-founder and CEO… 
Snap’s stock investors haven’t made much money since the company went public last year, but CEO Evan Spiegel still got a hefty payday. According to an SEC filing, he was granted an RSU of 37,447,817, which vested at the time of the IPO. In other words, that was worth nearly $636.6 million. His salary for the year was $98,078, and he had over $1 million in other benefits, so all in… 
As the streetwear and sneaker industry continues to explode in popularity we’re seeing more and more startups popping up to service the industry, all from slightly different angles. Meet Bump, a peer-to-peer take on a streetwear marketplace. Founded six months ago in the U.K and now part of Y Combinator’s Winter ’18 batch, the startup already has over 200,000 users buying… 
At this point, if you haven’t accepted the celebrity influence of the Kardashian/Jenner machine, you probably haven’t been paying attention to pop culture at large. Snap is definitely paying attention. Yesterday, Kylie Jenner tweeted a pretty brutal takedown of Snapchat with the nonchalance that only a celebrity who has mastered social media better than most can do. 
Facebook is looking to clean up and clarify the way advertisers measure their campaign performance. Over the past couple of years, the company has had to acknowledge multiple mistakes in its ad metrics. Last fall, researchers even pointed out that Facebook’s purported reach was greater than the US Census population in every state. So making these kinds of tweaks (and taking other steps… 
Airbnb today is rolling out a few new additions to their home-booking system, including new tiers that are aimed at higher-end customers called Airbnb Plus and Beyond by Airbnb. The new Airbnb Plus tier has homes that are verified for “quality and comfort,” rolling out with around 2,000 homes to start that have been inspected against a thorough checklist. The Luxury tier, called… 
Rich Communication Services (RCS) is basically the standard for the next generation of text messaging, with apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, LINE and others now offering features that go far beyond the standard SMS-based messaging apps that tend to ship with your phone — unless, of course, you are an Apple and iMessage user. 
French startup Snips is announcing two things for its voice assistant SDK. First, the company is showing off an interesting use case in Nuremberg with a Snips-powered voice assistant in a car. Second, you can now build voice assistants in German. Snips isn’t technically competing with Alexa Voice Service or Google Assistant SDK as they’re not designed the same way. Snips… 
MyBagCheck is a clever system that ensures that you’ll be able to spend that extra few hours in a foreign city without having to lug around fifty pounds of Samsonite. The founder, Micah B. Lewis, created the app to allow people who have bags to get those bags picked up and stored during the day, something every traveler would love. The app is self-funded and Lewis spent $60,000 of his… 
What if instead of blasting cargo into space on a rocket, we could fling it into space using a catapult? That’s the big, possibly crazy, possibly genius idea behind SpinLaunch. It was secretly founded in 2014 by Jonathan Yaney, who built solar-powered drone startup Titan Aerospace and sold it to Google. Now TechCrunch has learned from three sources that SpinLaunch is raising a massive… 
If you’ve tried to deal with a bot before you can speak to a human customer service rep, you know how frustrating that process can sometimes be. Sure, there are basic tasks that can free up a human rep to handle the more difficult matters, but it can be exasperating when there is no easy way to talk to a person. Agent IQ, a startup that has developed customer service bots, acknowledges… 
Max Rhodes was walking around that weird little parklet in Hayes Valley in San Francisco after taking a break from a five-year stint at Square to figure out what he wanted to do next — and he kept seeing Square registers everywhere. It was spotting them over and over again in smaller retail shops dotted throughout the city that made him think about the connections between the average… 
Coinbase has some serious competition. Today Robinhood starts rolling out its no-commission cryptocurrency trading feature in California, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana and New Hampshire. Users can buy and sell Bitcoin and Ethereum with no extra fees, and track those and 14 other coins in its sleek app. That’s compared to paying 1.5 to 4 percent fees in the US on Coinbase. Users can… 
“We didn’t want to create another app thirsty for attention” writes Product Hunt CEO Ryan Hoover. So instead of a constant stream of fresh stories and alerts, Product Hunt today is releasing what’s essentially a tech industry newsletter in iOS and Android form. Sip distills the day’s big headlines into a set of Twitter Moments-esque slideshows delivered via… 
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