Hire faster, work happier: Startups target employment with AI and engagement tools

Joanna Glasner Contributor More posts by this contributor Robot couriers scoop up early-stage cash Bots replacing office workers drive big valuations If you have a job today, there’s a good chance you personally reached out to your employer and interviewed with other humans to get it. Now that you’ve been there a while, it’s also likely the workday feels more like a long slog than the fulfilling career move you had envisioned. But if today’s early-stage startups have their way, your next employment experience could be quite different. First,...

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Startups Weekly: VCs celebrate the new year the only way they know how

Venture capitalists swore in the new year the only way they know how… by submitting SEC paperwork for new funds! insert party hat/confetti emoji here. As many of us brainstormed our New Year’s resolutions and let our hangovers wear off, several firms began this week what for some is a long and arduous process of raising a VC fund and for others is as simple as a few phone calls to LPs. What else happened this week? Pokémon GO creator Niantic secured $190 million, Mary Meeker announced the name of her fund and a whole bunch of people played...

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Engineers can now reverse-engineer 3D models

A system that uses a technique called constructive solid geometry (CSG) is allowing MIT researchers to deconstruct objects and turn them into 3D models, thereby allowing them to reverse-engineer complex things. The system appeared in a paper entitled “InverseCSG: Automatic Conversion of 3D Models to CSG Trees” by Tao Du, Jeevana Priya Inala, Yewen Pu, Andrew Spielberg, Adriana Schulz, Daniela Rus, Armando Solar-Lezama, and Wojciech Matusik. “At a high level, the problem is reverse engineering a triangle mesh into a simple tree. Ideally, if you...

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TikTok’s quietly launched ‘Lite’ app has reached over 12 million downloads since August

Short-form video app TikTok has been growing in popularity across international markets, including in the U.S. where a merger with Musical.ly has seen the app topping the App Store charts. Facebook and Snapchat have been hastily trying to copy TikTok’s features as a result. A part of TikTok’s ambitious global expansion plan has been its more recent targeting of emerging markets – like India and Indonesia – where the company’s quietly launched “TikTok Lite” app has been gaining ground in the latter half of 2018. TikTok hasn’t yet made much fuss...

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Boom Supersonic nabs $100M to build its Mach-2.2 commercial airliner

One Denver-based startup’s long-shot bid to move today’s commercial jets beyond supersonic speeds just got a big injection of cash. Boom Supersonic, which is building and designing what it calls the “world’s first economically viable supersonic airliner,” announced today that they’ve closed a $100 million Series B funding round led by Emerson Capital. Other investors include Y Combinator Continuity, Caffeinated Capital, SV Angel, Sam Altman, Paul Graham, Ron Conway, Michael Marks and Greg McAdoo. The startup has raised around $140 million to date....

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FloWater just raised $15 million to put bottled water out of business

FloWater, an eight-year-old, Burlingame, Calif.-based company whose reusable water bottle refilling stations produce purified water, has raised $15 million in its first major round of funding. Bluewater, a Swedish company that sells water purifiers, among other things, led the round. FloWater caters to schools, colleges, fitness centers, hotels and offices, and, in the words of CEO Rich Razgaitis, set out to address four environmental concerns from the outset: obesity in the U.S., which has been tied in part to the rise of sugary, carbonated...

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Trading app Robinhood is stealthily recruiting ahead of planned UK launch

Robinhood, the U.S.-based “zero-fee” stock trading app and cryptocurrency exchange, is stealthily recruiting for a new London office ahead of plans to eventually launch in the U.K., TechCrunch has learned. According to sources within London’s thriving fintech industry, Robinhood is hiring for multiple U.K. positions. These span recruitment, operations, marketing and PR, and customer support. Notably, the company is also seeking people in compliance, and product, including product design. In other words, significant localisation and local product...

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Moesif raises $3.5M seed round to provide insight into API usage

Today, many companies provide developer access to their services via APIs. Moesif, a San Francisco startup, wants to help these companies gain insight into their customer’s API usage patterns. Today, the company announced a $3.5 million seed round. The investment was led by Merus Capital with participation by Heavybit, Fresco Capital and Zach Coelius, who sold his startup, Cruise Automation, to General Motors for $1 billion in 2016. Moesif co-founder and CEO Derric Gilling says Moesif is akin to Mixpanel or Google Analytics, except instead...

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Qualcomm patent dispute forces Apple to pull iPhone 7 and 8 from its stores in Germany

{rss:content:encoded} Qualcomm patent dispute forces Apple to pull iPhone 7 and 8 from its stores in Germany https://tcrn.ch/2s9W6cr http://bit.ly/2Sx3tpT January 04, 2019 at 01:14PM In more bad news for Apple, the company’s iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 models are not currently on sale in its own retail stores in Germany. This follows an injunction issued by a Munich court last month related to patent litigation brought by chipmaker Qualcomm that’s being enforced from today. The patent dispute concerns smartphone power management technology...

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Challenger bank Monzo has quietly begun working on a U.S. launch

Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank with more than a million customers and a unicorn valuation to boot, has quietly began working on a U.S. launch, TechCrunch has learned. According to multiple sources, the fintech startup has set up a small team to begin laying the ground work to bring a version of Monzo to North America, which will initially be powered by a U.S. banking partner while Monzo works on the necessarily regulatory licenses to go it alone. The plan, which could still be subject to change, is for Monzo to create a “lite” version of its product...

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Pokémon GO creator Niantic closes $190M funding round

Mobile AR gaming startup Niantic has closed a $190 million round of funding according to newly filed SEC docs. The filing comes after a WSJ report last month suggested the company was in the process of closing a $200 million raise from investors, including IVP, aXiomatic Gaming and Samsung, at a $3.9 billion valuation. The round closed shortly after that report on December 20 according to the new documents. With the close of this round, Niantic has now raised more than $415 million to date. The startup’s other investors include Founders Fund, Spark...

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Hey look, it’s the Samsung Galaxy S10

{rss:content:encoded} Hey look, it’s the Samsung Galaxy S10 https://tcrn.ch/2SCgCOj http://bit.ly/2GWnCnV January 03, 2019 at 09:51PM Well, what have we here? If it isn’t the Samsung Galaxy S10, courtesy of perennial smartphone outer, EVLeaks. This marks one the first good looks we’ve got at the phone, which is likely due out in a couple of months at Mobile World Congress. It’s a pretty rough photo — the icons are all blurred out and the cropping job isn’t great, likely in an effort to conceal the source. But it’s a pretty decent shot of the front...

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PR management firm Cision is acquiring Falcon.io to expand into social media marketing

Social media has become a primary conduit for getting the word out, in some cases proving to be an even stronger force for publicity than more traditional media outlets and paid advertising, and so today, a company that has grown its business around public relations services has acquired a social media management company to make sure it has a foothold in the medium. Cision, which provides press release distribution, media monitoring, and other PR services to businesses and the media industry, has acquired Falcon.io, a startup founded in Denmark...

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Scratch 3.0 is now available

{rss:content:encoded} Scratch 3.0 is now available https://tcrn.ch/2CNqDmq http://bit.ly/2SvG881 January 03, 2019 at 06:33PM The only kids programming language worth using, Scratch, just celebrated the launch of Scratch 3.0, an update that adds some interesting new functionality to the powerful open source tool. Scratch, for those without school aged children, is a block-based programming language that lets you make little games and “cartoons” with sprites and animated figures. The system is surprisingly complex and kids have created things like...

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Scratch 3.0 is now available

The only kids programming language worth using, Scratch, just celebrated the launch of Scratch 3.0, an update that adds some interesting new functionality to the powerful open source tool. Scratch, for those without school aged children, is a block-based programming language that lets you make little games and “cartoons” with sprites and animated figures. The system is surprisingly complex and kids have created things like Minecraft platformers, fun arcade games, and whatever this is. The new version of scratch includes extensions that allow you...

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Daily Crunch: AR Startups face an uneasy future in 2019

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here: 1. Magic Leap and other AR startups have a rough 2019 ahead of them  2018 was supposed to be the year where the foundation of AR was set to expand, but now it looks like momentum has been sucked out of the industry’s heavy hitters. 2. Sorry I took so long to upgrade, Apple  Apple missed Wall Street’s Q1 sales projections yesterday and the company...

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Apple stock has dropped 38 percent in 90 days

{rss:content:encoded} Apple stock has dropped 38 percent in 90 days https://tcrn.ch/2BW8CAN https://tcrn.ch/2GVo1qK January 03, 2019 at 05:59PM Apple stock was down over 9 percent overnight and continued the downward trend in trading this morning. In fact, the company’s stock price is down a total of 38 percent since October. This, after the company halted trading yesterday afternoon to provide lower guidance for upcoming earnings. As the iPhone upgrade market softened, it was having a big impact on revenue, at least in the short term and...

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Workplace, Facebook’s enterprise platform, adds another major customer, Nestle

While Facebook continues to repair its image with consumers disenchanted with the social network’s role in disseminating misleading or false information and mishandling their personal data, it’s ironically been finding some traction for its enterprise-focused service, Workplace. Today, the company announced that it has added another huge company to its books today: Nestle, the coffee, chocolate and FMCG giant with 2,000 brands and 240,000 employees, has signed up as its latest customer. Facebook’s enterprise service competes against the likes...

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Sorry that I took so long to upgrade, Apple

{rss:content:encoded} Sorry that I took so long to upgrade, Apple https://tcrn.ch/2QlAraS http://bit.ly/2LKMJsw January 03, 2019 at 12:23AM Apple had some bad news tonight. It was so bad in fact that it had to halt trading for a time while posting a grim report that its numbers would be lower than it had forecast at the last quarterly earnings report in November. Apple blamed faltering sales in Asia, particularly in China, for the adjustment, but I’m afraid it can lay at least part of the blame on me too. You see I was part of the problem...

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Shine brings its female-focused self-care app to Android

{rss:content:encoded} Shine brings its female-focused self-care app to Android https://tcrn.ch/2F3KAYz https://tcrn.ch/2BT8PEH January 02, 2019 at 05:54PM Shine, one of the many apps capitalizing on the growing self-care trend, has now brought its app used by 3 million people to Android devices. Originally launched as a simple messaging bot that doled out life advice and motivation, Shine has grown over the years to become a larger self-help platform aimed largely at the millennial crowd – and in particular, millennial women. As of Shine’s $5 million...

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