TechCrunch

Madison Reed just raised another $25 million to open hair color bars across the U.S.

You get to a certain age, and if you’re remotely vain (and let’s face it, you are), you need to have your hair colored fairly frequently.<p>You’re hardly alone. Roughly 75 percent of women in the United States color their hair, which today adds up to an $18 billion opportunity for brands like L’Oréal …

Google’s AVA data set raises the bar for identifying human actions in videos

Today Google announced a new labeled data set of human actions taking place in videos. That may sound obscure, but it’s a big deal for anyone working to solve problems in computer vision.<p>If you’ve been following along, you’ve noticed the significant uptick in companies building products and …

18 pessimistic opinions on the next 10 years of fake news (and 5 optimistic ones)

A topic like fake news, or more broadly the question of trust and verification on the internet, is a complex one — a land of contrasts. Sometimes you just have to poll the room and get a feel for what people are thinking before drawing any conclusions. That’s what Pew Internet did, contacting …

Studio makes running more exciting with coaching, music and competition

Jason Baptiste wants you to run.<p>He said he’s seen the personal benefits of running since 2009, when he became unhappy with his weight and committed to run a “daily 5k,” something he’s held to ever since.<p>“Not only has running helped me be healthier, it’s helped my mind and spirit become stronger,” …

Adobe wants to let you draw data visualizations by letting you draw data visualizations

Every year at its MAX conference, Adobe shows off a couple of interesting prototypes that may or may net end up in one of its products. This year is no exception as the company highlighted 11 projects from its labs today. These included Project Lincoln, a tool that everybody who has ever tried to …

Lyft Raises $1 Billion | Crunch Report

Twitter bans ‘Hateful Display Names’ and shares Safety road map

Twitter has committed to a specific timeline for rolling out changes to its Safety features, and announced new policies, including a ban on hateful display names, and improvements for second-hand “witness reporting” of abuse.<p>By January, Twitter plans to have implemented all the abuse changes …

Palmer Luckey’s new defense company Anduril looks interested in AR and VR on the battlefield

Palmer Luckey’s new defense startup Anduril has aspirations well beyond a high-tech border wall. According to new information on the company’s website and its hires, Anduril intends to apply its virtual reality pedigree to “real-time battlefield awareness for soldiers,” among other defense-centric …

PayPal’s quarter exceeded expectations across the board

PayPal, the digital payments company, shared its growing financials after the bell on Thursday.<p>The company beat Wall Street’s expectations, posting an adjusted 46 cents per share. Analysts had been predicting 43 cents.<p>Revenue was also better than predicted, with $3.24 billion, versus the $3.16 …

Stitch Fix has filed for an IPO, and the numbers look good

Stitch Fix has filed to go public, finally revealing the financial guts of the startup which will be a test of modern e-commerce businesses that are looking to hit the market — and the numbers look pretty great!<p>Let’s start off really quick with profits: aside from the last two quarters, Stitch Fix …

MongoDB finishes up 34% in database IPO

New York-based MongoDB went public on the Nasdaq on Thursday, finishing the day at $32.07, up 34 percent above its IPO price of $24. This is also above the proposed range of $20 to $22, which had been increased from $18 to $20.<p>The IPO netted $192 million for the company and valued it at about $1.18 …

Data is the name of the game, as Intel Capital puts $60M in 15 startups, $566M in 2017 overall

Intel Capital, the investment arm of the processor giant, is today announcing its latest tranche of investments, a total of nearly $60 million going in to 15 startups that are working on solving different problems in the bigger area of big data (with a full rundown below). The investments come on …

SendGrid files for marketing email IPO

Denver-based SendGrid has filed for an IPO.<p>The company, which helps marketers send emails to customers, says in its S-1 that it has processed more than “one trillion emails.”<p>Revenue for last year was $79.9 million, compared with $58.5 million in 2015 and $42.3 million the year before. The business …

Chinese local services giant Meituan-Dianping raises $4B led by Tencent and Priceline

There’s a huge funding round from one of the top local services companies in China.<p>Meituan-Dianping, a company formed by a multi-billion dollar merger in 2015, said today that it has raised a $4 billion Seres C round from a group of investors led by existing backer Tencent.<p>Others involved include …

PayKey raises $10M for its millennial-targeted “social banking” smartphone keyboard

Banks face an increasingly crowded battlefield in the fight for millennial customers. Not only do they have to compete with services like Venmo, but many messaging apps are adding their own peer-to-peer payment services. Tel Aviv-based startup PayKey thinks it has the solution with a smartphone …

MongoDB shares pop 25% in its public market debut

MongoDB made its public debut with a bang, with jumping more than 25%, today after spending the past several days revising up its expectations throughout the IPO process — which seems to have landed on the right spot.<p>The company provides open-source technology that can be attractive for early-stage …

Quest to depict CG sperm leads to real biological advances

An effort to make a 3D animated sperm for a short film has ended up producing a model of unprecedented detail and considerable scientific value. If you were ever curious what goes on inside those things, this is probably the best depiction yet.<p>It started when Don Ingber of Harvard’s Wyss Institute …

What washing dishes, driving a truck and working in a cemetery taught me about the power of ‘blue-collar’ software

I work as a venture capitalist in a glass-walled office and wear dress shirts to work. But it wasn’t so long ago that I wore an orange neon vest instead. That was when I stocked shelves at a big-box, home-improvement chain. I also drove a truck — where I was once nearly arrested for incorrectly …

Here’s everything Adobe announced at its MAX conference this week

1/11<p>Hello Adobe XD<p>XD is Adobe’s newest tool for UI and UX designers. It lets you easily prototype and wireframe applications and websites on interactive artboards. Adobe stressed that its focus here was on making the application as fast as possible and to get out of designers’ way. “XD is a UX/UI …

Facebook attacks Pinterest with ‘Sets’ of posts

Identity is prismatic. You show different sides of yourself to different friends in your life. Now Facebook wants to let you share the niches of your interests while stealing thunder from Pinterest’s boards. Facebook is now testing a feature called Sets that lets you select several status updates, …

Facebook Messenger lets games monetize with purchases and ads

Facebook is finally giving developers a reason to build games for Messenger while also opening a new revenue stream for the chat app. After launching HTML5 ‘Instant Games’ inside Messenger, like Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Words With Friends Frenzy in November 2016, today Facebook is allowing …

Atlassian is on one heck of a run

When Atlassian went public at the end of 2015, it was a bit of an anomaly: a tech IPO whose numbers looked quite good with some profitability.<p>It’s been almost two years since that IPO, and since then, the company’s valuation is at around $9 billion. The company popped 32% on its first day and hit a …

Nintendo nabs two-thirds of monthly game hardware sales thanks to Switch

Nintendo has managed to lead the industry in video game hardware sales – by a wide margin – for September, which is a very promising sign going into the holiday shopping season. The Nintendo Switch helped this immensely, leading the industry as the top-selling console for the third straight month, …

Amazon’s original Echo gets a much-needed upgrade

With a good software-driven product, the hardware is almost inconsequential. After the unboxing and the setup, it just sort of fades into the scenery. That was always the case with Amazon’s original Echo, but even as Alexa continues to do all of the hard work, the grandaddy of smart speakers was in …

Apple makes the case that even its most banal features require a proficiency in machine learning

Amidst narratives of machine learning complacency, Apple is coming to terms with the fact that not talking about innovation means innovation never happened.<p>A detailed blog posting in the company’s machine learning journal makes public the technical effort that went into its “Hey Siri” feature — a …

Apple’s enterprise strategy begins to take shape

When Apple announced its partnership with GE this week, it would have been easy to dismiss it as another random collaboration from a company people don’t generally associate with the enterprise. After all, Apple killed off their enterprise server product years ago. You might rightly ask, what …

Bipartisan bill seeks to regulate political ads on Facebook, Twitter and Google

A new bipartisan bill known as the Honest Ads Act is the first major attempt to regulate online platforms that sell ads with rules akin to those that apply to more traditional advertising on TV, radio and in print.<p>The bill, introduced today by Democratic Senators Mark Warner and Amy Klobuchar, with …

The first episode of ‘Bubbleproof’ sets the stage of chaos on Sand Hill Road

<i>Bubbleproof</i> is a new mockumentary series following the misadventures of Reputation.com founder Michael Fertik and venture capitalist David Cowan as they launch a new fund.<p>But I’m getting ahead of myself. In this first episode, Fertik (who co-wrote the series with Cowan and director Martin Sweeney) …

Two Google alums just raised $60M to rethink documents

When you open a Google doc or a spreadsheet, you get a blank spreadsheet and some documentation as to what you can do with it — and that’s pretty much where we’ve been for quite some time.<p>But two MIT graduates, coming in from Microsoft and Google, have built up a team that for the past three years …

Google Play adds Android Instant Apps via a ‘Try it Now’ button, among other changes

Google today is announcing a number of changes to its Google Play app store, the most notable being a new way to try apps immediately without having to first install them on your mobile device. The new feature takes advantage of “Android Instant Apps” technology – Google’s attempt at bridging the …