Boston Dynamics CEO Marc Raibert demos the Spot at Disrupt
The audience at Disrupt got a surprise visit from Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot. While the company’s YouTube channel is quite popular, it’s even more impressive to see one of Boston Robotics’ robots in action. Boston Dynamics founder and CEO Marc Raibert got interviewed by TechCrunch’s Brian Heater. The two of them spent some time commenting on a video of the… Read More
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Meet Atomic, a prototyping service for your next mobile app or website. It works in your browser, but it’s a lot more powerful than you’d expect. Atomic handles animations and lets you make interactive designs. And you can collaborate on your designs with your team in real time. The startup launched the version 2 this week adding a bunch of new features that make your design… 
Front has been around for three years, but the startup is only releasing a proper mobile app now. If you’re a Front user, it brings all the features from the desktop version to your phone so that you can manage emails and other communication protocols in multiplayer mode. Front’s basic premise is quite simple. With Front, you can collaborate, comment, assign and reply to those… 
Apple is releasing a new video advertisement for the iPhone and iOS. Like previous ads, this video shows a stark departure from its predecessors. You can feel Tor Myhren’s influence on this ad. The recently hired VP of Marketing Communications has an impressive background in the advertising industry and is now in charge of Apple’s ads. That’s probably the reason why these… 
French startup Lydia raised $ 7.8 million (€7 million) from New Alpha AM and Oddo & Cie in order to expand to other European countries. The startup lets you easily pay back your friends without any fee using a mobile app — among other things. Think about it as a sort of Venmo for France. While Lydia has only been available in France, with today’s funding round, the company… 
French startup Zenly has raised $ 22.5 million over the summer from Benchmark and a few other investors. Business Insider first reported the round and TechCrunch got an official confirmation. Here’s what we know. Benchmark is leading the round with Peter Fenton joining the board of the company. Fenton has invested in a few social network companies and also is a board member of Twitter. 
In case you missed it, Aircall announced last week that it had raised another $ 8 million dollars in funding for its call center software-as-a-service. Balderton Capital is leading this Series A round, with New York-based VC firm FJLabs and existing investors also investing. I’m a bit late to the news because last week was TechCrunch Disrupt SF. It’s worth mentioning that because… 
After a summer of beta versions, Apple has just released the final version of macOS Sierra. macOS Sierra is the major update of OS X El Capitan — yes, OS X is dead, long live macOS. Other than the name change, this year’s update brings many neat improvements over El Capitan, making it a polished update from day one. It’s available in the Mac App Store as a free download. If… 
A new update means that many smart writers are publishing reviews showing the many new features of macOS Sierra. I’ll leave the hyper technical reviews to them. Based on three months of testing, there’s not much to say about macOS Sierra and this article could end up being the shortest macOS review ever published on this site. iOS 10 was a huge update. macOS Sierra doesn’t… 
Apple, the tech company, is negotiating with McLaren, the car manufacturer, according to the Financial Times. Yes, you’ve read that correctly. These negotiations have been ongoing for months and could lead to an acquisition, or at least a strategic investment. More precisely, Apple is talking with McLaren Technology Group, the parent company of all things McLaren, including McLaren… 
Surprise! You thought you were done with iOS 10 beta for a while? Apple already released the iOS 10.1 beta 1 for developers. This beta has one new feature in particular — the Portrait mode that takes advantage of both cameras in the iPhone 7 Plus. If you remember Apple’s press conference on September 7, the company talked about a really neat feature for the iPhone 7 Plus camera. If… 
Apple is rumored to be in talks to acquire McLaren, but that’s not all. While the New York Times was digging on the McLaren story, they also found out that Apple is also talking with Lit Motors for a potential acquisition. Now you might be thinking “Lit who?” While Lit Motors is nowhere as big as McLaren, it’s another interesting company in the automotive space. The… 
French startup StarOfService just raised another $ 10 million for its European Thumbtack alternative. Andrea Piccioni and Silvio Pagliani, ENERN Investments and Point Nine Capital participated in today’s round, as well as various business angels. When I first covered StarOfService, the company didn’t even try to hide from me that it was a Thumbtack copycat. The main difference is… 
Apple just released not one, not two but three new ads for its new devices — the iPhone 7 and the Apple Watch Series 2. They all tout new features, such as water resistance, low light camera performance and new fitness features. Let’s start with my favorite one. In “Midnight”, a young man goes for a night ride on his skateboard. He rides in the suburbs, sees a deer (!) at… 
Startups participating in the Startup Battlefield have all been hand-picked to participate in our highly competitive startup competition. They all presented in front of multiple groups of VCs and tech leaders serving as judges for a chance to win $ 50,000 and the coveted Disrupt Cup. After hours of deliberations, TechCrunch editors pored over the judges’ notes and narrowed the list down… 
Gathering petabytes of data about your customers is cool, but how can you take advantage of this data? BlazingDB lets you run high-performance SQL on a database using a ton of GPUs. The company is introducing a free community edition of its solution on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in our Battlefield competition. If you’ve been running complicated SQL queries, chances are it took so… 
Sony is holding a PlayStation Meeting in New York to unveil the PlayStation 4 ‘Neo’, and maybe also a PS4 Slim because why not. In case you don’t care about Apple’s iPhone event today, you can watch Sony’s conference live stream right here on this page. The conference starts at 3 PM ET (12 PM on the West coast, 8 PM in London, 4 AM in Tokyo). What’s the… 
If $ 159 sounds like a lot of money for 8 grams, it’s because it is. Shortly after introducing the iPhone 7, Apple unveiled the AirPods. If you’re familiar with the existing EarPods, you’ll feel right at home. The AirPods are like the EarPods, but without wires. These earbuds come with a built-in W1 chip for audio processing and pairing. According to the product page, they… 
Apple hasn’t mentioned the iPad during its press conference, but it doesn’t mean that the company has no news for the device. The iPhone 7 finally starts with 32GB of storage, and the iPad is also receiving a storage bump. The 9.7-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pros already start at 32GB, so only old iPad models are getting more gigs. In particular, the $ 399 iPad Air 2 now has 32GB instead… 
Apple is holding a press conference today at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, and the company is expected to unveil the new iPhone as well as the Apple Watch 2. At 10 AM PT (1 PM in New York, 6 PM in London, 7 PM in Paris), you’ll be able to watch the event on all Apple devices. Apple is likely to talk about iOS 10 and macOS Sierra, and maybe we’ll hear more about the huge… 
Earlier this year, Trainline acquired Captain Train for quite a bit of money. Now, Trainline is trying to unify its train ticket booking system. First, Captain Train is now called Trainline, just like its parent company. The logo, the app and the website are now all called Trainline. If you go on thetrainline.com, you can book tickets for the U.K. On trainline.eu, you can get tickets for Europe. 
Rumor has it that Apple is about to introduce an Apple Watch 2 on September 7, alongside a new iPhone. While many leaks indicate that the Apple Watch will have more or less a similar design as the original watch, a new leak from Byte shows that the Apple Watch 2 could have a bigger battery and a thinner display. The reasoning is quite simple. Based on previous rumors, the Apple Watch 2 will have… 
That’s what we call a teeny tiny fuckup. Beats sent a press release to iGen.fr and other French media outlets saying that they should expect new Beats products on September 7 during Apple’s press conference. There was also a screenshot of the official Apple media invite so that it was 100% clear for everyone that Beats was talking about Apple’s event. But this leak is… 
When I first covered Fleex, it was a neat little video player that let you learn English using your favorite movies or TV shows. Since then, Reverso has acqu-hired the team behind Fleex and now plans to relaunch the language learning platform with a new killer feature — Netflix shows. Maybe I’m biased because it’s basically how I learned English, but I think watching all… 
British media company Sky just disclosed an investment of $ 4.5 million (€4 million) in French startup Molotov. From what we’ve heard and according to Sky’s statement, this is just a fraction of a bigger round that is going to be announced at a later date. “This investment is part of a larger Molotov financing round,” the release says. The reason why Sky is announcing… 
I’ve been looking for a good replacement for a few months. While there are many mobile calendar apps out there, none of them come close to Sunrise as they’re not as polished and well-designed. Let’s break down what made Sunrise great. From sunrise to sunset Today sounds like a good time for a post-mortem on Sunrise. In October 2012, shortly after Hurricane Sandy hit New York,… 
Apple’s reality TV show ‘Planet of the Apps’ keeps getting weirder. Every time Apple and Propagate release new information about the show, it gets harder to understand what they’re actually trying to build. This time, Variety got a statement saying that Jessica Alba is joining the cast of the show as a mentor and adviser. In case you missed the previous episodes, Planet… 
Uber is making yet another big push in the self-driving car space. In addition to launching self-driving rides in Pittsburgh with the help of Volvo, the company is acquiring Otto and its all-star team according to a new report from Bloomberg. Otto has been focusing on self-driving technology that could be fitted into trucks that are already on the road now. In other words, Otto didn’t… 
Human’s team will join Mapbox and work on Mapbox’s mobile SDK and real-time maps. I’ve covered Human quite a few times over the years. It’s a well-designed fitness app that was ahead of the current trends in fitness tracking. Human turned the simple habit of moving around the city into human-readable data for yourself and your friends. Over time, Human started using… 
John Maeda is leaving VC firm KPCB where he was a design partner to join Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and a bunch of other things. Maeda will have a long, elaborate title at Automattic — he’s the company’s new Global Head, Computational Design and Inclusion. Before KPCB, Maeda was a research faculty member at the MIT Media Lab in the 1990s. “I wanted to… 
French startup Whyd started off as a social network for music lovers but recently announced that it would switch its focus for a hardware project. The company just unveiled this secret hardware project — it’s a high-fidelity connected speaker that combines voice recognition with all music streaming services out there. The company isn’t doing a Kickstarter. Instead, Whyd is… 
It’s no secret, I love Markdown. But when it comes to collaborating with someone, Google Docs, Quip, Pages on iCloud.com and Word on Office.com are all rich-text editors. Meet Canvas, a real-time Markdown editor on the web and now on iOS. With this editor, I can see myself collaborating on stories with my coworkers and seamlessly put the result in our CMS. 
Apple keeps releasing new iOS 10 betas ahead of the final iOS 10 release in September. The company just issued the seventh beta for both developers and public beta testers — the public beta’s version number is one digit behind, so it’s public beta 6, but it’s the same version. Head over to the Settings app of your iPhone or iPad to update. There’s no sign of… 
Twitter just unveiled a new feature that will let everyone filter low quality notifications from bots and spammers. Twitter has had bullying issues in the past, and the company is now taking actions to make it a more welcoming place. Twitter is wording this new quality filter as a tool to hide notifications from bots and duplicate tweets from spammers. But it could also be a way to prevent… 
Warning: don’t look at these photos before going to bed. 
