Massive Freelance Engineer Marketplace Toptal Now Sells Designers
Software is eating the world, but who’s setting the table? Engineers, and everyone needs them. But companies that hire freelance programmers are realizing an ugly product is as broken as buggy code. The talent crunch around engineers has now spawned a parallel desperation for designers. Toptal wants to answer that call by routing designers with spare cycles to companies in need after… Read More3D Printed Dolls And Jedi Mind Control Devices: A Look At Disney’s Second Accelerator Batch
The first batch of startups in Disney’s startup accelerator produced successes like the BB-8 droid from Sphero and Naritiv, a marketing platform that nabbed a deal with Snapchat. Sphero produced the BB-8 droid in anticipation of the upcoming Star Wars film, The Force Awakens. But it was a fated meeting with Disney CEO Bob Iger that gave the Sphero robotics team an idea to create the… Read MoreSunshine, A Crowd-Sourced Weather App, Goes Live
When it comes to the weather, there is no lack of applications to choose from to get your information. But there is very little diversity when it comes to those apps. A new startup, called Sunshine, is looking to change all that. Using information delivered from the barometer sensor in the phone, as well as user-generated reports of local weather, the app is trying to change the way we… Read MoreGiphy Wants To Become A Full-Fledged, Gif-Based Media Company
Giphy, which launched out of betaworks in 2013 as a search engine for gifs, is evolving into something much bigger. In the last year, we’ve seen Giphy launch a standalone mobile app for creating your own gifs, called GiphyCam. We’ve also seen Giphy partner with tech companies like Facebook and Slack for seamless gif sharing. Meanwhile, Giphy offers original content through… Read MoreAnnouncing The Startups Pitching At The NOLA TC Meetup + Pitch-Off (Judges, Too!)
TechCrunch is back on the road again with the upcoming New Orleans Meetup + Pitch-Off, in conjunction with Nola Tech Week, and we’ve finally made selections on which startups will have a chance to hop on stage and pitch. Seven companies will have exactly sixty seconds to pitch their wares to a panel of expert judges and a ready-and-waiting audience in a fight to win the opportunity to… Read MoreJet, Now Raising, Ditches Its Membership Fees But Says Profitability Still On Track For 2020
Jet.com, the discount shopping site promising to take on Amazon by competing on lower prices, has made a fairly radical change to its business, the company announced this morning. Instead of charging members an annual fee of $50, similar to the fee associated with Amazon’s “Prime” membership program, Jet says it will now drop the fee entirely. Read MorePro.Com Launches Text-A-Pro For Flat-Rate Pricing On Handy Tasks
Pro.com, the handywork/installation site that instantly offers price estimates and connects you with a contractor, has today launched a brand new feature to the service. Called Text-A-Pro, the feature allows users to simply text message their task into the system and be sent a flat-rate price and a connection to a contractor who is available during the preferred time. Pro has always… Read MoreParibus Raises $2.1 Million For Its Service That Saves Online Shoppers Money When Prices Drop
A service that helps online shoppers save when prices drop, Paribus, has raised $2.1 million in seed funding to continue to grow its business following the startup’s participation in the Y Combinator summer program and the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2015, where it first debuted. The company’s idea is to take a process that consumers were used to managing… Read MoreEmployee Relocation Platform Move Guides Closes $15.6M Series B
Move Guides, the London and San Francisco startup that offers ‘talent mobility’ software in the cloud to help companies manage the relocation of their employees, has closed $15.6 million in Series B funding. Read More
Pandora Acquires Ticketfly For $450M To Sell Concert Tickets
Pandora has a new tool in its belt to fight against Apple Music and Spotify. The music streaming just announced it will purchase Ticketfly, a Ticketmaster-type site, for $450m in cash and stock. Pandora says in a press release that Ticketfly’s service will allow Pandora listeners to better find live music events. It’s unclear at this point how deep the Ticketfly integration… Read MoreSpanish And LatAm Beauty Marketplace Miora Picks Up $4M Led By Seaya Ventures
They say lightning doesn’t strike twice, but after it did Seaya Ventures is hoping it does for a third time. The VC fund has led a $4 million round in Spanish and Latin American beauty marketplace Miora, founded by Diego Ballesteros. Read MoreMoneySmart Raises Series A To Bring Personal Finance Tools To Southeast Asia’s Growing Middle Class
For most consumers who aren’t Scrooge McDuck, learning about personal finance is like dental checkups—boring, sometimes painful, but necessary. Vinod Nair, the founder and chief executive officer of MoneySmart, wants to change that. The site, which publishes articles and lets users compare services like home loans and credit card, tries to make personal finance fun (or at least… Read MoreTado Scores Further $17.1M As Smart Thermostat Market Heats Up
The smart thermostat market continues to heat up, not least in Europe where Munich-headquartered Tado is aiming to become the leader. The German company, which counts Google-owned Nest as a competitor, along with the likes of the UK’s Heatmiser and Hive from British Gas, has raised further $17 million in backing, bringing total funding to $34 million since being founded in 2011. Read MoreImpossible Foods Raises a Whopping $108 Million For Its Plant-Based Burgers
Impossible Foods, a four-year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based company at work on a new generation of meats and cheeses made entirely from plants, has raised $108 million in new funding from a powerful group of backers. Investors in the round, which was led by UBS, include Viking Global Investors and earlier backers Khosla Ventures; Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates; and Horizons Ventures, which… Read More- CRUNCH NETWORK
The State Of Agtech
Since the beginning of modern agriculture, farmers and entrepreneurs alike have been sharpening their focus and looking at ways to apply technology to compensate for the mercurial behavior of Mother Nature and the vagaries of food prices and government policies. Now, in the second millennium, we are challenged in new ways to increase productivity while minimizing inputs, managing costs and… Read More - CRUNCH NETWORK
Linear Work In Nonlinear Environments
We are constantly bombarded by nonlinear success stories: The Facebook-MillionsOfDownloads-Airbnb-10,000Followers-ExponentialGrowth-AcquiredFor$200M-Snapchat-Uber-Zilla is stomping through our tech magazines/Twitter feeds/life every day. Our poor brains. We can’t help it, but this becomes the baseline for success. This is what our brain holds ourselves accountable to. Read More Postmates Pop Delivers Lunch In 15 Minutes Or Less
On-demand delivery startup Postmates just launched a new product called Pop to sling lunch to people in 15 minutes or less. For now, it will only be available to people based in San Francisco’s South of Market Street area during lunch time, but the plan is to expand into other locations, offer delivery in additional hours of the day, and eventually deliver more than just food in the… Read MoreMakerarm Is An All-In-One Robotic Laser Cutter, 3D Printer, Painter, Fabricator And Assembler
Makerarm is a robotic 3D printer, laser cutter, drawing and ink printer, fabricator and assembly machine all rolled into one that fits on a desktop and promises to make pretty much anything – including an entire laptop (It milled us the TechCrunch logo into a block of wood instead). Glowforge, a 3D laser cutter comes close but only offers laser cutting. Makerbot brings quality 3D printing… Read MorePitch Your Startup In The TC Radio Pitch-Off On Sirius XM
TechCrunch Radio is coming at you hard this week, with a full-show run of some of our best pitches from the TC Radio Pitch-Off. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need more stellar startups to grace us with their telephonic presence each Tuesday on TC Radio on Sirius XM. What does that entail, you ask? Each week, we select five companies to participate in the TC Radio Pitch-off. They… Read More- CRUNCH NETWORK
Cuba’s Startup Paradox
You see them everywhere. Throngs of young and old, men and women, heads down on their smartphones, fingers rapid fire, mouths curling into smiles as they soak up the joy of an Internet connection. Why are all these people clogging the sidewalks instead of logging in at home? This is Cuba, and in Cuba, you can’t log in at home. Read More
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