Pre-natal genetic testing, VR drones, and fracking nanoparticles were a few of the products featured in Y Combinator’s first Virtual Demo Day. They come from the YC Fellowship, a program designed to let the startup school help idea- or prototype-stage companies, beyond the full-fledged businesses in its main accelerator. The 8-week full-time fellowship mostly offers […]
Hardware is hard. Building a hardware startup is even harder. The good news is that the staggering amount of innovation in rapid prototyping, 3D printing and backend-as-a-service platforms has made hardware development move at Internet-development speeds. It’s not easy, but it is faster. When we started our company four years ago, we decided to bootstrap it […]
Things can get messy if you have sex on your period, so many couples avoid it. But The Flex Company wants to replace outdated pads and tampons with a sleek, disc-shaped blood blocker. Flex can be worn during sex to prevent making a mess. The Flex discs are disposable, can be worn for up to 12 […]
The FBI, which just a few days ago was attempting to convince the country of its helplessness in the face of encrypted iPhones, has generously offered its assistance in unlocking an iPhone and iPod for a prosecutor in Arkansas, the Associated Press reports. TechCrunch has contacted the prosecutor’s office for details, which for the moment […]
Long ago, when capturing video of the game you were playing was something only pros and highly motivated gamers (the term had not its current currency and was, at the time, pejorative or at least belittling) attempted to do, and with as little glory as attended such vocations and avocations at the time, there was […]
The Rift is here! The Rift is here! After years of build up and pre-release developer kits, the first deliveries of the consumer version of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset started arriving this morning. Lucas and I got to spend time with the Rift over the past few days (read Lucas’ full review here) […]
The public’s taste in drones is growing more sophisticated. The industry is improving so quickly that major new features are released every year, if not every few months. If a company wants to sell to the increasingly savvy entry-level quadcopter space, it needs to build a drone that can do more than simply fly. In an attempt to […]
DARPA has a new Grand Challenge underway, but it’s not an automation moonshot like the self-driving car challenges of the early 2000s or the recent (and hilarious) Robotics Challenge. The Defense Department’s R&D wing wants to revolutionize something with a bit less sex appeal, but plenty of real-world applications: radio frequency spectrum splitting. The Spectrum […]
June, a countertop “smart” oven designed by former Google, Apple and GoPro employees has closed a Series A round of financing for $22.5 million today, led by early stage combination hardware and software investor Eclipse. Previous investors also participated in this round, including Foundry Group, First Round Capital, and Lerer Hippeau Ventures. June is sort of like an […]
Smartwatch pioneer Pebble is laying off 25 percent of its staff amid increased financial concerns. This situation has been coming. Last year, we reported the company was in some trouble and had turned to debt funding and loans, as well as traditional investor cash, “in order to stay afloat.” Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky told Tech Insider […]