Google is shutting down its Emmy Award-winning VR film division, Spotlight Stories, after six years of building out content, Variety reports. We’ve reached out to Google for confirmation. Update: A Google spokesperson responded to TechCrunch with a statement confirming the shutdown. “Since its inception, Spotlight Stories strove to re-imagine VR storytelling. From ambitious shorts like […]
Google is a tech powerhouse in many categories, including advertising. Today, as part of its efforts to improve how that ad business works, it provided an annual update that details the progress it’s made to shut down some of the more nefarious aspects of it. Using both manual reviews and machine learning, in 2018, Google […]
The origin story of BlackBird, a startup that links travelers to planes and commercial pilots through an app, didn’t begin with air travel. It was prompted by car sickness. BlackBird CEO and founder Rudd Davis, who was getting his pilot’s license at the time, asked his flight instructor if he would fly his family to […]
GM Cruise plans to hire hundreds of employees over the next nine months, doubling its engineering staff, TechCrunch has learned. It’s an aggressive move by the autonomous vehicle technology company to double its size as it pushes to deploy a robotaxi service by the end of the year. Arden Hoffman, who helped scale Dropbox, will […]
Budget airline AirAsia is getting into the VC game after it unveiled a venture capital fund that aims to invest in startups across the world. The airline today announced Redbeat Capital, a $60 million fund that it says will operate independently and seek deals with startups worldwide in areas such as travel, lifestyle, fintech and […]
Google today announced an expansion of its educational initiatives with the Chromebook App Hub from Google for Education, due to launch later in 2019. The new resource is designed to offer teachers and other curriculum administrators an easier, more centralized means of finding the appropriate educational tools and apps they can use in the classroom. […]
U.S. smart speaker owners grew 40 percent over 2018 to now reach 66.4 million — or 26.2 percent of the U.S. adult population — according to a new report from Voicebot.ai and Voicify released this week, which detailed adoption patterns and device market share. The report also reconfirmed Amazon Echo’s lead, noting the Alexa-powered smart […]
Yesterday’s analysis of the ethical trade-offs faced by engineers working in the Valley certainly lit up my inbox with responses. The general thesis of that piece is that startups and tech companies face more — and worse — trade-offs as they have migrated from the “purity” of the early internet into more socially and ethically […]
Google is expanding its suite of apps designed for the Indian market with today’s launch of a new language-learning app aimed at children, called Bolo. The app, which is aimed at elementary school-aged students, leverages technology like Google’s speech recognition and text-to-speech to help kids learn to read in both Hindi and English. To do […]
Whether it’s by flood, fire, or the fury of a storm, climate-related catastrophes are now impacting most cities and towns across the country. As these natural disasters increase in frequency and severity, cities and the businesses that reside in them are mobilizing to understand how best to prepare for the climatological challenges they’re going to […]