Copycats are a dying breed. Each month the gap shrinks between a new digital service emerging in the U.S. and it being copied in other markets. This trend has big implications for global businesses, forcing them to rethink investment and innovation strategies. India is a good example of just how quickly technology dispersion is accelerating. […]
According to a 2014 study by Google, 74 percent of leisure travelers relied on the internet for travel planning. That’s not surprising; it’s generally understood that most consumers make travel plans online. But that same study found that 77 percent of business travelers also started their journey online. Similarly, 78 percent of business travelers used […]
There’s nothing like driving your nearly-empty Tesla up to a Supercharger station for a top-up and finding every spot taken by other cars — probably all charged up and ready to go. Where are their drivers? How dare they? Tesla shares your anger and will soothe it by giving those drivers a different kind of […]
Everyone is excited about the Nintendo Switch, but the company continues to be cagey about critical details like the resolution, the presence or absence of a touchscreen and so on. Well, speculation will certainly heat up with the appearance of a nearly 150-page patent application that gamers are still poring through for hidden info. The […]
Codementor (incorporated as Peer Idea Inc.) has raised $1.6 million in seed funding to grow its online education business into a marketplace for elite freelance developers who are among the top-rated mentors on its site. Based in Mountain View with a development office in Taiwan, Codementor is a graduate of Techstars in Seattle. WI Harper […]
Some downsizing and refocusing is underway at Disqus, the startup incubated at Y-Combinator that became an early mover in the business of offering a plug-in to help online publishers manage comments on stories. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that the company has laid of 11 people, about 20 percent of its small staff, as it prepares to shift […]
Facebook’s standalone Events app that launched in October on iOS is launching on Android today. The app will go live on Google Play soon. The Facebook Events app helps you browse nearby happenings, see the dates of your upcoming Facebook Events as well as imported calendars, and aggregates wall posts and alerts from Events to […]
The Honest Company has become a beloved brand in many homes in its five-year history. But the consumer products business has also taken its lumps in 2016. It’s currently fighting civil lawsuits brought against it by consumer show say they were misled by the company’s labeling of various products, including its laundry detergent and sunscreen. […]
We tend to think of machines, in particular smart machines, as somehow cold, calculating and unbiased. We believe that self-driving cars will have no preference during life or death decisions between the driver and a random pedestrian. We trust that smart systems performing credit assessments will ignore everything except the genuinely impactful metrics, such as […]
Many in the industry believe the next frontier for VR is web-based experiences that can be visited and absorbed across platforms. There are still quite a lot of unknowns when it comes to WebVR but Oculus is looking to start shedding some of the mystery through its own browser. Today, the company launched the Carmel Developer […]