When digital comics startup Madefire announced its latest funding round a few days ago, co-founder and CEO Ben Wolstenholme said the company was getting ready to move into virtual and augmented reality. He lived up to that promise in very short order, launching a preview app for Samsung’s Oculus-powered Gear VR platform and demonstrating it […]
Since the 1999 launch of Napster’s music-sharing platform, the music industry has been in near-constant turmoil, its timeline marked with dipping revenues, lack of transparency, piracy problems and feuds over the fair distribution of dividends. Music companies hate streaming services. Streaming services hate file-sharing services. And, most of all, artists and content creators hate virtually everyone else for making huge sums […]
Check I’m Here, a platform that helps colleges and universities track student engagement with campus activities, has raised a million in a Series A round of funding to continue to grow its service. Now live at over 80 institutions and reaching 400,000 students across 30 states and 3 countries, Check I’m Here’s advantage is that it’s […]
After years in the works, it’s finally happening: TechShop is opening up a Brooklyn location, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. It should be officially announced later today. For those unfamiliar with the chain: TechShop is something of a do-it-yourselfer’s paradise. You pay them a monthly membership fee, and in return are granted access to any and […]
I’ve recently seen a few examples of services that ask customers to type in their online banking usernames and passwords so the service can access their bank accounts on their behalf. The applications are fairly broad and definitely useful — making payments, ID verification and analyzing data, for example. This is a security anti-pattern. This […]
Google is hosting a press event today in San Francisco… and if the rumors are true, it should be a doozy. We’ve heard whispers about everything from new phones, to new Chromecasts, to a new VR headset, to a complete rethinking of Android as we know it. You might’ve assumed we’d be at the event […]
A startup called Heek wants to make building websites as simple as chatting over text and answering a few questions. Using a conversational interface, the bot asks you questions about yourself, your business and your site, then lets you click to see different designs you can customize to meet your needs. The bot will even prompt […]
Mick Bain Crunch Network Contributor Mick Bain is co-chair of WilmerHale’s Corporate Practice Group. He advises entrepreneurs, startups and high-growth companies throughout their life cycles. How to join the network While most founders want to make a boatload of money, achieving a stunning exit is hardly the only driver for most entrepreneurs. More often, they’re […]
On Thursday night, at a StrictlyVC event at SurveyMonkey in Palo Alto, we sat down with CEO Zander Lurie to learn more about the direction of the 17-year-old company, known for the roughly 90 million surveys that the company and its customers create for the constituents each month, and whose average order volume is $300. (Those customers include […]
Sometimes it’s a startup business, and not political power, that grows out of the barrel of a gun. At least, that’s the story behind Trocafone, a Brazilian startup that just raised $7 million for its services buying, refurbishing, and re-selling smartphones across Latin America. The company’s journey began with an armed robbery in Argentina. In 2013, Guillermo Freire […]