Blog

 At this point, if you haven’t accepted the celebrity influence of the Kardashian/Jenner machine, you probably haven’t been paying attention to pop culture at large. Snap is definitely paying attention. Yesterday, Kylie Jenner tweeted a pretty brutal takedown of Snapchat with the nonchalance that only a celebrity who has mastered social media better than most can do. sooo does… Read More

 Eight years after Amazon snatched up the daily deals site Woot!, the retailer is now leveraging the site to serve as another perk for Prime members. Woot! this morning announced that it will begin offering free shipping on purchases from its site to all Amazon Prime members. Woot!, which was founded in 2004, is no longer the household name it used to be back when Amazon acquired it in 2010… Read More

 French startup Snips is announcing two things for its voice assistant SDK. First, the company is showing off an interesting use case in Nuremberg with a Snips-powered voice assistant in a car. Second, you can now build voice assistants in German. Read More

 MyBagCheck is a clever system that ensures you’ll be able to spend those extra few hours in a foreign city without having to lug around 50 pounds of Samsonite. The founder, Micah B. Lewis, created the app to allow people who have bags to get those bags picked up and stored during the day, something every traveler would love. The app is self-funded and Lewis spent $60,000 of his own money… Read More

 Airbnb today is rolling out a few new additions to their home-booking system, including new tiers that are aimed at higher-end customers called Airbnb Plus and Beyond by Airbnb. The new Airbnb Plus tier has homes that are verified for “quality and comfort,” rolling out with around 2,000 homes to start that have been inspected against a thorough checklist. The Luxury tier, called… Read More

 What if instead of blasting cargo into space on a rocket, we could fling it into space using a catapult? That’s the big, possibly crazy, possibly genius idea behind SpinLaunch. TechCrunch has learned from three sources that SpinLaunch is raising a massive $30 million Series A to develop its catapult technology. And we’ve scored an interview with the founder after four years in stealth. Read More

 The car leasing and rental market is forecast to be worth $124 billion in 2022, and today a startup that is hoping to get a piece of that action by making the process of leasing a car easier is announcing a Series A in its effort to get there. Honcker — a New York-based startup that acts as an aggregator and search engine for leasing services, and platform for would-be customers to… Read More

 It turns out that while e-sports may be growing in popularity, the fans of different video games don’t spend the same way as fans for traditional sports. To try and figure out ways to part fans from their hard earned money, teams are beginning to turn to the types of data monitoring tools that are used to map and predict customer spending online. Enter FanAI, a Santa Monica,… Read More

 If you’ve tried to deal with a bot before you can speak to a human customer service rep, you know how frustrating that process can sometimes be. Sure, there are basic tasks that can free up a human rep to handle the more difficult matters, but it can be exasperating when there is no easy way to talk to a person. Agent IQ, a startup that has developed customer service bots, acknowledges… Read More

 UPS will work with partner Workhorse, a battery-electric transportation technology company, to develop and deploy a fleet of 50 custom-built plug-in electric delivery trucks with zero emissions. The goal is to make trucks that cost as much to buy as do traditional fuel-based delivery vehicles – even without taking into account subsidies. The Workhorse designed-vehicles, will be… Read More