Day: February 23, 2018

 Writer-director Alex Garland has said that his adaptation of Annihilation isn’t a straightforward retelling of the book — instead, he said, it’s “true to my subjective response to the novel.” That’s a fair warning: The movie’s details don’t really match the book, which was written by Jeff VanderMeer. What carries over, however, is a sense of… […]

 Google Assistant, the search giant’s answer to Alexa that lives on Android smartphones, tablets, and Google Home speakers, will expand to more languages over the course of the year, to cover 95 percent of all eligible Android smartphones, Google announced this morning. It will also soon become multilingual – meaning users who speak more than […]

 Discord, the voice and text chat app for gamers, is today announcing a new partnership with a number of eSports teams for the launch of Discord Verified Servers. Verified servers ensure that users know they’re communicating with an official source, similar to verified accounts on other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Alongside […]

 Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week the full gang was in town, with Katie Roof, Matthew Lynley and Alex Wilhelm all back in the podcast studio. The trio was joined by Hilary Gosher, a managing director at Insight Venture Partners who helped dig through […]

 Password management service 1Password has a neat new feature that lets users check whether a password they’re thinking of using has already been breached. At which point it will suggest they pick another. Read More Source: New feed

 WeChat is far and away the biggest messaging platform in China at the moment, and that is helping to drive a push among the smaller players to get together for better scale. Today, Momo, the Chinese location-based social networking app that has more recently made a big push into dating services and is traded on […]

 Opera Max lives on after Samsung acquired the mobile browser to save it from oblivion. The browser was one of the first data-friendly mobile browsers and it later added privacy-focused settings, including safeguards against insecure WiFi connections and a VPN. The popular app clocked up more than 500,000 installs, but that didn’t stop parent company Opera […]

 If you read the tech press, you might have seen reports that Uber is pursuing a sale in Southeast Asia that would see Grab, its Singapore-headquartered rival valued at $6 billion, acquire Uber’s business in the region. Rumors of such a tie-in have been rife for a while. Uber sold its China business in exactly such […]

 Nissan Motor and DeNA announced today that field tests of Easy Ride, the self-driving taxi service they developed together, will begin next month in Japan. This means that Nissan and DeNA now rank among Uber, Lyft, GM, Didi Chuxing and other companies pioneering self-driving taxi pilots, with the goal of launching commercially within the next […]