Day: August 22, 2018

An ESA mission 20 years in the making is set to take off today, launching the first satellite to monitor the planet’s winds directly — and using a giant laser, at that. Aeolus takes off from French Guiana at nearly midnight there, about 2:20 PM Pacific time, and you can watch the launch live here. […]

According to Chinese numerology, 48 represents a determination to prosper — as in business. How fitting, because 48 also represents the number of hours you have left to reserve your place in Startup Alley, the huge exhibition floor at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2018, which takes place on September 5-7. Disrupt events are all about […]

Lyft has hired Google veteran Manish Gupta as vice president of engineering to build out the ride-hailing company’s business platforms, including enterprise, partnerships and healthcare. Gupta will report directly to Peter Morelli. He will work alongside Ran Makavy, who heads up Lyft’s ride-share technology team, CFO Chris Lambert and Katie Dill, the company’s vice president […]

Amazon may be betting on the convenience of cashier-less stores, but Target is instead focused on order-ahead e-commerce. The company’s Drive Up service, which allows shoppers to place orders online, then pick up at a nearby store without getting out of their car, is now on track to reach nearly 1,000 U.S. stores before the […]

Earth Class Mail, a company that digitizes your physical mail so you don’t have to go to the mailbox every day, today announced that it has acquired receipt scanning and expense tracking service Shoeboxed. The reason Earth Class Mail would be interested in Shoeboxed is pretty obvious, given that both companies focus on taking the […]

It was quite a week for Slack, wasn’t it? The enterprise communications platform confirmed this publication’s earlier report that it had scored another $427 million investment on an over-the-moon valuation of over $7 billion. Slack took a market that had once been in the doldrums and turned it into something significant by making itself more than […]

Monument Valley, the award-winning and beautifully designed mobile puzzler from ustwo Games, is being turned into a movie, according to a report from Deadline. While the game involves a manipulating Escher-like architecture in order to guide a princess through her quest, the movie version will feature live-action characters being thrown into the game’s “mind-bending world,” […]

It’s most likely not going to be out until October, but we’ve already seen a lot of Google’s Pixel 3. A lot, a lot. And here’s a lot more. The umpteenth leak of the upcoming smartphone details just about every nook and cranny you could even want to see of the thing. In fact, there […]

A “legacy system” was to blame for exposing the contact information of attendees of this year’s Black Hat security conference. Colorado-based pen tester and security researcher who goes by the handle NinjaStyle said it would have taken about six hours to collect all the registered attendees’ names, email and home addresses, company names and phone […]

Amazon announced this morning a further investment in voice technology with an expansion of its Alexa Fund Fellowship to 14 new universities, up from only 4 in 2017, the Fellowship’s first year. The program, which is designed to support conversational A.I. and speech science research, is now coming to 18 total universities, including new additions, […]