Day: May 31, 2019

Amazon just announced that it’s acquiring Sizmek’s ad serving and dynamic content optimization businesses. “Sizmek and Amazon Advertising have many mutual customers, so we know how valued these proven solutions are to their customer base,” Amazon said. “Sizmek has been searching for a buyer for Sizmek Ad Server and Sizmek DCO, and we are both […]

According to the startups at Factory Berlin, it’s not just another co-working space. After all, the company took its name from Andy Warhol’s famous factory in New York City, and it describes itself as “Europe’s largest club for startups.” Late last year, we toured Factory Berlin’s five-story, 14,000-square-meter location in Görlitzer Park. Yes, it’s a […]

After weeks of sporting “Coming Soon” screens, the New York City MTA’s OMNY pilot finally launched today. The system augments the city’s MetroCard swipes with new contactless screens that work with contactless prepaid credit and debit cards and a variety of different smart devices. We’ve highlighted the latter already. For starters, the system will work […]

For a cybersecurity company, Bugcrowd relies much more on people than it does on technology. For as long as humans are writing software, developers and programmers are going to make mistakes, said Casey Ellis, the company’s founder and chief technology officer in an interview TechCrunch from his San Francisco headquarters. “Cybersecurity is fundamentally a people […]

Computex, which wrapped up today, is divided into two venues in Taipei. One, Nangang Exhibition Center, is where the big companies, including Asus and Microsoft, have their booths. The other, in Taipei World Trade Center, houses Innovex, the show’s exhibit for startups. While walking around, I realized there are no “booth babes” at the Innovex […]

Want to rock out together even when you’re apart? Spotify has prototyped an unreleased feature called “Social Listening” that lets multiple people add songs to a queue they can all listen to. You just all scan one friend’s QR-style Spotify Social Listening code, and then anyone can add songs to the real-time playlist. Spotify could […]

Tinder this morning announced a second, more premium version of its most popular à la carte purchase, Boost, with the launch of Super Boost — an upgrade only offered to Tinder Plus and Tinder Gold premium subscribers. The idea with the new product is to extract additional revenues out of those users who have already […]

Microsoft has issued its second advisory this month urging users to update their systems to prevent a re-run of attacks similar to WannaCry. The software giant said Thursday that the recently discovered “wormable” vulnerability in Remote Desktop Services for Windows can allow attackers to remotely run code on a vulnerable computer — such as malware […]

Just over a month ago, Emtek announced the end of BlackBerry Messenger for consumers. The once-mighty messaging service had a good run, outstripping the popularity of its hardware namesake. Launched in 2005, licensing rights for the service were acquired by Indonesia-based tech conglomerate Emtek 11 years later. For many years, BBM was considered BlackBerry’s (nee […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. It’s our first week in the new TechCrunch podcast studio, or it was for Kate Clark and Chris Gates. Alex Wilhelm will be back in SF next week. For now, we fired up the mics and dug into […]