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On-demand road freight startup Ontruck pulls in $10M Series A led by Atomico and Idinvest

Ontruck, a Madrid-based startup that has built an “on-demand logistics platform” to connect businesses directly with road freight carriers, has raised $10 million in Series A funding.<p>The round was led by VCs Atomico and Idinvest, with participation from existing backers Point Nine Capital, La …

Verizon reportedly wins bidding war for Straight Path with $3.1 billion offer

Verizon appears to have won its bidding war with AT&T; for Straight Path Communications after offering $3.1 billion.<p>AT&T; announced last month that it had agreed to buy Straight Path for $1.6 billion, but after Verizon placed a bid for nearly double that amount on Monday, AT&T; declined to match it, …

Essentium's FuseBox prints 3D with plasma

New York starts accepting applications for autonomous vehicle testing

Soon enough, self-driving car companies will have the opportunity to see how their cars deal with sitting in the occasionally snowy bumper-to-bumper New York traffic.<p>Today, NY Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that the state will begin accepting applications from companies interested in testing out …

Snap Trips and Falls on Wall Street

<b>Today’s Stories</b><p>Tesla’s solar roof tiles go up for pre-order today<br>• SoftBank confirms it’s putting $5BN into Didi Chuxing, the ‘Uber of China’<br>• Snap is getting absolutely crushed after falling short of Wall Street’s expectations<p>Full Interview with Gayle L. Laakman<p><b>Credits</b><p><b>Written by:</b> Tito Hamze, John …

Crunch Report Special: Gayle L. McDowell Full Interview

Snap Trips and Falls on Wall Street | Crunch Report

Lightspeed’s co-founders on their 17-year-long ‘overnight’ success story

Lightspeed Venture Partners is having quite a year, between the sale of AppDynamics to Cisco for $3.7 billion on the eve of its IPO (Lightspeed wrote its first check); to the March sale of publicly traded Nimble Storage to Hewlett Packard Enterprise for just north of $1 billion in cash; to the IPO …

HelloFresh is launching a wine club, taking a page from the Blue Apron playbook

As competition among them heats up, meal kit startups are expanding their repertoire, including by selling their dinner kits at groceries and adding new products to their catalogs.<p>Today, early meal kit player HelloFresh announced the availability of wines on their site beginning May 17th. …

SoFi plans to apply for a bank charter in the next month

With an eye on providing banking services later this year, online lending startup SoFi is planning to apply for an industrial bank charter in the next month, according to CEO Mike Cagney. If approved, it would become the first company to receive a new industrial loan company (ILC) charter in a …

Cannes Film Festival announces new rule that could block Netflix films from participating

This is the first year that Netflix will have movies premiering at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival — and it might be the last.<p>The source of the tension is Netflix’s relationship with theaters. Theoretically, the company has said it’s not opposed to bringing the movies it funds into theaters — …

Snap earned $8.3M on Spectacles ‘and other revenue’ in Q1, $4.5M in Q4

Snapchat won’t say exactly how many Spectacles its sold, but it did admit today that the “Other revenue” category that’s mostly from Spectacles brought in around $4.5 million in revenue in Q4 2016, and over $8.3 million in revenue in Q1 2017.<p>Ignoring other possible revenue drivers in this category, …

Microsoft Build 2017 - Seattle - May 10 - 12, 2017 | TechCrunch

11 hours ago Cloud<p>The launch of Azure IoT Edge was one of Microsoft’s slightly more esoteric but interesting announcements at its Build developer conference in Seattle… Read More<p>16 hours ago<p>Microsoft announced this morning at its Build 2017 conference that all developers can now publish their …

Snap is the new stubborn, slow-growing Twitter

Twitter fell apart in 2013 when its growth slowed significantly in the face of competition and copying from Facebook, and users found it too hard to find the best content due to its unsorted reverse chronological feed. Its share price fell 18 percent a quarter later as the growth troubles continued.<p>…

Former US mental health chief left Google’s life sciences arm to launch his own health startup

Tom Insel, the former head of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), has left his position at Google’s life sciences company Verily to found his own mental health startup, Mindstrong.<p>First reported in Nature, the new startup will try to analyze a person’s mental health state using …

Microsoft is extending Azure IoT to the edge of the network

The launch of Azure IoT Edge was one of Microsoft’s slightly more esoteric but interesting announcements at its Build developer conference in Seattle today. While “the cloud” is all about moving compute and data storage into the data center, there are plenty of situations where you want to avoid …

Snapchat hits a disappointing 166M daily users, growing only slightly faster

Snap’s growth rate increased just a little in Q1 2017 — a bad start to its first quarterly earnings report since going public. Snap hit 166 million daily active users at a growth rate of 5 percent, compared to the 158 million DAUs it had in Q4 when it hit a 3.2 percent growth rate. Snap’s …

Everything that happened at Microsoft Build Day 1

1/11<p>500 million Windows 10 devices are active monthly<p>One of the first and biggest stats Microsoft put out was the really quite impressive milestone of 500 million monthly active Windows 10 devices. Our calculations suggest this shows uptake that’s about twice as fast as Windows 8. A few other big …

Snap is getting absolutely crushed after falling short of Wall Street’s expectations

Snap may have had a successful IPO, but that was pretty much wiped out after it reported its first-quarter earnings — where it completely whiffed on what Wall Street was expecting.<p>The company said it brought in $149.6 million in revenue in the first quarter this year. It also said it lost $2.31 per …

Google acquires Owlchemy Labs VR game studio

Google has acquired the VR game studio behind such popular gaming titles as Job Simulator and Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality.<p>In a blog post, the founding team of the Austin-based Owlchemy Labs detailed that it has been acquired and will be joining the team at Google. “Today is a <i>REAAAALLY BIG</i> …

CBS launches an All Access-Showtime ‘skinny bundle’ for cord cutters

CBS has been promising a bundle of its two flagship streaming services, CBS All Access and Showtime, since last year. And on last week’s earnings call, CEO Leslie Moonves announced a combined package would soon be available. Today, that combined package has arrived.<p>Starting now, consumers can sign …

Cockroach Labs announces $27M Series B and enterprise tier for its reliable database

“A database that replicates itself and is meant to survive” — that was the connection that Cockroach Labs CEO Spencer Kimball made between the startup’s memorable name and its value proposition. Despite entering a crowded market, Cockroach has been able to gain the favor of some of the best known …

Tesla opens up Solar Roof pre-orders, answers the most important question: how much will it cost you?

Back in October of last year, Tesla unveiled a new project it had been secretly cracking away at behind the scenes: solar roof tiles. Unlike traditional solar panels that sit on top of the roof, these solar tiles would replace your roof outright — and, if all went to plan, they’d look as good as …

A new 3D printing technology uses electricity to create stronger objects for manufacturing

Nothing actually appears to happen when the Essentium rep flips the switch to fire up the company’s demo. The change is undetectable standing a foot away from the Stacker industrial 3D printer, but if you lean forward and peek into the small gap between the print head and bed, you’ll spot two small …

ShapeScale launches pre-orders for their fitness-minded 3D body scanner

When you hop on a bathroom scale, all you get is one number describing the weight of your entire body. That number doesn’t account for muscle, but rallies you behind the goal of dropping that number lower and lower.<p>ShapeScale utilizes 3D body scans to create a map of where you’re gaining and losing …

As tech startups surge in cities, inclusive economic growth must be a priority

Cities are shaping the story of America. The great success we have seen in our nation’s cities is clear — data shapes the narrative.<p>It tells us that the collective, shared future of our cities is not only defined by the continued growth of the tech and the creative sectors — it’s a future where …

Google Search will now help you find nearby events

Google today is updating its app and mobile web experience in the U.S. to help web searchers more easily find things to do – like concerts, art exhibits, lectures, festivals, meetups, sporting events, and more – which are happening nearby, either now or in the future.<p>The company says it’s rolling …

Announcing the judges for Disrupt NY Startup Battlefield Competition

TechCrunch is excited to announce the judges of the next round of Startup Battlefield. These are the experts tasked with picking the finalists and winner of the startup competition held at Disrupt NY. It’s a big task, but these judges are up to the challenge.<p>This year the competition will feature …

Microsoft Teams’ developers can now publish their apps

Microsoft announced this morning at its Build 2017 conference that all developers can now publish their Microsoft Teams applications through the Office Store. The apps will be surfaced in Teams through a new discover apps experience, the company also said.<p>At the event, Microsoft also demoed a …

Microsoft builds a full cloud-based Bash shell into its Azure Portal

At its Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced a new feature for the Azure Portal, its central dashboard for managing applications that run on Azure. The new Azure Cloud Shell brings a full Bash shell to the Portal, with support for Microsoft’s own PowerShell coming later. Access to …