Day: October 3, 2018

Talkdesk, the provider of cloud-based contact center software, has raised $100 million in new funding from Viking Global Investors, a Connecticut-based hedge fund, and existing investor DFJ. The round values the company at north of $1 billion, Talkdesk co-founder and chief executive officer Tiago Paiva confirmed to TechCrunch, but he declined to disclose the exact […]

Google today is launching a major visual redesign of its Assistant experience on phones. While the original vision of the Assistant focused mostly on voice, half of all interactions with the Assistant actually include touch. So with this redesign, Google acknowledges that and brings more and larger visuals to the Assistant experience. If you’ve used […]

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has today been announced as the keynote speaker at a European data protection conference taking place in Brussels later this month — at a time when US lawmakers are asking tech giants outright if they’ll support “EU-like” privacy rules to shield US consumers from platform power. For a week this month Europe’s data […]

We’ve just wrapped up Startup Battlefield MENA in Beirut, Lebanon. Throughout the day, 15 companies pitched their ideas, demonstrated their technology and answered questions. We took the feedback from all our expert judges and chose five teams to compete in the finals. Then after another round of pitches and Q&A, our finals judges selected a […]

Though some of the biggest names in tech are wholly focused on getting consumers to strap into VR, there has been an increasing amount of movement in companies adopting virtual reality to help train employees. STRIVR, one of the VR training startups leading this movement, announced today that they’ve pulled in $16 million in a […]

The patent system is broken — there are too many ways to list here, really. The problems surrounding prior art are certainly among them, and a team of high profile companies and organizations are joining forces to address some of the these with the Prior Art Archive. The database is a collaboration between MIT’s Media […]

I haven’t seen a virtual reality glove system that also includes a suitcase-sized pneumatic box accessory before, but then again there aren’t too many VR peripherals that have delivered quite the depth of immersion that the HaptX system did. Today, HaptX announced the release of their Gloves development kit that will allow its users to […]

Upwork, the rebranded merger of oDesk and Elance, debuted on Nasdaq this morning, after dropping its S-1 about four weeks ago. Shares opened at $23.00, which represents a 53% jump — shares were priced at $15 before the opening bell by investors, a significant uptick from the company’s revised projection of $12 to $14, which […]

As it approaches its 35th year in the venture capital business, Accel is staying true to its promise to continue passing the torch to the younger generation of investors. This week, the firm brought on Maya Noeth as a principal, leading its consumer growth investing efforts. Accel typically promotes from within; Noeth is its first outside hire […]

For the last two and a half years, Iron Ox has been working on perfecting its agricultural robots to tend its indoor farms. After first testing its systems on a small scale, the company is opening its first fully autonomous production farm, with plans to start selling its produce soon. The farm is currently growing […]