Day: July 1, 2019

Spotify is shutting down a program that allowed indie artists to upload their own music to the streaming service, the company announced today. The new upload tool was first introduced in beta testing in September 2018, offering U.S. artists an easy way to add tracks and their accompanying metadata to Spotify with just a few […]

After raising $21 million in 2017 for a late-stage pivot from mobile TV to set-top-box-free IPTV services for the home, MobiTV is announcing another large growth round. The company — an early mover in building services to stream broadcast TV on mobile devices (it was established in 1999) — has raised $50 million more to […]

All startup founders want to steer to a successful outcome the business they started. Sometimes the goal is an initial public offering. Sometimes it’s an acquisition. Though acquisitions often represent a kind of finish line for entrepreneurs, they aren’t easy to line up, and even when an offer is on the table, it often comes […]

In addition to expanding Prime Day to a two-day sale event, taking place on July 15-16, Amazon today announced it’s kicking things off with early Prime Day sales across a range of devices and services. The pre-sale includes discounts on the Fire TV Recast, Ring Video Doorbell and Echo Dot — the latter a perennial […]

After years of buildup, 5G is finally here — albeit more as a trickle than a deluge. These things take time, of course. Carriers are adding coverage, city by city, promising dozens by year’s end. And as for hardware, early adopters have somewhere between one and three handsets to choose from, carrier-dependent. Indeed, 5G is […]

When Shomik Dutta and Betsy Hoover first met in 2007, he was coordinating fundraising and get-out-the-vote efforts for Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign and she was a deputy field director for the campaign. Over the next two election cycles the two would become parts of an organizing and fundraising team that transformed the business of […]

Six months ago Korean games giant Nexon seemed headed for a management change, but now it seems very much back to business as usual. Days after founder Kim Jung-ju was reported to have called off selling his near-50 percent share in the firm, Nexon has snapped up a controlling stake in seven-month-old game developer Embark […]

The Europas Awards for European Tech Startups came around again last week (Thursday 27th June), and once again proved that Europe’s enormous diversity in startups continues to shine through on the world stage. Once again TechCrunch was the exclusive media sponsor of the awards, alongside new “tech, culture & society” event creator The Pathfounder. Attendees, […]

Artificial intelligence has become an increasingly important component of how a lot of technology works; now it’s also being applied to how technologists themselves work. Today, one of the startups building such a tool has raised some capital, Tara.ai, a platform that uses machine learning to help an organization get engineering projects done — from […]

Audio apps are flying high in China. In 2018, online listeners in the country grew 22.1% to surpass 400 million, at a rate far exceeding that of the mobile video and e-reading populations, according to market researcher iiMedia. But the fledgling sector is taking a hit. On Friday, a total of 26 audio-focused apps were […]