Author: pekandesigns

Amazon’s kid-friendly FreeTime service offering books, apps, videos, games, and more, is now available in Spanish, the company announced this morning alongside news of its new Fire HD 8 devices. The Spanish-language service will include access to over 1,000 age-appropriate books, videos, educational apps, games, and soon Audible books, the company says, all in Spanish […]

At TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018, BMW today premiered its digital personal assistant for its cars, the aptly named BMW Intelligent Personal Assistant. But you won’t have to say “Hey, BMW Intelligent Personal Assistant” to wake it up. You can give it any name you want. The announcement comes only a few weeks after BMW also […]

Yesterday was a blast, but there’s no reason to rest on our laurels. Disrupt SF 2018 Day 2 holds plenty in store for us. We’ll hear from Priscilla Chan, Dara Khosrowshahi, Reid Hoffman, Doug Leone and many more. First up, Dieter May from BMW with a global product announcement. Then, this afternoon, we’ll check out […]

You can now control the Xbox from Alexa and Cortana. Microsoft announced his morning it’s introducing a new way to interact with Xbox One using voice commands, by way of an Xbox Skill that works with both Alexa and Cortana, across platforms. The skill will allow users to launch games, adjust the volume, start and […]

This morning at TechCrunch SF 2018, Founders Fund partner Cyan Banister shared her inspirational journey from a homeless teen at the age of 15 to now a venture capitalist who’s invested in startups like Uber, Thumbtack, SpaceX, Postmates, EShares, Affirm and Niantic. Banister spoke this morning at Disrupt about the handful of values she cites as […]

Beth Seidenberg, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins since 2005, has taken the wraps off her new fund, Westlake Village BioPartners. The Los Angeles-based firm has raised $320 million to incubate and invest in early-stage life sciences companies — Seidenberg’s specialty. A spokesperson for Westlake Village confirmed to TechCrunch this morning that she is in […]

Factual announced this morning that it has raised $42 million in new funding. The company launched in 2009 and now provides location data to customers like Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. And it’s still adding new capabilities, like the ability for advertisers to measure whether their campaigns drove in-store visits. Founder and CEO Gil […]

“Where we are at the beginning of this century is where Star Trek begins,” says Alan Stern, the NASA researcher who was one of the architects of the New Horizons mission to Pluto.  In an age where science fiction is rapidly becoming a simple fact, Stern says moon mining, extra-terrestrial energy generation and space tourism […]

Facebook has accused BlackBerry of stealing its voice-messaging technology in its instant messaging app. In an 118-page complaint filed Tuesday in San Francisco, Facebook claimed BlackBerry infringed on five other patents, including the tracking and analysis of GPS data, voice-messaging technology and the ways in which the app displays graphics, video and audio. In the […]

The Justice Department has confirmed that Attorney General Jeff Sessions has expressed a “growing concern” that social media giants may be “hurting competition” and “intentionally stifling” free speech and expression. The comments come as Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey gave testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, as […]