Author: pekandesigns

Amazon appears to be restarting its funding efforts in India after Acko, the digital insurance startup in India, confirmed that the U.S. retail giant led a new round of funding for its business. Amazon — which has been linked with an Acko investment since the start of this year — backed lending startup Capital Float last […]

It’s been a long night at VivaTech. The building hosted a very special competition — the very first TechCrunch Hackathon in Paris. Hundreds of engineers and designers got together to come up with something cool, something neat, something awesome. The only condition was that they only had 24 hours to work on their projects. Some […]

David Kline Contributor David Kline is a journalist, author and intellectual property strategist. More posts by this contributor Where human intelligence outperforms AI A new (old) way for product makers to defeat patent roadblocks After meeting with Chinese Vice Premiere Liu He this week, President Trump is still considering easing penalties on Chinese telecommunications giant […]

U.S. President Donald Trump has claimed that Chinese telecom firm ZTE will pay a $1.3 billion fine and undergo a significant overhaul of its management team in order to remain operational in North America. ZTE looked to be in dire straits when it ceased its business in the U.S. earlier this month after a Department […]

Following the success of the live mobile game show HQ Trivia, a team of serial entrepreneurs have begun testing the market to see if another game show concept can work, too. Their new game show-inspired app, Gravy, is meant to be a riff on the “Price is Right” combined with a QVC-style shopping experience. That […]

Mobility is one of the most rapidly advancing technologies going, and we’re searching for the rising stars of early-stage mobility startups to apply as a TC Top Pick for Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September 5-7 at Moscone Center West. It’s a competitive application process, but if TechCrunch editors designate your company as a Top […]

As HTC gears up for a stateside launch of their Vive Focus standalone headset, the company announced a number of changes that they’re bringing to the device currently available in China. The company has long fancied itself the “premium” brand of VR, but at its annual developer conference it was tasked with showing off features […]

French startup Snips has been working on voice assistant technology that respects your privacy. And the company is going to use its own voice assistant for a set of consumer devices. As part of this consumer push, the company is also announcing an initial coin offering. Yes, it sounds a bit like Snips is playing […]

Spotify caused a stir when it unveiled its “hateful conduct” policy earlier this month. Now, a few weeks later, it’s reportedly already rethinking the tact, after pushback from artists and inside the company itself. According to a new report from Bloomberg, the streaming service has been in discussions to reinstate at least one of the […]

Earlier this week, it came to light that Apple had removed a number of VoIP-based calling apps from the App Store, at the request of the Chinese government. The apps had been using CallKit, Apple’s new developer toolset that provides the calling interface for VoIP apps, freeing up developers to handle the backend communications. China’s […]