software News of 06/27/19

Network With CrunchMatch At TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019

Ready to tackle the colossus that is enterprise software? Join us and more than 1,000 attendees for TC Sessions Enterprise 2019 on September 5 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. We’re talking founders, technologists and ...

With A Portfolio Including Acorns, Sweetgreen And Ro Health, Torch Capital Raises $60m For Its First Fund

Jonathan Keidan, the founder of Torch Capital , had already built a portfolio that included Acorns, Compass, Digital Ocean and Sweetgreen, before he raised single dollar for his inaugural venture capital fund, which just closed with $60 million. ...

Climate Change, AI And Ethical Leadership In ‘Big Tech’, With Amazon Principal UX Design Lead Maren Costa

“I just want to be proud of the company that I work for,” Maren Costa told me recently. Costa is a Principal UX Design Lead at Amazon, for which she has worked since 2002. I was referred to her because of her leadership in the Amazon ...

Week-In-Review: YouTube’S Awful Comments And Google’S $1b Tech-Free Investment

Hello, weekend readers. This is Week-in-Review where I give a heavy amount of analysis and/or rambling thoughts on one story while scouring the rest of the hundreds of stories that emerged on TechCrunch this week to surface my favorites for your ...

Netflix Is Testing A Pop-Out Floating Video Player On Desktop

Netflix is testing out a new feature that could mean you never have to stop watching, not even while you work – it’s a pop-out video player, similar to the one you may be used to from iOS and macOS for any website or app that supports ...

Nowports Raises $5.3 Million To Become Latin America’S Digital Shipping Answer To Flexport

Nowports , a developer of software and services to track freight shipments from ports to destinations across Latin America, has aims to become the regional answer to Flexport’s billion dollar digital shipping business. Almost 54 million ...

Slack’S Value Rockets As Stock Closes Up 48.5% In Public Debut

It was a historic day for Slack (NYSE: WORK). The workplace communication software juggernaut debuted on the New York Stock Exchange up 48% at $38.50 per share after reports emerged Wednesday night that the business had agreed to a reference ...

Slack Reportedly Prices IPO At $26 Per Share

Slack’s public debut is happening Thursday on the NYSE and the company has set a reference price of $26 per share for its direct listing, according to  WSJ , which would value the company at around $15.7 billion. The company’s stock ...

Still In Stealth Mode, Duffel Raises $21.5m In Series A From Benchmark For Its Travel Platform

Ten months ago London startup Duffel hinted that it would be “a new way to book travel online, aiming at the booking experience ‘end to end’”, and announced a healthy $4.7M funding round, but not much else. Today it goes further, ...

Microsoft PowerPoint Gets An AI Presentation Coach

Love it or hate it, Microsoft’s PowerPoint is a ubiquitous tool in the corporate world. Over the course of the last few years, Microsoft started to bring some of its AI smarts to PowerPoint to help you design good-looking slides. Today, ...

How Facebook’S Libra Is Similar In Concept And Motivation To Kik’S Kin Cryptocurrency

Facebook unveiled its Libra cryptocurrency initiative today , which is part of an alternative financial system (including new subsidiary and wallet ‘ Calibra ‘) it aims to build alongside industry and academic partners including ...

Google’S Game Builder Turns Building Multiplayer Games Into A Game

Google’s Area 120 team, the company’s in-house incubator for some of its more experimental projects, today launched Game Builder , a free and easy to use tool for PC and macOS users who want to build their own 3D games without having to ...

Telegram Faces DDoS Attack In China… Again

The popular encrypted messaging service Telegram is once again being hit with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in Asia as protestors in Hong Kong take to the streets. For the last several days, Hong Kong has been overrun with ...

We Won’T Be Listening To Music In A Decade According To Vinod Khosla

Depending on who you ask, the advantage of technology based on artificial or machine intelligence could be a topsy-turvy funhouse mirror world — even in some very fundamental ways. “I actually think 10 years from now, you won’t be ...

Citymapper Is Shutting Down Its Efforts To Reinvent The Bus

City navigation and public transit app Citymapper is ending the program it called ‘Citymapper Ride,’ which has gone through a number of incarnations since its introduction back in 2017 . Since then, the company has gone from running ...

Facebook Will Not Remove Deepfakes Of Mark Zuckerberg, Kim Kardashian And Others From Instagram

Facebook will not remove the faked videos featuring Mark Zuckerberg , Kim Kardashian and President Donald Trump from Instagram, the company said in a statement. Earlier today, Vice News reported on the existence of videos created by the ...

Telegram’S Crypto Tokens Are (Kind Of) Going On Sale To The Public For The First Time

Telegram, the most hyped ICO in the history of ICOs, is finally making its tokens available to retail investors through a limited listing that will precede a full sale later this year — but there are a lot of catches. The messaging company, ...

Holberton Opens Its Software Engineering School In Medellin

Holberton School , which sees itself as a college alternative for budding software engineers, today announced that it has opened a campus in Medellin , Colombia. With this, it now operates two schools in the country after opening its Bogota campus ...

Google Assistant Comes To Waze Navigation App

Ever since Google acquired Waze back in 2013, features from each have been slowly making their way back and forth between it and Google Maps – and today Waze gets a big upgrade with Google Assistant integration , which means you can use the ...

Why Identity Startup auth0’S Founder Still Codes: It Makes Him A Better Boss

If you ask Eugenio Pace to describe himself, “engineer” would be fairly high on the list. “Being a CEO is pretty busy,” he told TechCrunch in a call last week. “But I’m an engineer in my heart — I am a problem ...