The infamous green messaging bubbles. | Image: Google Google is kicking off a new publicity campaign today to pressure Apple into adopting RCS, the cross-platform messaging protocol that’s meant to be a successor to the aging SMS and MMS standards. The search giant has a new “Get The Message” website that lays out a familiar…
Monthly Archives: August 2022
Enlarge / Ahhh, the easy button! (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) This is the second episode in our exploration of “no-code” machine learning. In our first article, we laid out our problem set and discussed the data we would use to test whether a highly automated ML tool designed for business analysts could return…
Road damage at Mud Canyon. NPS In a season marked by record breaking heat waves around the globe and widespread drought, an unlikely spot experienced one wet and hot summer in a single day. Death Valley National Park on the California-Nevada border received almost 75% of its annual rainfall last Friday, triggering a wave of…
Pinata, an NFT-focused media distribution platform, has raised a total of $21.5 million in funding, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. This is the only capital the four-year-old company has raised to date. The total amount came from a recently closed $18 million Series A and $3.5 million seed round in 2021, Kyle Tut, co-founder and…
For fans of both reality television and web3 (hopefully that group includes more than just this reporter), Christine Quinn’s move to leave the Oppenheim Group and co-found a brokerage with her husband to serve the crypto-rich was quite the bombshell. Now, RealOpen CMO Quinn and CEO Christian Dumontet, who married Quinn in a swan-filled soiree…
Stores face new challenges in a world forever changed by the pandemic. Amazon and other tech giants are encroaching on their business. But perhaps more urgently, supply chain snarls haven’t gone away, presenting retailers with a host of inventory issues. In a March Retail Insights survey, seven in 10 (71%) shoppers said they felt that…
As data privacy laws proliferate, it’s becoming increasingly important for companies to protect sensitive data in their applications. Privya was born with the idea that privacy protection should happen at the code level in development before the code goes into production. One of the founders, CEO Uzy Hadad, was working a company called VisualDNA, which…
Online sales reached $1 trillion last year, and of that, $218 billion of merchandise was returned, according to the National Retail Federation. What’s more is that for every $1 billion of items sold, retailers incur over $160 million in returns. We’ve seen companies get creative — for example, Amazon teaming up with Kohl’s in 2019…
In this challenging fundraising environment, more startups than ever are turning to alternative financial solutions such as debt. Despite the negative connotation associated with debt, a startup should not view it as an act of desperation during downturns, as TechCrunch’s Kyle Wiggers and Alex Wilhelm have recently noted. Companies that have high recurring revenue and…
The idea for Gepek, a Croatian startup that aims to tap the sharing economy for same-day deliveries, came about because a brother and sister wanted to help their mother access her medication quickly. One Friday afternoon, Carla and Dario Ferreri’s mother had arrived at a seaside village for a holiday when she realized she forgot…