Meal kit makers Blue Apron may be preparing to file for a 2017 IPO, according to Reuters. The report says that the food startup has hired bankers from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup to this end. The whole thing has stirred up quite the conversation over here at TechCrunch, and we’ve been arguing amongst ourselves about the likelihood that the Blue Apron IPO happens soon, or… Read More
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Archaeological records show humans have been making alcohol since at least 7000 BC. We figured out wine more than 6,000 years ago. By the time the ancient Egyptians entered the scene, brewers were making at least 17 types of beer. Nonetheless, it appears we are not done innovating: Booze-related startups continued to rack up funding in the past year. Read More
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You might have missed it amidst Snap’s noisy consumer debut, but enterprise-facing IPOs put points on the board during the first quarter of 2017, even more than their consumer-focused siblings. In fact, the group may be set to dominate the year’s offerings. For startups working to sell to large corporations, their investors and their tens of thousands of employees, it’s… Read More
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Want to remember to tell a friend happy birthday, good luck or congratulations? Had a follow-up question for a client that just occurred to you at 1 AM? Want to write a heartfelt thank you to be texted at a later date? Unfortunately, neither SMS nor most messaging apps – including iMessage – allow you to draft a text in advance and schedule it to be sent out on a later date. But… Read More
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For the first time, news aggregator Nuzzel will include advertising. That doesn’t mean you’re going to see banner ads popping up all over the startup’s app and website. Instead, the Nuzzel Newswire consists of sponsored links in Nuzzel’s email newsletter, pointing to a blog post, press release or news article of the advertiser’s choosing. Read More
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Nearly a year ago, Twitter announced it would begin distancing itself from the requirement that all tweets could only contain 140 characters by no longer counting some things – like media attachments or @ replies towards the character count. However, it didn’t begin testing the change with @ replies until last fall. Today, Twitter says this change to replies is rolling out to all… Read More
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Spotting faces in a scene is easy when the punims are nice and close to the camera. But what about group shots where the faces are tiny? That, I fear, robots have a harder time with. A new research project by Deva Ramanan, associate professor of robotics, and Peiyun Hu, a Ph.D. student in robotics at Carnegie Mellon, fixes that problem by assessing the context of images. Instead of just… Read More
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Club Penguin Island, the mobile-only replacement for the original Club Penguin (which shut down last night) has launched. Started in 2005, Club Penguin was one of the first successful virtual worlds for children and, as they grew up, teens and adults. At its peak the platform had 200M users, and a few months ago was still seeing upwards of 5M visitors to the Club Penguin website each month.… Read More
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Business intelligence platform Looker is announcing an $81.5 million Series D today led by CapitalG. Rather than compete in segmented markets against visualization and data preparation startups, Looker wants to own the vertical of business intelligence. The company supports the adoption of enterprise machine learning by providing a source of clean and reliable data. Read More
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HelloSign, founded in 2011, has been best known to this point as an e-signature company, but today it announced something a bit more substantial, a new product called HelloWorks, which allows the company to move into workflow, digitizing processes that involve complex forms. For many years now, HelloSign CEO Joseph Walla said, the way we moved paper processes into the digital realm was… Read More
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