Amazon is hosting the second of two major keynotes at its re:Invent developer conference in Las Vegas today. TechCrunch has received detailed notes on the contents of today’s keynote, which will be delivered by Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels. We already knew he was going to talk about DevOps and containers today, but here are a few more details of what to expect. The keynote is scheduled to… Read More
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Annapurna Pictures, the production company behind films including Zero Dark Thirty and Her, is launching a new division focused on video game development and publishing. Annapurna was founded by Megan Ellison, daughter of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, and has developed a reputation for writing relatively large checks for arty, director-driven films — though it’s also faced… Read More
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A few months ago, iHeartRadio announced that it would be adding paid subscriptions for on-demand music. Today it’s releasing more details about its plans — and launching beta versions of those paid offerings. iHeartMedia, the company behind iHeartRadio, has its roots in traditional radio (it owns 858 stations), and until now, the app was largely a way for you to listen to radio on… Read More
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We often look to nature for tips on how to build better tech, and few things in nature are better at harnessing the power of the sun than the leaves of ordinary plants. Researchers at the University of Oulu in Finland have discovered a way to build coatings that can mimic the surface of the leaves of plants, which could eventually lead to solar panels that lose less of their captured energy… Read More
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Workramp, a startup that wants to change the way companies onboard and train their employees, announced a $1.8 million seed round today. Investors include Susa Ventures, Initialized Capital, Haystack, Liquid 2, Wei Fund, Elad Gil, Adrian Aoun, Charlie Songhurst, and Y Combinator. The company is a graduate of the Y Combinator Summer 2016 class and previously raised $120,000. Workramp… Read More
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Three members of the senior investing team at Genesis Partners, a major Israeli venture firm, are stepping out with a new, early-stage fund of their own called F2 Capital. For the unfamiliar, Genesis Partners’ portfolio companies have been acquired by the likes of Apple, IBM, Microsoft and Sapiens over the past decade, and have gone public on the Nasdaq exchange in the U.S. as well.… Read More
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This afternoon, Norwest Venture Partners announced that it led a massive $210 million Series D investment round in OpenDoor. The startup is looking to expand the usage of its marketplace platform for buying and selling real estate to 10 cities with the new capital. OpenDoor is unique in that it owns its own inventory of homes. While the predictive analytics the company employs to project… Read More
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Game tech startup Skillz today launched a service that allows brands to easily sponsor and host mobile e-sports tournaments for any game titles that they like, as long as they are already part of the Skillz platform. As we’ve previously reported, Skillz enables developers to turn mobile games into tournament-playable titles without writing a ton of new code. Its technology operates as a… Read More
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Online anonymity can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can give people a voice when they’d otherwise be afraid to speak up — whether that’s because of fear of government surveillance, discussing a topic that’s known to provoke cyberbullying or because the topic itself is sensitive — like a personal confession or health issue. But anonymity also… Read More
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Amazon’s popular Snowball storage container got a major update today at the company’s re:invent conference. Though largely overshadowed by the new batshit crazy AWS Snowmobile, the aforementioned Snowball will be getting a storage increase to 100 terabytes in addition to computing functionality. Users of the new Snowball Edge will be able to perform basic analysis on their data… Read More
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