We’d been hearing rumblings that Facebook was working on an “assistant” within Messenger (along with others), but today we’ve gotten the details that pull it all together. This puts the company squarely in competition with Apple, Google and Microsoft in the digital personal assistant space.
In a Facebook post, Facebook Messenger lead David Marcus spoke a bit about… Read More
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Simon Khalaf, Yahoo’s senior vice president of publisher products, today outlined some big shifts in the mobile ecosystem and unveiled some new tools for mobile developers. He made the announcements on-stage at the Yahoo Mobile Developer Conference in New York City and in related blog posts. Let’s start with the developer tools. The first one is Tumblr In-App Sharing.… Read More
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Apple has lost a challenge in the German court system that sought to overturn an earlier ruling, which voided its patent for ‘swipe to unlock’ in Europe. The patent (EP1964022) was granted back in 2010 and was used to win an injunction against Motorola smartphones (back when Moto was owned by Google) in 2012. Motorola has since appealed the injunction, with a decision dependent… Read More
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Hello friends and welcome back to Bullish, a weekly show from TechCrunch designed to see how long I can sit under lights and not sweat through my makeup. Jokes aside, Bullish is our first talk show, and we’re glad that you are here. This week, I’m very happy to report that we brought Buffer co-founder and COO Leo Widrich back to headquarters for a chat about salary transparency,… Read More
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Portal, a recently launched Android app that lets you move large files between your computer and your smartphone via your Wi-Fi connection, has today made its way to iOS. The new version offers a better alternative to something like Apple’s AirDrop, for example, as it lets you transfer as many files as you’d like, with no file size limits, while also not counting against your data… Read More
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Velostrata, an early stage hybrid cloud startup, emerged from stealth today announcing a $14 million Series A investment. The round was led by Norwest Venture Partners and Greylock IL Partners. The company has a sophisticated hybrid cloud solution that decouples storage from compute resources, leaving the storage in place on-premises while running a virtual machine in the cloud. The… Read More
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Intercom, a startup promising businesses a “fundamentally new” approach to communicating with their customers, has raised $35 million in Series C funding.
Co-founder and CEO Eoghan McCabe (pictured above) said the way that most online companies currently talk to their customers is “totally fucking broken,” with products and teams acting in isolation from one another. Read More
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ZeroStack, a company that hopes to help mid-market companies set up a private cloud more easily, exited stealth today and announced $5.6 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Foundation Capital. ZeroStack also announced that Mark Leslie, founder and CEO and Veritas will be joining the board of directors. The promise of private clouds has been mostly confined to larger… Read More
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Amazon just announced a new store for Android apps and games called Amazon Underground. While the company already has the Amazon Appstore, Amazon Underground is a brand new section as well as a new app to download premium apps for free. Here’s how it works. 
It looks like Angry Birds maker Rovio is having some troubles to pay the bills. The Finnish company is about to cut 260 jobs after reducing its workforce by 110 employees in October 2014. At the end of 2013, the company had 800 employees in total.