Hello, friends, and welcome to a slightly more important episode of CrunchWeek. This week, we became vassals of a new empire, Taylor Swift bequeathed her most recent album to Apple’s new streaming product, and WikiLeaks is back in the news as fresh NSA leaks have emerged. Read More
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Intuit has confirmed to TechCrunch that it has laid off 399 people, or just under 5 percent of the company’s roughly 8,000 employees, in a re-alignment of the company. Patrick Barry has also stepped back from leading Demandforce, though he remains an employee of Intuit. Read More
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Early adopters who signed up for Project Fi, Google’s recently announced initiative to provide its own cellular service, can now keep better tabs on the status of their requested invite thanks to a new online tool Google rolled out this week. Potential Project Fi customers were alerted to the availability of the tool by way of an email which informed them that they could now track… Read More
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French startup Snips just raised $6.3 million (€5.6 million) in a seed round led by The Hive, with participation from Eniac Ventures, 500 startups, Brent Hoberman, Xavier Niel and Bpifrance. The company wants to add some sort of artificial intelligence layer on top of your smartphone so that you can use your phone more efficiently. In pragmatical terms, Snips will release in the near future… Read More
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Disney has now somewhat belatedly joined the ranks of the numerous app publishers offering their own custom keyboards for iOS 8 users with the launch of an iOS application called Disney Gif. The new app is a mobile keyboard extension that lets you share Disney and Pixar-themed GIFs via text messaging as well as email and social networks. At launch, the app includes over 200 GIFs, the… Read More
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The Apple Watch is expanding beyond the launch group of countries today, shortly after the device first became available for in-store purchase at Apple Retail with a reservation. The international sales expansion includes Italy, Mexico, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland and Taiwan as of today, and the next group includes the Netherlands, Sweden and Thailand starting July 17.… Read More
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Kindle e-book reader owners will now have a new way to socialize with their friends about their favorite books or book quotes by way of mobile messaging apps, including Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, texting, and more. The change is indicative of the trend toward private sharing as the preferred means of connecting with friends, versus larger, more public social media platforms like Facebook… Read More
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As malicious hacks, data breaches and other forms of cyber crime continue to persist in our networked, Internet-connected world, Sophos, a maker of antivirus software, firewall hardware and other security products for networks, individual users and servers, is going public on the London Stock Exchange.
Trading now as Sophos Group plc and using the “SOPH” ticker, the company… Read More
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U.K. startup Naturebytes is bringing a different emphasis to the tech-plus-education space. It’s aiming to combine hackable technology with a mission to spark kids’ curiosity in the great outdoors. 
Playbasis, a company that offers gamification solutions for business and enterprises, has closed a $1.85 million Series A round as it bids to broaden its services and develop new technology such as virtual reality for companies.