“A lot of people ask what’s different this time,” said Sam Altman, who took over Y Combinator from Paul Graham at the beginning of the year. “But the main thing I’m trying to do is keep things running the same way. YC is on this unbelievable trajectory.” Today’s Demo Day marks the first batch of companies that Altman has shepherded through the… Read More
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Ravti co-founder Alex Rangel walked into TechCrunch with a stack of crumpled yellow slips in his hand. “This is what the Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning industry still looks like,” he said, showing me a stack of papers with unintelligible scrawl. But Rangel and his co-founder Chris Ginter want to make managing HVAC units easier for property owners by marking equipment… Read More
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The other day, as I sat on the couch with a dead iPhone resting on my belly, I found myself wondering why my phone is constantly out of battery. And I had a revelation: I’d rather have a dead phone within reach than be even a few feet away from it as it charges across the room. It’s pathetic, I know, but absolutely true.
Enter the noPhone. Read More
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If you’ve been eyeing the Philips Hue connected lighting series with keen interest but are also unwilling to spend the big bucks the current series demands, now’s your chance to get on board: Philips has kicked off pre-orders for the Hue Lux line of bulbs, including individual units and a starter kit including two bulbs and a base. The Lux trades programmable colors for a cheaper… Read More
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A new startup called Traction says it’s giving brands an alternative to the traditional marketing model — instead of working with agencies, Traction has created a marketplace for finding the best marketing specialist for a given campaign.
Traction is part of the current batch of startups incubated at Y Combinator, i.e., the one that’s taking the stage at today’s Demo Day. Read More
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Fresh out this morning is a tablet optimized version of OneNote for Android, and several new features to OneNote for Windows. OneNote for Android tablets — you can snag it here — contains what Microsoft calls “handwriting support,” more formatting options, and interface tweaks to better suit larger tablet screens. In keeping with Microsoft’s cross-platform… Read More
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A project cosponsored by a group of Canadian universities, startups and Microsoft Azure has resulted in a robot named HitchBOT successfully making its way across Canada, beginning its journey in Halifax on the country’s eastern coast and ending in Victoria, British Columbia on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. The project saw a rudimentary robot depending completely on strangers willing to… Read More
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Mobile commerce today is still challenging with complicated checkout flows that see users bouncing between screens, and having to tap out their personal information on tiny screens and keyboards. PayPal today is hoping to change that with the release of a new product called One Touch for merchants and app developers. Read More
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Mailbox, the ultra-awesome email client owned by Dropbox, is making its way onto the desktop. By doing so, it’ll be coming full circle and providing a seamless user experience on all the devices you’d want to view and respond to email on. 
Chartio, a business intelligence service that lets you explore your data from a wide variety of sources, is launching a new service today that should make getting started with data analysis and visualization quite a bit easier.