TechCrunch Startup News

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Xage introduces fingerprinting to protect industrial IoT devices May 15, 2018

Show notes

As old-school industries like oil and gas increasingly network entities like oil platforms, they become more vulnerable to hacking attacks that were impossible when they were stand-alone. That requires a new approach to security and Xage (prounounced Zage), a security startup that launched last year thinks it has the answer with a concept called ‘fingerprinting’ combined with the blockchain.

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Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank, now lets you pay ‘Nearby Friends’ May 11, 2018

Show notes

Monzo, one of a plethora of U.K. fintech startups aiming to re-invent current account banking, has launched a new feature that makes it even more frictionless to transfer money to friends. Dubbed ‘Nearby Friends’, the new geolocation functionality uses Bluetooth to let you see anyone else that uses Monzo who is nearby so that you can initiate a payment without needing their phone number to be in your contact book first.

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Fantasmo is a decentralized map for robots and augmented reality May 10, 2018

Show notes

“Whether forAR or robots, anytime you have software interacting with the world, itneeds a 3D model of the globe.We think that map will look a lot more like the decentralized internet than a version of Apple Maps or Google Maps.” That’s the idea behind new startup Fantasmo, according to co-founder JamesonDetweiler.

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On Fridays, HQ Trivia will let you see your friends’ answers during the game May 10, 2018

Show notes

HQ, the live trivia game that is now seeing up to 2 million players per game, is introducing some new social features, including answer sharing with friends. The company has been testing this feature across a small group of users already, but on Friday the feature will roll out to all HQ users. Here’s how it works: Users can connect their address book to HQ and add their friends. Once they have added friends, they can see which of their friends are playing the game alongside them.

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Brazil’s tech startups begin to expand globally May 09, 2018

Show notes

Startups in Brazil, Latin America’s largest entrepreneurial ecosystem, are no longer solely focused on Brazil as their only frontier to conquer. Based on conversations with founders and in tracking the news, dozens of startups born in Brazil have realized they can compete on a global scale and expand their companies quickly by exporting their business models to other regional markets around the world, including Canada, Colombia, Europe, Japan, Mexico, the U.K. and the U.S.

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Gamalon scores $20 M led by Intel Capital May 09, 2018

Show notes

Gamalon wants to change the game when it comes to understanding text-based customer communications. Instead of using neural networks to learn about vast corpuses of information, the startup takes a different approach, putting the text in a database and building decision trees to very rapidly train the data to arrive at the required information. Today, it announced a $20 million Series A investment led by Intel Capital. Other participants in the round included .

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The formula behind San Francisco’s startup success May 07, 2018

Show notes

Why has San Francisco’s startup scene generated so many hugely valuable companies over the past decade? That’s the question we asked over the past few weeks while analyzing San Francisco startup funding, exit, and unicorn creation data. After all, it’s not as if founders of Uber, Airbnb, Lyft, Dropbox and Twitter had to get office space within a couple of miles of each other. We hadn’t thought our data-centric approach would yield a clear recipe for success.

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ICO services: Lots of barnacles but no whales May 03, 2018

Show notes

Nearly every aspect of the current ICO market is pay-for-play or otherwise tainted. I do not paint the industry with such a broad brush lightly but this sort of chicanery hasn’t existed since the heyday of print media when journalists – myself included – took long, convoluted trips to distant headquarters where they enjoyed, as I wrote back in 2007, “suckling on the sweet teat of junket whoredom.

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Sling TV expands cloud DVR service to a bunch of new devices May 03, 2018

Show notes

Sling TV expands cloud DVR service to a bunch of new devices Dish’s Sling TV service is expanding its Cloud DVR to a wide variety of new devices. Chrome browser, Chromecast, Xbox One, LG Smart TVs, and more recent models of Samsung Smart TVs (2016 and 2017 models) will all now support Sling TV’s Cloud DVR service.

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SoFi founder Mike Cagney is back with a new startup and $50 million in funding, too May 02, 2018

Show notes

SoFi founder Mike Cagney is back with a new startup and $50 million in funding, too Mike Cagney, who was ousted last summer from the lending company he founded, is back with a new startup and a whole lot of funding from at least one of his previous investors.

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