The Best Pros Won’t Work For You, But You Can Still Engage Them

 Recruiting is one of the top jobs for any executive or entrepreneur. Talent is the lifeblood of your company; let it drain away, and you die. Unfortunately, that lifeblood is in very short supply — and it’s about to get worse. Here’s why. Read More

Stitch Is A Social Network For Seniors

 The winner of a recent TC Radio Pitch-Off contest, Stitch is a social network designed for those over 50 years old. Headquartered in Australia, the site is designed to help members find friends, romantic companionship, or just new activities to try. Marcie Rogo, cofounder of Stitch, explained that “many older adults have lots of things they want to do, but nobody to do them with.… Read More

Can Civil Comments Kill The Internet Troll?

 To paraphrase an oft seen Internet trollism, ‘Internet comments are the worst thing since Hitler’. By which I mean: they suck. They suck bad. No, they really suck. The problem we have right now with Internet comments is clear: negativity and nastiness is burying or discouraging everything else. Read More

Our 9 Favorite Companies From 500 Startups “Demo-Ween”

 500 Startups today presented its 14th batch of companies at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, with a spooky twist. Dave McClure said this batch was less international than previous batches, with only 39% of founders hailing from outside the United States. Of the 36 startups that went through the program, 25% had female founders. He made no mention of people of color.… Read More

Monclarity Raises $5M And Launches Its Brain-Training App Brainwell

 Startup Monclarity announced today that it has raised $5 million in seed funding from Access Industries. And it recently unveiled Brainwell, a brain-training app available on iOS, Android, Kindle and the web. Now, there’s been a lot of skepticism around brain-training games like Lumosity, particularly after a recent study of the existing research found that these games may improve… Read More

Legion Analytics Offers A Pandora-Style Interface For Finding Sales Leads

 The founders of Legion Analytics say they’re offering a better way for salespeople to find new customers. The startup is part of Y Combinator’s new fellowship system, an eight-week program for “very, very early” stage companies who receive a $12,000 grant and fly in for office hours and mentorship. What’s wrong with the current lead generation process? CTO… Read More

Sacca To Shark Tank: “I Will Not And Cannot Do It If I Have To Wear A Suit”

 If you’re not familiar with Shark Tank, it’s ABC’s show that drops companies in front of investors from all walks of life, including the very loud Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks. It’s oddly become a family favorite for a lot of people I know, mostly because they get to shout at the TV and make predictions on whether someone will invest or not, or talk about… Read More

Forget Self-Destructing Messages, Buzz’s New App Offers Self-Destructing Connections

 Today, there are a variety of apps to choose from if you just want to privately chat with friends or even place phone calls without having to give out your real phone number – for example, Google Voice, Burner, kik, Viber, Whatsapp and others are popular choices. But these apps aren’t fully private. Users still have to provide a phone number or email when creating an account, or,… Read More

More Than A Selfie App, Shots Produces Original Videos With Puppets (And Bieber)

 Shots has been pigeonholed since birth. First it was dismissed as just a startup funded by Justin Bieber. Then it was laughed at for being an app just for selfies. But after 2 years, $15.2 million raised, and almost 10 million sign-ups, Shots refuses to die. In fact, it’s branching out. Today the company released the first of a series of original video content it’s produced… Read More

Summly Founder Nick D’Aloisio Leaves Yahoo

 The founder of Yahoo-acquired Summly, Nick D’Aloisio, has left the company to focus on his philosophy and computer science schoolwork at Oxford, we’ve confirmed with D’Aloisio. During the summer, D’Aloisio did a stint at Airbnb as its ‘Entrepreneur In Residence’ according to his LinkedIn profile. Read More

TransferTo Is The Piping That Sends Cash And Phone Minutes To Overseas Friends And Family

 Getting lots of money from point A to point B is pretty easy if you have lots of money. If you want to send a little money, however, you run into a lot of problems. That’s where TransferTo comes in. The company, which was founded in 2006 but has recently hit its stride in the international remittance world, can send small amounts of money around the world and customers can receive… Read More

VSCO Takes On Instagram’s Boomerang With Its New GIF Creation App DSCO

 VSCO, one of the few apps to give Facebook’s Instagram solid competition with a photo editing application aimed at more serious mobile photographers, is today releasing its next new creation. DSCO, as the just-launched spin-off is called, takes advantage of VSCO’s imaging technology to allow users to create short, looping GIF images which can be shared to VSCO’s user… Read More

An Inside Look At Upthere, The Company Aiming To Be Your Personal Cloud

 The year is 2015 and yet the promise of the “personal cloud” has failed me. There are tons of drag and drop and syncing “backup services” but nowhere that’s my slice of the puffy white stuff. Enter the 80 employees and impressive pedigree of Palo Alto based Upthere. Read More

Giphy Expands Beyond Messenger With Its New GIF-Sharing App

 Giphy, the popular resource that’s becoming the web’s go-to resource for finding and sharing GIFs, has rolled out a significant upgrade to its flagship mobile application today, which sees the app rebranded from an add-on utility for Facebook Messenger users, to a fully-featured, standalone app for finding and sharing GIFs across a number of channels, including social networks,… Read More

Meet Teforia, A Tea Brewing Robot For The Home

 Tea making is a delicate process that only the truest of enthusiasts around the world appreciate. The time-honored tradition of sourcing the right ingredients, taking care to consider the age of the leaves, the season of the year and the temperature of the water and then waiting for it to steep to just the right amount of time takes knowledge and patience. And, according to Han, most of us… Read More

Spacio Pro Plans To Supercharge Open House Showings With A Smart App

 If software is eating the world, it’s also eating our houses. The real estate market changed radically when companies like Zillow unpacked the data around house sales. In theory you’d think there wasn’t much to do on house sales, but there remains a relatively untapped area. One of the next areas of change could be be in the ‘open house’ market, where houses… Read More

Talkspace Therapy-By-Text Service Launches Asynchronous Audio, Video Messaging

 Talkspace, the service that lets users have unlimited messaging to their therapists for $25/week, has today publicly launched asynchronous audio and video messaging between patients and therapists. This will allow users to connect via more than just text messages, and given that a level of trust between patient and therapist is the basis for effective psychotherapy, the deeper level of… Read More

Modsy Brings The Virtual When Designing Reality

 Modsy is today launching a private beta for its novel approach to home design. Using sophisticated 3D rendering solutions, the service turns photos of your simple room into the swanky home of your dreams. This startup has built a service that can bring professional interior decorating to the masses. The service works like this: The homeowner takes several pictures of the space they want to… Read More

Blippar AR Platform Acquires Binocular To Dive Into The Virtual Try-On

 Blippar, the ad platform that delivers AR content through real-world tags, has today announced the acquisition of Binocular. Binocular is an Austin, TX-based company that creates augmented reality applications for brands, with a specialty in the virtual try-on. The company created the Glasses.com app for Luxotica, which manufactures 75 percent of the world’s sunglasses, letting users try… Read More

Forget The 7-Day Forecast, WeatherPlanner Will Give You Year-Ahead Weather Predictions

 Are you sick of not knowing what the weather will be like at your cousin’s best friend’s sister’s birthday party that is in six months? Well, now you can know exactly what the weather will be like that day…sort of. Recently featured in the TechCrunch Radio Pitch-Off, WeatherPlanner is a year-ahead weather service that will tell you what the weather will be like on… Read More

Gobble Raises $10.75M For Its 10-Minute Dinner Kits

 Food delivery startup Gobble is announcing that it has raised $10.75 million in Series A funding. Gobble does the measuring, chopping, mixing and (to a certain extent) cooking for its customers. So when you get a dinner kit, you should be able to turn it into a fully-cooked meal in 10 minutes, using a single pan. The company says it currently serves 1 million customers in California, so the… Read More

YaJoe Makes Clothes For All Us Nerds, Geeks

The last 20 years of my life – from about senior year of high school until now – I have made a concerted effort not to look like a nerdy weirdo doofus head. It’s been a hard road, I assure you, but I’ve finally come out the other side the of dweeb door a better dorkus. And now YaJoe can help us all make the trek into non-nerditute. Created by ExOfficio founder Joe… Read More

How Startups Can Become The Unexpected Parental Leave Champs

 Work hard, write code, get rich. The technology business is rarely regarded as anything other than fast-paced and family-phobic. But the last few months have felt like a summer of change, as companies’ parental leave policies came under the spotlight, with businesses large and small falling over themselves to offer staff greater and greater benefits. Read More

Household Expenses App Splittable Raises $1.2M Funding

 Splittable, the London-based startup that makes an app to help manage and share household expenses, has raised raised $1.2 million in new funding to further build out the software and increase marketing. Read More

ADP Drops Lawsuit Against Human Resources Startup Zenefits

 The legacy payroll company ADP on Tuesday dropped its defamation lawsuit against its quickly growing competitor, Zenefits. In a major victory for the startup, a U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice. Per the terms of the settlement, ADP stated it has no reason to believe problems exist with the security of Zenefits software. Zenefits… Read More

Barry Silbert Launches Digital Currency Group With Funding From MasterCard, Others

 Less than a week after selling SecondMarket to NASDAQ, Barry Silbert has announced the official launch and and first round of funding for Digital Currency Group. Talking onstage to TechCrunch Editor John Biggs today at Money 20/20, Silbert announced that the company has closed a round from Bain Capital Ventures, Transamerica Ventures, FirstMark Capital, MasterCard, and New York Life,… Read More