News
Chris Enslin wants a sub-$1 sensor for the Internet of Things. For the right product, his company might be willing to purchase a few million of them — a year.
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Amazon recently launched ‘Pet Profiles’ on the Amazon.com marketplace. Now you can add your family’s furry (and scaly) friends to your account, because pets are people too.
Upon signing up your first pet you’ll be given a one-time 20 percent discount on your next pet food order. There’s also member-only discounts on pet-related items for customers who have set up the new profiles.
Getting started is simple, navigate to Amazon.com and select “Pet Supplies” from the list of departments. Once there click on “Pet Profile” in the horizontal menu.
To read more, click here.
N26, the European mobile banking service, today announced the launch of N26 Metal, the company’s premium Mastercard-affiliated credit card “tailored to the needs of digital customers” at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin. N26 Black customers in Germany, France, Italy and Austria will be able to sign up for the new NFC-enabled card, which obviously features a metal core made from tungsten and that makes the card weigh a lot, starting December 14.
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Consumer confidence fell again in November, marking the 20th consecutive month of negative shopper sentiment.
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Last week, the exposure of allegedly one of the biggest bot networks ever to be discoveredunderlined the looming threat that ad fraud poses to the digital media sector.
Adform, the adtech outfit behind the revelation, claims the bot network – dubbed “Hyphbot” – was so sophisticated that it compromised up to 500,000 machines, and generated up to a 1.5 billion fake ad requests a day.
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Edinburgh-based TravelNest, an advertising optimisation platform for holiday rental owners, has raised £3m in Seed funding.
Early-stage venture firms Pentech, Mangrove Capital Partners and Frontline Ventures participated in the round.
Mark Logal, former COO of Skyscanner, also invested and will be joining the firm’s board.
To read more, click here.
The findings come in a major new report from venture capital firm Atomico which signals a feared Brexit effect on the industry has not materialised.
Investors have ploughed $5.4bn into the UK's tech companies in 2017, figures from Dealroom show, more than double the amount of its nearest rival Germany.
And the country remains the number one destination for tech talent, attracting 20 per cent of all international migrants in European tech, LinkedIn data demonstrates, and is home to more professional developers than any other country.
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What if you could play with landmarks instead of just touring them? Nexto is turning audio guides into games to make sightseeing more interactive. Launching today as part of TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin‘s Battlefield competition, Nexto is partnering with tourist destinations to help them attract more visitors and earn more money to fund culture.
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For every thriving billion-dollar unicorn, there are endless numbers of start-ups that have passed onto the other side — laying off their engineers with their matching, branded t-shirts; closing down their game rooms filled with ping-pong tables; and leaving heartfelt goodbye notes for customers on their soon-to-be defunct websites.
To see who the 10 startups that died in 2017, click here.
User-generated Amazon reviews are one of the most important ways that consumers find products and decide what to buy. So much so that Amazon has consistently shown itself to be Google’s competitor in e-commerce search. Almost all Amazon product reviews are written but, as business research firm L2 wrote, Amazon is now pivoting to video.
To read more about Amazon's new video strategy, click here.