Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group has long been one of the most prominent early-stage funds in the backyard of Amazon and Microsoft. Now, however, the firm is starting to look beyond the Pacific Northwest with the launch of its $100 million Acceleration Fund, which will expand its geographic reach and give it a vehicle to invest […]

The family of Walter Huang, an Apple engineer who died after his Tesla Model X with Autopilot engaged crashed into a highway median, is suing Tesla. The State of California Department of Transportation is also named in the lawsuit. The wrongful death lawsuit, filed in in California Superior Court, County of Santa Clara, alleges that […]

The 11th mission for Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital launch vehicle is slated for takeoff Tuesday morning. The craft will be carrying 38 (!) experimental payloads from NASA, students, and research organizations around the world. You’ll be able to watch the launch live tomorrow at about 6 AM Pacific time. New Shepard, though a very […]

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Apple’s stock jumps 5 percent after beating expectations Apple released earnings for its fiscal second quarter yesterday, reporting revenue of $58 […]

Walmart-owned streaming service Vudu announced today that it will be launching new interactive shows later this year, created through the company’s joint venture with interactive content startup Eko. This confirms a Bloomberg report that Walmart plans to debut several interactive new shows produced with Eko, along with shoppable ads. We’d hoped that the company would take […]

During last year’s F8 developer conference, Facebook announced the 1.0 launch of PyTorch, the company’s open source deep learning platform. At this year’s F8, the company launched version 1.1. The small increase in version numbers belies the importance of this release, which focuses on making the tool more appropriate for production usage, including improvements to […]

At its F8 developer conference, Facebook today launched Ax and BoTorch, two new open-source AI tools. BoTorch, which, as the name implies, is based on PyTorch, is a library for Bayesian optimization. That’s a pretty specialized tool. Ax, on the other hand, is the more interesting launch, as it’s a general-purpose platform for managing, deploying […]

It’s no secret that unless you opt out, Google keeps a very detailed record of your location history and a log of the web sites you visit in Chrome and apps you use. There have always been ways to fully opt out of this or to painstakingly delete these records manually. Yet while there are […]

Twitter has faced a barrage of awkward questions from the U.K. parliament over its ongoing failure to tackle violent abuse targeted at women.  Katy Minshall, the social media platform’s head of U.K. government public policy, admitted it needs to do more to safeguard women users — but claimed the company is “acutely aware” of the […]

Google is combining several technologies including virtual phone numbers, audio transcriptions, automated reporting and analytics, in a new effort to help small business owners better manage their inbound phone calls. The company’s latest project from its in-house incubator is CallJoy, launching today.  Aimed at the U.S.’s 30.2 million small business owners, the system offers a […]