smartphone
South African startup Qwili gets $1.2M to scale its app and low-cost NFC-enabled smartphone
Qwili, a startup that provides a hybrid sales product to micro and small merchants in South Africa, has raised $1.2 million in seed funding a year after closing an undisclosed…
Messaging app Viber launches Payments, a new digital wallet for paying bills, money transfers and buying goods
Viber, the messaging app owned by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, has long been dancing around the area of fintech, launching services like money transfer and chatbot payments in various countries…
America’s favorite advertisement masquerading as a television show, “Shark Tank,” made Mark Cuban a household name (that is, if you weren’t already a Dallas Mavericks fan). But last week, the…
There’s some good financial news brewing for neobanks: new data indicates that at least some of the larger and better-known neobanks are going to be OK after all.
One way to curb competition in other countries is to file a patent in each of those countries. However, the cost of filing a patent in every country can be…
Luminar, the Florida-based lidar company that went public via SPAC in 2020, has formed a close alliance with an auto behemoth in China. It’s making a strategic investment of an…
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) used mobile location data to track people’s movements on a much larger scale than previously known, according to new documents unearthed by the American…
Welcome back to Chain Reaction. Last week, we looked at Solana’s smartphone and the post-Apple tech industry. This week, we’re looking at a web3 without…
Remember Meizu, the once-promising competitor to Xiaomi? The Alibaba-backed Chinese smartphone maker is making a comeback — in a way — as it gets acquired by the founder of Geely,…
Welcome back to Chain Reaction. Last week, we talked about the NFT community being down bad but still down to party. This week, we’re looking…
Apple’s relative hostility to the desires of crypto developers hasn’t gone unnoticed, and as the industry buckles down for a bear market, some of its proponents are pushing forward plans…
Five years ago, the European Union passed rules which largely ended mobile roaming fees for citizens traveling with their devices across borders within the bloc. Today lawmakers are reupping the…
Today, IKEA is launching a new AI-driven interactive design experience called IKEA Kreativ for IKEA.com and the IKEA app. With the new feature, U.S. customers can design and visualize their…
It’s hard to get a thrill from glimpses of unreleased smartphone hardware these days, given the baked-in maturity of the mobile market and the general form and function sameness of…
New report examines Africa’s growth in the digital economy and VC investment landscape
A new report from Endeavor Nigeria reveals that Africa’s digital economy and tech ecosystem is set to experience exponential growth periods. The report is dubbed “The Inflection Point: Africa’s Digital Economy is…
European Union co-legislators have reached provisional agreement on a common charging solutions for smartphones, laptops, tablets and other small and medium-sized electronics — some 15 different categories in all —…
Happy WWDC day. Today kicks off Apple’s annual developer’s conference, with the traditional keynote starting at 10:00 a.m. PST (watch it right here). Generally, WWDC focuses on software features and…
This Week in Apps: WWDC preview, hitting the Top Charts, Instagram’s AMBER Alerts
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues…
Smartphone manufacturing giant Foxconn has confirmed that a ransomware attack in late May disrupted operations at one of its Mexico-based production plants. “It is confirmed that one of our factories…
A group of more than 40 Democratic members of Congress has urged Google to stop collecting and retaining “unnecessary” location data over fears it could be used to identify people…
In 2017, we noted that smartphone screen sizes had settled into a sweet spot between five and six inches. In hindsight, that may well have been wishful thinking. A brief…
In April, Google introduced a new “multisearch” feature that offered a way to search the web using both text and images at the same time. Today, at Google’s I/O developer…
In the face of increased competition from Apple Maps and its 3D city views, Google today introduced its own vision for its next-generation Google Maps with a preview of its…
Indoor navigation was something we heard about a lot after the launch of the iPhone and during that first wave of location-based apps. But the technology has quietly evolved over…
reMarkable, maker of a focus-friendly e-paper tablet, says it closed funding at a $1B+ valuation after selling 1M devices
Hardware, as the saying goes, is hard; but there remains an opportunity for startups that focus on specific niches to build viable businesses. In the latest example, reMarkable, the Oslo,…
Featured Article
Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade: Should you delete your period-tracking app?
Experts say fears over period-tracking apps in a post-Roe vs. Wade world aren’t unfounded, but knowing which apps track you is only half of the battle.
Workforce management unicorn Workrise has fixed an exposed API that was spilling some users’ personal information. The Austin, Texas-based startup, which previously went by RigUp, was founded in 2014 as…
In a rare show of alliance, Apple, Google and Microsoft have joined forces to expand support for passwordless logins across mobile, desktop and browsers. Passwords are notoriously insecure, with weak…
Cybersecurity 101: These Android settings and features will help protect your privacy and security.
Eye-tracking has long been one of the those computing holy grails. Whether it’s accessibility concerns, opening up new form factors or just trying to put a novel spin on the…