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Pebble confirms it’s shutting down, devs and software going to Fitbit

RIP Pebble… The wearable maker that pioneered wrist-based notifications before Apple and many others waded into the smartwatch space has confirmed it’s closing its doors as an independent entity. Late last month rumors emerged that Fitbit was set to acquire Pebble — with our sources telling us the price-tag was between $34 million and $40M, a figure they said “barely” covered the startup’s debts. Although the company avoided an explicit confirmation of the rumor by tweeting a shrug emoji until now. Today Pebble’s CEO Eric Migicovsky has published a blog with official confirmation of the acquisition and details of what will happen to Pebble products. The post does not confirm the acquisition price, however. “We have made the tough decision to shut down the company and no longer manufacture Pebble devices,” he writes. “While dissolving Pebble as you know today is difficult, I am happy to announce that many members of Team Pebble will be joining the Fitbit family to continue their

Slack and Google announce partnership focused on better integrating their services

Slack announced a strategic partnership with Google Cloud this morning, which will bring a number of new features, including deeper integrations with Google services, to its collaboration platform for teams. Among the additions are new bots for notifications, as well as support for Google’s recently launched Team Drives, document previews, permissioning and more. The move comes at a time when Slack is facing new competition from Microsoft and Facebook, who have each launched their own rival products in recent weeks. Microsoft Teams is basically a Microsoft Slack clone, but has the added advantage of being able to tie into Microsoft’s suite of services, including Skype and Office 365. Slack, as an independent company, doesn’t have the same, native ability connect deeply to other products and services that a business may use – instead, it relies on third-party integrations. Google and Slack have already worked together on that front, though not via formal arrangement like this. Go

Airbnb plummets, Facebook ranks top in tech on Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work 2017

Facebook has risen to the top spot among tech companies on the annual Glassdoor Best Places to Work U.S. rankings. That seems fitting for the company in a year when it is taking on Slack, Microsoft-owned Yammer, and other workplace collaboration platforms with its own Facebook Workplace. Facebook’s Head of People, Lori Matloff Goler, told TechCrunch that the social media giant focuses on being a “strengths-based organization” and wants to be known as an employer that “takes good care of its people overall.” She said, “Most employees speak favorably about their ability to have a real impact here. Many talk about the flexibility in the way we work. Your manager is there to care for you, set context and help you play to your strengths, give you feedback and goals, but let you do whatever you need to get there. It’s not about how much time you spend in the office. This is great for families but was inspired by engineers who, as you know, like to or need to work at different hour

Google, HTC, Oculus, Samsung, Sony join forces to create Global VR Association

After a couple years of being driven primarily by the startups, the virtual reality industry is growing to be one increasingly dominated by the big dogs. There’s still a sizable amount of fragmentation in the industry as well a high chance of failure for many of the efforts currently being undertaken. For these reasons some of the biggest names in the industry, Google, HTC, Oculus, Samsung, Sony and Acer have joined forces to create the Global Virtual Reality Association (GVRA) which aims to “unlock and maximize VR’s potential,” but its really not clear what this all means for consumers. What many in the VR community have been thirsting for is some unification of standards in terms of software and hardware. Games bought in the Oculus store don’t play on the Vive or PS VR. Sensors for the Vive don’t work on Oculus. Sony doesn’t play nice with anyone else’s standards etc. etc. Valve, which makes the Steam store and SteamVR platform for the HTC Vive and others, is notably not a m

Google launches App Maker

Google today announced the launch of App Maker, the newest entry in the low-code, drag-and-drop app building market. Like its competitors from Microsoft and numerous startups, App Maker promises to make it easy for anybody to quickly develop basic apps that serve a very specific purpose inside an organization. The new service features a cloud-based drag-and-drop development environment that lets you build the user interface and populate it with data from your G Suite applications, Google Maps, Contacts and Groups and virtually any service that offers an API. These applications then run on the same infrastructure on which Google’s own G Suite apps run, and IT admins can also manage them in exactly the same way as Gmail, Drive and other G Suite applications. The typical use case for these kind of apps are time-tracking solutions, or tracking orders and inventory — essentially any problem inside a company that can be easily digitized and solved by a very basic custom app. The ad

Facebook’s advice to students interested in artificial intelligence

That’s the gist of the advice to students interested in AI from Facebook’s Yann LeCun and Joaquin Quiñonero Candela

 who run the company’s Artificial Intelligence Lab and Applied Machine Learning group respectively. Tech companies often advocate STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), but today’s tips are particularly pointed. The pair specifically note that students should eat their vegetables take Calc I, Calc II, Calc III, Linear Algebra, Probability and Statistics as early as possible. From this list, probability and statistics are perhaps the most interesting. From what I remember about high-school, those two subjects are regularly dismissed as too-obvious strategies for skirting the informal AP Calculus preference of top colleges and universities (AP Statistics is often thought of as a cop-out by students). If differential equations represents the electricity that powers machine learning, statistics represents the gears of the machine itself — as the company

Native mobile adtech startup Avocarrot acquired by Glispa Global Group for $20M

Native mobile advertising startup Avocarrot — which, interestingly, was in the first cohort of company builder Entrepreneur First — has been acquired by adtech company Glispa Global Group. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, though TechCrunch understands from sources that the headline price is around $20 million. That’s likely a mixture of cash and stock and may also include various earn-out stipulations. It should also be noted that EF won’t make a dime out of this exit. Avocarrot joined the London-based company builder, which targets technical graduates to help them become entrepreneurs, before it started investing in the startups it puts through its program. In other words, as was the case when CustomInk was bought for a reported $100 million, EF didn’t have an equity stake in Avocarrot. How times have changed. That said, the exit does provide a little more validation that EF’s unique model works. Described as a native advertising Supply-Side Platform, Avocarrot offers a

Concur buys Hipmunk to add search to its travel and expense management platform

Some interesting consolidation afoot in the travel industry: Concur, the travel and expense platform that was acquired by SAP in 2014 for $8.3 billion, is today making its own acquisition: it is buying Hipmunk, the travel search startup. The companies are not disclosing the terms of the deal but we are trying to find out. Hipmunk had raised around $55 million since being founded in 2010, but its valuation has never been sky-high. Some clues to the value of this deal: Its last valuation as of 2014 (ahead of two small venture rounds) was around $96 million, according to PitchBook.  We at TechCrunch had last heard around April 2016 that it was trying to raise money, but in a down-round. In the event, Hipmunk picked up a small $5.75 million in venture funding that very month. Hipmunk will be integrated into Concur’s platform (which currently has search already, but as a Concur user, I can attest to the fact that it’s not that great and will be very much improved by adding Hipmunk).

Uber starts self-driving car pickups in Pittsburgh

The announcement comes a year-and-a-half after Uber hired dozens of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics center to develop the technology. Uber gave a few members of the press a sneak peek Tuesday when a fleet of 14 Ford Fusions equipped with radar, cameras and other sensing equipment pulled up to Uber’s Advanced Technologies Campus (ATC) northeast of downtown Pittsburgh. During my 45-minute ride across the city, it became clear that this is not a bid at launching the first fully formed autonomous cars. Instead, this is a research exercise. Uber wants to learn and refine how self driving cars act in the real world. That includes how the cars react to passengers — and how passengers react to them. “How do drivers in cars next to us react to us? How do passengers who get into the backseat who are experiencing our hardware and software fully experience it for the first time, and what does that really mean?” said Raffi Krikorian, director of Uber ATC. If they a

Google launches final release version of Angular 2.0

After Google launched the first version of its Angular web application framework in 2010, it quickly became one of the hottest web technologies. Since then, the web has changed, though, and when Google announced Angular 2 in 2014, it created quite a stir in the web development community because this new version wasn’t just an update, but instead a complete rewrite that wasn’t compatible with the older version. Today, after numerous preview and beta releases, the company is officially launching the final release version of Angular 2.0. “Angular 1 first solved the problem of how to develop for an emerging web,” the company writes in today’s announcement. “Six years later, the challenges faced by today’s application developers, and the sophistication of the devices that applications must support, have both changed immensely.” Application developers today, however, also have a far wider choice of JavaScript frameworks. Facebook’s React framework especially has a lot of momentum behi

Analytics company Heap raises $11M

Heap announced today that it has raised $11 million in Series A funding. We’ve written about the company’s “capture everything” approach to analytics before — it aims to collect data about every tap, swipe and other action that a user takes on a website or app. CEO Matin Movassate said this should allow anyone at a company to answer any question they might have about user behavior without having to go through an engineer. In fact, Movassate said Heap is “most successful when it’s adopted by basically everyone in the organization and becomes the foundation for analysis across teams.” He recalled that when he was a product manager at Facebook, there were many analytics tools available, but “despite all of that apparatus, it was really difficult for me to use data effectively.” “It was always bottlenecked,” he continued. “By the time I’d get the answer to my question, I needed to loop in three different stakeholders.” Heap has now raised a total of $13 million. The new round

With iPhones and computer models, do we still need weather forecasters?

As the 10pm newscast drew near one night last month, the chief meteorologist of Birmingham's ABC-affiliate began to get worked up. Balding and characteristically attired in suspenders, James Spann is one of the most recognizable and respected local TV meteorologists in the country. But he had a familiar problem. The day had been pleasant in Alabama, and more of the same temperate spring weather lay ahead—so what the heck was he going to talk about? “I’ve got 2 minutes and 30 seconds to fill,” Spann explained. “Everyone in my audience is going to know what the weather is going to do. Except maybe my mom. She’s 85 years old. But most everybody has looked on their phone or some other device already. So what am I going to do? Am I just going to rehash everything they already know?” Many forecasters have been asking themselves this question lately. Two technologies have converged to rapidly displace the primary function of meteorologists. First are computers that are generally be

Microsoft officially launches Planner, its Trello competitor

The Microsoft Office lineup is getting a new addition today: Microsoft Planner, team collaboration software that lets you visually organize plans, assign tasks, share files, chat and more. The new app, first introduced into testing last fall, enters a competitive space which includes pro software like Atlassian’s JIRA Core, as well as other easy-to-use tools from startups like Trello and Asana. Very much like Trello, Planner also utilizes the concept of “Boards” to keep work organized. Within each Board are individual Cards that can have their own due dates, attachments, categories and conversations. These Cards can have documents or photos attached to make it easier to see – at a glance – what that Card is about, and the cards can be organized into columns called “Buckets” which can also be color-coded and prioritized. Another key aspect to the software is the “Hub” where you can track the overall progress of the plans, see who’s on time and who’s behind, and filter down to see

Artificial intelligence is changing SEO faster than you think

By now everyone has heard of Google’s RankBrain, the new artificial intelligence machine learning algorithm that is supposed to be the latest and greatest from Mountain View, Calif. What many of you might not realize, however, is just how fast the SEO industry is changing because of it. In this article, I’ll take you through some clear examples of how some of the old rules of SEO no longer apply, and what steps you can take to stay ahead of the curve in order to continue to provide successful SEO campaigns for your businesses. So what is artificial intelligence? There are generally three different classifications of artificial intelligence: Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI): This is like AI for one particular thing (e.g. beating the world champion in chess). Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): This is when the AI can perform all things. Once an AI can perform like a human, we consider it AGI. Artificial Superintelligence (ASI): AI on a much higher level for all things

Healthcare booking platform DocPlanner scores $20M Series C and merges with Doctoralia

Europe’s DocPlanner, an online booking platform for healthcare appointments, has raised a $20 million Series C round, and at the same time is announcing a merger with Spain’s Doctoralia. The new funding, which was led by Target Global, will be used for further international expansion and development of the company’s online practice management software solution. ENERN Investments and EBRD also participated, bringing total raised by DocPlanner to $34 million. That the acquisition of Doctoralia is being billed as a merger is interesting and apt, although no further details are being disclosed. Doctoralia claims 9 million users monthly and is available in 20 countries, including Spain, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. DocPlanner on the other hand, claims 8 million monthly users and is available in 25 countries, with a HQ in Poland and 200 employees based in offices in Warsaw, Istanbul and Rome. The idea is to make the combined company the market leader in healthcare online booking. T

Facebook is disabling messaging in its mobile web app to push people to Messenger

Facebook is removing the messaging capability from its mobile web application, according to a notice being served to users: “Your conversations are moving to Messenger,” it reads. Welcome news to the millions like me who switched to the web app in order to avoid Messenger in the first place! At the moment, you can just dismiss the notice and go about your business. But this summer the warning will become an impenetrable wall, and your only option will be to download the official Messenger app. I’m a little worried about this, because surely the mobile site is much used by people who have good reason not to download the app. People whose phones don’t have official clients, for instance, or who can’t upgrade to the latest version of an OS, and must access via the web. And really, it strikes me as quite a hostile move, as it did before when they axed messaging from the main app. If, as everyone in the company is constantly repeating, mantra-like, that they want to connect the

TeamViewer users are being hacked in bulk, and we still don’t know how

For more than a month, users of the remote login service TeamViewer have taken to Internet forums to report their computers have been ransacked by attackers who somehow gained access to their accounts. In many of the cases, the online burglars reportedly drained PayPal or bank accounts. No one outside of TeamViewer knows precisely how many accounts have been hacked, but there's no denying the breaches are widespread. Over the past three days, both Reddit and Twitter have exploded with such reports, often with the unsupported claim that the intrusions are the result of a hack on TeamViewer's network. Late on Friday afternoon, an IBM security researcher became the latest to report a TeamViewer account takeover. "In the middle of my gaming session, I lose control of my mouse and the TeamViewer window pops up in the bottom right corner of my screen," wrote Nick Bradley, a practice leader inside IBM's Threat Research Group. "As soon as I realize what is hap