Kiran Upadhyay

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...

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 Hipmu...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...