WTF is .xyz?

If you’ve visited a crypto company’s website recently, you’ve probably visited a URL ending in “.xyz” instead of its cheugier counterpart, .com. From fintech Block, formerly known as Square, to venture firm Paradigm, to blockchain startups like Mirror, .xyz has become the go-to URL ending for many web3 companies. But what does it mean, and […]

This week in TechCrunch Experts: conversational UX, brand building 101, marketing survey

I reached back out to 10 marketers we’ve met through our Experts program and asked them to share predications for the new year and reflect on some of the trends we’ve seen in 2021.

GDevelop wants to make game development accessible

GDevelop is a game engine that lets you develop a video game without any specific development experience. While the ‘no-code’ trend has been quite popular this year, GDevelop has been around for a few years already. Florian Rival first started working on GDevelop as an open-source side project. The first public version on GitHub was […]

Amazon Lex brings automated call transcript review to chatbot building

Today, at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company announced the Amazon Lex automated chat bot designer in preview, a new feature that simplifies the chatbot training and design process by bringing a level of automation to it. “We are excited to announce the Amazon Lex automated chat bot designer, a new capability that reduces […]

AWS launches new services for the automotive industry

At its annual re:Invent conference, AWS today announced two new initiatives for the automotive industry. One is a new product, AWS FleetWise, a new service that makes it easier for automakers to collect and retrieve sensor and telemetry data from their vehicle fleets. The other is AWS Automotive, a broader, industry-specific initiative that brings together […]

Developer productivity tools startup Raycast raises $15M from Accel and Coatue

Developer-focused productivity tool Raycast has raised $15 million in Series A funding, led by Accel and Coatue. Also participating in the round were angel investors Johnny Boufarhat, the CEO and founder of Hopin; Jeff Weinstein, the head of product at Stripe; Jason Warner, the former CTO of GitHub and Ott Kaukver, the CTO of Checkout.com, […]

Render secures $20M Series A to scale its DevOps cloud platform

DevOps cloud platform Render, which won our Disrupt SF 2019 Startup Battlefield, announced today that it closed a $20 million Series A funding round led by Addition alongside existing investors General Catalyst and South Park Commons. Addition first made a small investment in Render in February 2020 when the company was not looking to raise […]