Victoria's Blog

imToken , which claims to be the world’s largest Ethereum wallet, will focus on expanding in Asia and the United States after raising a $10 million Series A from IDG Capital, it announced today. The capital will also be used to add new features, including support for Bitcoin, EOS and other blockchains. imToken is the latest addition to IDG Capital’s cryptocurrency investments, which include Coinbase and Circle. In a press statement, global chairman Hugo Shong said “imToken has developed its product into one of the top crypto asset wallets in the world with such a sound reputation. We believe it will become a significant infrastructure for the tokenization manifesto, benefitting both the crypto economy and blockchain technology. We’re excited to back imToken.” Founded in 2016 by chief executive officer Ben He and based in Hangzhou, imToken’s core market is currently China. The company supports 30,000 tokens, claims more than 4 million monthly active users and says it handled $35 milli...

Mining hardware is weird stuff. Either it’s commodity hardware used – inefficiently – for complex computation or specifically-designed, expensive boards that can be used to bring in Bitcoin and little else. Asus, a motherboard maker of some renown, is now helping bridge the gap. The H370 Mining Master is a basic motherboard that supports 20 graphics cards, the boards used for Ethereum and other less resource-intensive scripts. The cards connect via PCIe-over-USB and each port has is individually controlled and managed by on-board diagnostics. This lets you ensure that each graphics card is running properly and fully connected. From the release: Less time maintaining your machine means more time mining with it, which is why the H370 Mining Master includes a suite of diagnostic features designed to make your platform easier to manage. Chief among them is GPU State Detection, which scans the system at boot and indicates whether each riser port is empty, connected to a functional gr...

Want to understand all the most important tech stats and trends? Legendary venture capitalist Mary Meeker has just released the 2018 version of her famous Internet Trends report. It covers everything from mobile to commerce to the competition between tech giants. Check out the full report below, and we’ll add some highlights soon. Then come back for our slide-by-slide analysis of the most important parts of the 294 page report. As of 2018, half the world population, or about 3.6 billion people, will be on the internet. That thanks in large part to cheaper Android phones and Wifi becoming more available, though individual services will have a tougher time adding new users as the web hits saturation. While smartphone shipments are flat and internet user growth is slowing, U.S. adults are spending more time online thanks to mobile, clocking 5.9 hours per day in 2017 versus 5.6 hours in 2016. Interest in cryptocurrency is exploding as Coinbase’s user count has nearly quadrupled s...

It looks like the investment service Acorns may turn into an oak faster than expected. Billed as an automated investment manager for the people, Acorns is off to a blistering start with its new retirement account service picking up 100,000 accounts in its first month. Unlike other investment services, Acorns takes spare change from transactions and rewards agreements with certain retailers to invest in a managed portfolio. The company’s initial “spare change” investment service cost $1 per month and its new retirement-focused account costs $2. “If you’re an Acorns customer, within 60 seconds you can open up a retirement account,” says chief executive Noah Kerner. Those fees ($2 per-month for the retirement account) are in place until a customer hits the $1 million investment threshold. Kerner says that most of Acorns over 3.5 million customers are investing roughly $50 to $60 per month into their core accounts, which is ideal for investors who aren’t particularly savvy about inv...

Snapchat is taking another shot at location after its always-on coordinate-broadcasting Snap Map proved a bit invasive for some users. Snapchat now lets you send your ongoing real-time location to a friend, or request theirs, which show up on the Snap Map and within your message thread. Essentially, this is location sharing built for the intimacy people love about Snapchat, rather than the foreign and a little freaky idea of giving a wide swath of your contacts access to your whereabouts through Snap Map. As Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp ruthlessly exploit their clones of Stories, it’s the more private, close friends features like this and ephemeral messaging that are Snapchat’s best shot at staying relevant. TechCrunch was tipped off to the location feature by our reader Chand Sethi (thanks!) and now Snapchat confirms it’s been slowly rolling out to iOS and Android users over the past few weeks. Snap Map, which launched last June , has always offered the option to only share wi...

At the very beginning, there were 15 startups. After a morning of incredibly fierce competition, we now have a winner. Startups participating in the Startup Battlefield have all been hand-picked to participate in our highly competitive startup competition. They all presented in front of multiple groups of VCs and tech leaders serving as judges for a chance to win €25,000 and an all-expense paid trip for two to San Francisco to participate in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch’s flagship event, Disrupt SF 2018 . After many deliberations, TechCrunch editors pored over the judges’ notes and narrowed the list down to five finalists: Glowee , IOV , Mapify , Wakeo and Wingly . These startups made their way to the finale to demo in front of our final panel of judges, which included: Brent Hoberman (Founders Factory), Liron Azrielant (Meron Capital), Keld van Schreven (KR1), Roxanne Varza (Station F), Yann de Vries (Atomico) and Matthew Panzarino (TechCrunch). And now, meet the Startu...

Fifteen companies just got off the stage at TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield Europe at VivaTech in Paris. The TechCrunch team has taken feedback from our expert judges and narrowed the group down to five companies that will be competing in the finals on the VivaTech Main Stage at 6:15pm CET. (If you’re not at VivatTech, you can watch the finals live here on TechCrunch.) One of the startups will receive the the TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Top European Startup award, as well as €25,000 in equity-free money. Here are the finalists: Glowee Glowee is developing biological light systems using the natural properties bioluminescent marine organisms. These systems are built by encoding genes in symbiotic bacteria and will require neither electricity nor installation infrastructure. IOV IOV is building a decentralized DNS for blockchains. By implementing the Blockchain Communication Protocol, the IOV Wallet will be the first wallet that can receive and exchange any kind of cryptocur...

The stories format has been one of the most sticky features of social apps like Snapchat and Instagram, letting users stitch together video, photo and text overlays to convey moods and experiences to friends and followers; even Google has incorporated stories into its services. Now Airbnb is becoming the latest adopter of the format: the travel and accommodations startup has quietly launched a new feature called Travel Stories, a way for guests to create video sequences of their Airbnb experiences to post on the site. The company has sent out invitations for a beta of the service to a pool of users (pictured below, sent to us by reader Matteo Gamba, who runs an Airbnb blog ). A FAQ page about the new format says that for now Story making is only available on the latest version of its iPhone app, under the Travel Stories tab of your profile. Video clips are limited to 10 seconds each and are taken from your camera roll and can be edited in the Airbnb app. You can then look at the ...

I’m not who I was supposed to be. No aspiring writer sets out to be a minor writer. I didn’t dream of growing up and writing books that sell modestly, are received quietly, and reviewed indifferently. I was indoctrinated by hours spent curled on the sofa and in bed at night reading great writers and feeling, somehow, in their presence. Whoever it is who first gets his or her hooks into you, Jane Austen, Saul Bellow, J.D Salinger, or, in my case, Jack London and then Joseph Heller, it feels as if he or she understands you, from thousands of miles away and even centuries ago. To become such a writer, a so-called major or important writer, that becomes the dream. Yet not all of us make it. For me, there was no map to becoming a major writer. (There might be one now, more on that below.) I read the lives of writers and how they came to their majesty and they were impossible to track. Jack London worked at a cannery. Joseph Heller wrote advertising copy. Harper Lee took airline reservatio...

Around 5 o’clock on a warm May evening, guests started lining up in Ossining, New York, for the closing performance of a new production of John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” But before they could enter the theater, they had to hand over their phones, remove their shoes, and walk through a metal detector, like travelers embarking on a long flight. A guard stamped their right hands with ultraviolet ink, led them into a room with bars on the doors, and locked the door behind them. After a moment, another guard unlocked a second door, and the guests were finally ushered into the visitor room of Sing Sing Correctional Facility. In many respects, the space resembled any community theater, with a couple hundred chairs lined up around a simple black stage. But Sing Sing is a maximum-security prison, so coils of razor wire were visible through the windows. Prison-issue green pants separated the incarcerated from the guests. Correctional officers stood watch, handcuffs and batons strapped to ...

M arcel Proust drew the inspiration for his earliest literary works from two of his high-school classmates: Jacques Bizet and Daniel Halévy. As Geneviève’s son and nephew (in the Breton way), they introduced him into her salon, catalyzing Proust’s involvement in mondain society. But first, the two boys did something that established a template for Proust’s entire creative output: They transfixed him, and then disappointed him, and thereby drove him to write. In October 1887, Jacques and Daniel, both 15, enrolled in Paris’s Lycée Condorcet, where Proust, 16, was in the class above theirs. The two cousins had been best friends since infancy, growing up in the same apartment building in the rue de Douai. Their families’ cozy cohabitation had come to an end in October 1886, when Geneviève had married Émile Straus after 11 years of widowhood. Following the wedding, the bride and groom had moved with Jacques into a new apartment in the elegant eighth arrondissement, geographically not far ...

Fintech startup Revolut is adding Bitcoin Cash and Ripple to its cryptocurrency feature. While cryptocurrency isn’t really Revolut’s focus point, it’s a good way to get started with cryptocurrencies. If you have a Revolut account, you can now buy and hold Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Ripple and Bitcoin Cash. Behind the scene, the startup has partnered with Bitstamp to process the transactions. Revolut currently charges a 1.5 percent fee for cryptocurrency transactions. There are currently 100,000 cryptocurrency transactions per day. Compared to a traditional cryptocurrency exchange, you can’t send or receive cryptocurrencies from your Revolut account. You don’t get a bitcoin address for instance. All you can do is buy tokens in the app. If you want to transfer those tokens somewhere else, you’ll have to sell them for USD, GBP, etc. and then buy cryptocurrencies on a traditional exchange using your fiat money. Recently, the startup also announced a new feature called Vaults . Revo...

From Howeycoin to a Chinese study that found 421 fake token sales , governments and researchers are finally shedding light on bad actors in the token sale space. Take, for example, Operation Cryptosweep. According to an North American Securities Administrator’s Association , regulators in the US and Canada are looking into 70 token sales and may be taking action against as many as 35. They write: NASAA members from more than 40 jurisdictions throughout North America participated in “Operation Cryptosweep,” which to date has resulted in nearly 70 inquiries and investigations and 35 pending or completed enforcement actions related to ICOs or cryptocurrencies since the beginning of May. NASAA members are conducting additional investigations into potentially fraudulent conduct that may result in additional enforcement actions. These actions are in addition to more than a dozen enforcement actions previously undertaken by NASAA members regarding these types of products. Many NASAA memb...

Right on the heels of launching its concierge service Hooch Black , Hooch announced today that it has raised $5 million in seed funding. The company’s basic subscription of $9.99 gets you one free drink per day from a variety of partner bars and restaurants. Hooch Black (which you have to apply for, and which costs $295 per year) adds hotel deals, concierge service and other perks on top. Even though Hooch had already raised $2.75 million in two pre-seed rounds, co-founder and CEO Lin Dai said it was more important to bring on strategic investors than it was to raise a lot of money: “We feel like the most important thing for our business is really the relationships.” After all, he said the hospitality industry is controlled by “a few key companies,” so success is determined by working with those companies — it’s not a situation where someone can just beat you by outspending you. The funding was led by Revelis Capital Group and Blue Scorpion Investments, with participation from ...

Circle Invest is one of the easiest products when you want to get started with cryptocurrencies. When Circle first launched the app, I compared it to Coinbase. And Circle is making it even easier to get started as you can just “buy the market” now. Circle Invest started with just a handful of cryptocurrencies — Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic and Litecoin. But now, the company has added Monero and Zcash. If you don’t know anything about cryptocurrencies, it’s hard to know where you should put your money. That’s why Circle has created a button that lets you buy all coins available on Circle Invest, weighted depending on their respective market capitalization. The total market cap of Bitcoin is much higher than the total market cap of Zcash, so you’ll end up with more Bitcoin than Zcash. Circle Invest is available on the App Store and Play Store in the U.S. except in except in NY, MN, HI and WY. The company plans to launch in Europe at some point. The app only...

Fueled by last year’s greed-inducing visions of a crypto-currency boom and a stock market largely untethered from classical economics , TradingView , a developer of social networking and data analysis tools for financial markets, has raised millions in new venture funding. The New York-based company just scored $37 million in funding led by the growth stage investment firm Insight Venture Partners . TradingView has developed a proprietary, JavaScript-based programming language called PineScript, which lets anyone develop their own customized financial analysis tools. The company “freemium” software as a service model let’s most users connect and exchange trading tips and tricks for free, but begins charging when customers want access to more charts, data and real-time server-side alerts. There are three payment plans beginning at $15, with a mid-tier at $30 and a high-end $60 per-month premium option. The company had previously boosted its growth by offering its charting softwar...

Within the first minute of Brooklyn Nine-Nine ’s fifth season finale, the show’s protagonist Detective Jake Peralta asks his colleagues to threaten a private citizen. It’s his wedding day, and his bride-to-be’s suddenly stained veil needs to be dry-cleaned ASAP. When Jake entreats Detective Rosa Diaz and Sergeant Terry Jeffords to use force to get it cleaned, Jeffords insists, “We’re not going to abuse our power.” “Of course not!” Jake pointedly exclaims “We’re good cops!” (Emphasis his.) This episode, indicative of Brooklyn Nine-Nine ’s series-long anxiety and ambivalence over being a cop show, could have been its last: The show was canceled by FOX in mid-May but picked up for a sixth season by NBC just over a day later, in part due to an outpouring of support on social media that included pleas from high-profile fans like Guillermo Del Toro and Lin-Manuel Miranda . Facebook posts, tweets, and essays lauded everything from the show’s stars, to its representation of gay an...