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TechCrunch is hosting one of our single-topic Sessions events centered on AR/VR and mixed reality in Los Angeles on October 18th at UCLA’s Royce Hall. We’re going to be doing some very cool stuff that we’re not quite ready to talk about, but at the core we’re looking to have incredible discussions with the best and brightest in reality creation. The goal is to get folks into one room to see some demos, hear some talks and take part in a salon of sorts about the state of AR/VR. We’ll talk shop, philosophy, hardware, software and inclusion. As someone who has logged hundreds of hours in a headset, reported on the space and been an advocate of what augmented and virtual realities could do for us, I’m pretty excited. I’ll be programming the event personally, along with our crack reporter in the space, Lucas Matney. The show promises to be bang-up cool with attention paid to the hardware and software that will enable the next generation of experiences in the augmented reality and virtual...

We’re excited to announce Steve Case and JD Vance will sit down for a fireside chat at Disrupt SF this September. There’s plenty to talk about, too, including the pair’s latest venture: A massive $150 million seed fund backed by an impressive group of investors that are targeted at startups outside of Silicon Valley. As  The New York Times  put it after the fund’s announcement, the complete list of investors in the Rise of the Rest fund “may be the greatest concentration of American wealth and power in one investment fund.” It includes among others Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, John Doerr, Jim Breyer, Dan Gilbert and members of the Walton, Koch and Pritzker families. This fund is core to what Case and Vance are championing at  Revolution . The Washington, D.C.-based venture capital firm primarily backs companies outside of major tech hubs. At Disrupt New York in May,  Case told the audience  that many regions are overlooked simply because investor...

Microsoft is launching an update to its Android launcher today that gives parents the ability to track their kids’ location. This is one out of a number of parent- and kid-focused announcements the company made today. Others include the ability to block sites in Microsoft Edge on Android and the launch of MSN Kids , a new curated news website for children. At the core of these new features are Microsoft’s family group settings  that already allowed you to do things like track a child’s activity on Windows 10 and Xbox One devices or limit screen time in general. “As a mother to a young and curious daughter, I deeply understand the need for tools to help balance the use of technology in the home as well as out of the home,” writes Shilpa Ranganathan, the General Manager of Microsoft’s Mobile Experiences group, in today’s announcement. “It’s especially near and dear to me as leader of a team building experiences for mobile devices. We emphasize the idea of transparency as a guidin...

Two weeks after his company attempted to impose a policy targeted at curbing “hate content and hateful conduct,” Spotify’s CEO admitted the company mishandled its roll out. During an interview at this week’s Code Conference , Daniel Ek told the crowd, “The whole goal with this was to make sure that we didn’t have hate speech on the service. It was never about punishing one individual artist, or even naming one individual artist as well.” The policy, introduced on May 10, pulled certain artists from Spotify’s curated content streams over bad conduct in their personal lives. Pushback on the policy was almost instantaneous,   and reports surfaced last week that Spotify was rethinking its approach. In particular, rapper XXXTencion, who was one of two artists single out by the service (along with R. Kelly), was reportedly going to be added back to Spotify’s popular Rap Caviar playlist at some unspecified point.  Ek acknowledged that the implementation could have been handled be...

If you’ve ever been in a pointless meeting at work, odds are you’ve spent part of the time responding to messages or just putzing around on the Internet — but Klaxoon hopes to convert that into something a bit more productive with more interactive meetings. The French startup today said it’s raised $50 million in a new financing round led by Idinvest Partners, with early round investors BPI, Sofiouest, Arkea and White Star Capital Fund also participating. The company offers a suite of tools designed to make those meetings more engaging and generally just cut down on useless meetings with a room of bored and generally unengaged people that might be better off working away at their desk or even taking  other meetings. The company has raised about $55.6 million in total. The whole point of Klaxoon is to make meetings more engaging, and there are a couple ways to do that. The obvious point is to translate what some classrooms are doing in the form of making the whole session ...

It’s often the case that women don’t think much about their reproductive health until they have to. Sometimes it begins with an aside from a well-meaning gynecologist — or one’s impatient parents. Sometimes, it’s because a couple is ready to try conceiving and it’s proving harder than they imagined it would be. A San Francisco-based startup called Modern Fertility wants to educate women about their reproductive health much earlier in their lives, enabling them to become more “proactive” instead of reactive, says co-founder and CEO Afton Vechery, who worked formerly as a product manager at the genetic testing company 23andMe and, before that, at a healthcare-focused private equity firm in Greenwich, Conn. At both places, she learned a lot about the growing number of companies that are empowering customers with information about their own bodies. She also learned, particularly at 23andMe, about the importance of making that information affordable. Indeed, after shelling out $1,500 for...

Amazon QuickSight , the company’s business intelligence tool for AWS, launched back in 2015, but it’s hard to say how much impact the service has made in the highly competitive BI market. The company has far from given up on this project, though, and today, it’s introducing a new pay-per-session pricing plan for access to QuickSight dashboards that is surely meant to give it a bit of a lift in a market where Tableau and Microsoft’s Power BI have captured much of the mindshare. Under the new pricing plan, creating and publishing dashboards will stay cost $18 per user and month. For readers, though, who only need to have access to these dashboards, AWS now offers a very simple option: they will now pay $0.30 per session up to a maximum of $5 per month and user. Under this scheme, a session is defined as the first 30 minutes from login. Previously, AWS offered two tiers of QuickSight plans: a $9 per user/month standard plan and a $24/user/month enterprise edition with suppor...