Hotel Urbano, a hotel search and booking platform and one of Brazil’s fastest growing startups, has raised an additional $60 million in strategic funding from discount travel conglomerate Priceline Group. Launched in 2011, Hotel Urbano previously raised $75 million from Tiger Global and Insight Venture Partners. The company declined to disclose a valuation, but co-founder João… Read More

Microsoft announced an academic research program Monday aiming to gather proposals for HoloLens technologies that further “the role and possible applications for holographic computing in society.”
Microsoft will be awarding $100,000 and two HoloLens development kits to the best five research proposals from academic institutions.
“This emerging technology teems with… Read More

Late last week, Microsoft kicked out another Windows 10 build, numbered 10162, to the ‘fast ring’ of its testing community.
The larger Windows Insider program has two groups, fast and slow, allowing people to select how raw they want their code. The build was rolled out to the larger group of testers today, those in the slow ring. Given that Windows 10 is now just 23 days out… Read More

Twitter today officially announced the launch of its new mobile Ads Manager, which allows users of Twitter’s smartphone applications to track their ad campaigns’ performance – including their impressions, engagements, spend, cost per engagement, and engagement rate – while on the go. The button was recently spotted in the wild, ahead of a formal announcement from… Read More

The best part of every TechCrunch Radio show (and trust me, there are tons of good parts) is the TC Radio Pitch-Off. For the last half-hour of each show, John Biggs and I bring on five of the coolest new startups we can find to pitch their product live on the radio. They each have exactly sixty seconds to share their story, at which point they’ll answer a few questions from a panel… Read More

Microsoft may have sold off some of its mapping assets to Uber last week, but almost as if to show that it’s still taking Bing Maps seriously, the company today announced a new preview release of Bing Maps for the web. Read More

If you’ve ever had to reserve a block of hotel rooms for a conference or wedding, you know how complicated the process can be. YC-Backed Roomblocker is a service that handles the entire group booking process, from gathering bids to accepting reservations for people in the group. Here’s how Roomblocker works: First, the company assigns each group organizer to a dedicated… Read More

While the rise of standalone streaming services has been fueled, in part, by increased connection speeds combined with the ubiquity of smart mobile devices, video consumption is still often taking place in the living room. And in the case of Hulu’s over-the-top streaming video service, living room viewing is actually on the rise. Today, living room viewing accounts for over 58 percent… Read More

Meet Talent.io, a new take on engineer recruitment companies. Talent.io isn’t your average headhunting agency and has opted for a more scalable model that should work for both engineers and recruiting companies. Three months after its beta launch in France, the company just raised $2.2 million (€2 million) from Alven Capital, Elaia Partners, Ventech and a few business angels. Read More

A number of apps over the years have attempted to make it easier for friends to get together offline by helping them to plan everything from casual get-togethers to more formal events. Now Microsoft is taking a shot at this space with a new social polling app called Tossup. The app lets a group of friends vote on things like where and when to meet, what restaurant to choose, as well as RSVP.… Read More