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Maria Rioumine Contributor Share on Twitter Maria Rioumine is the CEO and co-founder of Agora. U.S. cities are in the midst of an affordability crisis. Just between May 2020 and May 2021, home prices saw their biggest annual increase in more than two decades and construction material prices increased by 24%. The cost of renting […]

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. The enforcement of China’s new gaming regulations is unfolding like a cat-and-mouse game, with the country’s internet giants and young players constantly trying to outsmart each […]

The venture world is growing faster than ever, with more funding rounds, bigger funding rounds, and higher valuations than pretty much any point in history. That’s led to an exponential growth in the number of unicorns walking around, and has also forced regulators and venture law researchers to confront a slew of challenging problems. The […]

As policymakers and scholars work out how securities regulation can be used to address climate change, they should not overlook the potentially important role unicorn regulation can play.

Twenty years from now, will we look back on this decade as a turning point in protecting and upholding individuals' right to privacy, or will we still be saying, "Never again," again and again?

Last weekend, a reader wrote to this editor, politely asking why tech companies should speak up about the abortion law that Texas passed last week. “What does American Airlines have to do with abortion?” said the reader, suggesting that companies can’t possibly cater to both pro-abortion and anti-abortion advocates and that asking them to take […]

When we imagine what it will be like when we exit the pandemic, what we’re really wondering is what we want from the digital transformation we’ve seen overturn our understanding of work and living safely. As much as we long for the days of the office and collaboration with our peers, some of that is […]

“One of the biggest things that brands struggle with is figuring out attribution, and how you continue to spend money even though you may have lost some signal into the platform,” says Greg Gillman, chief revenue officer of LA-based performance marketing agency MuteSix, “If Facebook skews too heavily, and Google is on last click, then […]

Distilling the most impactful five to 10 minutes of content out of eight or more hours of raw video becomes a non-trivial time commitment. AI can help, but there are distinctions in methodologies.

Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

China is the second-largest source of venture capital in the world, and Chinese investors can bring value to foreign startups, but you need to study their expertise and how it can be useful for you.

We’ve been scouring the latest rumors and leaks and playing all of The Mamas and The Papas songs forward and backward to get the best possible picture of what we’re in store for with next Tuesday’s “California Streaming’” event. The invites, which went out a week in advance, don’t appear to give the game away […]

A specific vertical of BNPL products is gaining traction: one targeted toward small and medium enterprises (SMEs), also known as "SME BNPL."

China’s first data privacy laws go into effect on November 1, 2021. Will your company be in compliance? Modeled after the EU’s GDPR, the new regulations “[introduce] perhaps the most stringent set of requirements and protections for data privacy in the world,” writes Scott W. Pink, special counsel in O’Melveny’s Data Security & Privacy practice. […]

Quizlet, a flashcard tool turned artificial intelligence-powered tutoring platform, is planning an initial public offering nearly a year after it was valued at $1 billion. According to people familiar with the matter, Quizlet is considerably far along in the process to go public. A recent job filing shows that it is hiring for senior roles […]

Operators like Spin, Voi, Zipp, Bird and Superpedestrian are investing in tech that can detect and correct poor rider behavior, sometimes going as far as stopping scooters if they're on a sidewalk.

Just about every company is sitting on vast amounts of data, which they can use to their advantage if they can just learn how to harness it. Data is actually the fuel for machine learning models, and with the proper tools, businesses can learn to process this data and build models to help them compete […]

A judge this morning issued a ruling in California’s Epic Games v. Apple case, siding with the Fortnite maker on the topic of third-party payments. Effectively, the judge has ruled that Apple cannot prohibit developers from adding links for alternative payments beyond Apple’s App Store-based monetization. The mobile giant’s control over fees on iOS has […]

Crowberry Capital, operating in Reykjavik and Copenhagen, has launched Crowberry II: a $90 million seed and early-stage fund aimed at startups in the Nordic region. A second close — bringing in an additional $40 million — is planned for July 2022. The EIF (European Investment Fund) is the lead LP on the fund, after putting […]

WhatsApp said on Friday it will give its two billion users the option to encrypt their chat backups to the cloud, taking a significant step to put a lid on one of the tricky ways private communication between individuals on the app can be compromised. The Facebook-owned service has end-to-end encrypted chats between users for […]

Unless you hear it firsthand, it can be hard to discern if a partner is thinking about privacy, if they are committed to data ethics and how compliance is woven into their organization’s culture.

Microsoft said in January this year that Teams, its online collaboration platform, was being used by over 100 million students — boosted in no small part by the COVID-19 pandemic and many schools going partly or fully remote. Now, it’s made another acquisition to continue expanding its position in the education market. The company has […]

Vouch, a provider of business insurance to startups and high-growth companies, announced today it has raised $90 million in new funding. The $90 million figure was raised across two rounds: a $60 million Series C co-led by SVB Capital (a subsidiary of Silicon Valley Bank) and Ribbit Capital that values the company at $550 million, […]

MaxRewards is a digital wallet app that manages credit cards and automatically activates benefits like rewards, cashback offers and monthly credits.

Amagi provides cloud broadcast and targeted advertising software so that customers can create content that can be created and monetized to be distributed via broadcast TV and streaming TV platforms.

Ten days after Apollo Global completed its acquisition of Yahoo (formerly Verizon Media) from Verizon for $5 billion, it has appointed a new CEO for the group. Jim Lanzone, who is currently the CEO of dating app Tinder, is coming on to lead the company (which, disclaimer, also owns TechCrunch). Renate Nyborg, who had been […]

There are abusive corporations, and we do need a better social safety net so that people aren’t at the mercy of the doctrine of shareholder primacy, but that truth disguises a more complicated reality.

We like to buy things online ranging from e-commerce stores to subscription-based sites. However, no one enjoys the hassle when you have to always re-log into different sites and stores. I mean, shopping can be a whole lot more fun if a fast logging and checkout system existed across all your favorite online stores. In […]

Apple Music announced today that it’s created a process to properly identify and compensate all of the individual creators involved in making a DJ mix. Using technology from the audio-recognition app Shazam, which Apple acquired in 2018 for $400 million, Apple Music is working with major and independent labels to devise a fair way to […]

Epic Games has asked Apple to rejoin its Fortnite developer account in South Korea as the U.S. game maker plans to re-release Fortnite on iOS in South Korea, offering both Epic and Apple payments side-by-side, it said in a tweet. Epic has asked Apple to restore our Fortnite developer account. Epic intends to re-release Fortnite […]

Food ordering and delivery platforms DoorDash, Caviar, Grubhub, Seamless, Postmates and Uber Eats have banded together to sue the City of New York over a law that would permanently limit the amount of commissions the apps can charge restaurants to use their services. The Wall Street Journal first reported the news that the companies filed […]

Snyk, the Boston-based late-stage startup that is trying to help developers deliver more secure code, announced another mega-round today. This one was for $530 million on an $8.5 billion valuation, with $300 million in new money and $230 million in secondary funding, the latter of which is to help employees and early investors cash in […]

Apple has reportedly appointed a new executive to lead the development of its secretive self-driving car division. According to Bloomberg, the company has tapped Kevin Lynch to oversee Project Titan.

Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

GM unveiled Thursday the 2022 Chevrolet Silverado, a full-sized pickup truck that received a major technology upgrade, including its hands-free Super Cruise advanced driver assistance system and an infotainment system with embedded Google services, as well as an overhauled interior. A new flagship trim, the off-road ZR2 truck with a factory-installed suspension lift, has also […]

Modeled after the EU's GDPR, China's PIPL imposes protections and restrictions on data collection and transfer that companies both inside and outside of China will need to address.

Squad Mobility’s vision of the perfect urban vehicle is a low-cost EV equipped with solar panels, swappable batteries and enough zip and range in its diminutive 6.5-foot package to meet the needs of city drivers. The early-stage Dutch startup, which recently revealed the final design of its quadricycle, is now assembling working prototypes in Breda, […]

The U.K. government has announced a consultation on plans to shake up the national data protection regime, as it looks at how to diverge from European Union rules following Brexit. It’s also a year since the U.K. published a national data strategy in which said it wanted pandemic levels of data sharing to become Britain’s […]

Tired of swerving around the same pothole every day but don’t know how to report it to your city? Already reported it but feel like said report was fired off into the ether, never to be read much less fixed? DoNotPay, a company that makes annoying processes less annoying through automation, might be able to […]

Twitter today is introducing a new feature that will allow accounts to self-identify as bots by adding a label to their profile. This feature is designed to help people better differentiate between automated accounts — like bots that retweet the news, public service announcements or other updates — from those operated by humans. It’s not, […]

The JioPhone Next, the much-awaited smartphone designed by Google and India’s Jio Platforms to tap hundreds of millions of users in the world’s second-largest internet market, won’t launch on Friday, the Indian technology giant said Thursday midnight. In a statement issued just now, Jio Platforms said it has been testing the smartphone with a “limited […]

Southeast Asian tech companies are drawing the attention of investors around the world. In 2020, startups in the region raised over $8.2 billion, about four times more than they did in 2015.

Houseparty, the social video chat app acquired by Fortnite maker Epic Games for a reported $35 million back in 2019, is shutting down. The company says Houseparty will be discontinued in October when the app will stop functioning for its existing users; it will be pulled from the app stores today, however. Related to this […]

Earlier today, as part of a private event, this editor was afforded the opportunity to talk with some of the biggest names in the world of private equity, including Carlyle co-founder David Rubenstein; Bain Capital co-chair Steve Pagliuca; Jean Salata, the CEO and founding partner of Baring Private Equity Asia; and Sheila Patel, the vice […]

The aviation industry is notoriously difficult to decarbonize, in part because airplanes use a petroleum-based fuel to fly. Alder Fuels wants to change that. The new clean tech company, headed by Bryan Sherbacow, is developing a low-carbon jet fuel that can be used as a 100% drop-in replacement for petroleum fuel, without needing to adapt […]

GM has extended a shutdown at its Orion Assembly Plant another two weeks due to a battery pack shortage related to the widespread Chevrolet Bolt EV and Bolt EUV safety recall. GM said the extended downtime at the Orion plant will last through September 20. Orion Assembly Plant in Michigan has been shut down since […]

Fusion power plants will eventually replace most conventional power plants and related large-scale energy infrastructure that are still so dominant today. There will be no need for coal or gas.