Crunch Hype

Well, isn’t this a nice little surprise? This morning some PlayStation 4 owners are reporting the sudden and unexpected arrival of a new “PS5 Remote Play” app. While the app doesn’t do much yet (the PS5 isn’t out yet, after all), it seems meant to let you keep a PlayStation 5 in one room and […]

Prioritizing quality user research will ensure that your products and ideas are given the opportunities they deserve to be properly realized and to succeed.

Chafing at new misinformation safeguards and a lost election, dejected Trump supporters flocked to the alternative social network Parler over the weekend. Parler’s homepage promises that users can “Speak freely and express yourself openly, without fear of being ‘deplatformed’ for your views.” Parler shot up the charts across Apple’s App Store and the Google Play […]

One of the most challenging aspects of running your space startup is access to capital. At TC Sessions Space (December 16-17), we’re bringing together some of the top space funding programs to help founders discover how they can tap into grant money to fuel their startups. Each grant program will have 30 minutes for founders […]

Could there be a tech sector more thrilling and daunting than space? We think not. If that’s your orbit, don’t miss TC Sessions: Space 2020 on December 16-17. It’s where you’ll find the industry’s greatest thinkers, makers, shakers and investors. More on that in a minute. Right now, a reminder that the $125 admission price […]

As part of its latest stunt, MSCHF, a venture-backed creative studio that’s smarter and more audacious than most, is poking a little fun at the venture industry itself and perhaps publications like TechCrunch too. The startup has spun out a rather simplistic app into a separate company and raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding […]

YouTube Music is taking another cue from Spotify with today’s launch of a set of personalized playlists that are essentially YouTube Music’s own take on Spotify’s “Daily Mixes.” Each of these new “My Mix” playlists will feature a different aspect of a user’s tastes and interests, allowing users to dive in to a particular vibe […]

A number of healthcare disparities exist for Black people in America, but they can oftentimes go unaddressed due to the lack of education and understanding among medical professionals. Spora Health, which launches today for patients in Virginia, Tennessee, Pennsylvania and Florida, aims to fix that. “An equitable healthcare system has never existed in America, especially […]

Nuro, the autonomous delivery startup founded by two former Google engineers, has raised $500 million, suggesting that investors still have an appetite for long-term pursuits such as robotics and automated vehicle technology. Nuro now has a post-money valuation of $5 billion. The Series C round was led by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price […]

Great Jones is expanding into a new area of the kitchen tomorrow, with what co-founder and CEO Sierra Tishgart described as the startup’s biggest launch since it released its first products two years ago. Ahead of launching the new bakeware line, Great Jones is announcing that it has raised $1.75 million in new funding. The money […]

Macs. Okay, great. We’re done here.

So much can change in a day. This morning, news that a trial COVID-19 vaccine candidate had an effective rate of more than 90% shook the financial world. The Pfizer vaccine is reportedl;y so effective, the company “will have manufactured enough doses to immunize 15 to 20 million people” by the end of the year, […]

The Federal Trade Commission has announced a settlement with Zoom, after it accused the video calling giant of engaging in “a series of deceptive and unfair practices that undermined the security of its users,” in part by claiming the encryption was stronger than it actually was. Cast your mind back earlier this year at the […]

Quartz is going private, with co-founder and CEO Zach Seward buying the business news site from its current owner Uzabase. In his post announcing the deal, Seward described the move as a management buyout that will also see Editor in Chief Katherine Bell and the rest of the Quartz staff taking equity in the new […]

McDonalds is developing what it calls a plant-based platform called the McPlant that will debut in markets around the world early next year, according to a report in USA Today. In an investor meeting McDonald’s announced that it had worked to develop its McPlant formulation exclusively. “McPlant is crafted exclusively for McDonald’s, by McDonald’s,” Ian […]

Apple Music is targeting Gen Z users in its battle with Spotify . On Friday, Apple launched ten new Apple Music playlists focused on the music interests of Gen Z users — including one playlist that features the latest tracks to go viral across social media apps like TikTok. Other playlists feature emerging artists and […]

Riverside.fm is a new startup with an easy-to-use platform for recording professional-quality video podcasts. In fact, although the company only recently came out of stealth, it already has a number of high-profile customers including TechCrunch’s parent company Verizon Media and Hillary Clinton, who’s using Riverside.fm to record her new podcast “You and Me Both With […]

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every Saturday in your inbox. Welcome back to The Station, a newsletter dedicated to all the present and future ways people and packages move from Point A to Point B. What.A.Week. Shall we […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can […]

In addition to the new iPhone 12 mini and the iPhone 12 Pro Max, I was able to try out Apple’s new MagSafe Duo Charger. It’s a folding dual travel charger that will hold both an iPhone using MagSafe and an Apple Watch using its more traditional magnetic charger. Does it work? Yep, works exactly […]

India’s antitrust watchdog has opened an investigation into Google for allegedly abusing the dominant position of its app store to promote its payments service in the world’s second largest internet market. In its Monday announcement (PDF) about opening an antitrust case against Google, Indian watchdog Competition Commission of India said it would review claims whether […]

Qumulo, the Seattle-based data storage startup, announced a bunch of updates today including support for NvME caching, an approach that should enable customers to access faster flash storage at a lower price point. NvME flash storage development is evolving quickly, driving down the price with higher performance, a win-win situation for large data producers, but […]

Reviewing the iPhone 12 mini and the iPhone 12 Pro Max at the same time has been an exercise in extremes. I noted in my earlier reviews of the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro that it was difficult to evaluate the middle of the lineup without having the extreme ends of the scale available […]

The iPhone 12 Pro Max is probably the easiest of all of the new iPhone 12 models to review. It’s huge and it has a really, really great camera. Probably one of the best cameras ever in a smartphone if not the best. For those of you coming from an iPhone “Max” or “Plus” model […]

Japanese startup ispace, which is developing lander technology to support exploration of the Moon, is opening an office in Denver, the company announced today. The Colorado location was chosen because of its access to local aerospace engineering talent, and the plan is for the company to quickly staff up a full local engineering team. ispace […]

Cannabis was a big winner from the results of the United States’ election, and industry stocks are soaring on both the voting results and recent earnings. Companies such as Canopy Growth Corporation, Tilray, and Aurora Cannabis are seeing their valuations pop in pre-market trading as good news for the industry adds up. Some companies are […]

As 5G slowly moves from being a theoretical to an active part of the coverage map for the mobile industry — if not for consumers themselves — companies that are helping carriers make the migration less painful and less costly are seeing a boost of attention. In the latest development, Cellwize, a startup that’s built […]

Stock markets worldwide are soaring on news that a vaccine candidate is 90% effective at preventing COVID-19, and could start coming to market in a matter of months. This is upending the stock market, sending futures shares shooting higher in pre-market trading. But while the euphoria is helping sectors that have taken punishment during COVID-19, […]

A press report emerged over the weekend claiming European lawmakers who are worried about terrorism are speeding towards a ban on end-to-end encryption. Spoiler: It’s a little more nuanced than that. Read on for our break down of what’s actually going on… Is Europe about to ban E2E Encryption? No. A report in the Austrian […]

The COVID-19 vaccine being developed by Pfizer and its partner BioNTech has shown to be effective blocking vaccine in 90 percent of participants in its Phase 3 clinical trial, the companies announced on Monday. That’s based on data analyzed by an external, independent committee assigned to check the results of the trial, and reflects only […]

Apple has suspended new business with supplier Pegatron after the Taiwan-based original equipment manufacturer misclassified student workers. Apple also said Pegatron broke its Code of Conduct for suppliers. In a statement provided to Bloomberg, Apple said, “Pegatron misclassified the student workers in their program and falsified paperwork to disguise violations of our Code, including allowing […]

Singapore-based Nektar.ai, a productivity platform for sales teams, has raised $2.15 million in seed funding. Founded earlier this year, Nektar has been working in stealth mode with five companies, and has plans for an early adopter release before a public launch by the end of 2021. Its seed round was led by Nexus Venture Partners, […]

Inrupt, the startup from World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee, announced an enterprise version of the Solid privacy platform today, which allows large organizations and governments to build applications that put users in control of their data. Berners-Lee has always believed that the web should be free and open, but large organizations have grown up […]

On paper, “The Queen’s Gambit” might not sound like a compelling drama: Based on a novel by Walter Tevis, the Netflix series tells the story of Beth Harmon as she rises through the world of competitive chess, eventually taking on the world champion from the Soviet Union. But on the latest episode of the Original […]

When large parts of the world were shutting down in March, we really didn’t know how we would move massive numbers of employees used to working in the office to work from home. In early March, I wrote a piece on how to prepare for such an eventuality, speaking to several experts who had a […]

Welcome back to Human Capital and congrats on making it through one of the hardest weeks of the longest year. Now that the Associated Press has called the election in favor of Joe Biden, it should be good news for DEI practitioners, who expressed some worry they’d be out of a job if Trump was […]

This is The TechCrunch Exchange, a newsletter that goes out on Saturdays, based on the column of the same name. You can sign up for the email here. Are you tired? I am. What a week. But, if you kept your eyes off American politics and instead focused on the stock market, this was not a week […]

As the US settles in for some new form of national gridlock, state and local propositions are busy defining how technology businesses will be allowed to work (legally) in the US.

Following a tense week of vote tallying, Joe Biden won the state of Pennsylvania and vaulted ahead in the race to become the next president of the United States. Biden’s win in the critical state put him over the threshold of 270 electoral votes, cutting off all avenues for his opponent. Biden prevailed by flipping […]

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the TechCrunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending three hours and 40 minutes per day […]

A former CFO of the state of California, Steve Westly is passionate about government. The onetime eBay exec and early Tesla board member has also been a proponent of clean energy for roughly 30 years, so he’s feeling optimistic right now, with former U.S. VP Joe Biden amassing a growing number of electoral votes and […]

I’ve worked at TechCrunch for a little over a year, but this was one of the hardest weeks on the job so far. Like many people, I’ve been distracted in recent days. As I write this, I have one eye on my keyboard and another on a TV that sporadically broadcasts election results from battleground […]

Netflix takes an old-fashioned approach for its latest feature, Amazon plans a new data center in India and we review the PlayStation 5. This is your Daily Crunch for November 6, 2020. The big story: Netflix tests a linear video channel Today in surprising product strategies: Netflix is testing a linear channel in France called […]

Startups that produce lab-grown meat and meat substitutes are gaining traction and raising cash in global markets, mirroring a surge of support food tech companies are seeing in the United States. New partnerships with global chains like McDonald’s in Hong Kong, the launch of test kitchens in Israel and new financing rounds for startups in […]

Provizio, a combination hardware and software startup with technology to improve car safety, has closed a seed investment round of $6.2million. Investors include Bobby Hambrick (the founder of Autonomous Stuff); the founders of Movidius; the European Innovation Council (EIC); ACT Venture Capital. The startup has a “five-dimensional” sensory platform that — it says — perceives, […]

European lawmakers are pressing major e-commerce and media platforms to share more data with each other as a tool to fight rogue traders who are targeting consumers with coronavirus scams. After the pandemic spread to the West, internet platforms were flooded with local ads for PPE of unknown and/or dubious quality and other dubious coronavirus […]

In recent times startups have appeared offering credit at an e-commerce basket checkout so that a customer can buy a product without needing to pay right away. Klarna or Clearpay are the two most notable in this field. But what if you flipped the model around so that consumers could buy the item at a […]

Last year, the French government and the government-backed initiative La French Tech unveiled an index of French startups so that it would be easier to identify them. The 40 top-performing startups get the label Next40, and the top 120 startups are grouped into the French Tech 120 — it’s a play on words with the […]

Pony.ai, the Chinese autonomous vehicle startup and relative newcomer to the industry, is now valued at $5.3 billion following a fresh injection of $267 million in funding. The round was led by TIP, an innovation fund within the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board that focuses on late-stage venture and growth equity investments in companies that […]

What a difference a week makes. This time last week, in the wake of earnings from tech’s five largest American companies and early results from other software companies, it appeared that tech shares were in danger of losing their mojo. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or […]