Crunch Hype

SpaceX and NASA are getting ready to complete their most important joint mission to date – Crew Dragon Demo-2, which is the culmination of the partners’ work on their Commercial Crew program designed to certify a SpaceX spacecraft for regular human spaceflight operations. NASA astronauts are already on board Crew Dragon making their way back […]

NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley have successfully undocked from the International Space Station, which is the first crucial stage of their return to Earth. Next, they’ll travel on a coast phase that will take them on a descent course back through the atmosphere from space, shedding speed as they prepare to deploy the […]

As TikTok’s existential rollercoaster ride continues to rattle on, the company is trying to sway regulators and the public with a flood of dollars and arguments wrapped in free enterprise and free speech to ensure that its parent company Bytedance can retain control of its operations. The push to validate its business comes as reports […]

The TechCrunch Exchange newsletter just launched. Soon only a partial version will hit the site, so sign up to get the full download. Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter for your weekend enjoyment. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free. And it’s made just […]

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary, and Steve Gillmor . Recorded live Saturday, July 11, 2020. For more, subscribe free to the Gillmor Gang Newsletter. Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor @fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang The Gillmor Gang on Facebook The latest […]

Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7am PT). Subscribe here. German software giant SAP bought experience management platform Qualtrics for $8 billion days before the unicorn’s IPO, back in November of 2018. But last weekend it decided to spin out the experience management […]

TikTok’s U.S. General Manager Vanessa Pappas has posted a video message to the platform that appears to be a response to reports from Friday that President Trump is working on an effective “ban” of the app in the U.S., a plan he shared with reporters from the White House pool on board Air Force One. […]

With more than 90 major advertisers and counting announcing plans to dump Facebook, a significant question lingers: Where will brands go next for their digital marketing needs?

This week, we're focused on rounding up the news from the U.S. antitrust investigation into Apple, as it pertains to apps, the App Store and developers.

Welcome back to Tech at Work, where we look at labor, diversity and inclusion. Given the amount of activity in this space, we’re going to ramp this up from bi-weekly to weekly. This week, we’re looking at the latest action from a group of Amazon warehouse workers in the San Francisco Bay Area, how to […]

China’s ByteDance has agreed to divest its TikTok operations in the US, according to a report in Reuters. Under the deal, Microsoft would take over stewardship of the data of U.S.-based users. The deal allows another company besides Microsoft to operate TikTok in the United States. This would allow the service to continue to operate […]

SpaceX and NASA are now in the final stages of preparation for the conclusion of its Demo-2 Crew Dragon mission, which will see astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley depart the International Space Station and return to Earth. Behnken and Hurley launched aboard the Crew Dragon, SpaceX’s first human spacecraft, on May 30 and have […]

Parts of “Say I Do,” a new reality series on Netflix, will feel pretty familiar to fans of the streaming service’s popular reboot of “Queer Eye.” Like “Queer Eye,” “Say I Do” stars gay men who are experts in a particular field — in this case, interior designer Jeremiah Brent, fashion designer Thai Nguyen and […]

South Korean giant Samsung, Apple’s contract manufacturing partners Foxconn, Wistron and Pegatron, and Indian smartphone vendors Micromax and Lava among others have applied for India’s $6.6 billion incentive program aimed at boosting the local smartphone manufacturing, New Delhi said on Saturday. The scheme, called Production-Linked Incentive Scheme, will offer a range of incentives to companies including a […]

President Donald Trump said he could act to ban the world’s most popular short video app TikTok from the US as early as Saturday, according to The Hill. The president said he could use “emergency economic powers or an executive order” to bar TikTok from the US, he told reporters aboard Air Force One on […]

Even the hard-charging world of early-stage startups has its share of procrastinators, lollygaggers, slow-pokes, wafflers and last-minute decision makers. If that’s your demographic, today is your lucky day. You now have an extra week (courtesy of Saint Expeditus, the patron saint of procrastinators), to score early-bird savings to Disrupt 2020, which takes place September 14-18. […]

Earlier this month, Twitter told investors it’s considering a subscription model as a means of generating additional revenue to support its business. Now we know what sort of value-add features Twitter may be eyeing. In a new survey, the company asks users to evaluate paid features like “undo send” (an alternative to an edit button), […]

Three arrests are made following this month’s celebrity Twitter hack, Microsoft may be working to acquire TikTok’s U.S. business and Facebook launches licensed music videos. Here’s your Daily Crunch for July 31, 2020. The big story: Florida teen arrested in Twitter hack In a hack earlier this month, high-profile Twitter accounts like Apple, Elon Musk, […]

The cloud market is coming into its own during the pandemic as the novel coronavirus forced many companies to accelerate plans to move to the cloud, even while the market was beginning to mature on its own. This week, the big three cloud infrastructure vendors — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — all reported their earnings, […]

"If you only draw upon 20% of the population for that talent, you're missing out on people who are going to create these watershed things that do have a different perspective."

Rocket Lab has received clearance to launch from the FAA following the failure of its Electron rocket on July 4 and the loss of the half-dozen satellites on board. “This was a very, very sneaky and tricky issue,” said CEO Peter Beck. “However, the issue is well understood by the team. We’re really looking forward […]

Here they are, ranked by how much weight we put behind them:

Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren announced today that he has filed 30 felony charges against a 17-year-old resident of Tampa, Florida, who was described by Warren’s office as “the mastermind of the recent hack of Twitter .” The hack in question occurred earlier this month and involved high-profile Twitter users like Apple, Elon Musk, Joe […]

Google Vice President of Engineering Dave Burke provided an update about the Exposure Notifications System (ENS) that Google developed in partnership with Apple as a way to help public health authorities supplement contact-tracing efforts with a connected solution that preserves privacy while alerting people of potential exposure to confirmed cases of COVID-19. In the update, […]

Owning one brick-and-mortar business seems complicated enough. But running multiple locations? For many owners, that’s a constant juggling act of phone calls, check lists and driving back and forth from store to store. In the middle of a pandemic, it gets all the more complex. Delightree, a company out of the previous Alchemist Accelerator class, […]

President Trump has plans to order China’s ByteDance, the owner of hit social video app TikTok, to divest from the company, according to new reporting from Bloomberg. The app is increasingly a target of U.S. security concerns over its Chinese ownership. After the initial news, reports bubbled up that Microsoft is in talks to buy […]

Nearly 500 pages of evidence were made public during the House Judiciary’s marathon hearing this week on potential anti-competitive actions by Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple . We’ve collected them here with added context and an omnibus, searchable version for anyone who’d rather not juggle four dozen documents. The emails, chat logs and other communications […]

As the Internet of Things proliferates, security cameras are getting smarter. Today, these devices have machine learning capability that helps the camera automatically identify what it’s looking at — for instance, an animal or a human intruder? Today, Cisco announced that it has acquired Swedish startup Modcam and is making it part of its Meraki […]

Australia is closing in on a legally binding framework to force adtech giants Facebook and Google pay media companies for monetizing their news content when it’s posted to their social media platforms or otherwise aggregated and monetized. Back in April the country’s government announced it would adopt a mandatory code requiring the tech giants to […]

Facebook today confirmed it will begin rolling out official music videos across its platform in the U.S., as TechCrunch first reported, as well as introduce a new Music destination within Facebook Watch. The changes, which will go into effect starting this weekend, will allow Facebook users to discover, watch and share music videos from a […]

Behold, the Opple Watch. Many have borrowed heavily from Apple’s wearable, but few, if any, have done so as brazenly as Oppo. Sure Fitbit received some guff for the squircle hardware design of its Versa line, but it’s not useful to get too hung up on those vague similarities — there are, notably, relatively few […]

CRISPR tech startup Mammoth Biosciences is among the companies that revealed backing from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) program on Friday. Mammoth received a contract to scale up its CRISPR-based SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic test in order to help address the testing shortages across the U.S. Mammoth’s CRISPR-based approach could potentially […]

The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) is revealing the first beneficiaries of its Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) program, and San Mateo-based Helix is on the receiving end of $33 million in federal funding as a result. Helix is a health tech startup founded in 2015 that focuses on insights derived from personal genomics, […]

News broke last night that Affirm, a well-known fintech unicorn, could approach the public markets at a valuation of $5 to $10 billion. The Wall Street Journal, which broke the news, said that Affirm could begin trading this year and that its IPO options include debuting via a special purpose acquisition company, also known as […]

Like many industries with a high concentration of wealth — and the careers that help professionals accumulate it — investment firms have a severe dearth of diversity in their ranks.

Americans are rapidly becoming less religious, but now might be the perfect time for church tech to thrive.

It’s officially now o’clock startup fans. All good things come to an end, and today’s the last day you can score an early bird pass to Disrupt 2020. Don’t miss your chance to save up to $300 and get busy building your business at our global Disrupt event. Buy your pass before the deal — and […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. We had the full team this week: Myself, Danny, and Natasha on the mics, with Chris running skipper as always. Sadly this week we had to kick off with a correction as I am 1. […]

Amazon has received approval from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch and operate a planned constellation of 3,236 internet satellites. That’s the backbone of Amazon’s Project Kuiper, an initiative to create a satellite-based broadband internet service designed to provide high-speed, low latency connections to U.S.-based households that currently don’t have great access to […]

Twitter has confirmed it has permanently banned the account of David Duke, former leader of white supremacist hate group the Ku Klux Klan. Duke had operated freely on its platform for years — amassing a following of around 53k and recently tweeting his support for president Trump to be re-elected. Now his @DrDavidDuke account page […]

Twitter has revealed a little more detail about the security breach it suffered earlier this month when a number of high profile accounts were hacked to spread a cryptocurrency scam — writing in a blog post that a “phone spear phishing attack” was used to target a small number of its employees. Once the attackers […]

The reception to Bronco 2021 — Ford’s flagship series of 4×4 vehicles that were revealed earlier this month — surpassed expectations of the company’s most optimistic initial projections, CEO Jim Hackett said in an earnings call Thursday. More than 150,000 customers have plunked down $100 to reserve a spot to order one of the vehicles, […]

Autonomous vehicle technology startup Argo AI is valued at $7.5 billion, just a little more than three years after the company burst on the scene with a $1 billion investment from Ford. The official valuation was confirmed Thursday nearly two months after VW Group finalized its $2.6 billion investment in Argo AI. Under that deal, […]

Japanese conglomerate Rakuten has pulled the plug on its U.S. online retail store, originally known as Buy.com, and will wind down its operations over the next two months, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The shutdown means that the US headquarters will lay off its staff as well, meaning 87 people will lose their jobs, according […]

The lack of substantial progress toward true representation, diversity and inclusion across several industries illustrates what hasn’t worked.

Social video platform Triller has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against its biggest rival TikTok and parent company ByteDance. The suit, which was filed in the U.S District Court for the Western Division of Texas, claims TikTok is infringing on Triller’s U.S Patent No. 9,691,429. The patent covers “systems and methods for creating music videos […]

Apple has a strong quarter despite coronavirus, Impossible Foods is coming to Walmart and NASA launches a new Mars rover. Here’s your Daily Crunch for July 30, 2020. The big story: Apple beats Q3 expectations Apple’s latest earning report suggests that the company is thriving despite COVID-19, with revenue of $59.69 billion in the third […]

Lyft continues to expand beyond its core ride-hailing business into bikes, scooters, transit and now rental cars. The company said Thursday that it’s taking Lyft Rentals, a pilot program that launched in December, and expanding it through a partnership with Sixt. Lyft Rentals initially gave folks in Los Angeles and San Francisco the ability to […]

Users gearing up to buy the latest iPhones are going to have to wait longer than they did last year. In a call following the release of Apple’s Q3 earnings, the company’s CFO Luca Maestri shared that compared to the September 2019 release of iPhone 11 models, Apple is expecting this year’s supply of new […]

Today after the bell, Apple, Alphabet, Facebook and Amazon reported their earnings results. Each bested expectations, and all but one are up sharply in after-hours trading. Coming on the heels of a day’s worth of congressional hearings in which the four companies highlighted competition and downplayed their market position, the results are loud. The group’s […]