Crunch Hype

India’s antitrust watchdog has given its blessing to Facebook and Reliance Jio Platforms for their $5.7 billion deal. In a statement on Wednesday, the Competition Commission of India said it had approved Facebook’s proposed multi-billion-dollar investment in Jio Platforms for a 9.99% stake in the top Indian telecom network. Jaadhu Holdings LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary […]

Curve, the London fintech that is re-bundling various financial products by letting you consolidate all your bank cards into a single card and app, is partnering with Samsung in the U.K. to power its forthcoming debit card, which is scheduled to launch later this year. Dubbed “Samsung Pay Card” — and obviously a bid by […]

Flipkart on Wednesday added support for three more local languages as the Indian e-commerce giant looks to widen its foothold in smaller cities and towns across the country where fewer people speak English and Hindi. The Walmart -owned firm said its online marketplace now has interfaces in Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada, three languages that are […]

Memo Bank wasn’t always called Memo Bank. It originally started as Margo Bank and it has been flying under the radar for a few years. The French startup is now about to launch publicly and shared more details about what it is building. As the name suggests, Memo Bank is a bank. It plans to […]

A collective of more than 1,000 researchers, academics and experts in artificial intelligence are speaking out against soon-to-be-published research claims to use neural networks to “predict criminality.” At the time of writing, more than 50 employees working on AI at companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft had signed on to an open letter opposing the […]

Brazil, the second largest market for WhatsApp, has suspended the instant messaging app’s mobile payments service in the country a week after its rollout in what is the latest setback for Facebook. In a statement, Brazil’s central bank said it was taking the decision to “preserve an adequate competitive environment” in the mobile payments space […]

Qupital, a trade financing platform, announced today that it will partner with eBay as one of its officially recommended Hong Kong financing service providers. In today’s announcement, Qupital said it will provide offshore financing services, including working capital, to eBay sellers in China and Hong Kong through QiaoYiDai, its main product. The agreement with eBay […]

AngelList, a platform that helps startup founders discover and connect to angel investors and job seekers, on Wednesday branched out to a new category in India to further serve the ecosystem. The startup platform said its new product, called EquityList, allows founders to easily manage their cap table, which as the name suggests, is a […]

Each year, the hiring platform Hired produces a look at tech salaries based on the data it says it gleans from hundreds of thousands of interview requests and job offers. This year, as in past years, it looked at salaries around the globe for software engineers, product managers, DevOps engineers, designers, and data scientists. Of […]

Segway’s story can’t be told without rehashing its entry onto the scene as one of the most hyped tech products of the early 21st century. Alternately codenamed “Ginger” and “IT,” the personal mobility device engendered serious conversations among futurists about the ways in which it would transform sidewalks and cities. Nearly 20 years after its […]

Google is showing off one of the most impressive efforts yet turning traditional photography and video into something more immersive: 3D video that lets the viewer change their perspective and even look around objects in frame. Unfortunately, unless you have 46 spare cameras to sync together, you probably won’t be making these “light field videos” […]

Zopa, the 15-year-old peer-to-peer lending company, is announcing that it has been awarded its full U.K. bank licence, as it gears up to launch a fixed-term savings account, followed by a credit card. Dubbed “Zopa Bank,” the new challenger bank will sit alongside its existing peer-to-peer lending business, under Zopa Group, creating what the veteran fintech […]

"This would be a blow to very early-stage tech companies trying to get off the ground."

The App Store ecosystem today is home to nearly 2 million apps. That means finding new apps to download is now more challenging than ever. This, in turn, leads app developers to funnel more money into App Store Search ads, traditional SEO and digital advertising in an effort to acquire new users. A new feature […]

Dig into the guts of a 2020 Mercedes-Benz — or just about any modern luxury vehicle — and dozens of electronic control units (ECU) will appear. Traditional automakers have historically added ECUs as they have added more technology, a practice that has introduced complexity and cost as well as limitations that newer rivals like Tesla […]

"And and so for us, that is that is the only thing that really drives an acquisition conversation, is can we achieve this mission that we hope to achieve in a faster, better way?"

Twitter took its latest action on content from President Trump Tuesday, again hiding a threat of state violence behind a warning label and appending it with a notice. Trump’s latest offending tweet declared “There will never be an ‘Autonomous Zone’ in Washington, D.C., as long as I’m your President. If they try they will be […]

Apple is responding to the COVID-19 crisis with a range of new features across its software platforms. Some are intended to directly combat the threat of the novel coronavirus, as with Apple Watch’s new handwashing feature. Other updates can be seen in a new light in the COVID-19 era. For example, your Apple Watch can […]

Two months after Quibi’s high-profile launch as a short-form mobile-native TV app led by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, it is evident the startup is greatly underperforming relative to the hundreds of millions of dollars already spent on content and marketing. According to a Wall Street Journal report, “daily downloads peaked at 379,000 on its […]

TaskRabbit CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot announced today that she is stepping down from her role at the freelance labor marketplace. Brown-Philpot joined TaskRabbit seven years ago as the company’s chief operating officer and was promoted to CEO in the spring of 2016. In the fall of 2017, the company was acquired by Ikea for undisclosed financial […]

The future of Accelerated Digital Ventures (ADV), the U.K. early-stage investment firm now majority owned by Legal & General, is in flux after three of its founders have lost their seat on the board, TechCrunch has learned. ADV’s investments include Push Doctor, WeFarm and Perlego, amongst many others. Rumours began circulating earlier this month within the […]

Get ready for five days of education, action and opportunity at Disrupt 2020 on Sept. 14-18. This year the programing and networking may be virtual, but the connections you make and the benefits you derive are very real. If the idea of virtual networking feels somehow less potent, we have great news for you. We’ve […]

Teleoperators who remotely monitor and control autonomous vehicles rely on high-performance connectivity to transfer 4K video, multiple audio streams and other data. Even a skosh of latency, jitter or packet loss could spell disaster for a teleoperator intervening to help an autonomous sidewalk delivery bot or even a robotaxi. One Israeli startup, which spun out […]

There's a chance for broader perspectives on platform power to shape the next decades online, and much more besides.

The FCC said Tuesday it will vote next month to designate 988 as the new three-digit U.S. nationwide number to reach the National Suicide Prevention Hotline. In a notice, the federal regulator overseeing U.S. internet and phone providers said it will vote on the proposal on July 16 to make the number change official. FCC […]

We round up Apple’s news from its big WWDC keynote, Wirecard’s CEO is arrested and Facebook acquires another VR studio. Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 23, 2020. 1. Here’s everything Apple announced in the WWDC 2020 keynote Apple announced a number of changes for iOS 14, including widgets and an automatically sorted app library. […]

Just two years after launch, Facebook announced today that it’s discontinuing the Oculus Go, the least powerful and least expensive virtual reality headset that the company sold. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement of the device in late 2017 was a major development for the company, which had never released a standalone headset before and was […]

Amazon has announced a $2 billion “Climate Pledge Fund” to invest in sustainable technologies and services that will help the company reach its commitment to be net zero carbon in its operations by 2040. It’s a sizable commitment from a company that has been criticized for its contributions to carbon emissions in its own operations […]

A landmark regulatory intervention that seeks to apply structural antitrust remedies to cut big (ad)tech’s rights-hostile surveillance business models down to size has been revived after Germany’s federal court overturned an earlier ruling that had suspended enforcement of a ban on Facebook combining user data. The upshot is the tech giant could be forced to […]

The countdown clock is running, and you have just four days left to score the lowest price on passes to TC Early Stage 2020, which takes place on July 21-22. We’ve packed this two-day virtual event with more than 50 workshops covering essential topics that every early-stage founder needs to master. Take advantage of the […]

Instagram announced today it’s expanding access to Instagram Shopping to more businesses, including creators who want to sell their own merchandise. To enable this expansion, the company introduced new “Commerce Eligibility Requirements” that offer a set of guidelines that interested businesses must adhere to, in order to qualify for Instagram selling. For example, the guidelines […]

Sleep apnea is a huge problem across the U.S. world but is often under-diagnosed because getting a diagnosis often involves getting hooked up to numerous machines and sleeping under the supervision of a doctor. There are at-home solutions, but most are still clunky options with plenty of wires, straps and tubes being used to gather […]

If you regularly write in Spanish, you’ll be happy to hear that Google today announced that its neural network-powered grammar suggestions in its Docs online text editor are now available in Spanish, too. Just like with grammar suggestions for English, though, this feature will only be available for G Suite customers for now — but […]

In recent years, Seattle-based Wyze made a name for itself thanks to making a lot of smart home gadgets affordable. These days, the company sells everything from smart plugs and locks to scales and fitness bands, but what started it all was the $20 Wyze indoor security camera. Today, the company is following that up […]

As movie theaters reopen across the United States and the world, there are lingering questions about what kinds of measures those theaters will be taking to keep staff and moviegoers safe in the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. These concerns were illustrated last week, when AMC CEO Adam Aron said in an interview that […]

Snap’s latest developer offering is a tool called Verify that’s aiming to save its mobile-first developers cash on verifying user phone numbers en masse. The new tool is being integrated into its Login Kit framework allowing devs with a “Log In with Snapchat” button to move away from tapping services like Twilio for SMS verification, […]

As June comes to a close, TechCrunch will welcome GGV Capital’s Hans Tung and Jeff Richards to Extra Crunch Live. Eagle-eyed readers will recall that we discussed this conversation earlier in the month. Happily, after a minor scheduling shuffle, the venture capital firm will join Extra Crunch Live next week. Next Tuesday, June 30th, at […]

Lyft is using data collected from drivers on its ride-hailing app to accelerate the development of self-driving cars. Lyft’s Level 5 self-driving car program is using the data to build 3D maps, understand human driving patterns and improve simulation tests — all tools needed to push their autonomous vehicle technology forward, according to a blog […]

NASA is going to chart a path for its astronauts and other personnel to take part in future commercial suborbital spaceflight missions, letting the agency conduct experiments and do research aboard suborbital human spacecraft – including, potentially, vehicles like Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo. The agency isn’t naming any individual providers yet, however, since the announcement of […]

Your company’s ability to recruit and retain Dreamers has largely returned to the way things were, but the DACA program remains in jeopardy.

Forecast, a new project from Facebook’s internal R&D group, NPE Team, is launching today to build a community around predictions. The iOS app will allow users to ask questions and then use in-app points to make predictions about what might happen in the future. Users can also create, discuss and view these crowdsourced predictions. At […]

Flip the “days since the last Twitter security incident” back to zero. Twitter said Tuesday that it has emailed its business customers, such as those who advertise on the site, to warn that their information may have been compromised in a security lapse. The social network giant said that business users’ billing information was inadvertently […]

It’s the company that just can’t catch a break! In a new SEC filing this morning Luckin Coffee, the embattled China-based and American-listed coffee chain that has become embroiled in scandal, announced that the Nasdaq really wants it gone. According to the firm, the Nasdaq exchange where Luckin is listed sent “an additional written notice […]

In the chip game, more is usually better and to that end, Ampere announced the next chip on its product roadmap today, the Altra Max, a 128 core processor, the company says is designed specifically to handle cloud native, containerized workloads. What’s more, the company has designed the chip, so that it will fit in […]

For a startup valued north of $8 billion, Robinhood's investors are betting that it will quickly scale as a business, something the famous unicorn appears to be doing in recent quarters and years.

New York City was an initial U.S. hotspot for the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s also one of the most expensive cities in the world — so you might think startups would be anxious to leave. However, when we surveyed a number of New York-based venture capitalists, they seemed bullish about the city’s future as a […]

Salesforce has a bunch of announcements coming out of the virtual Trailheadx conference taking place later this week, starting today with some new developer tools. The goal of these tools is to give developers a more modern way of creating applications on top of the Salesforce platform. Perhaps the most interesting of the three being […]

As chatbots and other AI-based services like interactive voice apps continue to become more ubiquitous, a startup that’s built software to help create and — critically — improve how they work over time is announcing a significant funding round to continue expanding its business. Rasa, which has developed an open source-based platform for developers to […]

BrightInsight, which makes a toolkit and dashboard for digital medical devices and therapeutics focused on compliance with international regulations around healthcare, has raised $40 million in its latest round of financing, the company said. The latest round comes only two years after the company’s launch and a year since it raised $25 million from New […]

One of the new space companies that has done the most for popularizing the idea of in-space manufacturing, including use of additive technologies like 3D printing on the International Space Station, has been acquired by Redwire, a newly formed entity created by a private equity firm to roll up a number of space technology, supply […]