Crunch Hype

Apple’s earnings show the impact of COVID-19, NVIDIA’s top scientist shares an open source ventilator design and Amazon anticipates big spending in the coming months. Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 1, 2020. 1. iPhone sales are down, ahead of uncertain times for the industry Apple device sales have taken a hit, but the company’s […]

SpaceX is getting ready to launch its first-ever spacecraft with humans on board, the Commercial Crew Demo-2 mission (DM-2) that will take off from Florida on May 27. There are still a couple of things remaining to finish up prior to flight, including a final parachute system test that’s happening later today. The company also […]

Ali Amin-Javaheri grew up in the chemicals business. His father had worked for Iran’s state-owned chemical company and when the family fled the country in the nineteen eighties during the Iran-Iraq war, they first settled in Houston where employers welcomed the senior Amin-Jahaveri’s experience. Houston in the 80s was dominated by the petrochemicals industry and […]

Mark Cuban isn’t impressed that you’ve raised money. “If you think the accomplishment is raising money first, we’re probably not gonna get along,” said Cuban in an Extra Crunch Live interview. “If your orientation is ‘I got to raise the money first,’ you don’t really have a company yet, and you really haven’t accomplished anything […]

Grenco Science just added a new product to its wide-ranging offering of vaporizers and ancillary products. Stündenglass was founded by Tracey Huston and produced a wild-looking water pipe that uses kinetic motion, water, and opposing airflow to create a unique, contactless experience. The exact terms of the deal were not disclosed though the purchase price […]

Online child exploitation is a horrific crime that requires an effective response, but this bill fails to meet the challenge and creates new problems of its own.

It’s fair to say that even before the impact of COVID-19, companies had begun a steady march to the cloud. Maybe it wasn’t fast enough for AWS, as Andy Jassy made clear in his 2019 Re:invent keynote, but it was happening all the same and the steady revenue increases across the cloud infrastructure market bore […]

NVIDIA Chief Scientist Bill Dally has released an open-source ventilator hardware design he developed in order to address the shortage resulting from the global coronavirus pandemic. The mechanical ventilator design developed by Dally can be assembled quickly, using off-the-shelf parts with a total cost of around $400 – making it an accessible and affordable alternative […]

Let's about a16z's new crypto fund, recent economic data, the Ebang F-1, Lime's layoffs, Procore's IPO delay and fresh valuation, stocks, Luckin, and, if we have time, Twitter's changing jobs data.

Sound industry leader Rode has done an amazing job keeping up with the needs of the fast-moving creator industry, supporting YouTubers, podcasters, Instagram and Tik Tok media mavens with a host of new products at impressive price points. The Rode Wireless GO mic system might be the most impressive of these, taking the quality you’d […]

More rough figures from Canalys. After reporting a 13% year-over-year drop for global smartphone shipments, the firm is back with even worse numbers for China. Shipments dropped 18% year-over-year for Q1 in the world’s largest smartphone market. And once again, the COVID-19 pandemic was to blame. It tracks that China was hard hit for Q1, […]

During this pandemic, many organizations are offering free or drastically cheaper courses to help people skill-up for when we eventually get out of lock-down. There are numerous outlets if you want to learn to code from, for instance, Freecodecamp or the ‘Free Fridays‘ scheme form General Assembly. And for gamers, Gamedev.tv has taken 80% off […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. What a week. Are you still standing? Did you make it? If you are upright and typing, congratulations, you’re top-decile. If you’re reading this from bed, that’s fine too. We understand. The week was so busy that we […]

Cliqz, a Munch-based anti-tracking browser with private search baked in that has sought to offer a local alternative to Google powered by its own search index, is shutting down — claiming this arm of its business has been blindsided by the coronavirus crisis. Today was not great. We closed parts of @cliqz & our dream […]

Bó, the digital bank developed by RBS-owned Natwest, is to shutter, just 6 months after launching publicly. The incumbent bank’s consumer challenger brand was an attempt to build a startup within a larger bank and in the longer term compete with trendy upstart banking apps, such as Monzo, Revolut, Starling and others. The initial “attack […]

Hooq, a five-year-old on-demand video streaming service that aimed to become “Netflix for Southeast Asia,” has shut down weeks after filing for liquidation and terminated its partnerships with Disney’s Hotstar, ride-hailing giant Grab, and Indonesia’s VideoMax. Hooq Digital, a joint venture among Singapore telecom group Singtel (majority owner), Sony Pictures, and Warner Bros Entertainment, discontinued […]

More personnel changes are afoot at Monzo, as the U.K. challenger bank continues to bolster its leadership team. Specifically, TechCrunch has learned that Sujata Bhatia, a former American Express executive in Europe, has been recruited as Monzo’s new Chief Operating Officer, replacing previous COO Tom Foster-Carter (who left the bank rather suddenly in November to […]

Vaping is a controversial habit: it certainly has its downsides, but anecdotally it’s a fantastic smoking cessation aid. The thing is, until behavioral scientists know a bit more about who does it, when, how much and other details, its use will continue to be something of a mystery. That’s where the PuffPacket comes in. Designed […]

We knew it was going to be bad — but not necessarily “lowest level since 2013” bad. As Apple was busy reporting its earnings, Canalys just dropped some of its own figures — and they’re not pretty. After two quarters of much-needed growing, the global smartphone market just took a big hit. And you no […]

Record usage of grocery delivery services amid the COVID-19 pandemic has led to delayed orders, fewer open delivery windows and, on occasion, an inability to even book a delivery time slot. Walmart now hopes to capitalize on the increased demand for speedier delivery with the introduction of a new service that allows consumers to pay […]

Microsoft has now opened registration for the virtual edition of its online-only Build 2020 developer conference, which will take place from May 19 to 20. Typically, the event draws more than 6,000 developers, but because of the coronavirus pandemic, that’s obviously not an option. In contrast to Google, which completely scrapped its I/O developer conference […]

During the pandemic crisis, active users of Apple’s news platform hit an all-time high. On an earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook shared that Apple News had reached 125 million monthly active users. Cook announced the number after revealing the company’s Q2 performance, which saw its Products revenue decline year-over-year while Services surged. The company […]

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Apple device sales have taken a hit, but the company’s services are doing swell. The iPhone, the longtime cornerstone of the company’s hardware portfolio, hit $28.96 billion in revenue for Q2, down from $31.1 billion from this time last year. The iPad and Mac lines saw drops […]

The coronavirus pandemic has laid low a lot of Americans, more than 62,000 of whom have already died since the beginning of March and 30 million more who are now out of work owing to the resultant shutdown of most businesses and public gathering places. The ensuant crisis it has created is so massive that […]

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized for emergency use as outlined in the agency’s COVID-19 guidelines a new ventilator designed by engineers working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory . The ventilator, which has an acronym because this is NASA we’re talking about, is called “VITAL” (Ventilator Intervention Technology Accessible Locally), and its […]

Apple delivered a rough Q2 earnings report Thursday, besting investor expectations but showing a significant growth slowdown as the coronavirus pandemic deeply impacted the company’s business with year-over-year declines in iPhone, iPad and Mac sales. Apple’s stock was largely unchanged in after-hours trading. The company shared that in Q2 it earned $58.30 billion in revenue, […]

AWS, the cloud arm of Amazon would be a pretty successful business on its own. Today, the company announced it has passed $10 billion for the quarter, putting the cloud business on an impressive run rate of more than $40 billion. It was a bright spot for the company in an earnings report that saw […]

AI-generated music is a fascinating new field, and deep-pocketed research outfit OpenAI has hit new heights in it, creating recreations of songs in the style of Elvis, 2Pac, and others. The results are convincing, but fall squarely in the unnerving "uncanny valley" of audio, sounding rather like good, but drunk, karaoke heard through a haze of drugs.

Amazon has been one of the biggest names synonymous with how the consumer masses are experiencing life under lockdown: its site lets you buy anything from soup to nuts, from books to baking pans for all your sourdough; and via its streaming services, it gives you many ways stay entertained. But it can also be […]

Hunter Walk is one of the more interesting investors in Silicon Valley, and in an industry of brashness and bravado, he's more thoughtful than most.

When former Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst moved on to become president at parent company IBM earlier this month, the logical person to take his place was long-time executive Paul Cormier. As he takes over in the most turbulent of times, he still sees a company that is in the right place to help customers […]

By the summer of 2016, Marie Outtier had spent eight years as a consultant advising media agencies and martech companies on marketing growth strategy. Pierre-Jean “PJ” Camillieri started as a music software engineer before joining one of Apple’s consumer electronics divisions. Inspired by Siri, he left to start Timista, a smart lifestyle assistant. When the […]

Following an explosive report about the dark past of its founder and CEO Damien Patton, Utah-based company Banjo is facing a backlash in its own backyard. After revelations of Patton’s former ties to a branch of the KKK came to light, Utah’s Attorney General and the University of Utah froze their relationships with the company. […]

Directly taking on Google and Amazon generally seems to be an ill-advised strategy for a young startup. It’s even more complicated when you’re competing on the home assistants front, a technically complex, capital-intensive future platform into which both tech giants have dumped substantial sums. Over the past few years, the small smart home startup Josh.ai […]

Two years ago, the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) took the wraps off a dedicated crypto fund from a subset of its limited partners, who’d provided the firm with $300 million in capital commitments. Now, the firm says it has closed a second fund in the same vein, this time with $515 million in capital […]

The Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) just went through a major leadership change, with executive director Abby Kearns stepping down after five years (and becoming a CTO at Puppet) and the CFF’s CTO Chip Childers stepping into the top leadership role in the organization. For the most part, though, these changes are only accelerating some of […]

Blue Origin was among the companies selected by NASA to develop and build a human lander system for its Artemis missions, which include delivering the next man and first woman to the surface of the Moon in 2024. The Jeff Bezos -founded space company chose to deliver a bid that included a space industry “dream […]

A LabCorp shareholder has filed a lawsuit against the laboratory giant, accusing its board of concealing details of two data breaches that affected millions of patients. The derivative suit, filed on Tuesday by shareholder Raymond Eugenio, targets the company’s leadership and board members, including its chief executive, Adam Schechter. The first breach hit third-party billing provider […]

Achieving a sense of community has been the pursuit of businesses trying to attract the experience-over-items millennials and Gen Z who want their consumerism to have a positive impact on the world.

When California announced a statewide lockdown, Tony Martens and Maurits van de Ven decided to stay put instead of heading home to Amsterdam. So, the co-founders of Plantible bought two trailers and started living at their HQ: a two-acre duckweed farm in San Diego. Plantible uses duckweed, a tiny aquatic leaf, to extract a plant-based […]

Lyft, which just had a massive round of layoffs wherein 982 people lost their jobs and 288 were furloughed, is also pumping the brakes on its scooter operations in a handful of cities. “We’re focusing our resources where we can have the biggest impact and best serve cities and riders,” a Lyft spokesperson said in […]

Figma, the design platform that lets folks work collaboratively and in the cloud, has today announced the close of a $50 million Series D financing. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with partner Peter Levine and cofounding partner Marc Andreessen managing the deal for the firm. New angel investors, including Henry Ellenbogen from Durable […]

About a year ago, Microsoft launched Visual Studio Online, its online code editor based on the popular Visual Studio Code project. It’s basically a full code editor and hosted environment that lives in your browser. Today, the company announced that it is changing the name of this service to Visual Studio Codespaces. It’s also dropping […]

If you are thinking about starting a company, look beyond your inner circle.

Zoom is not having a good month. As it scales to meet pandemic demand, it has been beset by security issues, which it has had to explain and fix. Today, The Verge reported that the company just changed a blog post, which had previously listed 300 million daily active users (DAUs) to active participants. The […]

NASA has selected the companies that will provide them with the human landing system for their Artemis Moon missions, including a lander vehicle which will carry astronauts from space to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. Blue Origin, SpaceX and Dynetics were picked from a larger field of competitors to develop and […]

Twitch is doubling down on esports in this new era of social distancing as a number of traditional sporting events have been cancelled. The company this week introduced a new esports directory on its site that will make it easier for viewers to find live matches, information on players, games with active competition leagues, a […]

Apple and Google ask for developer feedback on their contact tracing efforts, Facebook sees a “significant reduction” in ads and Microsoft makes life easier for IT managers. Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 30, 2020. 1. Apple and Google release first seed of COVID-19 exposure notification API for contact tracing app developers This is a […]