Crunch Hype

You don’t need your PhD in economics to know the economy is in rough shape right now due to the impact of COVID-19, but ServiceNow today pledged that it would not lay off a single employee in 2020 — and in fact, it’s hiring. While Salesforce’s Marc Benioff pledged no significant layoffs for 90 days […]

Israel-based Pileus, which is officially launching today, aims to help businesses keep their cloud spend under control. The company also today announced that it has raised a $1 million seed round from a private angel investor. Using machine learning, the company’s platform continuously learns about how a user typically uses a given cloud and then […]

Google today is making it easier for families to find quality educational apps with the addition of a new “Teacher Approved” section to Google Play. All apps found in this section are vetted by a panel of reviewers, including more than 200 teachers across the U.S., and meet Google’s existing requirements for its “Designed for […]

Researchers have discovered a new Earth-sized planet orbiting a star outside our solar system. The planet, called Kepler-1649c, is only around 1.06 times larger than Earth, making it very similar to our own planet in terms of physical dimensions. It’s also quite close to its star, orbiting at a distance that means it gets around […]

Pokémon GO was built to be played outside, with friends, as you wandered around and explored interesting landmarks around you — or, you know, the exact opposite of what we’re supposed to be doing right now. Niantic has been working on transitioning the game into something that can still be played from your couch (Pokémon […]

Airbnb takes on new debt as it adapts to a world without tourism, Apple announces a new entry-level iPhone and Google lowers Nest camera quality. Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 15, 2020. 1. Airbnb ups its debt by $1B amid the coronavirus travel crunch Airbnb has secured commitments of $1 billion for a syndicated […]

While controversy has dogged the $10 billion, decade-long JEDI contract since its earliest days, a report by the DoD’s Inspector General’s Office concluded today that, while there were some funky bits and potential conflicts, overall the contract procurement process was fair and legal and the president did not unduly influence the process in spite of […]

The global supply chain is currently being squeezed from all angles amid a global pandemic. At least one product, however, will arrive ahead of schedule. Originally planned for a May arrival, the iPad Pro’s new trackpad-sporting Magic Keyboard is up for preorder now and set to start shipping next week. You can read all of […]

Disrupt San Francisco 2020, the OG of startup tech conferences, takes place at Moscone West September 14-16. It’s an event you don’t want to miss, and we’re here to tell early-stage founders one of the best ways to get the most out of the Disrupt experience. Apply to compete in Startup Battlefield for a shot […]

Instagram is partnering with the Los Angeles-based restaurant ordering platform ChowNow to make pictures and stories from local restaurants shoppable by adding “Order Food” buttons and stickers to their images and videos. The buttons and stickers will link directly to ChowNow to complete order flow, the companies said. Followers can also re-share stickers on their […]

No one has a playbook for this. But we can experiment. We can stop a bunch of activity that was normal just weeks ago. We can learn from each other.

Apple has dropped a new iPhone SE on the market today. It’s a 4.7” iPhone with a physical home button, Touch ID, a single rear-facing camera and the A13 Bionic chip on board. With a $399 starting price point, the new SE is aimed squarely at new iPhone users or first time smartphone buyers but […]

We need to flatten the curve of this disease, but we also need to bend the curve for small businesses on the brink of collapse.

GE Healthcare is extending its longtime collaboration with Microsoft to launch a cloud-based COVID-19 patient monitoring software for health systems. GE Healthcare had originally intended to debut its Mural Virtual Care Solution at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society meeting earlier this year. When the COVID-19 epidemic scuttled those plans the company went redesigned […]

Frame AI, a New York City startup that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help companies understand their customers better across multiple channels, announced a $6.3 million Series A investment today. G20 Ventures and Greycroft led the round together. Bill Wiberg, co-founder and partner at G20, will join Frame’s board under the terms of […]

The European Commission has set out a plan for co-ordinating the lifting of regional coronavirus restrictions that includes a role for digital tools — in what the EU executive couches as “a robust system of reporting and contact tracing”. However it has reiterated that such tools must “fully respect data privacy”. Last week the Commission […]

Nifty Games is aiming to reshape the mobile gaming strategies of national sports leagues, partnering with associations like the NFL and NBA to publish officially licensed titles that the startup hopes can take better advantage of mobile gaming trends. The Bay Area games publisher announced Wednesday that they had recently closed a $12 million Series […]

Contactless transactions have become a major priority at a time when people all around the world are minimising their contact with others outside their households to slow down the often-insidious spread of the novel coronavirus. But if a lot of the consumer focus lately has been on things like payments or deliveries, that’s overlooking the fact […]

India’s push to digital payments in the last three years has seen tens of millions of people get comfortable with exchanging money online for the first time. But most businesses in the country are still offline and relying on traditional ways to engage with their customers. A Bangalore-based startup that is attempting to bring a […]

Airbnb has secured commitments of $1 billion for a syndicated term loan from institutional investors, it said. The emergency cash injection comes as the coronavirus travel freeze continues to hammer vacation rentals, with holidaymakers locked down at home and global travel banned or heavily discouraged for public health reasons. Neither the names of the parties […]

Credit Kudos, a U.K. fintech using open banking to provide more accurate credit scoring, has raised £5 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is AlbionVC, which is joined by TriplePoint, Plug & Play Ventures, Ascension Ventures’ Fair by Design fund, and Entrepreneur First (EF). In addition, a number of fintech angels participated. They […]

French startup Slite has raised an $11 million Series A round led by Spark Capital with existing investors also participating. Slite is a sort of multiplayer Evernote. It lets you collect and organize documentation, create shared documents and build a company handbook. Many companies struggle to keep a single source of truth when it comes […]

Google is offering financial support to local newsrooms hit by the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, as part of its Google News Initiative. The company isn’t disclosing the size of what it’s calling its Journalism Emergency Relief Fund, but in a blog post, Google VP of News Richard Gingras said the goal is to […]

More than 150 e-commerce and delivery companies globally use an Indian logistics startup’s service to work out the optimum way before they ship items to their customers. That startup, Noida-based FarEye, has raised $25 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand its footprint in international markets. M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, led […]

Ooni (nee Uuni), has been around for a few years now, but its latest oven, the Koda 16, launched in March. Just like everyone else, I’ve been cooped up at home for weeks with nothing but all of the projects I would get around to one day. At the top of my list was learning […]

Online consignment company The RealReal is the latest tech company to lay off and furlough employees amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In the company’s quarterly earnings report today, The RealReal announced layoffs affecting 10% of its workforce and furloughs impacting 15% of employees. By doing so, The RealReal says it will be able to reduce its […]

It’s hard enough in the first place having to drive an astronomically expensive rover around a planet millions of miles away. Doing it from home seems like a pretty big ask — but it turns out NASA’s Curiosity team is up to it. The space agency posted today about how the team has adapted to […]

Adriel is a South Korean startup bringing automated ad tools to small businesses — and in recent months, it’s been expanding into the United States and the United Kingdom. This might seem like exactly the wrong time to be growing an ad-buying platform, since we’re at the beginning of what’s likely to be a tremendous […]

If you’re looking at footage from your Nest Cam and the quality seems a bit lower than normal: it’s not your eyes. In an email to users, Google says it is temporarily lowering the video quality of Nest Cams in an effort to limit how much bandwidth each camera uses and, in turn, “conserve internet […]

The well-funded Japanese space startup Synspective has tapped launch provider Rocket Lab to take its first Earth observation satellite to orbit. Launch is planned for late 2020, and the company’s StriX–α craft will be the sole payload. Synspective was founded in 2018 and by mid-2019 had raised about $100 million, making it one of the […]

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented an unprecedented challenge for healthcare workers. Among the major challenges are social distancing issues, which have required novel approaches to diagnosing and treating illness. For many who have already tested positive, home stays are the best option to avoid an already massively overtaxed hospital system in many areas and to […]

Labster, a virtual science lab edtech company, today announced that it is partnering with California’s community college network to bring its software to 2.1 million students. California Community Colleges claims to be the largest system of higher education in the country. The Labster partnership will provide 115 schools with 130 virtual laboratory simulations in biology, […]

As the COVID-19 death toll in the United States continues to climb, American stocks are, in a grim divergence, recovering lost ground. It isn’t clear precisely why locally-listed equities have risen in recent weeks, let alone today, but let’s go over the day’s results so that we’re all on the same page. In regular trading […]

Bradley Tusk is relatively unique among investors. Where other VCs shy away from heavily regulated industries and businesses, Tusk leans in. The Tusk Ventures founder and CEO has investments that include Uber, Bird, Coinbase, Lemonade, FanDuel and Alma Health. At a time when good governance is front and center, and innovative thinking to evolve the […]

I'm an E-3 visa holder and I usually go back to Australia to extend my visa. Given the COVID-19 travel restrictions, how do I extend my immigration status from inside the U.S.?

NBCUniversal’s new streaming service Peacock is launching for Comcast’s Xfinity X1 and Flex customers tomorrow, April 15, at no additional cost. Comcast says the rollout to its platforms begins tomorrow and will complete by month’s end. This lines up with the schedule that the company announced in January, which pointed to a broader launch on July […]

Though more people are stuck at home with their PCs and gaming consoles, times are still tough for small indie game developers that are often dependent on gaming conferences to both promote their titles and source investments and publishing deals. Today, Sony announced that they had earmarked $10 million for a fund dedicated to helping […]

Could avatars that show what co-workers are up to save work-from-home teams from constant distraction and loneliness? That’s the idea behind Pragli, the Bitmoji for the enterprise. It’s a virtual office app that makes you actually feel like you’re in the same building. Pragli uses avatars to signal whether co-workers are at their desk, away, […]

Amazon fires two employees who criticized the company’s COVID-19 response, Google may be creating its own chips to use in Pixel phones and more details emerge about Apple and Google’s contact tracing plan. Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 14, 2020. 1. Amazon fires two more employees who were openly critical of working conditions during […]

Apple is providing a data set derived from aggregated, anonymized information taken from users of its Maps navigational app, the company announced today. The data is collected as a set of “Mobility Trends Reports,” which are updated daily and provide a look at the change in the number of routing requests made within the Maps […]

Newly launched mobile streaming service Quibi is killing one of its more highly anticipated series — a show depicting Snapchat’s origin story, focused on founder Evan Spiegel. The news was exclusively reported by Variety on Tuesday, which did not detail the source of its news. Plans for the Snapchat show were first announced at SXSW […]

With a lot of towns instituting shelter-in-place orders to restrict how people physically interact in order to slow down the spread of the novel coronavirus, fitness has come into its own. In places where people are still allowed outdoors to exercise, we’ve seen an explosion of independent exercising like walking, running and cycling — often […]

A court in Nanterre, France, has ruled that Amazon should greatly restrict orders in France in the coming weeks. According to the decision that AFP and a union have obtained, Amazon can only accept orders of groceries, hygiene and health-related products. The company has 24 hours to comply or it’ll have to pay a fine […]

As recently as a year or two ago, the idea of a $900 starting price for a OnePlus device would have seemed, at best, fanciful. The company built a name for itself with a series of flagship quality devices at a mid-tier price point. It was a smart approach that served the company well, carving […]

The student loan crisis has crescendoed to even worse heights. As universities shut down across the country due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and employment opportunities dim with the rapidly decelerating economy, today’s students and post-grads need better tools than ever to navigate their finances. Unfortunately, student loans in the United States are extraordinarily complicated, […]

GitHub today announced that all of its core features are now available for free to all users, including those that are currently on free accounts. That means free unlimited private repositories with unlimited collaborators for all, including teams that use the service for commercial projects, as well as up to 2,000 minutes per month of […]

At their best, Satechi’s products sit somewhere between the silly and the sublime (practicality is nice, too, if you can manage). In spite of a profoundly uninspiring name, the USB-C Wireless Charging Dock for Apple AirPods fit the bill pretty nicely. There’s nothing about the product that specifically fits the company’s opportunistic pitch of “easy […]

Bruce Springsteen once wrote, “We’re living in the future and none of this has happened yet.” It seems that the world is changing before our eyes as COVID-19 has sent us all home and forced us and our institutions to change the way we operate overnight. As Box CEO Aaron Levie pointed out on Twitter […]

Attack methods logically exploit changes in the global environment. Mass working over remote connection leads to mass remote login activity.

Nintendo just released the 10.0.0 firmware for its Switch gaming console and finally added a feature users have wanted since the system launched. The update allows downloaded games to be transferred to an SD card, giving users flexibility and freedom. Previously, Switch owners had few options if their console ran out of storage space. The […]