Crunch Hype

If you weren’t playing games when Half-Life came out, it’s hard to drive home just how shocking a departure it was from what had come before. Though some familiar mechanics served as a base to build off of, the injection of elaborately scripted sequences that put you into the action, mature humor and genuinely engaging […]

Fake news about the novel coronavirus disease is a rampant problem across our social timelines. Think misinformation about treatments, symptoms and anecdotes tainted with racism and xenophobia. As scientists and health professionals are still scrambling to find a cure, and even contain the outbreak, falsehoods can resonate more than they might during a time of […]

Over the last five-plus years of my podcast, I’ve turned down a number of interview offers with artists who weren’t able to meet face to face. I know a lot of folks who do great podcasts remotely, and I’ve even done a few (relatively okay) ones myself. But there’s really no replacement for being able […]

Tech companies are donating supplies and adjusting priorities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, an activist investor takes three seats on the Box board and aircraft taxi company Lilium raises $240 million. Here’s your Daily Crunch for March 23, 2020. 1. Amazon, Apple and Microsoft CEOs detail their companies’ efforts to combat coronavirus pandemic Over […]

Amazon is making a selection of family-friendly and programming for kids available for free streaming on Prime Video as a result of the COVID-19 health crisis, which has people trapped at home. The content is available to all Amazon customers, and includes a mix of Amazon Original kid and family shows as well as select […]

Google Cloud today announced the beta launch of Game Servers, a managed service that provides game developers with the usual backend services for running their games, including multi-player games, in the company’s cloud. It’s worth stressing that these are not game streaming servers but solely meant to make it easier for game developers to build, […]

Zillow said Monday it will temporarily stop buying homes in all 24 markets where it operates in response to public health orders related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the latest real estate startup to shift how it operates as the disease caused by coronavirus continues to spread. Zillow said it decided to pause making offers to […]

Planet 13 is located blocks off the Las Vegas Strip and holds the title as the world’s largest cannabis dispensary. But it’s much more than just a storefront. There’s a lot to the 115,000-square-foot facility, including entertainment, restaurants and cannabis processing equipment where the company makes edibles and drinks. This is a destination, Vegas-style. In […]

Good morning friends, and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a short-form audio hit to kickstart your week. Equity was busy last week, so catch up if you missed anything. We interviewed the CEO of Y Combinator, hosted a call with the TechCrunch staff digging into our favorite Demo Day companies, hosted Equity Monday on a […]

Big tech has been making a huge effort to mobilize its power to help people work better together to battle the ongoing coronavirus pandemic — whether it’s creating search and information portals or making sure the most authoritative voices are surfacing above the noise, or gathering compute power to supercharge research efforts to find vaccines. […]

Want to join a Zoom meeting in the browser without having to download its app to do so? Check out this browser plug-in — which short-cuts the needless friction the videoconferencing company has baked into the process of availing yourself of its web client. As we noted last week Zoom does have a zero download […]

While a number of companies who currently offer at-home medical and health diagnostics had rushed to produce kits that would allow for self sample collection by people who passed a screening and believed they might have contracted the new coronavirus, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has updated its Emergency Use Authorization guidelines to […]

The rapid spread of the coronavirus pandemic has put a freeze on many in-person sales and transactions for goods and services, so in what might be a sign of the times for funding in the startup world, today a company in the UK that’s been building a portal to carry out car sales in the […]

Facebook is temporarily downgrading the quality of video streaming in Europe on its social platforms Facebook and Instagram in response to a call for action from the European Commission, per Reuters. Disney has also said it will work to shrink bandwidth used by its streaming service, Disney+, which is due to begin launching in Europe […]

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention introduced a bot over the weekend to help people make decisions about what to do if they have potential symptoms of COVID-19. Called Clara, the “coronavirus self-checker” was created in partnership with CDC Foundation and Microsoft Azure’s Healthcare Bot service. While COVID-19 has been declared a global […]

Uber and Ola have suspended all ride options in Delhi till March 31 and the Indian ride-hailing firm is restricting ride options across the country in a bid to slow the coronavirus pandemic. The firms said the suspension of their services in India’s capital was in compliance with the local state government’s lockdown order that went […]

Enable, a U.K. startup that has developed a cloud-based “rebate management solution” to help distributors, manufacturers and retailers manage rebates, is announcing $13 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Sierra Ventures. As part of the investment, Menlo Ventures’ Steve Sloane has joined the Enable board. Founded […]

Germany’s Global Savings Group (GSG), the e-commerce content company, has acquired French cashback company iGraal for €123.5 million in a mixture of cash and stock. Specifically, the deal was reached with iGraal’s majority owner M6 Group, and consists of €35 million in cash and the remaining made up of an exchange of shares. The acquisition […]

Pan-African e-commerce company Jumia is adapting its digital retail network to curb the spread of COVID-19. The Nigeria headquartered operation — with online goods and services verticals in 11 African countries — announced a series of measures on Friday. Jumia will donate certified face masks to health ministries in Kenya, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Nigeria and […]

The Canadian Olympic Committee announced that it will not send athletes to the Tokyo Olympic Games, as the International Olympic Committee weighs a decision on whether or not to postpone the event during the COVID-19 pandemic is currently. Meanwhile, the Australian Olympic Committee told athletes to prepare for the Games being delayed by year. The […]

MasterClass is known for selling access to pre-recorded online classes by a long list of people who are among the best at what they do, from tennis great Serena Williams to writer David Sedaris to chef Thomas Keller. More recently, however, the company added live Q&A sessions with these same stars as a member benefit, […]

Long and short distance travel have all but stopped for many people at the moment. But looking forward to a time when that may no longer be the case, a company designing flying taxis is today announcing a large round of funding to help continue developing its product. Lilium, a Munich-based startup that is designing […]

During today’s White House coronavirus task force press conference, President Trump announced the launch of a new public/private consortium to “unleash the power of American supercomputing resources.” The members of this consortium are the White House, the Department of Energy and IBM . Other companies, including Google, Amazon and Microsoft, as well as a number […]

U.S. federal prosecutors have filed and won a temporary restraining order against a website offering a fraudulent coronavirus vaccine, which the Justice Department said is its first enforcement action related to the pandemic. In a statement, the Justice Dept. said the action was taken against a website, said to be engaging in a wire fraud […]

Ford, GM and Tesla have been given the “go ahead” to make ventilators to help alleviate a shortage amid the COVID-19 pandemic, President Donald Trump said in a tweet Sunday that ended with a challenge to auto executives to show how good their companies are. Ventilators are a critical piece of medical equipment for patients […]

The COVID-19 virus is touching every aspect of our lives and having a profound impact on individuals, businesses and society at large. Box’s Aaron Levie has built a successful business from dorm room to IPO and beyond. He spoke to TechCrunch today about the level of creativity and focus that it’s going to take to […]

Emirates, the world’s largest airline by international traffic, today briefly announced on Twitter and its own website that it would halt all passenger flights by March 25 but then reversed course and said that it would still fly to 13 destinations, including the U.S., UK, Japan, Australia and Canada. It’s a sign of the times […]

We’ve been diligently following the development of virtual worlds, also known as the “metaverse,” on TechCrunch. Hanging out within the virtual worlds of games has become more popular in recent years with the growth of platforms like Roblox and open-world games like Fortnite, but it still isn’t a mainstream way to socialize outside of the […]

The tech industry is mobilizing its considerable resources to attempt to support efforts against the growing global coronavirus pandemic. Over the weekend, the CEOs of Amazon, Apple and Microsoft all shared updates regarding some aspects of their company’s ongoing contributions, which range from donations of medical supplies and personal protective equipment (PPE) for frontline healthcare […]

Lyft is expanding the types of services it provides through its on-demand transportation network in an effort to boost efforts to deal with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The company announced that it will be offering delivery of critical medical supplies to individuals who need them during this time, including the elderly and those living with […]

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is moving much more quickly to grant special ’emergency use authorization’ to equipment and tests that could help increase testing for the novel coronavirus in the U.S., which lags behind most countries in the world when it comes to tests conducted relative to the size of its population. […]

The path forward now seems pretty clear. First we get through the grim month-and-more ahead, supporting health care workers in any way we can. (Tip: findthemasks.com lists where to donate PPE, personal protective equipment, in the U.S. If you have any, do so. We are very literally all in this together, and they need it […]

The effort to combat the spread of the coronavirus pandemic globally relies on testing as a core component of the current strategy, which primarily focuses on isolating individuals to slow the transmission of COVID-19 and give researchers time to develop potential treatments and vaccines. The availability and amount of testing can help chart how the […]

Following similar moves by Lime, Bird, Tier and others, Voi Technology, the European e-scooter rentals and so-called micro-mobility startup, says it has “paused” operations in several countries due to the Coronvirus pandemic. This sees the company suspend operations in all but nine key cities. In a short statement issued to media on Friday, Voi said […]

Right now the world is at war. But this is no ordinary war. It’s a fight with an organism so small we can only detect it through use of a microscope — and if we don’t stop it, it could kill millions of us in the next several decades. No, I’m not talking about COVID-19, […]

The flood of status symbol content into Instagram Stories has run dry. No one is going out and doing anything cool right now, and if they are, they should be shamed for it. Beyond sharing video chat happy hour screenshots and quarantine dinner concoctions, our piece-by-piece biographies have ground to a halt. Oddly, what remains […]

Billions of dollars have flowed into startup investing this decade, but the era appears to be closing with the coronavirus pandemic. Limited partners are saying no to younger venture firms who are still out raising, while cutting back on weaker existing firms in their portfolios, Connie Loizos reports on TechCrunch this week. Other firms with […]

Much of the world is waking up to a strange new reality. As the coronavirus strain, COVID-19, swept across the planet, today may go down in history as the day when huge numbers of countries were largely united in a global shut-down to address the pandemic. TechCrunch brings you a wrap of the technology world’s […]

It’s been two-and-a-half years since the news first broke that Steven Spielberg would be rebooting his ’80s anthology series “Amazing Stories” for Apple’s then-unnamed streaming service. Now, after some behind-the-scenes drama, “Amazing Stories” has launched on Apple TV+, with the first two segments currently available. The first, “The Cellar,” is a time travel romance, while […]

WhatsApp, one of the most popular instant messaging platforms on the planet, is testing a feature that could make it simpler for its 2 billion users to tell whether the assertion made in messages they have received is true. In the recent most beta version of its Android app, the Facebook-owned service has given users […]

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch 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 in 2019 and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App […]

At long last, here’s an actually useful purpose for Twitter’s blue-check verification mark: Twitter last night announced that it is mobilising the badge system to help surface and signal more authoritative and verified voices that can provide “credible updates” on the topic of the coronavirus, and made a general call out for people that are […]

Google says coronavirus has become its biggest search topic by a country mile this year, and to continue its efforts to harness that attention in the best possible way, late on Friday the company launched a new information portal dedicated to the pandemic as well as an improved search experience for desktop and mobile. The […]

India is turning to WhatsApp, the most popular app in the country, to create awareness about the coronavirus pandemic and has urged social media services to tackle spread of misinformation on their platforms. Narendra Modi, India’s Prime Minister, said on Saturday that citizens in the country can text a WhatsApp bot — called MyGov Corona […]

GM said Friday that it is working with Ventec Life Systems to help increase production of respiratory care products such as ventilators that are needed by a growing number of hospitals as the COVID-19 pandemics spreads throughout the U.S. The partnership is part of StopTheSpread.org, a coordinated effort of private companies to respond to COVId-19, […]

Panasonic is pulling its 3,500 employees from the massive Nevada factory it operates with partner Tesla over concerns about the spread of COVID-19. The company said Friday it will ramp down operations early next week and then close for 14 days. The move only affects Panasonic employees. Tesla also employs thousands of workers at the […]

In a memo yesterday detailing relief efforts for small businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control has temporarily allowed retailers to sell alcoholic beverages for takeout. This lifts a ban previously imposed on restaurants and bars to only sell alcohol in-house. Bars can sell manufactured pre-packaged containers of liquid, such […]

Efforts to get at-home test kits for the COVID-19 coronavirus are ramping up quickly, and two more health industry startups are bringing their own products to market, with both Carbon Health and Nurx starting to ship their own in-home sample collection kits. Both of these new offerings are the same in terms of approach to […]