Crunch Hype

Smart rings are still a relatively young category in the wearable hardware world, but the Oura Ring seems to be a standout in terms of early success. The Oura Ring hardware is sleek and packed with sensors, allowing it to measure a user’s sleep patterns, take your body temperature and track activity, and now Oura […]

By now we know that Kubernetes is a wildly popular container management platform, but if you want to use it, you pretty much have to choose between having someone manage it for you or building it yourself. Spectro Cloud emerged from stealth today with a $7.5 million investment to give you a third choice that […]

Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess this week announced plans to suspend production at European factories, over COVID-19 fears. The news will impact a number of prominent makes under the umbrella of the world’s largest car maker by sales. Plants in Spain, Portugal and Italy will be suspended before the end of this week, with VW’s native […]

It's no secret I'm a fan of the reMarkable, a tablet with a paper-like display that's focused on text and sketching rather than rich media and games. The sequel to the original, announced today, looks to make a good thing even better.

A new study published in science journal Nature Medicine (via Bloomberg) examines the case of a patient who contracted COVID-19 in Wuhan and fell ill in Melbourne, Australia could provide a more comprehensive view of how and why certain people react to the virus more seriously than others. The patient’s case was described as a […]

Penta, the Berlin-based business banking challenger that also now operates in Italy, has raised €18.5 million, described as the first closing of a new funding round. Leading the round is new investor RTP Global and existing investor HV Holtzbrinck Ventures. Also participating is ABN AMRO Ventures and Berliner Volksbank Ventures, and Finleap (the fintech company builder that […]

Uber has suspended its shared ‘Uber Pool’ class of rides, the company announced on Tuesday. The Uber Pool option would match up to three passengers together in one vehicle based on their destination, and Uber said in a statement from Uber Rides and Platform Vice President Andrew Macdonald that the company’s “goal is to help […]

As edtech startups emerge and expand in India, millions of students in the country now have an additional option to choose from when they prepare for competitive exams. But despite the proliferation of cheap Android handsets and availability of some of the world’s cheapest mobile data plans, online learning platforms in India are struggling to […]

Renewed phones, laptops and tablets can be as much as 40% cheaper than their brand new cousins, working equally as well and, because they have been saved from the scrapheap, are therefore a great deal more environmentally friendly. Players in this space include Back Market (raised €48M), Swappa (US) and Amazon Renew. Refurbed, a marketplace […]

GiveVision, the U.K. startup creating wearable technology to help “restore” sight to people with visual impairments, is partnering with Sony (via the Sony UK Technology Centre) to develop and manufacture its next generation device. Specifically, GiveVision says it will be working with Sony UK Tec to help bring to market a new, lightweight version of […]

Tesla said Monday it has started delivering the Model Y crossover to customers in the U.S., hitting a milestone one year after unveiling the prototype and six months ahead of schedule. Reports of deliveries started last week. The tweet from Tesla, which included a video of the Model Y being assembled and then hitting the […]

Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank, is officially launching business bank accounts today, after an extensive trial period over the last 12 months that saw early access given to 2,500 business customers. Perhaps surprisingly, right out of the gate Monzo is offering two versions of its business bank account — which is aimed at sold traders […]

As schools around the world close or move classes online to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, many parents and educators are scrambling for ideas. The United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has assembled an online guide with links to distance learning apps and other resources. According to UNESCO, “an unprecedented number of children, […]

In an unprecedented move to reassure customers and flag the potential for misinformation about COVID-19 on their platforms, all of the major social media companies and their parent corporations issued a joint statement on their efforts. “We invite other companies to join us as we work to keep our communities healthy and safe,” the statement […]

While companies might pay for a CEO coach, lower level employees often get stuck with lame skill-building worksheets or no mentorship at all. Not only does that limit their potential productivity, but it also makes them feel stagnated and undervalued, leading them to jump ship. Therapy…err…executive coaching is finally becoming destigmatized as entrepreneurs and their […]

Event organizers were the first to be hit hard. As fear of the spread of COVID-19 began to sweep cities and countries around the world last month, one by one, large conferences with long uninterrupted histories — Mobile World Congress, SXSW — began reluctantly pulling the plug on their plans. It wasn’t just a shock […]

This week brings another batch of Democratic primaries, this time in Arizona, Florida, Illinois and Ohio. But a lot has changed since Super Tuesday. Lately, a lot changes every hour. In a joint statement last Friday, top election officials from the four states with a primary scheduled on March 17 addressed concerns about COVID-19. “Americans […]

The rise of the cloud over the past decade has forced software developers and DevOps engineers to completely rearchitect the modern web application, ensuring scalability, performance, and security. That’s a really painful proposition when done manually, which is where HashiCorp comes in to play. The company’s suite of products helps everyone in the tech workforce […]

Y Combinator’s Demo Day has historically drawn crowds of investors and journalists into a big warehouse to watch hundreds of startups come out to the public for the first time ever. Think two minute pitches, a big audience, and tons of networking opportunities after. This year, citing COVID-19 concerns, the accelerator canceled its in-person Demo […]

TransferWise, the London-headquartered international money transfer service most recently valued by investors at $3.5 billion, has partnered with China’s Aliplay for international transfers. The launch enables TransferWise’s now 7 million-plus users to be able to send Chinese yuan from 17 currencies to users of Alipay, which serves more than 1.2 billion people worldwide including via […]

The food delivery ecosystem suffers from a lack of differentiation, compounded by an opaque and confusing web of markups and fees.

Earlier today, San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced a shelter-in-place order in an attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19. The order legally requires people to stay home as much as possible unless it’s essential that they leave to do things like go to the grocery store, buy gas or go to the pharmacy. So, […]

An engineer from Charter, one of the largest phone and internet providers in the U.S., sent an email blast to a senior vice president and hundreds of engineers on Friday. In the email, Nick Wheeler, a video operations engineer based in Denver, criticized his employer for not allowing its staff to work from home despite ongoing […]

Former Coinbase chief legal officer Brian Brooks has been tapped as the chief operating officer and first deputy comptroller of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, beginning April 1, 2020. In the role, Brooks will help the OCC in its mission of chartering, regulating and supervising national banks and federal savings associations, along […]

Three days after announcing plans to reduce theater attendance by 50%, Regal Cinemas announced that it will be closing all theater locations, effective March 17. The company announced the news via social media, noting that “All theatres will remain closed until further notice.” The dramatic shift comes amid declining attendance over fears of the rapid […]

Rocket Lab is acquiring Sinclair Interplanetary, a manufacturer of spacecraft hardware based in Toronto that has provided hardware for more than 90 satellites sent to orbit to date, including AstroDigital, BlackSky, ALE and Rocket Lab itself. Sinclair also worked on The Planetary Society’s LightSail 2, which is an experimental spacecraft developed by a non-profit organization […]

As governments across the country weigh whether to push non-essential public venues like gyms to close, more people are searching out expensive gear from Peloton . The public markets are obviously seeing some pretty substantial swings in recent days, but newly public Peloton is proving more aptly positioned than other tech stocks. Today, the exercise […]

During a White House briefing on Monday detailing new recommendations regarding public health from the administration’s coronavirus task force and the CDC, President Trump was asked by a member of the press corps about reports that the White House is in “daily” contact with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos regarding the COVID-19 epidemic. Trump’s answer wasn’t […]

NBCUniversal announced today that its movie studio Universal Pictures and specialty label Focus Features will be releasing their films in theaters and on-demand, simultaneously. In other words, it’s eliminating the theatrical window — the period between the time you can watch a movie in theaters and when you can watch in the comfort of your […]

Schools around the country are closing, and while some universities are able to switch to online classes, that’s not really an option for K-12 students, many of whom lack the necessary equipment or connection at home to do so. Legislators and the FCC are hoping to fix at least part of the problem with an […]

Apple and Goldman Sachs will allow Apple Card holders to skip their March payment without incurring interest by signing up for a Customer Assistance Program, Apple is informing its customers. Existing cardholders were alerted to the option via an email sent out over the weekend, which explains that, in light of the challenges posed by […]

All major indices fell sharply Monday as the COVID-19 pandemic continued its spread, prompting airlines to slash capacity and state and local officials to close schools and businesses like restaurants and bars. Stocks accelerated their fall in the waning minutes before the markets closed Monday as Wall Street reacted to a White House press conference […]

Disney surprised the media industry on February 25 when it announced that longtime CEO Bob Iger had replaced himself with executive Bob Chapek. The abruptness of the news and the choice of successor, combined with the company’s explanation that it was a long-planned transition, didn’t seem to add up. Here’s what you need to know […]

Service, a tool that helped you get compensation when there are flight delays and find lower hotel rates after you’ve already booked, today said it would shut down its service. The company, which launched in 2015, says it faced a fundraising round that collapsed two weeks ago and was in the middle of an acquisition […]

In a briefing on Monday, research leaders across tech, academia, and the government joined the White House to announce an open dataset full of scientific literature on the novel coronavirus. The COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, known as CORD-19, will also add relevant new research moving forward, compiling it into one centralized hub. The new dataset […]

The first step to combating climate change for businesses is for them to understand their contributions to it. That’s where the new Y Combinator graduate, SINAI Technologies, comes in. Founded by Maria Fujihara, a 16-year veteran of the sustainability industry whose previous work had been around the technical adaptation of LEED certification tools, SINAI is […]

Live TV is a staple of bars and restaurants, packing sports fans in during playoffs and convincing people to grab one more beer to finish off that late-night X-Files rerun before heading home. But the commercials are a pain. Taiv turns TV ads into opportunities by sensing when they start and immediately switching to the […]

Varsity Tutors, the edtech company looking to connect students with tutors live and on-demand, is today releasing a free product called Virtual School Day for students and parents, as schools close across the globe due to the coronavirus pandemic. Virtual School Day offers more than 20 hours of live, online classes across a variety of […]

We need to go hands-off in the age of coronavirus. That means touching fewer doors, elevators, and sign-in iPads. But once a building is using phone-based identity for security, there’s opportunities to speed up access to WIFI networks and printers, or personalize conference rooms and video call set-ups. Keyless office entry startup Proxy wants to […]

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a number of additional measures being taken at a federal level in Canada to prevent further spread of the coronavirus within the country. The most extreme is that Canada is closing its borders to non-citizens and anyone not holding permanent residence status, with the exception of U.S. citizens, though […]

YouTube today warned its creator community that video removals may increase during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company said its systems today rely on a combination of technology followed by human review. But the current health crisis is leading to reduced in-office staffing in certain sites, which means automated systems will be removing some YouTube content […]

As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads across the U.S., grocery delivery apps have begun seeing record numbers of daily downloads, according to new data from app store intelligence firm Apptopia. On Sunday, online grocery apps including Instacart, Walmart Grocery, and Shipt hit yet another new record for daily downloads for their respective apps, the firm says. […]

With many businesses switching staff to remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic there’s been a clearly chronicled surge in demand for videoconferencing and others comms tools like Zoom. Other types of startups are also seeing a bump in usage as both consumers and businesses seek to do more online during a global health crisis. Telehealth […]

Kenya’s largest teleco, Safaricom, will implement a fee-waiver on East Africa’s leading mobile-money product, M-Pesa, to reduce the physical exchange of currency in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. The company announced that all person-to-person (P2P) transactions under 1000 Kenyan Schillings (≈ $10) would be free starting Tuesday for the next 90 days. The move came […]

Unfortunately, the world doesn’t have a constant quantity of problems, and while governments and most private businesses are focused on tackling the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, companies like Genecis Bioindustries are working on technologies to solve another major problem: climate change. For over a decade, sustainability advocates and entrepreneurs have been searching for a way to […]

Remote collaboration tools like Zoom are gathering massive amounts of attention as people begin working from home en masse. But, as with most trends, virtual reality seems to be sitting out this boom. This should be surprising to absolutely no one, but the lack of widespread adoption is not for lack of trying. Virtual reality […]

Doxzoo proudly says on its website that your “documents are in safe hands.” But for some time, that wasn’t true. The U.K. printing company left its customer files on a cloud storage bucket, hosted on Amazon Web Services, without a password. Anyone who knew the easy-to-guess bucket name could access the massive trove of customer […]

Meet Riot, a company participating in Y Combinator’s current batch that wants to help you fight phishing attempts. Riot runs fake phishing campaigns on your employees. For instance, your team members could receive an email saying that their Google account has been deactivated to see if they can spot real email notifications from fake ones. […]

Microsoft Teams, the collaboration software that rivals Slack, is currently down. A lot of workers are staying at home because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Countries are shutting borders, entire industries are struggling, the U.S. Federal Reserve has slashed interest rates, and governments are scrambling to protect their populations by asking millions to stay at home. […]

Lockheed Martin has announced a major shift in its corporate leadership: CEO Marilyn Hewson, who has been in the role since 2013, will be replaced by board member and American Tower President and CEO James Taiclet. Hewson will become executive chairman of the board, and both shifts will be effective as of June 15. Hewson’s […]