Crunch Hype

What kinds of businesses might be able to operate in space? Well, data centers are one potential target you might not have thought of. Space provides an interesting environment for data center operations, including advanced analytics operations and even artificial intelligence, due in part to the excellent cooling conditions and reasonable access to renewable power […]

AWS announced a new local zone today in LA, designed to provide customers in southern California with a set of higher bandwidth, lower latency compute resources. It’s not a coincidence that this area is the epicenter of the entertainment industry. Having a local zone gives LA-area companies, whether that’s related to video processing, gaming, ad […]

India's Vikram lander was very near making its proud creators the fourth country in history to touch down on the moon — but it was not to be, and the craft was lost. Now India has a bit of closure: The remains of the lander have been located on the Moon's surface.

Just as Qualcomm was starting to highlight its 5G plans for the coming years, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg hit the stage at AWS re:Invent to discuss the carrier’s team up with the cloud computing giant. As part of Verizon’s (TechCrunch’s parent company, disclosure, disclosure, disclosure) upcoming focus on 5G edge computing, the carrier will be […]

Today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company announced a new search tool called Kendra, which provides natural language search across a variety of content repositories using machine learning. Matt Wood, AWS VP of artificial intelligence, said the new search tool uses machine learning, but doesn’t actually require machine learning expertise of any kind. […]

Today at Amazon re:Invent, Amazon announced a new ability to manage Cassandra databases on AWS. Already used by companies as diverse as Grubhub.com, Netflix, Ooyala, Openwave, Reddit, and Uber, to manage distributed NoSQL databases, that handle large amounts of data across commodity servers, the new Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service, is AWS’ attempt to offer […]

Amazon says Cyber Monday 2019 has now become the retailer’s biggest shopping day of all-time, based on the number of items sold worldwide. However, in the U.S., a different trend took shape over the big sales holiday weekend kicked off by Black Friday. This year, Walmart became the No. 1 shopping app in the U.S. […]

At its re:Invent conference, AWS CEO Andy Jassy today announced the launch of SageMaker Studio, a web-based IDO for building and training machine learning workflows. It includes everything a data scientist would need to get started with, including ways to organize notebooks, data sets, code and models, for example. It essentially wants to be a […]

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Cyber Monday totalled $9.2B in US online sales, smartphones accounted for a record $3B Cyber Monday — the final day of […]

AWS announced a new tier for Amazon Elasticsearch Service. And it could potentially lead to some cost savings. It is now available in preview. There are now two storage tiers for Amazon Elasticsearch Service — hot and UltraWarm. Hot is still the most effective tier when you care about performance. You can use the hot […]

At its re:Invent conference, AWS CEO Andy Jassy today announced the launch of AQUA (the Advanced Query Accelerator) for Amazon Redshift, the company’s data warehousing service. As Jassy noted in his keynote, it’s hard to scale data warehouses when you want to do analytics over that data. At some point, as your data warehouse or […]

Today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company announced that Elastic Kubernetes Service is available on Fargate. EKS is Amazon’s flavor of Kubernetes. Fargate is a service announced in 2017 that enables you to launch containerized applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. “Starting today, you can start using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service to […]

We’re gearing up for another great TC Sessions Robotics+AI March 3 at UC Berkeley, and we’ve got some big names to announce. Last week, it was AI expert Stuart Russell and today we’re pleased to note that we’ll be joined by Amazon Robotics Chief Technologist, Tye Brady. A co-founder of MassRobotics, Brady has held a […]

This is it, code jockeys — your last call to grab a seat and compete in the TC Hackathon at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. We limited participation to 500 people and, with just eight days to go, only a few spots remain. Do you have the skills, stamina and creativity it takes to build a […]

Under the terms of a a settlement with the ACLU and other civil rights groups earlier this year, Facebook has been taking steps to prevent discriminatory ad targeting. Specifically, the company says ads in the United States that involve housing, employment or credit can no longer be targeted based on age, gender, ZIP code or […]

Podcorn, the service that connects brands with podcasters to acquire in-broadcast sponsored time (not pre- or post-roll advertising), is officially launching its services today. The benefit of Podcorn is that we aim to service podcasters of all sizes, many of which don’t currently qualify for traditional advertising but can still bring a lot of value […]

The four ex-Google employees, also known as the “Thanksgiving Four,” who were fired right before the holiday, are planning to file a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. “We look forward to hearing the NLRB’s findings, which we expect will confirm that Google acted unlawfully,” ex-Googlers Laurence Berland, Paul Duke, Rebecca Rivers and Sophie […]

Uberflip is acquiring SnapApp, bringing together two startups that promise to help marketers use their content more effectively. President and Chief Marketing Officer Randy Frisch argued that Uberflip focuses on content experience, not content marketing. In other words, it’s not selling productivity and workflow tools for marketers to write blog posts and create videos. Instead, […]

Mozilla today announced that its Firefox Private Network (FPN), which lets you encrypt your Firefox connections, is now in an extended beta after a few months of relatively limited testing in the Firefox Test Pilot program. This beta, however, is only available to users in the U.S. and the free service is restricted to 12 […]

Salv, an anti-money laundering (AML) startup founded by former TransferWise and Skype employees, has raised $2 million in seed funding. The round is led by Fly Ventures, alongside Passion Capital and Seedcamp. Angel investors also participating include N26 founder Maximilian Tayenthal (who seems to be doing quite a bit of angel investing), former Twilio CTO […]

Marvel has a trailer out for Black Widow, the story focused on the member of the Avengers team played by Scarlett Johansson. This preview of the movie features a lot of heart-pumping action, and an all-star cast that includes Rachel Weisz, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, and of course, Johansson herself. What we get in this […]

Xiaomi, the top smartphone vendor in India, today joined a growing wave of fintech startups in the nation that are offering credit to aspirational young professionals and millennials. The Chinese electronics giant said today it is launching Mi Credit, its curated marketplace for digital lending, that offers users credit between Rs 5,000 ($70) and Rs […]

While French President Emmanuel Macron and U.S. President Donald Trump initially reached a deal on France’s tax on tech giants, the U.S. is moving forward with retaliation tariffs that could be as high as 100% on French goods (wine, cheese, handbags…). The United States Trade Representative published a report following an investigation into the French […]

Vancouver based mobility startup Damon Motorcycles has entered the EV arena with a preview of its first e-moto, the Hypersport Pro. The seed-stage company had previously focused on creating digital safety technology — like its 360 degree radar detection system — to augment two-wheelers made by other manufacturers. Damon has determined to create its own […]

Do you feel you have been receiving more spam calls of late? You are probably not wrong — or alone. The volume of spam calls has grown by 18% globally this year, according to Truecaller. In its annual report published Tuesday, the Stockholm-based firm said users worldwide received 26 billion spam calls between January and […]

Canadian venture capital firm Portag3 Ventures has closed a second fund focused on investing in fintech startup, with final commitments from institutional and strategic LPs totally $427 million CAD (around $320 million USD). The fund will before costing on early stage investments, and it’ll look to invest in companies globally, but with a particularly focus […]

Xometry, the U.S.-based marketplace for on-demand manufacturing that raised $55 million in Series D funding this summer, has acquired Munich-based Shift as a path to European expansion. Exact terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although the exit sees at least some of Shift’s investors, such as Cherry Ventures, picking up shares in Xometry . I […]

After growing its lending business in West Africa, emerging markets credit startup Migo is expanding to Brazil on a $20 million Series B funding round led by Valor Group Capital. The San Mateo based company — previously branded Mines.io — provides AI driven products to large firms so those companies can extend credit to underbanked […]

Cuvva, the app-based insurance provider that began life offering pay-as-you-go driving cover but has since expanded to also sell travel insurance, has raised £15 million in Series A funding. Backing comes from RTP Global, Breega, and Digital Horizon, joining existing investors LocalGlobe, Techstars Ventures, Tekton and Seedcamp. A number of angels also joined the round, […]

Penta, the Berlin-based business banking challenger that also now operates in Italy, has partnered with BBVA-backed card reader company SumUp in a bid to attract more offline businesses. Up until recently, Penta had been targeting digital businesses, such as startups and e-commerce SMEs, but has since re-positioned itself for wider business banking appeal. By partnering […]

In the waning years of the last millennium, at my university, one of the cause célèbres of the progressive left was a concept known as “Manufacturing Consent,” the title of a book and film, by and starring Noam Chomsky. Its central thesis was that US mass media “are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry […]

Apple now has its own music awards, with winners picked by Apple Music’s editorial team or based on streaming data from the service. The first recipient of its top award, Global Artist of the Year, is Billie Eilish. The Apple Music Awards will be streamed live on Dec. 4 at 6:30PM Pacific Standard Time from […]

Even to an experienced carpenter, it may not be obvious what the best way is to build a structure they’ve designed. A new digital tool, Carpentry Compiler, provides a way forward, converting the shapes of the structure to a step-by-step guide on how to produce them. It could help your next carpentry project get off […]

COO Akshay Kothari says the startup has "never felt like if we had more money we could grow faster."

The data shows that competition for talent and access to the best founders has increased ferociously, while progress with gender diversity has stalled.

Singapore-headquartered FinAccel has secured $90 million in one of the largest funding rounds for a fintech startup in Southeast Asia as it looks to further grow its credit lending app Kredivo and build more financial services. The financing round, dubbed Series C, for the three-and-a-half-year-old startup was jointly led by Asia Growth Fund — a […]

Mucker Capital, the now eight-year-old, Santa Monica, Calif.-based pre-seed startup accelerator and venture outfit, has brought aboard Omar Hamoui, a partner at Sequoia Capital for the last six-plus years, as its third general partner. Hamoui joins firm co-founders Erik Rannala and William Hsu, along with several other investors on the team who are collectively working […]

Ebony Beckwith discusses how the nonprofit Salesforce Foundation's status as an impact team that's also a fully-integrated business unit sets it apart from other corporate philanthropy efforts.

Some VCs have a bias against startups with an explicit positive social impact on the grounds that they have a smaller addressable market, and that the founders aren't sufficiently focused on creating shareholder wealth.

Facebook is expanding Crisis Response, its disaster-reporting and communications feature that’s been used in 300 crises in more than 80 countries. The company today is announcing several new features, including WhatsApp integration, support for first-hand information sharing and an expansion of its “Data for Good” tools for things like better disaster and displacement maps. Crisis […]

Homeland Security wants to expand facial recognition checks for travelers arriving to and departing from the U.S. to also include citizens, which had previously been exempt from the mandatory checks. In a filing, the department has proposed that all travelers, and not just foreign nationals or visitors, will have to complete a facial recognition check […]

Canalys released its latest cloud infrastructure spending numbers for China today, and it’s all trending upward. For starters, the market reached $2.9 billion for the quarter, an increase of 60.8%. China now accounts for 10.4% of worldwide cloud spending, meaning it’s second only to the U.S. in overall spending. That is pretty amazing, given that […]

A few weeks ago, Ubiquiti unveiled the UniFi Dream Machine, an all-in-one networking device that for $299 combines a router, a switch with four Ethernet ports and a Wi-Fi access point. It has what Ubiquiti calls an integrated cloud key that lets you control your network. I’ve been using the UniFi Dream Machine on my […]

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Facebook launches a photo portability tool, starting in Ireland Facebook says it will make it easier for users to get their […]

For about a year now, continuous integration and delivery service CircleCI has offered Orbs, a way to easily reuse commands and integrations with third-party services. Unsurprisingly, some of the most popular Orbs focus on AWS, as that’s where most of the company’s developers are either testing their code or deploying it. Today, right in time […]

Twitter today is launching a new resource that aims to serve as the central place for everything related to the company’s efforts around privacy and data protection. The new site, the Twitter Privacy Center, will host information about Twitter’s initiatives, announcements and new privacy products, as well as other communication about security incidents. Related to […]

A new study, published in Nature Communications (via Washington Post), found promising early results from an experiment wherein sounds that you’d hear from a healthy reef are played back at a reef that’s dying. It may sound a bit like a bait-and-switch, but previous research has shown that one way to help reefs that are under […]

Jerusalem Venture Partners has raised more than $1.4 billion raised over two decades, powering some of Israel's largest cybersecurity startups.

Cyber Monday online sales are on track to hit $9.4 billion today, a figure that’s up 18.9% year-over-year, and even larger than Black Friday’s record-breaking $7.4 billion in online sales, according to analytics from Adobe. As of 9 AM Eastern on Cyber Monday, U.S. online shoppers had already spent $473 million, Adobe says. Adobe’s forecasts […]