Crunch Hype

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 […]

Welcome back to The Station, the go-to newsletter for keeping up-to-date on what the heck is going on in the world of transportation. I’m your host, Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch. Portions of the newsletter are published as an article on the main site after it has been emailed to subscribers (that’s what […]

The 5G question has long been carts and horses. The next-generation wireless network has always been an inevitability, of course, but the rollout has always felt a bit piecemeal. T-Mobile, to its credit, is looking to flip the switch all at once (kind of), launching a “nationwide” deployment of 5G to a coverage area it […]

The U.S. government may be in the process of formally withdrawing from the term of the Paris Agreement, an international accord on targets to fight climate change, but major U.S. employers say they’ll stay the course in a new statement jointly signed by a group of around 80 chief executives and U.S. labor organization leaders. […]

Today, as AWS re:Invent begins, Amazon announced DeepComposer, a machine learning-driven keyboard aimed at developers. “AWS DeepComposer is a 32-key, 2-octave keyboard designed for developers to get hands on with Generative AI, with either pretrained models or your own,” AWS’ Julien Simon wrote in a blog post introducing the company’s latest machine learning hardware. The […]

Amazon is expanding its automatic transcription service for AWS, Amazon Transcribe, to include support for medical speech, the company announced this morning at its AWS re:Invent conference. The new machine learning-powered service, Amazon Transcribe Medical, will allow physicians to quickly dictate their clinical notes and speech into accurate text in real time, without any human […]

Accel, one of the world’s most influential venture capitalist firms, is becoming more bullish on India. The Silicon Valley-headquartered firm, which largely focuses on early stage investments, said today it has closed $550 million for its sixth venture fund in India. This is a significant amount of capital for Accel’s efforts in the country, where […]

Microsoft has fixed a vulnerability in its login system, which security researchers say could have been used to trick unsuspecting victims into giving over complete access to their online accounts. The bug allowed attackers to quietly steal account tokens, which websites and apps use to grant users access to their accounts without having them to […]

A couple weeks back Tesla unveiled the its first pickup truck, called the Cybertruck. During its unveiling the company showed a butt-to-butt pull-off. Besides being a silly test, this particular demo was flawed in multiple ways, giving the Tesla a major advantage. Here’s the math to prove it. It’s likely Tesla will redo this test […]

Lucid Motors today is breaking ground on its manufacturing facility. Located in Casa Grande, Arizona, the factory will be used to build the Lucid Motor Lucid Air electric sedan. According to the company, production will begin in late 2020. This groundbreaking is the latest step taken by Lucid Motor towards getting the Lucid Air on […]

Ikea believes its approach to making small spaces more liveable applies even on other planets: The company has been working with an Earth-based research facility that is meant to mimic what a Mars habitat would be like, according to Fast Company. Originally, Ikea sent a designer to the station to seek out inspiration for creating […]

It’s not friend portability, but Facebook has announced the launch today of a photo transfer tool to enable users of its social network to port their photos directly to Google’s photo storage service, via encrypted transfer. The photo portability feature is initially being offered to Facebook users in Ireland, where the company’s international HQ is […]

The holiday season is officially on, and Disrupt Berlin 2019 opens its doors in just nine days. We’re ready to celebrate both occasions in festive style with a one-day Cyber Monday special. Buy a pass to Disrupt Berlin* today, 2 December, and you can pick any gift — up to $200 in value — from […]

India has long been a wonderland for cellphone users. At a time when most telecom operators across the globe charge anywhere between $5 to $10 for a gigabyte of mobile data, telcos in India deliver that for just a few cents. Spare another $2 to the same telecom operator, and you get a gigabyte of […]

Uncapped, a London headquartered and Warsaw-based startup that wants to provide “revenue-based” finance to growing European businesses, is officially launching today and disclosing that it has raised £10 million in funding. The capital is a mixture of equity funding and debt (money it can use for lending), and sees the fintech company backed by Rocket […]

November 2019 could mark when Nigeria (arguably) became Africa’s unofficial capital for fintech investment and digital finance startups. The month saw $360 million invested in Nigerian focused payment ventures. That is equivalent to roughly one-third of all the startup VC raised for the entire continent in 2018, according to Partech stats. A notable trend-within-the-trend is […]

Want to get professional feedback about your pitch deck, marketing assets, or immigration issues? Attending Disrupt Berlin? We’ve brought in experts from around Europe (and Silicon Valley) to help you directly. These events were hugely popular when we first did them at Disrupt in San Francisco the other month, so get your submissions in ASAP. […]

Susan Wojcicki may be one of the most powerful women in Silicon Valley, but she also holds the unenviable role of being ultimately responsible for a lot of misinformation that we, along with our parents, siblings, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and children — not to mention billions of strangers — now consume on YouTube. That garbage, […]

If you just bought a smart TV on Black Friday or plan to buy one for Cyber Monday tomorrow, the FBI wants you to know a few things. Smart TVs are like regular television sets but with an internet connection. With the advent and growth of Netflix, Hulu and other streaming services, most saw internet-connected […]

Figure Technologies, a nearly two-year-old, San Francisco-based fintech cofounded by Mike Cagney, the founder of the more established fintech company SoFi, is raising a whole lot of money — again. By February of this year, Figure had already raised $120 million in equity funding from a gaggle of investors, including RPM Ventures, partners at DST […]

A massive database storing tens of millions of SMS text messages, most of which were sent by businesses to potential customers, has been found online. The database is run by TrueDialog, a business SMS provider for businesses and higher education providers, which lets companies, colleges, and universities send bulk text messages to their customers and […]

Hey everyone. Thank you for welcoming me into you inboxes yet again. Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. After dodging your inboxes for a couple weeks as I ventured off to China for a TechCrunch event in Shenzhen, I am rested up and ready to go. If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, […]

Following swiftly on the heels of a Thanksgiving that broke records with $4.2 billion in online sales, Black Friday also hit a new high, although it just fell short of predictions. According to analytics from Adobe, consumers spent $7.4 billion online yesterday buying goods online via computers, tablets and smartphones. The figures were up by […]

Ockam, a two-year-old, Bay Area-based company that’s selling tools to developers so they can establish an “architecture for trust” within their connected device applications, has raised $4.9 million in seed funding, including from Core Ventures, Okta Ventures, SGH Capital, and Future Ventures. This serverless platform for IoT development is being led by CEO Matthew Gregory […]

Storm Ventures, a now 19-year-old, Sand Hill Road venture firm in Menlo Park, Ca., has closed on $130.4 million, shows a new SEC filing. The outfit began its fundraising late last year, according to an earlier filing. It had closed its previous fund with $180 million in 2015. Storm distinguishes itself in numerous ways, including […]

Facebook added a correction notice to a post by a fringe news site that Singapore’s government said contained false information. It’s the first time the government has tried to enforce a new law against ‘fake news’ outside its borders. The post by fringe news site States Times Review (STR), contained “scurrilous accusations” according to the […]

Since it’s a holiday week for those of us in the United States, we’ve put together an (even more) unstructured episode of the Original Content podcast. Among other things, this gives us a chance to update our initial review of “The Mandalorian” by acknowledging the Disney+ show’s breakout character, known unofficially as Baby Yoda — […]

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. What are developers talking about? What do app publishers and marketers need to know? How are politics impacting the App Store and app businesses? And which […]

As the Holiday Season approaches, new jobs for players in the tech ecosystem beckon. And this is no less true for investors. Two notable moves have recently happened that are worthy of note in the European scene. The first is that GR Capital, a pan-European VC, is opening an office in London and has lured […]

In this week's newsletter: China's pivot to Africa, another big scooter funding and a new entry to the unicorn club.

A data breach at Mixcloud, a U.K.-based audio streaming platform, has left more than 20 million user accounts exposed after the data was put on sale on the dark web. The data breach happened earlier in November, according to a dark web seller who supplied a portion of the data to TechCrunch, allowing us to […]

If you're interested in cameras and taking pictures, you should definitely check out our 2019 Photography Gift Guide, but if you're specifically looking to encourage a developing creator who wants to work with video on their preferred platform of choice, be it YouTube, TikTok, Instagram or any other, you've come to the right place. From smartphone accessories to get the most out of their built-in cameras, to stuff for people with more expensive dedicated camera setups, we've got it all.

It’s not like this wasn’t among the reasons everywhere suspected when Apple suddenly announced it was buying Intel’s modem business, but now the chipmaker has filed a brief in support of the FTC in an ongoing appeal by Qualcomm of a decision made in May. That decision found in favor of the FTC’s allegations that […]

Meet Pixpay, a French startup that wants to replace cash when you’re handing out pocket money to your kids. Anybody who is older than 10 years old can create a Pixpay account, get a debit card and manage pocket money. Challenger banks are nothing new, but they’re still mostly targeted towards adults. If you want […]

Synchronize your watches startup fans, and get ready to score serious savings on passes to Disrupt Berlin 2019. For today only, you can get 2 passes for the price of one. Our Black Friday sale starts now and runs through 11:59pm CET on 29 November. Don’t miss out! Simply purchase a pass to Disrupt Berlin […]

With popular social networks seeing some downtime, most shops closed, and many people off work for Thanksgiving, bargain hunters flocked online to start their holiday shopping. Sales for the day totalled $4.2 billion, according to research from Adobe Analytics. That makes this year the first time that Thanksgiving Day online sales have passed the milestone […]

Ah, Black Friday. The day of a zillion “deals” — some good, many bad, most just meant to clear the shelves for next year’s models. Hidden amidst ten thousand “LOWEST PRICE EVER! ONE DAY ONLY!” e-mails, though, are a handful of solid sales on legitimately good stuff.

Monitoring seismic activity all over the world is an important task, but one that requires equipment to be at the site it's measuring — difficult in the middle of the ocean. But new research from Berkeley could turn existing undersea fiber optic cables into a network of seismographs, creating an unprecedented global view of the Earth's tectonic movements.

Andrea Thomasz of Diligent Robotics and Prayag Narula of LeadGenius spoke to Greg Epstein at EmTech Next, a conference organized by the MIT Technology Review.

In this interview, Greg Epstein talks to Meili Gupta, a senior at Phillips Exeter Academy, and Walter Erike, an independent consultant and SAP Implementation Senior Manager.

Excerpts from conversations with Gideon Lichfield, editor in chief of the MIT Technology Review, and Karen Hao, its artificial intelligence reporter.

Greg Epstein interviews economist David Autor and Susan Winterberg, an academic who studies business and ethics.

Zebra Fuel, the London-based startup that delivered fuel directly to your vehicle — backed by Robin and Saul Klein’s LocalGlobe, Brent Hoberman’s Firstminute Capital and Zoopla founder Alex Chesterman — has told customers it is “no longer” delivering fuel in London. However, it is unclear at this stage if the company has ceased operations entirely. […]

French startup Foodvisor has raised a $4.5 million funding round after generating 2 million app downloads. Agrinnovation is leading the round and various business angels are also participating. I covered Foodvisor last month, so I’m not going to describe the app once again. In a few words, the startup uses deep learning to enable image […]

Peak Design has evolved from a crowdfunded upstart into a trusted accessory brand for photographers everywhere, and this week it introduced updates to its ‘Everyday’ line of backpacks and bags. These new and improved designs offer stuff that impresses anyone who was previously a fan of Peak’s work, and should also win the company brand […]

Will tomorrow’s leaders, despite good and ethical intentions, ultimately use their high-tech tools to exploit others ever more efficiently, or to find a better path forward?

The Samsung Galaxy Fold is a very unique smartphone, in more ways than one. The most obvious differentiator is that it folds out to expose a large, continuous 7.3″ display, hiding the seam thanks to a flexible OLED screen. It’s also at the very top end of the smartphone market price-wise, which could explain why […]

Translating the physical world to the digital has been a challenge, especially when it comes to things like color: Color isn’t actually all that static a thing, and the myriad displays and cameras we use can represent them in very different ways. But new gadgets from startup Nix can help cut through the confusion – […]

Fintech startup Bunq is launching a metal card called the Green Card. While some banks offer a cashback program with premium cards, Bunq is offering a special kind of “cashback”. For every €100 spent, Bunq plants a tree. The company has partnered with Eden Reforestation Projects to finance reforestation around the globe. Manufacturing a metal […]

TikTok has issued a public apology to a teenager who had her account suspended shortly after posting a video that asked viewers to research the persecution of Uighur people and other Muslim groups in Xinjiang. TikTok included a “clarification on the timeline of events,” and said that the viral video was removed four days after […]