Crunch Hype

The market for second-hand clothes — the “circular economy” as it’s sometimes called — has been on the rise in the last several years, fuelled by economic crunches, a desire to make more responsible and less wasteful fashion choices, and a wave of digital platforms that are bringing the selling and buying of used clothes […]

Fintech startup Revolut is adding a key feature for users who want to replace their traditional bank account altogether. You can now pay with GBP direct debits. Revolut already added EUR direct debits last year. While most people use cards to pay for goods and services in the U.K., some businesses require you to pay […]

Looking for some gift ideas for the photographer in your life? Look no further. Though shooters amateur and professional tend to take care of their own needs pretty well, there are plenty of things you can given them that they’ll appreciate. But you might have to be ready to spend a bit — people don’t […]

The mobility industry is rapidly shifting to readjust for an electric and autonomous future. Automotive companies are increasingly looking outside the manufacturing sector to fuel growth, and companies that used to bank on selling vehicles are now building mobility apps, scooters, and subscription services. Detroit is turning to to Silicon Valley for fresh ideas while […]

Simple Contacts has launched a new service letting users try out new contact lenses for as little as $3. The company launched a little over three years ago as a way for contact lens wearers to slash their refill costs, has now expanded into a service that offers users a chance to try out different […]

Global politics are difficult to navigate ordinarily, but in times of conflict companies that aim to provide an unbiased service, such as a map or search function, may have to come down on one side or another. Apple just came down at least partly on the side of Russia in its controversial annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, and Google has accommodated Russian interests as well.

There’s no such thing as perfect privacy or security, but there’s a lot you can do to lock down your online life. And the holiday season is a great time to encourage others to do the same. Some people are more likely to take security into their own hands if they’re given a nudge along […]

Twttr, the prototype app Twitter launched earlier this year, has been testing new ways to display conversations, including through the use of threaded replies and other visual cues. Now, those features have been spotted on Twitter.com, giving the service a message board-like feel where replies are connected to original tweeter and others in a thread […]

Twitter has changed its tune regarding inactive accounts after receiving a lot of user feedback: It will now be developing a way to “memorialize” user accounts for those who have passed away, before proceeding with a plan it confirmed this week to deactivate accounts that are inactive in order to “present more accurate, credible information” […]

Argentina’s Ualá became the most recent Latin American fintech to receive a growth-stage funding ($150 million) from Asian investors, Tencent and Softbank. This marks Tencent’s second round of investment in Ualá, the first coming in April 2019. Tencent also invested $180M in Brazil’s leading neobank, Nubank in 2018. With Ualá, Tencent and Softbank will join a […]

Prevailing wisdom states that as an enterprise SaaS company evolves, there’s a tendency to sacrifice profitability for growth — understandably so, especially in the early days of the company. At some point, however, a company needs to become profitable. Box has struggled to reach that goal since going public in 2015, but yesterday, it delivered […]

Science is exciting in theory, but it can also be dreadfully dull. Some experiments require hundreds or thousands of repetitions or trials — an excellent opportunity to automate. That's just what MIT scientists have done, creating a robot that performs a certain experiment, observes the results, and plans a follow-up... and has now done so 100,000 times in the year it's been operating.

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. Twitter will free up handles by deleting inactive accounts “As part of our commitment to serve the public conversation, we’re working […]

A new app called Fabric aims to make it simpler for parents to plan for their family’s long-term financial well-being. The goal is to offer parents a one-stop-shop that includes the ability to ability for term life insurance from their phone, create a free will in about five minutes, and collaborate with a spouse or […]

Just one-third of the 2020 U.S. presidential candidates are using an email security feature that could prevent a similar attack that hobbled the Democrats during the 2016 election. Out of the 21 presidential candidates in the race according to Reuters, only seven Democrats are using and enforcing DMARC, an email security protocol that verifies the […]

Every day, people slog over inputting date from invoices and other forms. So instead of using traditional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) extraction software, you could apply a new form of machine learning to documents to speed up the process. That’s the thinking behind Rossum’s technology, which uses ‘Cognitive Data Capture’ to teach computers to understand […]

Like another famous accelerator program founded around the same time, Techstars has grown considerably since its 2006 launch in Boulder, Colorado. In fact, the brand seems to be in so many places that it’s hard to keep track of its reach, along with its impact. Where is Techstars, exactly? Who funds it? And how many startups […]

A general lack of judgement has always been one of the strongest appeals of smart assistants. Whatever bad pop song or terrible online video you play for the 10,000th time — they don’t care. They’re simply there to help, judgement free. Amazon, however, has been working on some features behind the scenes to help make […]

Whether you're a founder or just have equity, there's a bunch of stuff you need to know — stuff that you won't actually learn until you've been through it.

Facing a shorter holiday shopping season this year, U.S. retailers started rolling out their Black Friday deals earlier than usual. That move has paid off, according to new e-commerce data shared by Adobe Analytics this morning, which found that U.S. consumers have already spent $50.1 billion online between November 1 and November 26, 2019 — […]

Xiaomi, the world’s fourth largest smartphone vendor, on Wednesday shared its earnings figures for the quarter that ended in September. While the results fell largely in line with analysts’ expectations, a drastic drop in the company’s growth underscores some of the struggles that handset makers are facing as they shift to services to make up for […]

Love it or hate it, networking is a necessary part of business — especially for early-stage startup founders searching for investors, customers and collaborators. When you head to Disrupt Berlin 2019 this December, you can relax a bit because we have a networking tool to help you make the most of two very full days. […]

Last year at AWS re:invent, the company’s massive customer conference, Amazon launched a new miniature race car and a racing league, all designed to teach developers about machine learning in a fun way. Today, ahead of next week’s re:Invent conference, the company announced some enhancements including an improved car and expanded racing schedule. “We are […]

Chefclub hasn’t attracted a lot of headlines over the years as it has only raised $3.5 million. But it is slowly building a major media brand on social media platforms as it now competes directly with Tastemade and Tasty. Compared to more traditional recipe websites and brands, Chefclub focuses exclusively on the intersection of food […]

Mojichat, the Los Angeles startup which makes full-body, animated emojis, is launching a partnership with Streamlabs to offer gamers an opportunity to sell customized emojis to fans and potential sponsors. Viewers can create customized Mojichat emotes that can be displayed in chat boxes next to their names, that will appear in-stream if they donate to […]

Lego seems to have been inspired by recent events to bring its own vision fo the truck of the future to the world – behold this bold design statement in all its glory. Clearly, Lego is having a go at Elon Musk and the Tesla Cybertruck that he unveiled last week – which was… divisive […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Amazon helped pioneer and now dominates the online marketplace business model, where a variety of merchants post items for sale on its platform for billions of consumers to discover and buy them. Today, a London startup that’s taken that idea but is applying it to a far more curated set of retailers and goods has […]

A joint investigation by watchdogs in Canada and British Columbia has found that Cambridge Analytica-linked data firm, Aggregate IQ, broke privacy laws in Facebook ad-targeting work it undertook for the official Vote Leave Brexit campaign in the UK’s 2016 EU referendum. A quick reminder: Vote Leave was the official leave campaign in the referendum on the […]

Back in 2010, the web performance and security company Cloudflare launched in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Battlefield competition. The company came in second. Earlier this year, Cloudflare IPOed. To talk about this journey, Cloudflare CEO Matt Prince will join us on the main stage at Disrupt Berlin on December 12. He’ll also participate in a […]

Big bucks are pouring to get you through the chaotic traffic on Indian roads. Bounce, a Bangalore-based startup that operates over 17,000 electric and gasoline scooters in three dozen cities in India, has raised about $150 million as part of an ongoing financing round led by existing investors Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital and Accel Partners […]

Nico Berardi considers himself to be a citizen of the world, with a penchant for travel and a wide range of interests. Unlike many other VCs, who’ve increasingly specialized as the market has grown more crowded, Berardi is nearly as wide-ranging in his approach to venture capital, too. Somewhat counterintuitively, it’s paying off. At least, […]

Editor’s note: Drew is a geek who first worked at AOL when he was 16 years old and went on to become a senior writer at TechCrunch. He is now the VP of Communications for venture equity fund Scaleworks. There are a few ways that people use Twitter, but for the most part the ones who […]

Netflix is expanding its theatrical presence by signing a long-term lease for The Paris Theatre, a historic single-screen venue in New York City. This follows reports that Netflix is also working to buy the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles. And while these might seem like odd moves for a streaming company, they may also be […]

It's strange that no matter how hard Amazon denies that its warehouses are terrible, dangerous places to work, the reports to that effect just keep coming out. Not only that, but now a whistleblower alleges the company worked with Indiana officials to erase a workplace safety violation that cost a man his life.

Jason Sherman, founder and CEO of TapRm (pronounced “taproom”), says it’s time for beer-lovers to do more of their shopping online. It’s an industry that Sherman knows well, having worked as an attorney at Anheuser Busch and at the alcohol giant’s ZX Ventures incubator. He said it was through the job that he began wondering […]

How should a growth company manage its budget? Does the annual budget approval process even make sense in a fast-moving firm?

We've refreshed our annual STEM toy gift guide with the latest wares clamoring to entice and inspire kids with coding tricks and electronic wizardry. Yes folks! Another year, another clutch of shiny gizmos making grand claims of computing smarts in child-friendly packaging.

Xerox fired the latest volley in the Xerox -HP merger letter wars today. Xerox CEO John Visentin wrote to the HP board that his company planned to take its $33.5 billion offer directly to HP shareholders. He began his letter with a tone befitting a hostile takeover attempt, stating that their refusal to negotiate defied […]

Virtual reality doesn’t have many hit games yet, but Facebook is buying the studio behind one of the platform’s biggest titles. Facebook announced today that it will be buying Beat Games, the game studio behind Beat Saber, a rhythm game that’s equal parts Fruit Ninja and Guitar Hero — with light sabers of course. Terms […]

Those who’ve attempted to snag their preferred Twitter handle know what a pain the process can be. Users can squat on an account for years, holding onto handles in spite of long stretches of inactivity. As spotted by a BBC reporter, a new move by the company could help alleviate the situation. The service confirmed […]

It was the challenge heard around the electric vehicle world. And now it seems, the Ford F-150 versus Tesla Cybertruck tow battle that we were all ready for, probably won’t happen. A quick recap: Tesla CEO Elon Musk poked the figurative Dearborn, Michigan bear in the middle of the company’s Cybertruck unveiling when he played […]

Google is hoping to juice holiday sales of Chromebooks by tacking on a subscription to the hot new streaming service, Disney+. The company on Monday announced it would give Chromebook buyers three, free months of Disney+ with the purchase of new devices. Specifically, the deal is valid for Chromebooks bought between November 25, 2019 and […]

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. Google employee activist says she’s been fired Employee activist Rebecca Rivers (who was involved in a campaign pressuring Google to end […]

Once again, TechCrunch has asked me to put together a list of travel-friendly gadgets, and once again, I find myself between back-to-back international flights. If nothing else, all of the travel for this gig has made me much better at figuring out what to pack and what to leave behind.

Who could have guessed an adorable, big-eyed baby Star Wars alien would have generated a ton of demand for toys? Apparently not Disney, which today started to sell merchandise based on The Child from new Disney+ show The Mandalorian, commonly known as “Baby Yoda”. The shirts, bags, mugs, and phone cases all feel…forced, like Disney […]

FedEx’s autonomous delivery bot got a cold reception from New York City officials. After the company’s SameDay Bots — named Roxo — popped up on New York City streets last week, Mayor Bill de Blasio and transportation officials delivered a sharp response: Get out. FedEx told TechCrunch that the bots were there for a preview […]

Today, Amazon announced a new approach that it says will put machine learning technology in reach of more developers and line of business users. Amazon has been making a flurry of announcements ahead of its re:Invent customer conference next week in Las Vegas. While the company offers plenty of tools for data scientists to build […]

You’ve probably heard murmurs about Google’s forthcoming Ambient Mode for Android . The company first announced this feature, which essentially turns an Android device into a smart display while it’s charging, in September. Now, in a Twitter post, Google confirmed that it will launch soon, starting with a number of select devices that run Android […]

The Valley’s affinity for robotics shows no signs of cooling. Technical enhancements through innovations like AI/ML, compute power and big data utilization continue to drive new performance milestones, efficiencies and use cases. Despite the old saying, “hardware is hard,” investment in the robotics space continues to expand. Money is pouring in across robotics’ billion-dollar sub […]