Crunch Hype

Despite ongoing public relations crises, Facebook kept growing in Q3 2019, demonstrating that media backlash does not necessarily equate to poor business performance. Facebook reached 2.45 billion monthly users, up 1.65%, from 2.41 billion in Q2 2019 when it grew 1.6%, and it now has 1.62 billion daily active users, up 2% from 1.587 billion […]

CEO Jack Dorsey just announced, via tweet, that Twitter will be banning all political advertising — albeit with “a few exceptions” like voter registration. “We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought,” Dorsey said. While it’s not totally clear how broad those exceptions will be, it sounds like the ban will apply to […]

Immigration advocates are rightly fretting over the Trump administration’s new health insurance mandate and efforts to dismantle the asylum system. But away from the spotlight, another crisis is quietly brewing that could affect virtually every foreign-born STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) student and worker.

If you’ve ever tried buying a bike online, or ski equipment, or any number of expensive goods where it would be useful to know a lot more than you do, you might check out Curated, a two-year-old San Francisco-based startup that wants to help busy shoppers who know generally what they want but don’t necessarily […]

The online grocery wars continue. Amazon this week just made grocery delivery free, so Walmart is now touting how its grocery service offers the booze. The retailer today announced a new milestone in terms of giving its customers the ability to shop for alcohol online, noting that more than 2,000 Walmart locations across 29 states […]

As much as we'd like to think that we're entering an era of autonomous robots, they're actually still pretty helpless. To keep them from falling down all the time, a human's fast reflexes could be the solution. But the human has to feel what the robot is feeling — and that's just what these researchers are testing.

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. HBO Max will cost $14.99 per month and launch in May 2020 AT&T and WarnerMedia announced the pricing, launch timetable and […]

The Roman Empire, the Iroquois Confederacy and the United States of America are human inventions as surely as airplanes, computers, and contraception. Technology is how we do things, and political institutions are how we collaborate at scale. Government is an immensely powerful innovation through which we take collective action.

An accidental sweep of the App Store removed more than 20 million ratings from the most popular apps — including from well-known brands like Google, Microsoft, Starbucks, Hulu, Nike and others — as well as from smaller developers. The issue began on October 23, 2019 and wasn’t resolved until yesterday, October 29. Apple hasn’t yet […]

Chances are you mostly think of Samsung as a consumer-focused electronics company, but it actually has a very sizable B2B business as well, which serves more than 15,000 large enterprises and hundreds of thousands of SMB entrepreneurs via its partners. At its developer conference this week, it’s putting the spotlight squarely on this side of […]

Google open-sourced its TensorFlow machine learning framework back in 2015 and it quickly became one of the most popular platforms of its kind. Enterprises that wanted to use it, however, had to either work with third parties or do it themselves. To help these companies — and capture some of this lucrative market itself — […]

Facebook has reached a settlement with the UK’s data protection watchdog, the ICO, agreeing to pay in full a £500,000 (~$643k) fine following the latter’s investigating into the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal. As part of the arrangement Facebook has agreed to drop its legal appeal against the penalty. But under the terms of the […]

Particle, a platform for Internet of Things devices, has raised $40 million in its latest round of funding. Qualcomm Ventures and Energy Impact Partners led the Series C raise, with backing from existing investors including Root Ventures, Bonfire Ventures, Industry Ventures, Spark Capital, Green D Ventures, Counterpart Ventures, and SOSV. With its latest round of […]

Ahead of Friday’s launch of Apple’s new streaming service, Apple TV+, the company announced an Apple Music/Apple TV+ bundle deal specifically aimed at making the service more affordable for younger subscribers. According to an Instagram Story published by Hailee Steinfeld, star of Apple TV+’s first potential hit series, Dickison, Apple Music student subscribers will be […]

New numbers from Gartner mark another major increase for global wearable spending in 2020. The analyst firm forecasts a 27% jump in end-user spending over this year, from $40.5 billion to $51.5 billion. Once again, the pack is lead by smartwatches, which continue to burn the hottest among in the space. Interestingly, the increase on […]

Stampli, the Mountain View-based company looking to automate invoice management, has today announced the close of a $25 million Series B round. The funding round was led by SignalFire, with participation from existing investors such as Hillsven Capital, Bloomberg Beta, as well as new investors such as NextWorld Capital. Stampli launched in 2015 to build […]

The ubiquity of APIs and cloud solutions have opened up a world of interesting ways for businesses to create a service without having to build every part of it themselves. But they have unleashed something else, too: an increased risk of breaches resulting from data being moved and used in multiple places and in multiple […]

Good news, satellite radio fans: SiriusXM is getting a bit easier to control on your various Google Home and Nest Mini speakers. The streaming radio network is at long last getting support for Google Assistant, allowing you to say things like “Hey Google, play 90s on 9” and have the station start right up. While […]

Capital raises $5M from Future Ventures, Greycroft and others.

In a move to boost family subscriptions to its app, Spotify this morning announced the launch of a dedicated Kids application which allows children three and up to listen to their own music, both online and offline, as well as explore playlists and recommendations picked by experts, and more. The music selection is also filtered […]

Urban air mobility company Volocopter has focused its efforts to date on getting its passenger electric drone business off the ground – literally, in fact. But now, the German startup has unveiled a new electric vertical take-off and landing craft (eVTOL), which is designed specifically to move large payloads of goods around, without a pilot […]

Uber Freight, the Uber business unit that helps truck drivers connect with shipping companies, said Wednesday it’s launching the app in Canada as part of its global expansion plan. The move into Canada will give Uber Freight access to the country’s $68 billion trucking industry, which is facing severe driver shortage that has constrained freight […]

Workiz, a startup whose software helps field service professionals manage their work, said today it has raised $5 million in Series A funding. The funding was led by Magenta Venture Partners, with participation from returning investor Aleph. The company announced the launch of Workiz Voice, an Amazon Alexa-powered feature that allows the app to be […]

Microsoft-owned Github has removed the APK of an app for organizing political protests in the autonomous community of Catalonia — acting on a takedown request from Spain’s military police (aka the Guardia Civil). As we reported earlier this month supporters of independence for Catalonia have regrouped under a new banner — calling itself Tsunami Democràtic […]

Millions of neighborhood stores that dot large and small cities, towns, and villages in India and have proven tough to beat for e-commerce giants and super-chain retailers are at the center of a new play in the country. A score of e-commerce companies, offline retail chains, and fintech startups are now racing to work with these mom […]

If your budget simply can’t manage a line item for a ticket to Disrupt Berlin 2019, we have exciting news for you. Volunteer for our work exchange program, and we’ll give you a free Innovator pass good for both days of the show (11-12 December). We have a limited number of volunteer positions, and applications […]

An amateur radio rig exposed to the internet and discovered by a security researcher was collecting real-time of medical data and health information broadcast by hospitals and ambulances across U.K. towns and cities. The rig, operated out of a house in North London, was picking up radio waves from over the air and translating them […]

A lawsuit filed a by former Juul executive alleges that the company knew a batch of contaminated e-liquid had been used in about one million pods shipped to retailers earlier this year, but did not inform customers. The lawsuit, first reported by BuzzFeed, was brought by Siddharth Breja, former senior vice president of global finance […]

Sam Altman, Index Ventures back a startup taking on Slack.

AT&T and WarnerMedia just announced the pricing of their HBO Max streaming service, along with sharing more details about the timing and content lineup. The service will cost $14.99 per month — the same price as HBO Now. WarnerMedia also says it will be free for HBO Now subscribers and for viewers who subscribe to […]

MX Player, a popular video app that offers both local playback and streaming services, said on Wednesday that it has raised $110.8 million in a new financing round led by Chinese internet giant Tencent as the video app looks to expand its business in India and other international markets. Times Internet, which acquired a majority […]

Chan Park feels like “an eternal nomad.” He has since age 12, when he moved from Korea to the U.S., where he attended middle school in Minnesota, followed by high school in New Jersey, followed by college in New Hampshire. Then he really began to bounce around. Park worked as a trader in New York […]

“These $250 earbuds are nice.” That’s the first thing I wrote to a co-worker after unboxing and trying on the new AirPods. After wearing them around the New York City streets, the subway and into a couple of cafes, that pithy review stands. Here are a few more words: They’re super comfortable. I’ve used a […]

The death of Flash has been a long time coming... and a long time going on, too. For years we've heard that it's on its way out, but who among us has not found an errant Flash video or widget in the last month or two? To hasten its demise Google is taking the understandable step of... pretending it doesn't exist.

Good Today offers a simple way for people to support a variety of charity organizations: By donating as little as 25 cents a day, supporters get a daily email allowing them to vote for one of two charity organizations, with the day’s donations split based on the votes. The nonprofit, previously known as Good St., […]

Depending on who you ask, space-based technology is past peak hype, at the beginning of its investment growth curve, or in an infrastructure-building phase akin to the railway industry in 1800s America. One emerging technology could change everything for startups and aerospace giants, however — in-space manufacturing. One of the hard limits of building businesses […]

Amazon, Microsoft and Google are often referred to as the Big 3 in the cloud infrastructure market, and if you had any doubt about the growth potential of the cloud, take a look at this quarter’s eye-popping revenue numbers from these three companies, which reached almost $22 billion this earnings’s season. Before we get into […]

Last year at its developer conference, Samsung showed off an early glimpse of its upcoming foldable. In hindsight, the Galaxy Fold’s roll out could have gone more smoothly, but sometimes first gen products go that way, I suppose. At very least, it’s clear that the company won’t let a rocky start stand between it and […]

Walmart announced today an expansion of its existing relationship with financial services provider Green Dot, which will continue to serve as the issuing bank and program manager for the Walmart MoneyCard program for another seven years. The two companies also agreed to partner on the creation of a new fintech accelerator which focuses on the […]

It’s time to get your robotics fix, startup fans. That’s right, TC Sessions: Robotics & AI returns to UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on March 3, 2020. Join us for a day-long deep dive focused on the intersection of robotics and AI — arguably two of the most exciting and world-changing technologies. Registration is now open. […]

WhatsApp has filed a suit in federal court accusing Israeli mobile surveillance maker NSO Group of creating an exploit that was used hundreds of times to hack into target’s phone. The lawsuit, filed in a California federal court, said the mobile surveillance outfit “developed their malware in order to access messages and other communications after […]

It’s a year since the European Commission got a bunch of adtech giants together to spill ink on a voluntary Code of Practice to do something — albeit, nothing very quantifiable — as a first step to stop the spread of disinformation online. Its latest report card on this voluntary effort sums to the platforms […]

Self-driving vehicle technology company Waymo has expanded its business relationship with automotive retail company AutoNation, the companies announced today. The new extension builds on the existing partnership between Waymo and AutoNation, which began as a way for Waymo to service its Phoenix, Ariz.-based vehicles, and which grew last year into an arrangement wherein Waymo would […]

There are two types of enterprise startups: those that create value and those that protect value. Cybersecurity is most definitely part of the latter group, and as a vertical, it has sprawled the past few years as the scale of attacks on companies, organizations, and governments has continuously expanded. That may be a constant threat […]

Sony’s live TV streaming service, PlayStation Vue, is shutting down. The service will no longer be available as of January 30, 2020, the company announced today. The news comes only days after rumors circulated which claimed Sony was in search of a new owner for the struggling service. A report in The Information claimed Sony […]

Some features are the result of consumer demand. Others simply make sense. And then there are features like the Galaxy Book Flex and Ion’s Wireless PowerShare that appear to be more a product of a “because we can” approach to product design. Wireless charging is, in and of itself, kind of a no-brainer in an […]

Yext helps businesses manage their presence on search and across the web; starting today, with the launch of Yext Answers, it’s also helping them provide a better experience on their own websites. “It lets any company with a website answer a question about their own brand in a Google-like experience on their own site,” CEO […]

Contract, self-employed and temporary jobs are on the rise in developed markets, with some 85% of the global workforce, 2.7 billion people, estimated to be on some form of hourly wage rather than flat salary. Today, a startup that helps companies source these kinds of candidates is announcing a round of funding to help meet […]

Everyone’s in the wireless earbuds business these days. Razer, never one to be left out of a trend, is entering the category this week with Hammerhead True Wireless, a pair of fully wireless earbuds targeting its core demographic of gamers. Where the headphones set to distinguish themselves from the chattering masses of competitors is a […]

A group of Lyft, Uber and DoorDash drivers are announcing this morning in Sacramento a statewide ballot measure for the November 2020 ballot. Called the Protect App-Based Drivers & Services Act — funded by Uber, Lyft and DoorDash — the measure aims to ensure drivers and couriers can continue to be independent contractors with flexible […]