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Welcome back to TechCrunch’s China roundup, a digest of the latest events that happened at major Chinese tech companies and what they mean to tech founders and executives around the world. Alibaba’s nemesis Alibaba’s new rival is shaking up China’s internet landscape. This week, four-year-old e-commerce upstart Pinduoduo displaced JD.com to be the fourth-most valuable […]

Patient communications software provider, Weave, collects $70M at a $970M valuation.

Hey everyone. Thank you for welcoming me into you inbox yet again. Last week, I talked about Zuckerberg’s quest to tell us that Facebook has governing principles when he’s really just building the stairs one step at a time. If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox here, […]

Zamna — which uses a blockchain to securely share and verify data between airlines and travel authorities to check passenger identities — has raised a $5m seed funding round led by VC firms LocalGlobe and Oxford Capital, alongside Seedcamp, the London Co-Investment Fund (LCIF), Telefonica, and a number of angel investors. Participation has also come […]

You’ve probably already heard that HBO’s “Succession” (which recently completed its second season) is amazing. And as three East Coast tech reporters, we were probably the easiest targets for the show’s many charms. Still, we felt like we had to talk about it. In fact, our “Succession” review on this episode of the Original Content […]

A new space race is forming globally, energized by venture capital and the hype around companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. The privately-funded space industry is still in its infancy, but there has been an explosion of startups and investors in the sector, and the fever has, in the last few […]

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. The app industry in 2018 saw 194 billion downloads and more than $100 billion in purchases. This past quarter, consumer spending exceeded $23 billion and installs topped […]

With 72 unicorns created since 2009 and $8.7 billion in venture funding last year, the UK is Europe’s leading startup hub. Although it remains uncertain how Brexit will impact startups’ ease of recruiting and rapid scaling, initial pains are unlikely to displace London from its position as a global center for finance, media, retail, and […]

Does quantum computing really exist? It’s fitting that for decades this field has been haunted by the fundamental uncertainty of whether it would, eventually, prove to be a wild goose chase. But Google has collapsed this nagging superposition with research not just demonstrating what’s called “quantum supremacy,” but more importantly showing that this also is […]

In this week's newsletter: Fair lays off 40% of staff, a mobile banking startup raises more VC and Bespoke Financial seeks to fund cannabis entrepreneurs.

Uber is selling foodie experiences such as cooking classes and multi-course fine dining in its on-demand food delivery app, Uber Eats, under a new Moments tab, per Forbes, which reports on a small-scale test currently running in San Francisco. It says Uber Eats users in the city have received an email saying they can book […]

Sequoia Capital founder Don Valentine passed way at his home in Woodside, Ca., today at age 87 of natural causes. Sequoia posted a tribute to Valentine shortly afterward, calling him “one of a generation of leaders who forged Silicon Valley.” A native of New York, Valentine majored in chemistry at Fordham University before joining Raytheon […]

Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, has a new book coming out this coming Monday titled “What You Do is Who You Are,” that takes a look at how to create “culture” at a company. It’s a word that’s thrown around a lot but that’s very hard to grasp, let alone […]

The U.S. Department of Defense today announced that Microsoft has won its Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract, worth up to $10 billion over a period of 10 years. With this, Microsoft will provide infrastructure and platform services for both the Pentagon’s business and mission operations. “The National Defense Strategy dictates that we must […]

NASA is looking for liquid gold on the Moon — not oil, but plain-old water. If we’re going to have a permanent presence there, we’ll need it, so learning as much as we can about it is crucial. That’s why the agency is sending a rover called VIPER to the Moon’s south pole — its […]

Tesla has launched the third iteration of its solar roof tile for residential home use, which it officially detailed in a blog post on Friday and in a call with media. Tesla CEO Elon Musk kicked off the call with some explanatory remarks on the V3 Solar Roof, and then took a number of questions. […]

While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg seemed cheerful and even jokey when he took the stage today in front of journalists and media executives (at one point, he described the event as “by far the best thing” he’d done this week), he acknowledged that there are reasons for the news industry to be skeptical. Facebook, after […]

A fleet of electric, autonomous Hyundai Kona crossovers — equipped with a self-driving system from Chinese autonomous startup Pony .ai and Via’s ride-hailing platform, will start shuttling customers on public roads next week. The robotaxi service called BotRide will operate on public roads in Irvine, California, beginning November 4. This isn’t a driverless service; there […]

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 starts testing News, its new section for journalism Facebook’s news section, which was previously reported to be imminent, is here: […]

With cross-platform experiences like Fortnite and PUBG, in-game socializing environments, and subscription-based cloud gaming services from Playstation, Google, Amazon, and others, the gaming industry is entering a new era beyond mobile.

Google today announced one of the biggest updates to its search algorithm in recent years. By using new neural networking techniques to better understand the intentions behind queries, Google says it can now offer more relevant results for about one in 10 searches in the U.S. in English (with support for other languages and locales […]

Bespoke Financial wants to provide cannabis businesses with the same kind of financial services that other businesses get, but that dispensaries and growers can’t yet access. The regulations around cannabis operations are so stringent at the local level — and so nebulous at the federal level — that national banks won’t give businesses in the […]

It has been a tough week for China-U.S. relations. Vice President Mike Pence ratcheted up the administration’s rhetoric yesterday, calling the NBA “a wholly owned subsidiary of the authoritarian regime” in China while the league’s commissioner Adam Silver continued to try to tamp down the intensity of criticism over the league’s business, saying in an […]

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

NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will have to operate on its own in a harsh environment, hundreds of millions of miles from the nearest mechanic. But for now, it’s still in development at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab — and every milestone is an important one. Including supporting its own weight, fully assembled and resting on its […]

NASA and its commercial astronaut program partners are laser-focused on getting crew into space. But to get to space you first have to get to the rocket, and that’s where the Airstream Astrovan II comes in. This vehicle, which is the sequel to the original Astrovan that brought America’s astronauts to the launch pad in […]

Speaking at a quick series of interviews with commercial space companies at this year’s annual International Astronautical Congress, SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell shed a little more light on her company’s current thinking with regards to the mission timelines for its forthcoming Starship spacefaring vehicle. Starship, currently in parallel development at SpaceX’s South Texas […]

Facebook’s news section, which was previously reported to be imminent, is here: The company is rolling out Facebook News in a limited test in the U.S. as a home screen tab and bookmark in the main Facebook app. In a blog post, Facebook’s Campbell Brown (vice president of global news partnerships) and Mona Sarantakos (product manager, […]

HowNow, the workforce learning platform, has raised $3 million (£2.4m) in a “pre-series A” funding round. The round is led by Mark Pearson’s Fuel Ventures and brings the total raised by the startup to $4.5 million. Other investors include Andy Murray OBE; Michael Whitfield and Chris Bruce (founders of Thomsons Online Benefits); Bernie Sinniah (former […]

StepLadder, another London-based startup aiming to help so-called “generation rent” get onto the housing ladder, has raised £1.5 million in seed funding. Backing the round is Spanish banking giant BBVA and fintech VC Anthemis via the London-based venture studio the pair have partnered on. Early investor Seedcamp also followed on, in addition to unnamed angel […]

Few, if any, saw coming the Chromebook’s utter dominance of the K-8 category. In hindsight, it’s easy to see why the systems have been such a success story, of course: low prices, coupled with ease of wide-scale deployment and lockdown make them a perfect fit for the classroom. Fifteen million Chromebooks were sold in 2018 […]

Are we really doing this again? After the pivot to video. After Instant Articles. After news was deleted from the News Feed. Once more, Facebook dangles extra traffic, and journalism outlets leap through its hoop and into its cage. Tomorrow, Facebook will unveil its News tab [Update: Here’s the announcement and our coverage]. About 200 […]

Ford provided its first peek of a Mustang-inspired electric crossover nearly 14 months. Now, it’s ready to show the world what “Mustang-inspired” means. The automaker said Thursday it will debut the electric SUV on November 17 ahead of the LA Auto Show. Not much is known about the electric SUV that is coming to market […]

SpaceX will look to launch its Starlink service for consumers sometime next year, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell confirmed at a media roundtable meeting at the company’s offices in Washington during the International Astronautical Congress this week (via SpaceNews). Shotwell, who also appeared on stage at the event to share some updates around SpaceX’s […]

SaaS has been the motherlode of enterprise software investing for two decades now. Venture investors, entrepreneurs, and Wall Street have all learned to pile on, leading to a shared consensus that cloud investing is “a sure thing."

Amazon shares fell by nearly 7%, or $118.38, in after-hours trading on Thursday after the company reported its first earnings miss in two years. Financial analysts had predicted that the launch of one-day shipping would eat into Amazon’s earnings, but even with the forewarning investors pummeled the stock after the market closed. It didn’t help […]

Lotame, a company offering data management tools for publishers and marketers, today unveiled a new product called Cartographer — described by CMO Adam Solomon as “our new people-based ID solution.” In other words, it’s Lotame’s offering to help businesses connect their visitor and customer data across platforms and devices. We’ve written about plenty of other cross-device […]

Apple Arcade introduced the idea of all-you-can-eat subscription-based mobile gaming to the mainstream. Google Play Pass soon followed as a way to subscribe to a sizable collection of both apps and games on Android devices. Today, a startup called GameClub is launching in the U.S. to offer an alternative. For $4.99 per month, mobile consumers […]

Enterprise software tool startups are so often birthed to either un-bundle or re-bundle what came before them. In an age where “consumerization of the enterprise” is a trendy phrase for investors, it was natural a startup would come along to bundle its take on some of the trendiest startup tools. Taskade appears to be the […]

In a wide ranging interview with The Wall Street Journal’s global technology editor Jason Dean yesterday, Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield had some strong words regarding Microsoft, saying the software giant saw his company as an existential threat. The interview took place at the WSJ Tech Live event. When Butterfield was asked about a […]

In the past, founders could get away with giving pricing short shrift under the mantra, "the best product will ultimately win." No more.

At this week’s International Astronautical Congress, where the space industry, international space agencies and researchers from around the world convene to discuss the state of space technology and business, I asked NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine about what role he sees for startups in contributing to his agency’s ambitious Artemis program. Artemis (named after Apollo’s twin […]

As the market continues to turn against the wave of highly valued venture-backed startups operating with little end in sight to their huge losses — Uber and WeWork being two prime examples — another startup is taking a proactive step to get ahead of the story, by cutting costs and restructuring before public opinion forces […]

Yesterday, in addressing nervous WeWork employees at an all-hands, the company’s new chairman, SoftBank executive Marcelo Claure, told those gathered that their days of worrying are over, says Recode, which obtained a leaked recording of the meeting. In comments that may stun industry observers who haven’t done the math — and upset at least some […]

Two lawmakers have asked the government’s most senior U.S. intelligence official to assess if video sharing app TikTok could pose “national security risks” to the United States. In a letter by Sens. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Tom Cotton (R-AR), the lawmakers asked the acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire if the app maker could […]

Anyone who has tried to ride an electric scooter knows the likelihood of finding one with a charged battery is quite low. Swiftmile, which just landed a contract with the city of Austin, supplies cities and private operators with docks equipped to park and charge both scooters and e-bikes. What Swiftmile offers serves as a […]

I’ve been tearing my gadgets apart for as long as I can remember. Consoles, phones, printers, whatever — I’ve always needed to see what makes it all work. Sometimes they even work when I put them back together. As soon as Google announced that the new Pixel 4 had friggin’ radar built-in for detecting hand […]

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 Q3 misses big on revenues of $824M and EPS of $0.05 on the back of adtech glitches Twitter said the […]

Caffeine, the live streaming service founded by former Apple designers Ben Keighran and Sam Roberts, has signed an exclusive streaming deal with Offset. The startup has been relatively quiet since raising nearly $150 million in funding last year, but Keighran (who previously co-founded Chomp and then served as Product Design Lead for Apple TV) told […]

Modern Animal just raised a $13.5 million seed round of funding to fuel its mission of offering pets, humans and veterinarians a better experience. Led by Founders Fund with participation from Upfront Ventures, Susa Ventures and others, the round will enable Modern Animal to open its first location in Los Angeles early next year. Founded […]