Crunch Hype

Announced this summer at IFA in Berlin, LG’s G8X ThinQ offers yet another take on the folding/dual-screen phenomenon. Rather than the outright foldable display of the Samsung Galaxy or the dual-screen of the forthcoming Microsoft Surface Duo, the device sneaks in additional screen real estate through an accessory. Available here in the States starting November […]

Medium is announcing significant changes to its Partner Program, where subscribers pay for access to exclusive content, and the revenue gets split with writers. The biggest change is that writers will now be compensated based “primarily” on reading time, rather than claps. In a post, Medium’s Emma Smith describes reading time as “a closer measure […]

As designers grow both in sheer numbers and within the hierarchy of organizations, design tool makers are adapting to their evolving needs in different ways. Figma, the web-based collaborative design tool, is taking a note from the engineering revolution of the early aughts. “What if there were a GitHub for designers?” mused Dylan Field, early […]

European launch provider Arianespace announced some exciting news regarding its ambitions for the Moon at the International Astronautical Congress today. Arianespace CEO Stéphane Israël revealed on stage that its forthcoming space launch vehicle, the Ariane 6, will aim to deliver the first rideshare mission to the Moon in four years. ”By 2023 we are ready to […]

Roku is beefing up its advertising business with the acquisition of Boston-based dataxu, a demand-side platform that will allow marketers to plan, buy and optimize their video ad campaigns that run on Roku’s devices and services. The deal, a mixture of cash and stock, is for $150 million and has been approved by each company’s […]

Mozilla today announced that its Enhanced Tracking Protection feature for Firefox, which launched in July (and became the default in September), has now blocked a total of over 450 billion third-party tracking requests from the thousands of companies that try to track you as you browse the web. That’s a big number, but with today’s […]

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has put an end to the deceptive marketing tactics of Devumi, a company that sold fake indicators of social media influence — like Twitter followers, retweets, YouTube subscribers and views, and more — which was also the subject of a 2018 investigation by The New York Times into the world […]

Following a crowdfunding campaign that raised an impressive $1 million earlier this year, Sphero’s STEM/STEAM kit RVR is now on sale. Announced back in February as part of the Colorado company’s first-ever Kickstarter campaign, RVR presents a bit of a change for Sphero in a number of key ways. For starters, it’s a move away […]

Koio, the high-end sneakers brand led by Chris Wichert and Johannes Quodt, has today raised an additional $6 million in Series A funding, bringing total Series A funding to $9 million. The round was led by Founders Fund, with participation from existing investors Acton Capital Partners and Brand Foundry, among others. The direct-to-consumer product was […]

Every startup is a story and every startup’s success depends — on some level — on how well they can either tell that story or get that story told. The best stories are the ones that create an instant brand. One that sparks a relationship or a moment of inspiration with customers and consumers alike. […]

When Okta launched its $50 million Okta Ventures investment fund in April, one of its investments was in an early stage privacy startup called DataGrail. Today, the companies announced a partnership that they hope will help boost DataGrail, while providing Okta customers with a privacy tool option. DataGrail CEO and co-founder Daniel Barber says that […]

Aurora Insight, a startup that provides a “dynamic” global map of wireless connectivity that it built and monitors in real time using AI combined with data from sensors on satellites, vehicles, buildings, aircraft and other objects, is emerging from stealth today with the launch of its first publicly-available product, a platform providing insights on wireless […]

At the International Astronautical Congress in Washington, D.C. today, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos announced a new “national team” that will join forces in order to help return humans to the Moon via NASA’s Artemis program. They’ll focus on developing the Human Landing System that will be used to achieve this goal. Blue Origin will […]

Bootstrapped tech company Doist, the company behind popular task management Todoist, is releasing a major update called Todoist Foundations — the update should be rolled out over the next 24 hours. As the name suggests, it lays foundations for many new features down the road. But there are already some interesting improvements. Task lists in […]

Pizza Hut this morning announced plans to pilot Zume’s signature round pizza boxes. Testing for now will be extremely limited — in fact, it’s only happening at a single location in Phoenix, Ariz. The boxes are one of a number of different technologies being pushed by the SF Bay startup. In fact, my recent conversation […]

The Ethereum community is hard at work on Ethereum 2.0, the next major upgrade of its blockchain. It is an incredibly challenging task, and the Ethereum Foundation has been completely transparent about its roadmap and progress. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin. […]

In yet another letter seeking to pry accountability from Facebook, the chair of a British parliamentary committee has pressed the company over its decision to adopt a policy on political ad that supports flagrant lying. In the letter Damian Collins, chair of the DCMS committee, asks the company to explain why it recently took the […]

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk used an internet connection provided by his company’s Starlink constellation of broadband satellites early on Tuesday AM. Musk used the network in place with the Starlink satellites already in orbit to send a simple tweet, declaring that he’d done just that. Sending this tweet through space via Starlink satellite 🛰 — […]

How funding rounds are classified these days has much more to do with positioning than any VC definitions, but it’s still true that nothing has quite the pizazz as the “strategic investment” celebrity party round. Sandbox VR, a location-based virtual reality startup that capped off a huge $68 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz […]

Google has hired Microsoft’s former Cortana and Outlook VP, Javier Soltero, to head up its productivity and collaboration bundle, G Suite — which includes consumer and business tools such as Gmail, Hangouts, Drive, Google Docs and Sheets. He tweeted the news yesterday, writing: “The opportunity to work with this team on products that have such […]

The early-stage startup community knows that the Disrupt Main Stage is the place to hear and learn from iconic founders, technologists and investment leaders. And the speakers you’ll hear at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December will follow that grand tradition. Hold up a sec. Don’t have a ticket yet? Buy your early bird pass today and […]

Uber said on Tuesday that it has won a bid to work with government-run subway system in India’s capital in one of its rare announcements in India, a key overseas market where it is facing a fierce battle with local giant Ola. The ride-hailing giant said it has partnered with Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) […]

Supermercato24, the Italian same-day grocery delivery service, has acquired Szopi.pl, an on-demand grocery delivery service in Poland. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although I understand it is a mixture of cash and stock. Szopi had raised €1.7M from various investors, including Impera Alfa. The acquisition sees the two companies join forces to speed up […]

Lilium, the Munich-based startup developing an on-demand “air taxi” service, has released its latest flight video — this time demonstrating a successful transition from vertical flight (liftoff) to horizontal flight. The company is also announcing the completion of its first manufacturing facility and plans for a much larger second factory in preparation for a 2025 […]

Media monitoring — where news sources and other public information outlets are scanned regularly for mentions of specific organizations — is a well established service used by companies for market intelligence and to measure sentiment around their businesses. Today, London-based Signal AI, which has built a substantial operation in the area, has raised $25 million funding […]

When Adobe acquired Magento, the e-commerce platform aimed at SMBs, last May for $1.68 billion, you knew it would only be a matter of time before the company would begin integrating its new purchase into the Adobe technology stack. Today, at the MagentoLive customer conference in Amsterdam, Magento announced some new integrations with Adobe. Perhaps […]

There are 831 financial technology startups headquartered in or operating in Canada, according to data collected by Fintech Growth Syndicate, yet only a handful of venture capital funds specializing in the region and sector. Luge Capital, a fintech and AI-focused venture capital fund headquartered in Montreal and Toronto, is looking to close that gap. The […]

As more and more news businesses turn to paywalls and subscriptions, The Financial Times looks like an early model and success story — a few months ago the organization announced that it’s passed 1 million paying readers, with digital subscribers accounting for more than three-fourths of its circulation. Now The FT is looking to share […]

Backed by Forerunner Ventures, NEA and True Ventures, The Yes is an AI-powered shopping platform.

And there we have it: the very last trailer for a Star Wars movie focusing on the Skywalkers. After 42 long years of Jedi returning, clones attacking, and Force awakenings… the three pack of trilogies that is the “Skywalker saga” comes to an end this December with the release of Episode IX: The Rise of […]

Nvidia is making a hard pitch at this year’s Mobile World Congress Los Angeles that the future of software defined 5G networks should be powered by its chipsets. Through the launch of a new software development toolkit and a series of partnerships announced today with Ericsson (for networking); Microsoft (for its cloud computing); and Red […]

India said on Monday that it is moving ahead with its plan to revise existing rules to regulate intermediaries — social media apps and others that rely on users to create their content — as they are causing “unimaginable disruption” to democracy. In a legal document filed with the country’s apex Supreme Court, the Ministry […]

Veena Dubal is an unlikely star in the tech world. A scholar of labor practices regarding the taxi and ride-hailing industries and an Associate Professor at San Francisco’s U.C. Hastings College of the Law, her work on the ethics of the gig economy has been covered by the New York Times, NBC News, New York […]

SoftBank expected to inject as much as $5B in the struggling business.

If you’ve read anything of mine in the past year, you know just how complicated security can be. Every day it seems there’s a new security lapse, a breach, a hack, or an inadvertent exposure, such as leaving a cloud storage server unprotected without a password. These things happen, but they don’t have to; aecurity […]

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine took part in a joint presentation by the chiefs of a number of international space agencies at the annual International Astronautical Conference on Monday. At the end of the event, a question was put to the entire group — when do we get to Mars? After a joke answer of “Tuesday” […]

The Station is back for another week of news and analysis on all the ways people and goods move from Point A to Point B — today and in the future. As always, I’m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior reporter at TechCrunch. Portions of the newsletter will be published as an article on the main […]

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. Pixel 4 review: Google ups its camera game Brian Heater was impressed by the improvements in Google’s latest smartphone, including camera […]

In China, Toutiao is literally big news. Not only has its parent company ByteDance achieved a $75 billion valuation, two of its apps — Toutiao, a news aggregator, and Douyin (Tik Tok in China) — are chipping into WeChat’s user engagement numbers, no small feat considering the central role WeChat plays in the daily lives […]

Heaven forbid a political candidate’s Facebook account gets hacked. They might spread disinformation…like they’re already allowed to do in Facebook ads… Today Facebook made a slew of announcements designed to stop 2020 election interference. “The bottom line here is that elections have changed significantly since 2016″ and so has Facebook in response, CEO Mark Zuckerberg […]

Amazon-owned game streaming service Twitch has snagged Zynga’s chief marketing officer, Doug Scott, to join as its own CMO, the company announced today. At Zynga, Scott led global marketing for just over three years. Prior to that, he was CMO at the music startup BandPage and the VP, Marketing and Revenue at mobile game publisher, […]

The founder of one of 2019’s most buzzworthy startups is putting on his VC hat.

Microsoft wants to make it as easy as possible to migrate to Microsoft 365, and today the company announced it had purchased a Canadian startup called Mover to help. The companies did not reveal the acquisition price. Microsoft 365 is the company’s bundle that includes Office 365, Microsoft Teams, security tools and workflow. The idea […]

One ongoing theme in the world of smart homes has been the emergence of gadgets and other tools that can turn “ordinary” objects and systems into “connected” ones — removing the need to replace things wholesale that still essentially work, while still applying technology to improve the ways that they can be used. In the […]

At the recent TechCrunch Disrupt SF, Senegalese VC investor Marieme Diop suggested that Silicon Valley’s unicorn IPO model might not be right for African startups. The is largely because the continent’s startups face a vastly different macro business environment, Diop explained during a discussion of investing in Africa with 500 Startups’ Sheel Mohnot and IFC’s […]

Chad Hurley is hunting for what comes after fantasy sports. He envisions a new way for fans to play by watching live and cheering for the athletes they love. Beyond a few scraps of info the YouTube co-founder would share and his new startup’s job listings revealed, we don’t know what Hurley’s game will feel […]

The Australian scene industry has, in the last few years, started to generate a swathe of startups that have broken through internationally. Prior to this current era, Australia was scene has very much a local market in tech terms, with only occasional breakouts, like Atlassian . In fact, it’s now gaining a reputation as a […]

Meet Moon, a three-person startup that lets you pay for stuff on Amazon using bitcoin via the Lightning Network, bitcoin, Litecoin or Ether. The company has released a desktop browser extension for Google Chrome, Brave and Opera. While some e-commerce retailers let you pay with cryptocurrencies, the biggest e-commerce platforms have yet to accept cryptocurrencies. […]

Nielsen announced this morning it will now be able to measure the viewing taking place on Amazon Prime Video, through its Subscription Video on Demand Content Ratings solution. This product, first launched two years ago, was originally focused on measuring Netflix’s viewing numbers with promises to add support for measuring Prime Video in 2018. Though […]

Last week, Apple caved to the Chinese government and pulled an app called HKmap.live that was being used by Hong Kong protestors to crowdsource the location of police forces. While Apple CEO Tim Cook defended Apple’s stance, the move is a reminder that Apple is the only judge and jury regarding what’s acceptable in the […]