Crunch Hype

Apple is rolling out a new opt-in notice for Siri audio sample review with the beta of iOS 13.2. This new opt-in feature was promised back in August after reports that audio from Siri requests were being reviewed by contractors and that the audio could contain sensitive or personal information. Apple had previously halted the […]

Dyson said it will end its electric vehicle project after determining it could not make the car commercially viable or find a buyer. The company, known for its high-tech vacuum cleaners and fans, said in a statement Thursday that its automotive team had developed a fantastic car, but decided to close the project. Dyson also […]

Steven Aquino Contributor Share on Twitter Steven Aquino is a freelance tech writer and iOS accessibility expert. More posts by this contributor iPhone 11 Pro is the most accessible iPhone yet Apple puts accessibility features front and center Reviewing Apple Watch Series 5 is not hard. It is so largely similar to last year’s Series […]

Amazon Music is now available on the Apple TV, including both the Apple TV 4K and the Apple TV HD running tvOS 12.0 or later, Amazon announced this morning. The launch is yet another example of the eased tensions between the two rivals, who finally came to an agreement to support each other’s streaming media […]

Nexkey, a company that provides a mobile access control solution for commercial buildings and workspaces, today announced that it has raised a $6 million Series A round led by Upfront Ventures. K9 Ventures, Mark IV Capital and Anand Chandrasekaran, the former Head of Platform for Messenger at Facebook, also participated in the round. Upfront also […]

We’ve aggregated the world’s best growth marketers into one community. Twice a month, we ask them to share their most effective growth tactics, and we compile them into this Growth Report.

Spotify is opening up its Canvas feature to more artists, the company announced this morning, which means you’ll see a lot more of those looping videos on the app starting soon. The feature has been in limited testing before today with select artists. When available, you don’t just see the album artwork behind the player […]

AMP, Google’s somewhat controversial project for speeding up the mobile web, has always been open-source, but it also always felt like a Google project first. Today, however, Google announced that the AMP framework will join the OpenJS Foundation, the Linux Foundation-based group that launched last year after the merger of the Node.js and JS foundations. […]

Cryptocurrency exchange company Coinbase is launching a mobile app for its advanced users today. You can now download the Coinbase Pro mobile app on iOS — the Android version is coming soon. Coinbase Pro is the company’s exchange that lets you set up advanced order types, such as limit orders. Those are fairly standard features […]

In May of last year, Yandex launched the Yandex.Station. The $160 smart speaker was a clear logical step for the so-called “Google of Russia.” This week, the company is back with the next-next logical step. The Yandex.Station Mini is essentially its take on the Echo Dot/Google Home Mini. At 3,990 rubles (around $61), it’s clearly […]

Audi spin-out Holoride is launching to the general public for the first time, though a collaboration with Ford and Universal Pictures . The young company is focused on a unique twist on virtual reality: In-car VR, to be experienced by a passenger while a vehicle is in motion. VR in cars might sound like a […]

Not a great start to the day for Cisco employees, many of which are struggling in the face of an internal IT outage. The technology and networking giant confirmed in a tweet it was “aware of some disruption” to its IT systems and is “working” on restoring the network. Worse, the company’s corporate blog also […]

Lattice raises another $25 million.

Global app revenue continues to climb, thanks to the growth in mobile gaming and the subscription economy. In the third quarter of 2019, consumer revenue grew 22.9% year-over-year from $17.9 billion to reach an estimated $21.9 billion across both the App Store and Google Play worldwide, according to new data from Sensor Tower. Notably, the […]

The electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) industry is heating up, with a lot of companies finding dancing partners for what looks like it could be a boom industry – provided the significant technical and regulatory hurdles still standing in the way of viable commercial consumer air travel are overcome. Now, automaker Porsche is throwing […]

Parsley Health, the NY-based service that focuses on the source of a medical issue rather than the symptoms, has today announced the close of a $26 million Series B round of funding led by White Star Capital, with participation from FirstMark Capital, Amplo, Alpha Edison, Arkitekt Ventures and Galaxy Digital. Flatiron Health founder Nat Turner […]

Xage is working with utilities, energy companies and manufacturers to secure their massive systems, and today it announced some significant updates to deal with the scale and complexity of these customers’ requirements including a new hierarchical blockchain. Xage enables customers to set security policy, then enforce that policy on the blockchain. Company CEO Duncan Greatwood […]

Vahdam Teas, an India-based e-commerce startup that sells fresh tea in international markets, has closed a new financing round as it looks to expand its presence in the U.S. and Europe. The three-year old startup said it has raised $11 million in its Series C financing round. The round, which according to a person familiar […]

NASCAR could introduce hybrid powered cars as early as 2022, NASCAR’s SVP for Racing Development John Probst told TechCrunch. The auto-racing series — which is America’s most popular motorsport — opened up on the development of competition vehicles powered by gas and electricity. “We travel the world visiting other sanctioning bodies and are not ignorant […]

While attention continues to be focused on the rise and growing sophistication of voice-based interfaces, a startup that is using artificial intelligence to improve how we communicate through the written word has raised a round of funding to capitalise on its already-profitable growth. Grammarly — which provides a toolkit used today by 20 million people […]

As Adobe expanded its product lineup and cloud-based services in recent years, its core Creative Cloud app, the desktop app you use to download the rest of the Creative Cloud apps, started to feel a bit limited. Today, the company is introducing a completely redesigned Creative Cloud app that better integrates your Creative Cloud Libraries […]

Salesforce certainly has a lot of tools crossing the sales, service and marketing categories, but until today when it announced Lightning Order Management, it lacked an integration layer that allowed companies to work across these systems to manage orders in a seamless way. “This is a new product built from the ground up on the […]

Clari uses AI to help companies find key information like the customers most likely to convert, the state of orders in the sales process or the next big sources of revenue. As its revenue management system continues to flourish, the company announced a $60 million Series D investment today. Sapphire Ventures led the round with […]

Call it clever branded. Call it peak Silicon Valley. Either way, the Calm Booth by Room will run you $4,195. Perhaps it’s worth it for the peace of mind — and the dozen annual Calm subscriptions the companies throw in. I’m not going to tell you how to spend your hard earned venture capital. And […]

“Flying cars” — airborne vehicles designed for urban and other short-distance commutes to replace conventional private automobiles — are (at best) still years away from being a reality, with significant safety, technology and business model hurdles to clear before they ever hit the sky. Now, sources tell us that one of more promising startups in […]

In less than two years, Revel has gone from an idea to a shared electric vehicle startup with more than 1,400 mopeds across Washington D.C., and Brooklyn and Queens, New York. Now, it’s ready to grow up — and beyond these three cities — with a fresh injection of $27.6 million in capital raised in […]

End users tend to get a bad rap in the security business because they are often the weakest security link. They fall for phishing schemes, use weak passwords and often unknowingly are the conduit for malicious actors getting into your company’s systems. Okta wants to change that by giving end users information about suspicious activity […]

We’re T-minus 48 hours and counting startup fans. You heard right — only 48 short hours stand between you and substantial savings on all passes to Disrupt Berlin 2019, which takes place 11-12 December. Super early bird prices start at €345 + VAT and, depending on which pass you choose, you can save up to […]

New Vector, a European startup founded in 2017 by the creators of an open, decentralized communications standard called Matrix to drive adoption and grow an ecosystem around an alternative messaging protocol for instant messaging and VoIP apps, has raised an $8.5 million Series A funding round. Investors in New Vector’s Series A round include enterprise […]

GoCardless has been around for 8 years. But the company has experienced tremendous growth over the past couple of years. It now has a shot at becoming a global leader when it comes to payments via direct debit. Its co-founder and CEO Hiroki Takeuchi has become a fintech expert, and that’s why I’m excited to […]

Less than a day after Apple was criticized by Chinese state media for allowing HKmap in the App Store, the crowdsourced map app said it had been delisted. Its removal comes less than a week after Apple reversed its initial decision to reject the app, which provides information about the location of pro-democracy demonstrations, street […]

A growing number of newer dental brands has been attracting money from venture investors who are still kicking themselves for missing runaway hits. Most notable among these breakout companies is newly public SmileDirectClub, which sells teeth-straightening products directly to consumers and is beloved by analysts even though its shares have slipped since its September IPO. […]

If you had to slip a couple AAs into your smartphone every morning to check your email, browse Instagram, and text your friends, chances are the mobile revolution would not have been quite so revolutionary. Fortunately the rechargeable lithium-ion battery was invented — a decades-long task for which three men have just been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Waymo, the autonomous vehicle business under Alphabet, sent an email to customers of its ride-hailing app that their next trip might not have a human safety driver behind the wheel, according to a copy of the email that was posted on Reddit. The email entitled “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way” was sent […]

Up until now, commercial satellites have essentially been disposable. Even the massive, multi-ton ones that can have service lives spanning a decade or more eventually just become so much space trash once they’re out of fuel, or they experience some kind fo terminal mechanical failure. A new spacecraft built by Northrop Grumman and launched aboard […]

Ensuring politicians in the 2020 election stay truthful is hard work, so Facebook has decided it’s going to sit this one out. Joe Biden’s campaign team sent a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, COO Sheryl Sandberg and global elections policy chief Katie Harbath that essentially called on the company to take down a Trump campaign […]

The Richard Branson-backed small satellite launch operation Virgin Orbit wants to be the first to dedicate a mission to bringing commercial CubeSats to the “Red Planet,” the company announced today. Working with Polish satellite company SatRevolution, Virgin Orbit has established a consortium along with a group of Polish academic institutions to jointly work on at […]

Pinterest is the latest tech company to introduce a “Lite” version of its mobile application to meet the needs of users in emerging markets. With Pinterest Lite, launched on Monday, users will benefit from a faster download and an app that takes up less storage space on their mobile device, the company says. Pinterest previously […]

Homeland Security’s cybersecurity division is pushing to change the law that would allow it to demand information from internet providers that would identify the owners of vulnerable systems, TechCrunch has learned. Sources familiar with the proposal say the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), founded just less than a year ago, wants the new administrative […]

Julie Yoo will make investments out of the firm's bio fund.

“If Silicon Valley is going to keep telling itself the story that the only uses of their technology will be the most optimistic, the most hopeful, the most salubrious, the most prosocial,” New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz told me in Part 1 of this recent conversation for Extra Crunch, “you can try to rebut […]

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. China attacks Apple for allowing Hong Kong crowdsourced police activity app Apple’s decision to greenlight an app called HKmaps, which is […]

Apple has booted from the App Store cannabis-promoting app Social Club after it devolved into a place where users were openly posting drugs for sale, and it became filled with photos of various drugs, guns and weaponry, racist content, memes, gore videos and adult and child pornography, according to its users. The app is inexplicably […]

Toys “R” Us is back online, thanks to a new deal with Target. Tru Kids, the parent company that acquired the defunct toy chain following its bankruptcy, has announced the relaunch of the ToysRUs.com website as it begins the process of opening its retail stores across the U.S. As a part of its comeback strategy, […]

Working photographers, and enthusiasts who just love taking plenty of pictures, know that even the biggest SD cards can sometimes fill up, especially when you’re working with large file sizes, shooting both JPG and RAW, and shooting 4K video. The solution? A good mobile backup drive. There are a number of options out there that […]

European Union Member States have published a joint risk assessment report into 5G technology which highlights increased security risks that will require a new approach to securing telecoms infrastructure. The EU has so far resisted pressure from the U.S. to boycott Chinese tech giant Huawei as a 5G supplier on national security grounds, with individual […]

Last year, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore had a small viral sensation on its hands with the release of Ikea Bot. The robot did laps around its inept human counterparts by autonomously assembling an Ikea chair in less than nine minutes. That same team is behind NTU spin-off Eureka Robotics, which this morning debuted Archimedes, a […]

FedEx and Walgreens are partnering to make online returns more convenient, in a move that’s part of a growing trend where brick-and-mortar retailers cater to the needs of e-commerce shoppers in order to increase foot traffic at their stores. Under the new agreement, consumers will be able to drop off their online returns at thousands […]

We’re still very much in the collaboration phase of autonomous driving, since it’s looking still quite a ways off from being anything consumers can use on the regular. That means there’s plenty of opportunity for things like the new “Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium” (AVCC) announced today. This industry group includes Arm, Bosch, Continental, GM, Toyota, […]

Uber is piloting a new feature that lets U.S. riders alert drivers that a pet will be coming along, the latest effort from the company to appeal to a broader audience and become to the one-stop shop for transportation, meals and other services. The feature called Uber Pet will be available beginning October 16 in […]