Crunch Hype

General Motors is adding Amazon Alexa to the infotainment systems of its Chevrolet, Buick, GMC and Cadillac vehicles in the first half of next year — one of the broadest rollouts of an embedded Alexa Auto experience, the automaker said Wednesday. The new in-vehicle Amazon Alexa experience will be added through a software update to […]

I think we’re on Echo device number seven for the morning? Echo Flex is one of the more interesting additions at this morning’s big event in Seattle. For those cases where the Echo Dot isn’t cheap enough or versatile enough, there’s the Echo Flex. The device plugs directly into a wall outlet, bringing Alexa functionality […]

Amazon is launching a new generation of Eero router, the first new iteration of Eero hardware since it acquired the company earlier this year. The new router is $99 for one, or available in a three-pack for $249, and is available in the U.S. today and in Europe later this year. Alongside the new hardware, […]

Out of all of the hardware announced so far at this morning’s big Amazon event, the Echo Glow is perhaps the oddest entry. It’s a $30 colorful glowing sphere. Why? Because Amazon said so. Tapping the top of the device will cycle through a number of different colors. It can blink. It has a campfire […]

Amazon is partnering up with Food Network on a new recipe service for its Echo Show line of devices, borne out of the interest it saw in users for recipes and cooking videos on the smart video speaker. The new Food Network Kitchen service, which is launching in October, will be available on phones and […]

BetterCloud started out as a way to add a missing operations layer on top of Google G Suite. Later it added support for other SaaS tools, and last year it built an API, so developers could build integrations on top of BetterCloud. Today, it announced a new Integration Center, a place where users can build […]

Today’s deluge of Amazon hardware kicked off with a new addition to the Echo Dot line, the Echo Dot With Clock. That’s it. That’s the name. It is, as advertised, an Echo dot with a digital alarm clock built into the front, next to the speaker grille. The new version of Amazon’s insanely popular entry […]

Oculus is going to be further blurring the lines between its standalone virtual reality headset and what it’s built on PC with a new software update in November, Mark Zuckerberg announced onstage at the company’s Oculus Connect 6 conference. Oculus Link will allow Quest users to tether their Quest to PCs via USB-C and play […]

With the EU’s sweeping GDPR privacy laws and the upcoming California Consumer Privacy ACT (CCPA), companies have to figure out how to deal with keeping private data private or face massive fines. Segment announced a new Privacy Portal today, that could help companies trying to remain in compliance. Segment CEO and co-founder Peter Reinhardt says […]

Editor’s Note Apologies for not getting this roundup newsletter out on Saturday — I was on vacation this weekend. So this newsletter covers the back half of last week and the first half of this week, and some of the articles are summarized more aggressively to keep this email at least somewhat reasonable in length. […]

“Make their metrics your metrics” is one of Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen’s mantras. Sometimes that means building free software for your clients. It can be frustrating aligning your fates with a fellow business if they operate on email, phone, and fax like much of the freight forwarding industry that gets pallets of good across the […]

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. CEO ouster, looming layoffs and devaluation turn WeWork into cautionary tale Adam Neumann succumbed to pressure yesterday to step down as […]

Travis VanderZanden is perhaps one of the best known electric scooter startup founders in the business. Although his business, Bird, competes with the likes of Uber and Lyft these days, VanderZanden has been all-in on micromobility since 2017, when Bird deployed its first batch of scooters on the streets of Santa Monica. Since then, the […]

Vox Media announced yesterday that it’s acquiring New York Media, making it the new owner New York Magazine, as well as digital offshoots like The Cut and Vulture. The companies said Vox Media’s chairman and CEO Jim Bankoff will continue to lead the combined organization, while New York Media CEO Pam Wasserstein will become president […]

There is no more important savings asset for most American families than owning a home, but the dream of ownership has turned into a nightmare. Homeownership, which peaked in 2004 at around 70%, hit its nadir after the global financial crisis, reaching 63% in 2016 according to data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve bank. […]

Juul Labs chief executive Kevin Brown is stepping down from the leadership role in the company making way for a longtime tobacco executive from the company’s largest shareholder, Atria, to take the reins. The move comes as Juul faces extreme scrutiny from U.S. regulators over the company’s marketing tactics and a possible ban on some […]

A few months ago, Microsoft announced that PowerPoint would soon get an AI-powered presentation coach that could help you prepare for that important next presentation by giving you immediate feedback. Today, the company is launching this new tool, starting with the web version of PowerPoint. Public speaking is a skill that takes lots of practice, […]

Nearly everything about Netdata, makers of open source monitoring tool, defies standard thinking about startups. Consider that the founder is a polished, experienced 50-year old executive, who started his company several years ago when he became frustrated by what he was seeing in the monitoring tools space. Like any good founder, he decided to build […]

Acquia announced yesterday that Vista Equity Partners was going to buy a majority stake in the company worth a $1 billion. That would seem to be reason enough to sell the company. That’s a good amount a dough, but as co-founder and CTO Dries Buytaert told Extra Crunch, he’s also happy to be taking care […]

Critical cyber attacks on both businesses and individuals have been grabbing headlines at an alarming rate. Cybersecurity has moved from a background risk for enterprises to a critical day-to-day threat to business operations, forcing executive teams to pour time and hundreds of billions in capital into monitoring and prevention efforts. Yet even as investment in […]

Unbabel, a Lisbon-based startup that’s built a platform for translating customer service messages at scale by combining the speed of machine translation with native (human) speaker nuance and expertise, has closed a $60 million Series C round. The investment was led by Point72 Ventures, with participation from e.ventures, Greycroft, and Indico Capital Partners. The 2013-founded startup […]

Ford is adding another city to the list of places it’s going to be deploying self-driving vehicles: Austin. The automaker revealed that the Texas city would join Miami-Dade County and Washington, D.C. as the third deployment location for its autonomous vehicle testing and commercial service development. As with its prior roll-outs, Ford will first begin […]

Holberton School, the coding school that bills itself as an alternative to college for budding software engineers from all walks of life, keeps expanding. After recently opening up schools in Colombia and Tunisia, the organization today announced that it will open new campus in Tulsa, Oklahoma in January 2020. With this, Holberton will soon operate […]

Quantum computing is almost ready for prime time, and, according to most experts, now is the time to start learning how to best develop for this new and less than intuitive technology. With multiple vendors like D-Wave, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Rigetti offering commercial and open-source hardware solutions, simulators and other tools, there’s already a […]

NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, Rocscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka and first-time UAE spaceflight traveler Hazza Ali Almansoori are all set to launch aboard a Roscosmos rocket in a Soyuz capsule, as part of the Expedition 61 crew launch to the International Space Station. The crew is set to take off from Kazakhstan at 9:57 AM EDT, […]

eBay this morning announced that Devin Wenig has stepped down from the role of CEO. A former executive at Reuters, Wenig joined the company eight years ago this month as president of its global market place division. He was appointed to the CEO role in July 2015, following eBay’s spinoff of PayPal. “Devin has been […]

Few organizations have the complex data and analytics problems that challenge the defense and intelligence communities every single day. Whether it is managing petabytes of text, audio, or video data, finding extraordinarily small patterns in the noise, or processing multilingual analytics, the agencies at the heart of America’s national security system confront cutting-edge problems every […]

It’s hard to compete against the Apple Watch or even an app on your phone when it comes to personal heart rate monitors these days. However, Eko, a startup best known for creating an electronic stethoscope to monitor your heart rhythm, hopes further research and development will help give its more clinically promoted device a […]

There are two sides to starting a new business. On one side, entrepreneurs need creativity, imagination — a dream, essentially — to find, build, and market a new product to users and consumers. But on the other side, they have to deal with the regulatory state and all the minutia that comes with running any […]

The number of elderly adults requiring home care is set to grow at an alarming rate in most western countries as people live progressively longer. But underinvestment in technology and healthcare means society is at risk of vastly under-delivering. It’s very hard to scale these service and subsequently, no company has more than a low […]

WordPress last week secured its position as a top dog in the world of web development when its parent company Automattic announced a $300 million raise at a $3 billion valuation, just weeks after it snapped up Tumblr from Verizon. But true competition never really ends, and today brings the latest development on that front: […]

Mario Kart Tour, Nintendo’s latest mobile game, is now available on iOS for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, as well as on Android devices. The game, like Nintendo’s other mobile releases, is free-to-play with in-app purchases (in-game currency called ‘rubies’) that you use for upgrades and unlocks. Players immediately unlock one rider and get a […]

Cash advances (or simply, loans) continue to be a lucrative area for startups to tackle. By leveraging new AI-based tools to evaluate potential customers, the network effect of the internet and the quick efficiency of digital money transfer, they’re taking on incumbent banks to disrupt a consumer lending market estimated to be worth some $284 […]

Cairo based startup MaxAB looks to optimize the supply-chain network for Egypt’s food and grocery retailers. The B2B e-commerce company raised a $6.2 million seed-investment co-led by Beco Capital and 4DX Ventures. Others to join the round were 500 Startups, Endure Capital, and Outlierz Ventures. Founded in 2018, MaxAB has built a digital platform to […]

Manila-based financial tech startup PayMongo has raised $2.7 million in seed funding to give merchants in the Philippines and other Southeast Asian markets simple ways to set up online payments. Investors included Founders Fund, Peter Thiel and Stripe, with participation from Y Combinator (PayMongo is the first Philippine fintech company it has funded), Global Founders […]

Fidel, the U.K.-headquartered startup that offers an API to let developers build functionality, such as rewards, on top of the major card payment networks, has raised $18 million in Series A funding. The pretty sizeable round is co-led by U.S.-based fintech funds Nyca Partners and QED Investors. Also participating are Citi Ventures, Commerce VC, Elefund, […]

Alibaba Group introduced its first AI inference chip today, a neural processing unit called Hanguang 800 that it says makes performing machine learning tasks dramatically faster and more energy-efficient. The chip, announced today during Alibaba Cloud’s annual Apsara Computing Conference in Hangzhou, is already being used to power features on Alibaba’s e-commerce sites, including product […]

ALTBalaji, a leading video streaming service in India, has partnered with Microsoft and fintech firm Eko as it moves to expand its subscriber base in the country that is already larger than any of its local rival. ALTBalaji, which has over 27 million paying subscribers, said it will use Microsoft’s BlendNet technology to help its […]

DJI announced two new drones and a new initiative to support first responders during natural disasters and recovery missions with drone technologies as it moves to consolidate its position as the leading drone technology provider. The company hyped its new multispectral drone as the world’s first fully integrated multispectral imaging drone to enable more efficient […]

Digital identity startup Passbase has closed a $3.6 million seed round, led by Cowboy Ventures and Eniac Ventures, with participation from Seedcamp and other European investors. The 2018 founded startup bagged a $600k pre-seed round earlier this year for its full-stack identity engine with a privacy twist. The latest tranche of funding will go on growing […]

The Los Angeles-based startup Canoo has finally unveiled its first model, the eponymously named canoo. The Canoo designers have departed pretty radically from the traditional designs that other electric vehicle manufacturers have favored going with something that looks more like a VW Microbus than the sport utility vehicle that Byton is aiming for, or Tesla […]

Major layoffs are all but inevitable at high-flying real estate startup WeWork after Adam Neumann succumbed to pressure today to step down as CEO and take the role instead of non-executive chairman of the company he cofounded nine years ago. Two well-placed sources tell us that the scope is likely to be massive, and includes […]

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced official impeachment proceedings against President Trump today, and while the approaching political fracas may not be directly tech-related, it could have serious effects on several efforts at the federal level to rein in or otherwise influence the tech industry.

NBCU is again going after Gen Z and millennials with the launch of a new digital news brand and soon-to-arrive streaming network, called LX — short for “Local X.” Local, because the focus is on local news and “X” because…well, it sounds cool? (NBCU says it’s for LX’s “exponential abilities,” if you want the official […]

VC firm Target Global has just announced it’s expanding its European network by adding a local office in Barcelona, Spain — building on its existing presence in Berlin and London, plus Tel Aviv and Moscow. The firm has €700 million under management and a broad investment range that covers SaaS, marketplaces, fintech and insurtech, as […]

BlaBlaCar, the marketplace that matches people for long-distance ridesharing between cities, has announced plans to acquire Busfor, the leading bus ticketing platform in Russia and Ukraine. “This is the biggest acquisition in BlaBlaCar’s history and Busfor is the region’s leading bus distribution company, with over 150 employees. Connecting our significant online demand with Busfor’s supply […]

Hola Barcelona. Target Global, a pan-European VC firm with €700 million under management and a broad investment canvas spanning SaaS, marketplaces, fintech, insurtech and mobility, is opening an office in the Catalan capital. Investor director, Lina Chong, will lead the expansion into Spain, having relocated to Barcelona from the fund’s Berlin headquarters. They’re setting up […]

U.S. security experts are conceding that China has won the race to develop and deploy the 5G telecommunications infrastructure seen as underpinning the next generation of technological advancement and warn that the country and its allies must develop a response — and quickly. “The challenge we have in the development of the 5G network, at […]

In 2012, the emblematic podcast This American Life did a special on politics in Afghanistan. They noted that in order to be a politician in Afghanistan, one needs to command a personal armed militia. That’s how politics is practiced in a fragmented country with a long history of violence, and without a stable, credible centralized authority.

Amazon has gone live with Amazon Care, a new pilot healthcare service offering that is initially available to its employees in and around the Seattle area. The Amazon Care offering includes both virtual and in-person care, with telemedicine via app, chat and remote video, as well as follow-up visits and prescription drug delivery in person […]