Crunch Hype

NASA has selected 13 companies to partner with on 19 new specific technology projects it’s undertaking to help reach the Moon and Mars. These include SpaceX, Blue Origin and Lockheed Martin, among others, with projects ranging from improving spacecraft operation in high temperatures to landing rockets vertically on the Moon. Jeff Bezos-backed Blue Origin will […]

As anticipated, Apple’s hardware numbers were a mixed bag during today’s fiscal Q3 earnings report. Apple continues to shift much of its resources to services and content, including a billion-dollar push into Apple TV+. But while iPhone number were down, things weren’t all bad on the device front. Notably, wearables are up in a big […]

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has made reinstating net neutrality via FCC appointments one of his campaign promises, the Daily Dot reported today. He is far from alone among the Democratic Presidential candidates in supporting the policy, but appears to be the first to make it part of his election campaign.

Apple hitting its release timelines has become far from certain these days, cough, cough AirPower, but the Apple Card will be released during the summer time frame it was given at launch. CEO Tim Cook announced on the company’s quarterly earnings call that the Apple Card — which Apple has partnered with Goldman Sachs to […]

One of the constant refrains about Apple in 2019 is its shift toward services — a trend that’s reflected, once again, in its third-quarter earnings release. In fact, the release trumpets the “all-time high” for services revenue in its headline, while a statement from CEO Tim Cook describes this as “our biggest June quarter ever […]

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, a planet-seeking satellite that launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket last April, has found three new worlds that orbit a nearby dwarf star that is both smaller and cooler than our own Sun. The newfound planets range in size and temperature, but are all bigger than Earth and with […]

Apple just released its Q3 earnings and it had a solid June quarter, outperforming analyst expectations. The company reported $53.8 billion in revenue and $2.19 earnings per share. The company’s stock popped 4 percent on the news. Apple’s June quarter revenue showcases just how much revenue growth has been slowing for the company. The Q3 […]

Thanks to modern machine learning techniques, text-to-speech engines have made massive strides over the last few years. It used to be incredibly easy to know that it was a computer that was reading a text and not a human being. But that’s changing quickly. Amazon’s AWS cloud computing arm today launched a number of new […]

As I wrote for TechCrunch recently, immigration is not an issue always associated with tech — not even when thinking about the ethics of technology, as I do here. So when I was moved to tears a few weeks ago, on seeing footage of groups of 18 Jewish protestors link arms to block the entrances […]

A newly released data model and draft implementation guide for providing directly to patients digital access to historical health insurance claims data could mean you have better access to this info from the devices you use everyday. Called the CARIN Blue Button API, it’s a new model developed by private sector partners, including consumer organizations, […]

Ford has agreed to acquire Journey Holding Corporation, a company that has developed vehicle tracking software and app-based technology designed for public transportation, as the automaker seeks to scale up its new mobility business. Journey Holding will be housed under Ford Smart Mobility, a Ford subsidiary that invests in and builds the automaker’s transportation services. […]

Apple is combining two long-standing major efforts in a new push, making AR more consumer-friendly and helping portray Apple Stores as civic centers where communities can come together. The project, called [AR]T Walk, is a walking tour through various city centers around the globe aiming to help the digital art works of artists come alive […]

When I was told that I’d be visiting the production of Disney’s new “Lion King,” I had a hazy idea of what to expect — sets recreating the iconic landscapes of the animated film, maybe some actors in costumes or motion capture suits. Instead, if you’ve seen the movie (which came out on July 19), […]

Let’s start with the good news. LG actually had a pretty good quarter (on the strength of appliance sales). The LG Home Appliance & Air Solution division made $5.23 billion for Q2. Anyone who’s been following the company for the past several years can guess where the bad news comes. Smartphone sales dipped 21.3% year […]

Ford has acquired a small robotics company based in Michigan called Quantum Signal, which has produced mobile robots for a number of clients, including the U.S. military. The company’s specialty has been building remote control software for robotic vehicles, specifically, and it’s also responsible for a very highly regarded simulated testing and development environment for […]

DigitalOcean, the cloud infrastructure service that made a name for itself by focusing on low-cost hosting options in its early days, today announced that it has appointed former SendGrid COO and CFO Yancey Spruill as its new CEO and former EnerNOC CFO Bill Sorenson as its new CFO. Spruill will replace Mark Templeton, who only […]

Disrupt San Francisco 2019 takes place on October 2-4, and we’re working every angle to make it financially accessible to as many people as possible. It starts with early-bird pricing on four types of passes for different needs and budgets. Plus, we offer discounts for students, nonprofit organizations, government employees and military personnel. But did […]

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. Capital One hacked, over 100 million customers affected Another day, another data breach. This time, the company involved is Capital One, which […]

The “10x engineer.” Shudder. Wince. I have rarely seen my Twitter feed unite against an idea so loudly, or in such harmony. I refer of course to the thread last month by Accel India’s Shekhar Kirani, explaining “If you have a 10x engineer as part of your first few engineers, you increase the odds of […]

Google is starting to roll out an updated version of its in-car platform Android Auto that aims to make it easier and safer for drivers to use. The version, which was first revealed during Google I/O 2019, has a dark theme, new fonts and color accents, more opportunities to communicate with Google’s virtual assistant and the […]

Lobbying, whether we like it or not, is an effective way to enact political change. But it has historically only been available to special interest groups and corporations with hoards of cash on hand. CrowdLobby, a non-partisan organization that launched this month, hopes to change that. Last year, corporations and special interest firms spent $3.5 […]

Facebook this morning issued a lengthy breakdown of recent research into BCI (brain-computer interface) as a means with which to control future augmented reality interfaces. The piece coincides with a Facebook-funded UCSF research paper published in Nature today entitled, “Real-time decoding of question-and-answer speech dialogue using human cortical activity.” Elements of the research have fairly […]

To survive in the post-Amazon era, the way companies have been storing and delivering physical goods to their final destination will need to change profoundly in the next decade.

The rise of streaming video platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime has upended traditional power balances in Hollywood and is reorganizing the way we consume films and TV series as consumers. Following her talk at the recent Banff World Media Festival in Canada, I interviewed Laura Martin, the senior analyst covering entertainment and internet stocks […]

Vacasa, a provider of vacation rental management services akin to Airbnb, has agreed to acquire Wyndham Vacation Rentals from Wyndham Destinations. Portland-based Vacasa will pay Wyndham a total of $162 million, including at least $45 million in cash at closing and upwards of $30 million in Vacasa equity. Vacasa, founded in 2009, has raised $207.5 […]

Quarterly sales for the Switch remained brisk for Nintendo’s most recent quarterly earnings. The number made a jump from 1.88 to 2.13 million units year over year. Modest, sure, but still solid for a console that’s getting slightly long in the tooth — especially given the fact that we’ve been aware new versions are on […]

Managing your customers has changed a lot in the past decade. Out are the steak dinners and ballgame tickets to get a sense of a contract’s chance at renewal, and in are churn analysis and a whole bunch of data science to learn whether a customer and their users like or love your product. That […]

A UK parliamentary committee has published new evidence fleshing out how membership data was passed from UKIP, a pro-Brexit political party, to Leave.EU, a Brexit supporting campaign active in the 2016 EU referendum — via the disgraced and now defunct data company, Cambridge Analytica. In evidence sessions last year, during the DCMS committee’s enquiry into […]

The media has largely bought into Huawei’s ‘strong’ half-year results today, but there’s a major catch in the report: the company’s quarter-by-quarter smartphone growth was zero. The telecom equipment and smartphone giant announced on Tuesday that its revenue grew 23.2% to reach 401.3 billion yuan ($58.31 million) in the first half of 2019 despite all […]

Just yesterday, we experienced yet another major breach when Capital One announced it had been hacked and years of credit card application information had been stolen. Another day, another hack, but the question is how can companies protect themselves in the face of an onslaught of attacks. Confluera, a Palo Alto startup wants to help […]

Tim Hsia & Neil Devani Contributor Share on Twitter Tim Hsia is the CEO of Media Mobilize and a Venture Partner at Digital Garage. Neil Devani is an angel investor and venture capitalist focused on companies solving hard problems. More posts by this contributor ‘The Operators’: Understanding your user – The art and science of […]

Vymo, a New York-headquartered startup that operates an eponymous mobile-first service to help salespeople manage their leads, has raised $18 million in a new financing round to expand its footprint in the U.S. and other markets. The Series B round for the six-year-old startup was led by Emergence Capital, a VC firm that focuses on […]

There are a lot reasons to assume Huawei’s numbers would be on the decline. Even without getting caught smack in the middle of increasing trade tensions between two superpowers, the smartphone market has been trending down for some time now. A confluence of factors, including slowed upgrade cycles and stagnate economies in both China and […]

Cowboy Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Maveron and more are betting on cruelty-free, organic and sustainable makeup sales.

AWS, Amazon’s cloud arm, announced today that it has opened a Middle East Region in Bahrain. The Middle East is an emerging market for cloud providers and this new region is part of a continuing expansion for the cloud giant. Today’s news comes on the heels of Microsoft announcing its own Middle East data centers […]

The company called Blockchain is mostly known for its cryptocurrency wallet. Today, the company is also launching an exchange so that you can buy and sell cryptocurrencies without going through a third-party exchange. The company’s exchange is called The Pit and is focused on mainstream adoption and ease of use. It is available in 200 […]

SVB Financial Group, the holding company of Silicon Valley Bank, invests in Techstars.

The real estate market will forever go through ups and downs, but today comes big news for a startup in the space that has built a platform that it believes can help all players in it — buyers, sellers, and those who help with the buying and selling — no matter what stage of the […]

Workplace collaboration platforms have become a crucial cornerstone of the modern office: workers’ lives are guided by software and what we do on our computers, and collaboration tools provide a way for us to let each other know what we’re working on, and how we’re doing it, in a format that’s (at best) easy to […]

Truecaller, a service that helps users screen robocalls, has rolled out an update to its app in India, its largest market, after a previous software release covertly signed up an unspecified number of users to its payments service. A number of users in India began to complain late Monday that Truecaller, which has amassed over […]

Africa’s mobile phone industry has in recent times been dominated by Transsion, a Shenzhen-based company that is little known outside the African continent and is gearing up for an initial public offering in China. Now, its Chinese peer Vivo is following its shadow to this burgeoning part of the world with low-cost offerings. Vivo, the […]

Nigerian fintech firm Carbon — an early stage financial services startup based in Lagos — has posted financials audited by KPMG on its website. This comes four months after the company obtained a credit rating as a pre-IPO venture. Carbon — which recently rebranded its OneFi holding company and PayLater product titles into one name […]

When Stackin initially pitched itself as part of Techstars Los Angeles accelerator program two years ago, the company was a video platform for financial advice targeting a millennial audience too savvy for traditional advisory services. Now, nearly two years later, the company has pivoted from video to text-based financial advice for its millennial audience and […]

Another day, another massive data breach. This time it’s the financial giant and credit card issuer Capital One, which revealed on Monday a credit file breach affecting 100 million Americans and 6 million Canadians. Consumers and small businesses affected are those who obtained one of the company’s credit cards dating back to 2005. That includes […]

Capital One was hacked, the company has disclosed. The breach was first discovered on July 19th. A notice about the data breach is currently being broadcast from the company’s home page. Here’s what we know so far: Capital One believes the breach exposed credit card application data for those who applied between 2005 and 2019. […]

Tesla has launched a new utility-scale energy storage product called Megapack modeled after the giant battery system it deployed in South Australia as the company seeks to provide an alternative to natural gas “peaker” power plants. Megapack is the third and largest energy storage system offered by Tesla. The company also sells the residential Powerwall […]

Here’s what I knew when I visited the Museum of Future Experiences: The startup is part of the current batch of companies at Y Combinator, and it’s doing work with virtual reality. Beyond that, I had no idea what to expect. The MOFE is currently located in New York’s SoHo neighborhood. To reach it, I […]

Even before pitching onstage at Y Combinator, Indian car refueling startup MyPetrolPump has managed to snag $1.6 million in seed financing. The business, which is similar to startups in the U.S. like Filld, Yoshi and Booster Fuels, took 10 months to design and receive approval for its proprietary refueling trucks that can withstand the unique […]

Civil liberties campaign group Liberty has lost its latest challenge to controversial U.K. surveillance powers that allow state agencies to intercept and retain data in bulk. The challenge fixed on the presence of so-called “bulk” powers in the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act (IPA): A controversial capability that allows intelligence agencies to legally collect and retain […]

Google today announced a new partnership with VMware that will make it easier for enterprises to run their VMware workloads on Google Cloud. Specifically, Google Cloud will now support VMware Cloud Foundation, the company’s system for deploying and running hybrid clouds. The solution was developed by CloudSimple, not VMware or Google, and Google will offer […]