Crunch Hype

A cryptocurrency loan startup exposed reams of customer credit cards and user transactions for almost a month — because it forgot to protect the server with a password. Security researchers Noam Rotem and Ran Locar found the database belonging to YouHodler, a lending platform designed for cryptocurrency, which claims to have processed $10 million in […]

In a post on RED’s message board, founder Jim Jannard reasserted the company’s commitment to the disappointing Hydrogen One handset. It’s a distant memory now, but the pricey niche device was teased and delayed for months, only to be generally run through the ringer in reviews. The camera module was one of various complaints with […]

SpaceX is set to fly its CRS-18 resupply mission for the International Space Station later today (or tomorrow depending on weather). One big, important part of its cargo is the new International Docking Adapter built by Boeing, otherwise known as IDA-3. This new docking station will offer new types of standard ports that are designed […]

As part of the investigation against Facebook’s privacy lapses, the FTC announced today that it is suing Cambridge Analytica. The agency has already agreed to settlement with former Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix as well as app developer Aleksandr Kogan. The Federal Trade Commission described the administrative complaint in a press release. It alleged that […]

At an event this week in Nigeria, Google introduced Gallery Go, a photo management and editing tool designed for offline use. The new offering joins a suite of Google apps created specifically for users in development markets, where solid online connections aren’t always a given. Gallery Go works with devices running Android 8.1 (Oreo) and […]

Adam Nelson, an early Dropbox employee and partner at Social Capital, has today announced that he’s joined New York-based FirstMark Capital as a partner. Nelson was actually born and raised here in New York City on the Upper East Side and moved out to the West Coast when he attended Stanford for his MBA. It […]

One more consequence of the FTC’s investigation of Facebook, which culminated in a record $5 billion settlement announced today: it’s finally tightening another string in its privacy policy by cutting off access to friend data for Microsoft and Sony, the company announced today. It described having allowed them access up to now as “our mistake” […]

Cann, a Los Angeles-based purveyor of CBD and THC-infused intoxicants, is rolling out its first major distribution through the venture-backed delivery service Eaze as it begins to hit the streets in California. The company founded by two former Bain consultants is the latest to take on the growing market for non-alcoholic intoxicants that use a […]

One of the major problems that technology companies working to find a cure for cancer need to solve is finding a safe, minimally invasive way to detect cancers early. Almost all cancer screening will eventually require a biopsy, but determining whether that’s necessary in the early stages of cancer can mean the difference between life […]

SpaceX is currently set to launch its eighteenth commercial resupply mission (CRS-18) for the International Space Station at 6:24 PM ET (3:24 PM PT) on Wednesday, from LC-40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The mission will carry equipment for experiments and scientific research, as well as supplies for ISS astronauts, and a […]

Tesla will report its second-quarter earnings after market closes today. And while CEO Elon Musk’s traditional post-report conference call with analysts tends to garner the most buzz and headlines, there are some important matters — namely numbers — to watch for in the automaker’s actual earnings report. Before getting into what indicators to pay attention […]

Every employee loves receiving their paycheck. It just so happens though that paying employees can be a royal pain, what with incredibly diverse labor laws across all 50 U.S. states. While large, Fortune 500 employers have a bevy of options, from traditional firms like ADP to newer entrants like Workday, small and medium businesses (SMBs) […]

After months of anticipation, Nintendo Switch is ready to shed more light on its China launch. The Japanese console giant and Tencent are “working diligently” to bring the Switch to the world’s largest market for video games, the partners announced on Weibo today, the Twitter equivalent in China. The pair did not specify a date […]

Following more than a year of speculation since the Federal Trade Commission announced it was investigating Facebook over privacy lapses, the regulator has officially announced the terms of its settlement with the beleaguered social network: $5 billion (as previously rumored) and improved privacy oversight within the company. Facebook assessed $5 billion penalty, subjected to sweeping […]

With support from venture capitalists, Bravado is evangelizing the sales industry.

Tile — the company that makes popular small square-shaped tags and other technology to help people keep track of physical belongings like keys and bags — has made more recent moves to link up with chipmakers, helping it expand to wireless headsets and other electronic and other connected items as part of a wider smart home strategy. […]

Researchers from two universities in Europe have published a method they say is able to correctly re-identify 99.98% of individuals in anonymized datasets with just 15 demographic attributes. Their model suggests complex datasets of personal information cannot be protected against re-identification by current methods of ‘anonymizing’ data — such as releasing samples (subsets) of the […]

Mark Gallivan Contributor Mark Gallivan is the Lead Data Scientist at Metabiota, which provides risk monitoring services on global epidemics. On Wednesday the World Health Organization declared the ongoing – and now year-old – Ebola outbreak a global health emergency. The emergency declaration comes after a man became sick and brought the virus to the Congolese city […]

Drip Capital, a startup that helps small and medium-sized exporters secure working capital, has raised $25 million to expand its reach globally. The Series B financing round for the two-and-a-half-year old startup was led by Accel and Boosts Total Venture. In an interview with TechCrunch, Neil Kothari, co-founder and co-CEO of the startup, said Drip […]

Hipcamp raises $25 million Series B to take its campsite booking service global.

LIV, a Prague-based company that wants to make VR gaming more fun to watch, and in turn bring players and spectators closer together, has picked up $1 million in funding. That’s a pretty modest raise as far as ambitious upstarts go — and LIV is certainly ambitious. However, the list of backers includes noteworthy names, […]

Netflix has a new plan to win users in India: make its service incredibly cheap. The streaming giant today introduced a lower-priced mobile tier in the country that costs Rs 199 ($2.8) per month. The new subscription tier restricts the usage of the service to one mobile device (and one concurrent stream) and offers only […]

Pomona, an Indonesian startup that creates omnichannel marketing and sales software for consumer brands, announced today it has raised a Series A-2 of $3 million led by Vynn Capital. The round also included participation from new investors Ventech China and Amand Ventures, and returning ones Stellar Kapital and Central Capital Ventura. (As for why it’s […]

China is taking steps to regulate its blossoming vaping market as health concerns over electronic cigarettes increase in recent times. China’s National Health Commission has begun research into e-cigarettes and plans to issue legislation for the industry, said the head of the health authority Mao Qunan at a press conference this week. The attempt came […]

There are probably many of us who’d wish quite a lot of the last couple of years could be thrown into that temple fire, but this documentary is the first I’ve seen to expertly unpick what has become the real-world dumpster fire that is social media, dark advertising and global politics which have all become […]

A WeWork IPO may be just weeks away, says new report.

Google is just a couple of months away from releasing its first smart home device with an onboard camera. The company quietly updated one of its support pages today, detailing that the 10″ Nest Hub Max will be available September 9 for $229. After the page was first discovered by Droid Life, the text on the […]

If we're going to map the world, we're not going to do it with ever-greater volumes of elbow grease. There's just too much work to do. AI and computer vision are helpful assistants in this task, however, as a Facebook effort has shown, laying down hundreds of thousands of miles of previously unmapped roads in Thailand and other less well-covered countries.

The Department of Justice announced that its Antitrust Division is reviewing how the world’s largest technology companies have gotten that way and whether their business practices reduced competition or hurt consumers. In a statement the DOJ said that it will consider “widespread concerns that consumers, businesses, and entrepreneurs have expressed about search, social media and […]

Here is a small but potentially handy update if you’re an AWS EC2 user. The company today launched a new feature called “EC2 Resource Optimization Recommendations,” which does exactly what the name promises. It’s not flashy, it’s not especially exciting, but it may just save you and your company a good amount of money (and […]

Google’s smart home device business, Nest, is increasing its ties to the utility industry by adding another partner to bring its smart thermostats into homes to reduce energy consumption and provide that unused power back to utilities in times of peak power demand. Last year the company inked an agreement with OhmConnect, and it has […]

UPS has big plans for drone delivery, and it’s taking two key steps to put them into action. First, it’s building its own dedicated subsidiary focused entirely on drone delivery, called UPS Flight Forward, and it’s seeking FAA approval to operate its drones over populated areas, during nighttime hours and when not within view of […]

TD Ameritrade has integrated with in-vehicle software platforms Apple CarPlay, Android Auto and Amazon’s Echo Auto to give customers the ability to check their stock portfolio or get the latest financial news while sitting behind the wheel. TD Ameritrade launched the suite of in-vehicle experiences this week, the latest move by the company to place […]

There needs to be a clear set of rules for everyone to play by to accelerate growth, with the philosophy that “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

After a tumultuous public debut, the state of Snap in 2019 is slowly improving and Wall Street is responding. The social media messaging company is up nearly 12% after-hours following a beat on Q2 earnings, announcing $388 million in revenue versus the the Zacks consensus estimate of $358.5 million, and a loss of $0.06 EPS […]

Axis is selling its first product, the Axis Gear, on Amazon and direct from its own website, but that’s a relatively recent development for the four-year-old company. The idea for Gear, which is a $249.00 ($179.00 as of this writing thanks to a sale) aftermarket conversion gadget to turn almost any cord-pull blinds into automated […]

Can subscriptions and everyday payments be used to help build or rebuild a credit score? The Los Angeles-based Grow Credit thinks so. The service, which launched earlier this month, is one of the slew of new ideas coming from businesses that are angling to help build up credit scores for folks who can’t (or won’t) […]

Starbucks is gearing up to bring its on-demand delivery service, in partnership with Uber Eats, throughout the nation early next year. Starbucks first partnered with Uber Eats in 2018 with a pilot in Miami and expanded to cover 11 markets. “We are driven to create new and unique digital experiences that are meaningful, valuable and […]

Early-stage enterprise startup founders listen up. That sound you hear is opportunity knocking. Answer the call, open the door and join us for TC Sessions: Enterprise on September 5 in San Francisco. Our day-long conference not only explores the promises and challenges of this $500 billion market, it also provides an opportunity for unparalleled exposure. How’s […]

Another day, another monster fintech venture round. This morning, it was personalized banking app MoneyLion, which raised $100 million at a near unicorn valuation. Last week, it was N26, which raised another $170 million on top of its $300 million round earlier this year. Brex raised another $100 million last month on top of its […]

Crowdfunded spacecraft LightSail 2 is making good on its name, after successfully unfurling its solar sail in orbit so that it can begin propelling itself using the force of light alone. The sail’s Mylar surface reflects photons from the Sun, accumulating velocity gradually thanks to the additive effect of countless sub-atomic impacts. The team confirmed […]

Researchers at MIT have developed a new type of sensor that could make diagnosing sepsis much quicker, easier and more affordable than ever before. This could have a huge potential impact, as sepsis is one of the leading causes of death in hospitals, and is responsible for almost 250,000 patient deaths per year in 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. Apple reportedly in talks to acquire Intel’s modem business for $1B+ Apple is in “advanced talks” to buy Intel’s smartphone modem […]

Researchers have found several security flaws in popular corporate VPNs which they say can be used to silently break into company networks and steal business secrets. Devcore researchers Orange Tsai and Meh Chang, who shared their findings with TechCrunch ahead of their upcoming Black Hat talk, said the flaws found in the three corporate VPN […]

As the ways we consume content multiply and change, media creators are hard pressed to adapt their methods to take advantage. Short-form audio and video news is one growing but labor-intensive niche — and Agolo aims to help automate the process, pulling in the AP as a client and Microsoft, Google, and Tensility as investors.

Alphabet’s Loon subsidiary, which aims to blanket the Earth in high-speed broadband internet connectivity, has passed the 1 million-hour mark in terms of total time spent in Earth’s stratosphere across all its flights. The balloons occupy the upper-edge of Earth’s atmosphere, in an altitude band between 50,000 and 70,000 feet, riding wind currents and using […]

Transitioning between different types of professional roles can be challenging — new expectations arise, and fresh ways of seeing the world are required to be successful. A few weeks ago, I interviewed Anjul Bhambhri of Adobe about how she transitioned from engineering into product, where she now leads the company’s customer experience cloud. This week, […]

The Planetary Society’s pioneering spacecraft LightSail 2 is getting ready for its big moment – deploying the solar sail it carries on board, which should be able to propel the spacecraft using only the force of photons from the Sun striking its surface, if all goes to plan. You can watch live as it undergoes […]

Earlier this month, TechCrunch held its annual Mobility Sessions event down in San Jose, where leading mobility-focused auto companies, startups, executives and thought leaders joined us to discuss all things autonomous vehicle technology, micromobility and electric vehicles. Extra Crunch is offering members access to full transcripts key panels and conversations from the event, including a […]

Microsoft today published three data sharing agreements that it hopes can function as a basis for other organizations who want to create similar documents. In today’s announcement, Erich Andersen, Corporate Vice President and Chief IP Counsel at Microsoft, argues that while there are plenty of organizations that want to work together on shared datasets, the […]