Crunch Hype

Global Entry, used by millions of busy passengers traveling to the U.S., is “vulnerable” to criminals taking advantage of weaknesses in the system, according to a new report by a government watchdog. The immigration and border check system, designed to allow vetted low-risk travelers expedited entry to the U.S., has more than six million people […]

Italy’s data protection watchdog has issued Facebook with a €1 million (~$1.1M) fine for violations of local privacy law attached to the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal. Last year it emerged that up to 87 million Facebook users had had their data siphoned out of the social media giant’s platform by an app developer working […]

With the rollout of Apple’s public beta software previews of macOS and the new iPadOS, I’ve finally been able to experience first-hand Sidecar, the feature that lets you use an iPad as an external display for your Mac. This is something I’ve been looking to make work since the day the iPad was released, and […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Facebook has produced a report summarizing feedback it’s taken in on its idea of establishing a content oversight board to help arbitrate on moderation decisions. Aka the ‘supreme court of Facebook’ concept first discussed by founder Mark Zuckerberg last year, when he told Vox: [O]ver the long term, what I’d really like to get to […]

Google today announced Equiano, a new private subsea cable that will connect Portugal and South Africa. The cable will be built by Alcatel Submarine Networks and the first phase of the project is scheduled for completion in 2021. In April, the WSJ first reported the company’s plans for this cable. This is the company’s third […]

Fintech has been one of the bigger stories of the UK startup world — due in no small part to the fact that its capital, London, is also one of the world’s major financial centers. Today, one of those startups made a big splash by buying an incumbent business, and taking on an equity investment […]

Spotify seems to have learned little from the Facebook developer platform’s scandals despite getting a huge boost from the social network in its early days. Spotify has been caught allowing record labels to grab tons of unnecessary user data and permissions to even control their accounts just so people can “pre-save” upcoming song releases. An […]

When you live in Silicon Valley, it feels like nearly everyone works in tech and that entry into the industry is wide open. Of course, the reality is very different. Even as software eats the world, not everyone has the training or connections to land a high-paying job in either the traditional tech industry or […]

There’s seemingly no end in sight for DoorDash’s compensation model where it subsidizes driver wages with customer tips. The mildly bright side, however, is that DoorDash is now providing more transparency after each completed delivery, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu wrote in a blog post today. “With our current pay model, Dashers see a guaranteed minimum — including […]

Companies that create the most compelling end-user experiences will win over the long term, and this trend of the consumerization of enterprise technology has only just begun.

Today’s major Apple news may be the departure of its design guru Jony Ive, but the even as the company stomachs the executive loss, their software plows ahead. Today, in an interview with French news site Numerama, Apple honcho Eddy Cue revealed that the number of Apple Music subscribers has now climbed to 60 million. […]

Hans Zimmer, the film score composer behind dozens of Hollywood movies including The Lion King and Inception, is shaping what the next generation of BMW electric vehicles sound like. Zimmer and Renzo Vitale, an acoustic engineer and sound designer at the BMW Group, recently composed the sound for the BMW Vision M NEXT, the concept […]

PepsiCo is planning to replace its plastic bottles of Aquafina with aluminum cans at locations around the U.S. The move is part of a broader initiative from the company to reduce its plastic use as a consumer backlash against plastic use grows across the country. Microplastics, found in both air and water, block up the […]

Facial recognition is a controversial enough topic without bringing in everyday policing and the body cameras many (but not enough) officers wear these days. But Axon, which makes many of those cameras, solicited advice on the topic from and independent research board and in accordance with its findings has opted not to use facial recognition for the time being.

NASA has just announced its next big interplanetary mission: Dragonfly, which will deliver a Mars Rover-sized flying vehicle to the surface of Titan, a moon of Saturn with tantalizing life-supporting qualities. The craft will fly from place to place, sampling the delicious organic surface materials and sending high-resolution pictures back to Earth.

The man who won over decades of Apple fans with iconic product design and his pronunciation of “aluminum” is out at the company. Sir Jonathan Paul “Jony” Ive told The Financial Times today that he’s leaving Apple after 27 years. Ive led a design team that created an army of consumer electronics’ most iconic devices, […]

Ash Egan Contributor Ash Egan leads crypto investing at Accomplice. He formerly was a VC at ConsenSys Ventures and Converge. In the early 2000s, journalists popularized the term “PayPal mafia” to describe the PayPal founders and employees who left to start their own wildly successful tech companies, including Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Elon Musk. […]

To celebrate International Small Business Day, Google today launched a new website that will suggest its products that seem like the best fit for a specific business. The Google for Small Business portal was announced today at the Grow with Google Learning Center in New York City, where the company offers a variety of workshops and […]

Chinese automotive startup Nio is recalling nearly 5,000 of its ES8 high-performance electric SUVs after a series of battery fires in China and a subsequent investigation revealed a vulnerability that created a safety risk. The recall affects a quarter of the ES8 vehicles it has sold since they went on sale in June 2018. A […]

James Winter Contributor James Winter is currently the VP of Marketing at Brandfolder, a leading digital asset management solution; prior to joining Brandfolder, James was the Director of Marketing at AspireIQ where he grew the marketing team from zero to seven. As brands pursue audiences online, they are producing more creative content than ever — particularly […]

Amazon along with Boulder company Nite Ize, a maker of specialty lights and phone mounts under the STEELIE brand, filed suit on Wednesday in a Seattle federal court against a group of counterfeiters who have been ripping off Nite Ize products. The issue was brought to Amazon’s attention in October 2018, following a tip from […]

A $30-per-month email service capturing the adoration of investors and founders in Silicon Valley is perhaps an unsurprising story in a subscription-obsessed landscape, yet we’re only now hearing how stealth-y startup Superhuman has captured investor $$$. The New York Times reports that the SF startup closed a $33 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz […]

Niantic had already been hinting at plans to throw a big festival for Harry Potter: Wizards Unite players — something in the same vein as its Pokémon GO Fest events, but with less Pokémon and more virtual witchcraft and wizardry. I mentioned it back when the game first got a launch date. Now it’s a […]

Hey, so remember earlier today when I said that new 5G cities still qualify as news, for a little while longer, at least? AT&T is making it under the wire with the addition of Las Vegas to its growing portfolio of 5G business cities. The addition of Sin City brings the carrier’s total up to […]

We've seen Harvard's Robobee flying robot evolve for years: After first learning to fly, it learned to swim in 2015, then to jump out of the water again in 2017 — and now it has another trick up its non-existent sleeve. The Robobee X-Wing can fly using only the power it collects from light hitting its solar cells, making it possible to stay in the air indefinitely.

French startup Ornikar is raising a $40 million Series B round (€35 million) from Idinvest and Bpifrance. The company competes with traditional driving schools in Europe with an online marketplace of students and teachers. And Ornikar has been a massive success in France. Overall, 35 percent of driving school registrations in 2019 are handled by […]

Did you miss the deadline to compete in the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on Oct. 2-4? Cheer up buckaroo. You may be down, but you’re not out. You have one last chance for Startup Battlefield glory. “Tell me more,” we hear you cry. Buy a demo table and exhibit in Startup Alley […]

It’s NEWSLETTER TIME get pumped! I know I am – it’s my first Daily Crunch in over a year. That’s right, your friendly neighborhood Anthony Ha is otherwise occupied today so I’m back to deliver this baby to you, devoted readers. And there’s news: Plenty o’ News. 1. Reddit puts r/The_Donald in a corner Reddit […]

Google Cloud today announced that Chronicle, the enterprise security company Google’s parent company Alphabet incubated under its X “moonshot factory,” is moving to Google Cloud and becoming part of Google’s security portfolio. Chronicle officially launched out of X in January 2018, when it became an independent company under the Alphabet umbrella. Stephen Gillett, who was […]

SpaceX is looking to raise a bunch of new cash – $314.2 million at a per share price of $214, according to a new CNBC report. The raise would be the third total this year, which together added up to over $1 billion in new capital. Both those filings were revealed in May, so it’s […]

Many, many startups have tried to work their way into the U.S.’s $76 billion wedding market. But Zola is one of the few that’s truly carved a path in this massive industry. That’s why we’re so thrilled to have Shan-Lyn Ma, CEO of Zola, join us at Disrupt SF in October. After graduating with an […]

Google Maps just got a lot more useful for commuters. The company today announced a pair of updates for its mapping application — one that will offer live traffic delays for buses in the cities where it didn’t already provide real-time updates, and another that will tell you how crowded your bus, train, or subway […]

Soon, you might not need anything more specialized than a readily accessible touchscreen device and any existing data sets you have access to in order to build powerful prediction tools. A new experiment from MIT and Brown University researchers have added a capability to their ‘Northstar’ interactive data system that can “instantly generate machine-learning models” […]

More than a dozen engineers, who lost their jobs after consumer robotics startup Anki shut down in April, have found a new home. The 13 robotics experts, a group that includes Anki’s co-founder and former CEO Boris Sofman, are heading over to self-driving vehicle company Waymo, to lead engineering in the autonomous trucking division, according […]

Over the past five years, Kubernetes has grown from a project inside of Google to an open source powerhouse with an ecosystem of products and services, attracting billions of dollars in venture investment. In fact, we’ve already seen some successful exits, including one from one of our panelists. On September 5th at TC Sessions: Enterprise, […]

Twitter didn’t name any names with today’s new feature news, but one extremely online user loomed large over the announcement. The company took to its Safety blog to announce the addition of a new “abusive behavior” label that users will have to click through to access content. This isn’t just any content warning, though. It […]

After twenty five years of research, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology think that they have finally cracked the code for the commercialization for nuclear fusion reactions. Commonwealth Fusion Systems is the fruit of that research. It’s a startup building on decades of research and development that plans to harness the power of the […]

Rohan Silva is obsessed with social mobility and why certain groups are so under-represented in the technology industry. He co-founded Second Home, a coworking space looking to bring together disparate civic-minded, cultural, creative and commercial entrepreneurs at sites in Lisbon, London and (now) Los Angeles, and he has spent years examining how gender, race and class […]

Mozilla today announced the first preview of a redesigned version of Firefox for Android that promises to be up to two times faster. The new version also introduces an easier to use and rather minimalist user interface, as well as support for collections, Mozilla’s new take on bookmarks. The new browser also features Firefox’s tracking […]

Autonomous driving company Waymo has launched its tie-in with Lyft, using a “handful” of vehicles to pick up riders in its Phoenix testing zone, per CNBC. To be eligible, Lyft users requesting a ride have to be doing a trip that both starts and ends in the area of Phoenix that it’s already blocked for […]

Fungible, a startup that wants to help data centers cope with the increasingly massive amounts of data produced by new technologies, has raised a $200 million Series C led by SoftBank Vision Fund, with participation from Norwest Venture Partners and its existing investors. As part of the round, SoftBank Investment Advisers senior managing partner Deep […]

Amazon’s Prime Day event, now in its fifth year, is no longer just a big sales day for Amazon — it’s become the official kickoff to back-to-school shopping season and a new sales holiday that extends across the web among rival retailers. And those retailers’ competitive response to Prime Day is bigger than ever this […]

For many years, the boom and bust of China’s tech landscape have centered around consumer-facing products. As this space gets filled by Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and more recently Didi Chuxing, Meituan Dianping, and ByteDance, entrepreneurs and investors are shifting attention to business applications. One startup making waves in China’s enterprise software market is four-year-old Laiye, […]

Amazon is going big on this year’s Prime Day. In addition to expanding its popular sales event to two days instead of one, the retailer is also planning to host a Prime Day Concert headlined by Taylor Swift, exclusively for Prime members. The concert streams worldwide on July 10, 2019, at 9 PM ET on […]

There’s going to be a point in the not so distant future when the addition of new 5G cities won’t be news. After several years of hype, however, we’re still not quite there. The 5G picture is set to be quite different by year’s end, but for now, the big network war is one of […]

The Customer Data Platform (CDP) has certainly been getting a lot of attention in marketing software circles over the last year as big dawgs like Salesforce and Adobe enter the fray, but Amperity, a Seattle-based startup, has been building a CDP solution since it launched in 2016, and today it announced some updates to give […]

Making good on plans revealed last year to debut an EV-exclusive car sharing service, Volkswagen is actually launching its fleet for customers – debuting WeShare, a new shared service similar to Car2Go or GM’s Maven, but featuring only all-electric vehicles. Initially, WeShare will be available only in Berlin, where it’s launching today with 1,500 Volkswagen e-Golf […]

The business plans to use the funds to double down on the international market.