Crunch Hype

International shipping giant FedEx is showing it’s serious about attracting the ecommerce crowd after a high-profile termination of one of its contracts with Amazon to provide delivery using its express air service in the US. FedEx is now offering the same two-day express air shipping direct to some customers for the same price it usually […]

Cloudflare, a company providing performance and security to websites, is having network problems of its own this morning — and taking down a lot of its customers’ sites and apps in the process. Affected companies include podcast app Overcast, chat service Discord, managed hosting provider WP Engine, eCommerce hosting provider Sonassi, public web front-end CDN […]

As hundreds of millions of people turn their attention to the ongoing ICC Cricket World Cup tournament, many of them are using an Indian streaming service to follow the ins and outs of the game. More than 100 million users tuned in to Hotstar, an on-demand streaming service owned by Disney, on June 16, the […]

As one European VC raises a fund to double down on bigger growth rounds in Europe, another has closed a fund to continue focusing on early-stage investments. Stocklhom-founded Creandum, an early backer of companies like Spotify and iZettle, has closed a fifth fund €265 million ($300 million). The plan is to use the money to […]

Hot on the heels of Amazon’s decision to shutter its local marketplace, Carrefour — another global commerce giant — is switching up its approach to China, and shifting the balance of power between the country’s tech giants. Carrefour, which is Europe’s largest retailer, sold a majority 80% stake in its China-based business to Chinese retailer […]

Facebook’s head of global spin and policy, former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, will give a speech later today providing more detail of the company’s plan to set up an ‘independent’ external oversight board to which people can appeal content decisions so that Facebook itself is not the sole entity making such decisions. In […]

Not long ago, people in China would need to visit a posh, stylish mall for luxury shopping. That’s rapidly changing as high-end brands race to embrace digital channels, which aren’t just the obvious options of ecommerce platforms or brand-owned sites. In China, Louis Vuitton, Cartier, Bulgari and other luxury brands are now connecting and selling […]

Huawei may be on the ropes as it battles sanctions from the U.S. government, but fellow Chinese smartphone rival Xiaomi is in expansion mode with the launch of a new brand that’s aimed at winning friends (and sales) among the young and fashionable. “Mi CC” is the newest brand from Xiaomi. Unveiled on Friday, the […]

I am a knitter. It is more than just my hobby. Knitting has been a core part of my identity since I was five years old, when my grandmother patiently taught me how to make my first garter stitch square. I am also a person of color. Over the past few years, it’s been painful to […]

The Raspberry Pi 4 is here — and it’s an awesome upgrade. Earlier rumors said that it would take a while before a major Raspberry Pi upgrade, but it’s available starting today. When it comes to physical design, the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B looks a lot like the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, the […]

The latest pairing between a tech upstart and a financial titan is a digital prepaid card targeted at Southeast Asia’s 430 million-plus unbanked and underserved population. On Monday, Razer, the Singapore-based company best known for its gaming laptops and peripherals, announced a partnership with Visa to develop a Visa prepaid solution. The service, which allows […]

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Esteban Kolsky, and Steve Gillmor . Recorded live Sunday June 23, 2019. Streamed live to Twitter, or just slightly after the fact. Debates and free media, or how Facebook could take crypto global with Libra and the Democrats the White House in 2020. Produced and […]

What do early-stage startups Forethought, Pi and Recordgram have in common with successful tech companies like Dropbox, Mint and TripIt? They all competed in Startup Battlefield, our epic pitch competition. If you’re ready to step up, go big and launch your startup to the world, you need to get moving. We stop accepting applications in […]

There is so much to write about Libra, and so much which has already been written misses the mark, mostly, I think, because most pundits haven’t spent much time in the developing world, which is very clearly the target market here. Just look at its launch video: I’ve seen apocalyptic reactions warning of Libra ushering […]

Hello, weekend readers. This is Week-in-Review where I give a heavy amount of analysis and/or rambling thoughts on one story while scouring the rest of the hundreds of stories that emerged on TechCrunch this week to surface my favorites for your reading pleasure. Last week, I talked about how the top gaming industry franchises were […]

This week, a young, New York-based startup called Alma raised $8 million in funding to expand its “co-practicing community of therapists, coaches, and wellness professionals,” which it first launched from a space on Madison Avenue last fall. As CNN was first to report, the company is charging psychiatrists, psychologists, clinical social workers and acupuncturists $165 […]

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite (think Pokémon GO, but with wands and giant spiders instead of pokéballs and Pikachus) officially launched earlier this week, but with a catch: it was only available in the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Why? Amongst other reasons, a country-by-country rollout helps Niantic ensure that their servers stay stable. By […]

“When They See Us,” a new miniseries on Netflix, can be so infuriating that it’s hard to watch — especially its first hour, which depicts the arrest of the teenaged boys who became known as The Central Park Five, and shows police detectives coercing them into confessing to a brutal rape. We review the series […]

At a recent event hosted for founders by the venture firm Village Global, one of its most prominent investors, Bill Gates, sat down with Eventbrite cofounder and CEO Julia Hartz to discuss founding a company and the tough decisions necessary at nearly every turn in order to create and sustain a thriving enterprise. As part […]

NASA’s Curiosity Rover has detected high levels of methane output during its mission on the Martian surface, the New York Times reports. The discovery, found during a measurement taking on Wednesday by the robot and observed by NASA researchers, could indicate that microbial lifeforms may have taken up residence underground on Mars. Methane is often […]

Ray Dalio on the Extra Crunch stage at Disrupt SF 2019 This year at Disrupt SF, we will be hosting a special Extra Crunch stage focused on the issues that confront startup founders in building their companies. I am pleased to announce that Ray Dalio of Bridgewater fame will be sitting down for a fireside […]

In this week's newsletter: Slack's direct listing, Juul's conundrum and Facebook's new cryptocurrency.

Netflix is testing out a new feature that could mean you never have to stop watching, not even while you work – it’s a pop-out video player, similar to the one you may be used to from iOS and macOS for any website or app that supports Safari’s native video player. Basically, that means you […]

Google and PayPal have been strategic partners for some time. The companies in 2017 announced that PayPal would become a payment method in Android Pay, the service that later rebranded as Google Pay. Last year, users who added PayPal as a payment method on Google Pay could then pay for services like Gmail, YouTube, Google […]

With the release of the Facebook consortium’s project Libra whitepaper, the internet, tech world, financial services industry and policy circles are all burning with conversation on the project’s potential.

The U.S. air taxi market is heating up: Aeronautics industry giant Airbus will be among the companies operating on-demand air travel service in 2019 in American skies, FastCompany reports. Airbus’ Voom on-demand helicopter shuttle operation will set up shop in the U.S. starting this fall, after previously providing service exclusively in Latin America. Uber announced […]

An ongoing global project to map the human body cell by cell has receive a $68 million shot in the arm from the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. It will support dozens of individual projects contributing to the eponymous atlas of human cells.

When it comes to the gods of finance, few people reach the stratosphere of Ray Dalio . The founder of Bridgewater, the investment firm that has grown to manage $150 billion in assets, Dalio is one of the most successful financial entrepreneurs of his generation, and indeed, of all time. While Dalio and Bridgewater are […]

Among the many spacecraft and satellites ascending to space on Monday's Falcon Heavy launch, the Planetary Society's LightSail 2 may be the most interesting. If all goes well, a week from launch it will be moving through space — slowly, but surely — on nothing more than the force exerted on it by sunlight.

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. Google says it’s not making any more tablets “For Google’s first-party hardware efforts, we’ll be focusing on Chrome OS laptops and […]

Two of the highest-flying now-public enterprise companies of the year — Slack and Zoom — are different in many ways, besides the fact that one is focused on workplace messaging while the other is centered around video conferencing. Slack began life as a very different startup, while Zoom founder Eric Yuan knew from the outset […]

What would a $100,000 cash infusion do for your early-stage startup? Don’t just imagine it. Apply to compete in Startup Battlefield at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. Our premier pitch competition has launched hundreds of startups on an exponential success trajectory, attracts massive media and investor attention and, yeah, it offers a fat $100K […]

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, the highly anticipated new mobile game from Pokémon Go makers Niantic and Warner Brothers’ games division, is off to a good start but it’s not breaking Pokémon Go records. According to preliminary estimates from Sensor Tower, the new game has been installed some 400,000 times in its first 24 hours in […]

Welcome to this week’s transcribed edition of This is Your Life in Silicon Valley. We’re running an experiment for Extra Crunch members that puts This is Your Life in Silicon Valley in words – so you can read from wherever you are. This is your Life in Silicon Valley was originally started by Sunil Rajaraman and […]

This is it, the final day the super-early-bird is hanging out at TechCrunch dispensing serious savings on passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2019. Once the clock ticks onto 11:59 p.m. (PT) tonight, the bird flies off to parts unknown. The known part? Ticket prices go up. Disrupt events provide outstanding ROI at any price. But […]

Security vulnerabilities in LTE can allow hackers to “easily” spoof presidential alerts sent to mobile phones in the event of a national emergency. Using off-the-shelf equipment and open-source software, a working exploit made it possible to send a simulated alert to every phone in a 50,000-seat football stadium with little effort, with the potential of […]

TechCrunch is headed back to NYC to find the next wave of early-stage startups tackling big ideas! Last time we held an event in New York it was 2017, so we are overdue for a visit. Hear about what TechCrunch has been up to — Startup Battlefield, Extra Crunch and more. This is your chance […]

Nowports, a developer of software and services to track freight shipments from ports to destinations across Latin America, has aims to become the regional answer to Flexport’s billion-dollar digital shipping business. Almost 54 million containers are imported and exported from Latin America each year, and nearly half of them are either delayed or lost due […]

YouTube’s comments section has a bad reputation. It’s even been called “the worst on the internet,” and a reflection of YouTube’s overall toxic culture, where creators are rewarded for outrageous behavior — whether that’s tormenting and exploiting their children, filming footage of a suicide victim, promoting dangerous “miracle cures” or sharing conspiracies, to name a […]

Conventional wisdom would suggest that you close your data centers and move to the cloud, not the other way around, but in 2016 Dropbox undertook the opposite journey. It (mostly) ended its long-time relationship with AWS and built its own data centers. Of course, that same conventional wisdom would say, it’s going to get prohibitively […]

The robotaxi’s blowin’ its horn and zooming autonomously down the home stretch. At 11:59 p.m. (PT) on June 21 — that’s tonight, people — we hit the brakes on early-bird pricing for TC Sessions: Mobility 2019. Don’t miss your chance to join us in San Jose, Calif. on July 10 and save a smooth $100. […]

The private space industry is seeing a revolution driven by cube satellites, which are affordable, lightweight satellites that are much easier than traditional satellites to design, build and launch. It’s paving the way for new businesses like Wyvern, an Alberta-based startup that provides a very specific service that wouldn’t even have been possible to offer […]

Facebook and eBay have been warned by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to do more to tackle the sale of fake reviews on their platforms. Fake reviews are illegal under UK consumer protection law. The CMA said today it has found “trouble evidence” of a “thriving marketplace for fake and misleading online reviews”. Though […]

As the gaming market continues to boom, billions of dollars are being invested in new games and new streaming platforms vying to own a piece of the action. Most of the value is accruing to the large incumbents in a space, however, and the entrance of Google and other big tech companies makes it difficult […]

PayPal Chief Operating Officer Bill Ready is leaving the company at the end of the year, PayPal announced via a statement issued on Thursday. The exec joined PayPal when it acquired his startup, the payments gateway Braintree, back in 2013 for $800 million in cash. He became PayPal’s COO a few years later, in 2016. […]

African fintech has taken center stage for the Catalyst Fund, a JP Morgan Chase and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-backed accelerator that provides mentorship and non-equity funding to emerging markets startups. The organization announced its 2019 startup cohort and three out of the four finance ventures — Chipper Cash, Salutat and Turaco — have an […]

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

As Facebook grapples with the spread of hate speech on its platform, it is introducing changes that limit the spread of messages in two countries where it has come under fire in recent years: Sri Lanka and Myanmar. In a blog post on Thursday evening, Facebook said that it was “adding friction” to message forwarding […]

Terry Gou said at Foxconn’s annual general meeting today that he is leaving the electronics manufacturing giant as he prepares to run for president of Taiwan. Gou, who founded Foxconn (also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co.) 45 years ago and is also its biggest shareholder, will remain on the company’s board. Young Liu, […]