Crunch Hype

Microsoft kicked things off on Sunday, and while Sony’s sitting this one out, Nintendo’s up to its old tricks. The company is once again skipping whole in-person thing in favor of its livestreamed Nintendo direct. We don’t expect any major hardware news for the show this year, but there’s some possibility that the company may […]

As electric vehicle charging infrastructure grows, a nagging complexity has popped up. Each electric vehicle charging networks has its own system with memberships. For an EV owner, that translates into a handful, or more, of standalone apps or RFID dongles used to activate and pay for charging. ChargePoint and Electrify America have reached an agreement […]

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is expected to take the stage Tuesday for the company’s annual shareholder meeting following a volatile year that saw swings between profitability and wider-than-expected losses, production goals met and deliveries milestones missed, and a securities fraud charge, and subsequent settlement, with the SEC. The board, like the company it governs, has […]

UK mobile network operators have drafted a letter urging the government for greater clarity on Chinese tech giant Huawei’s involvement in domestic 5G infrastructure, according to a report by the BBC. Huawei remains under a cloud of security suspicion attached to its relationship with the Chinese state, which in 2017 passed legislation that gives authorities […]

Fintech startup Revolut has expanded its support for Apple Pay, confirming that from today the payment option is available for users in 16 European markets. The list of supported markets is: UK, France, Poland, Germany, Czech Republic, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Ireland, Belgium, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland. Press reports last month suggested the UK […]

Crane Venture Partners, a newish London-based early-stage VC targeting what it calls “intelligent” enterprise startups, is officially outing today. Founded by Scott Sage and Krishna Visvanathan, who were both previously at DFJ Esprit, “Crane I” has had a second closing totalling $90 million, money the firm is investing in enterprise companies that are data-driven. Sage […]

Electric vehicle charging stations could become one of the next big targets for fraudsters — thanks to proposals in several state that researchers say would weaken their security. Most electric vehicle (EV) charging stations rely solely on a credit card linked to an app or through contactless payments with RFID-enabled credit cards or through a […]

French startup Foodles is raising a $10 million funding round (€9 million). The company provides canteen-like services using connected fridges and daily deliveries. Creadev, DN capital and Adelie are participating in today’s round. This isn’t just fresh capital as existing shareholder Elior is selling its shares in the company. Elior is a large catering and […]

Troy Hunt has revealed he’s looking for an acquirer for the breach notification service he set up more than five years ago — aka: Have I Been Pwned. In a blog post discussing the future of the service, Hunt details how traffic to the site has exploded since January when he uploaded a massive 773M […]

Infarm, the Berlin-based startup that has developed vertical farming tech for grocery stores and restaurants, is disclosing $100 in in Series B investment. The round is led by London VC Atomico, and consists of mix of equity funding and debt financing. Infarm’s existing investors, including Balderton Capital, Astanor Ventures, Cherry Ventures, also participated in the […]

APIs — the lightweight programming interfaces used by developers to integrate other applications with theirs, or to help their apps integrate with others — have become an essential building block of our software-powered world, with a majority of organizations building and working with them and, by some estimates, upwards of 50,000 of them in circulation […]

Shazam, the Apple-owned app that helps users identify songs playing around them, can now recognize songs you’re listening to through your headphones when using an Android phone or tablet. Acquired by Apple for $400 million last year, the company introduced a feature called ‘Pop-Up Shazam’ to its Android app recently, which when enabled, works with […]

Telegram, the most hyped ICO in the history of ICOs, is finally making its tokens available to retail investors through a limited listing that will precede a full sale later this year — but there are a lot of catches. The messaging company, which serves as the de facto chat app for the crypto community, […]

When Facebook Graph Search launched six years ago, it was meant to help users discover content across public posts on the platform. Since then, the feature stayed relatively low-profile for many users (its last major announcement was in 2014 when a mobile version was rolled out), but became a valuable tool for many online investigators […]

Amazon Personalize, first announced during AWS re:Invent last November, is now available to all Amazon Web Services customers. The API enables developers to add custom machine learning models to their apps, including ones for personalized product recommendations, search results and direct marketing, even if they don’t have machine learning experience. The API processes data using […]

The travel tech industry has got another unicorn. Following the likes of Airbnb, OYO, Traveloka and Klook, Korea’s Yanolja said today it has closed a $180 million Series D round that takes it valuation beyond $1 billion. The investment is led by GIC, a Singapore sovereign wealth fund, and Booking Holdings, the U.S. firm behind […]

The long series of press conferences that marks the beginning of E3 is nearly at an end, with Square Enix the last to present, if you don't count Nintendo tomorrow. The company leaned hard on nostalgia, piling remake upon remaster, but had a few surprises as well. Okay, maybe not "surprises," but there was some good stuff.

This evening’s Square E3 press was…something. After more than an hour of Final Fantasy remasters, the publisher closed things out with far and away its most eagerly awaited game. Licensing some white hot IP, the RPG masters at Square are offering up their own take on Earth’s mightiest heroes. Bay Area-based Crystal Dynamics addressed what […]

When it launched out of stealth just three years ago, Barefoot Networks was hailed as a company that would transform the way a generation of computing giants like Facebook, Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft would function while making chip manufacturers like Intel and networking companies like Cisco take notice Now, Intel has not only taken notice, […]

Facebook’s Oculus Quest standalone VR headset hasn’t been out long, but VP of AR/VR Andrew Bosworth says the company is already selling a substantial amount of content for the device. At Vox Media’s Code conference, the exec detailed that in the first two weeks of sales there has been $5 million in content sales. We […]

Facebook’s Portal devices may still have plenty of privacy questions lingering around them since launch, but that hasn’t swayed the company’s dedication to bringing more video chat hardware to market. Onstage at Vox Media’s Code Convention, Facebook’s VP of AR/VR Andrew Bosworth shares that sales of the existing hardware were “really good,” but more interestingly […]

Bolt, the Uber rival formerly known as Taxify, is taking a significant step this week in its effort to build out its transportation-on-demand business across the biggest cities in Europe and Africa, which currently covers 25 million users in 30 countries and 100 cities: it’s finally opening for business again in London, the biggest ride-hailing […]

YouTube is standing by its decision not to remove Steven Crowder from its platform.

Once released, art belongs to the world. No one knows that better than Matt Furie. The Boys Club cartoonist has spent several years grappling with how the internet has coopted Pepe, turning his fun-loving stoner frog into one of the most prominent symbols of the alt-right. Furie has launched campaigns, including a Kickstarter, aimed at […]

Workhorse Group, the electric vehicle company that grabbed headlines last month over a proposed deal to buy General Motors’ Lordstown, Ohio factory, has raised $25 million from a group of unnamed investors. The money will not go toward the factory. Instead, it will be used for the more pressing matter of keeping the company running. […]

Lilium, the ambitious Munich-based startup developing an all-electric vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) device, has announced that London is to be its new software engineering base, flying in the face of Brexit, you may well say. This, says the company, will create “hundreds of high-end software engineering roles” in the U.K. capital city over the […]

For a press conference that spent most of the first half on a single title (Watch Dogs: Legion), Ubisoft’s E3 press conference was surprisingly packed on the news front. We got a new subscription service, a TV show and even an upcoming film. As always though, games were the real focus here — and there […]

When people bring their own devices to work or school, they don’t want IT administrators to manage the entire device. But until now, Apple only offered two ways for IT to manage its iOS devices: either device enrollments, which offered device-wide management capabilities to admins or those same device management capabilities combined with an automated […]

WarnerMedia has placed a straight-to-series order for “Dune: The Sisterhood,” a show based on Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novels and tied to the big-screen “Dune” adaptation coming from Warner Bros. next year. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the film’s director Denis Villeneuve will also be helming the show’s pilot, which is being scripted by […]

When you’re talking about 16 billion smackeroos, it’s easy to get lost in the big number. When Salesforce acquired Tableau this morning for $15.7 billion, while it was among the biggest enterprise deals ever, it certainly wasn’t the largest. There was widespread speculation that when the new tax laws went into effect in 2017, and […]

If you can’t beat ’em, launch your own service. Today at its E3 press event, Ubisoft announced that it will be joining the growing list of companies launching their own streaming service. UPlay+ will be up and running on September 3, priced at a lofty $14.99 a month. Ubisoft is also opening access to preorders […]

Netflix has snagged the distribution rights to Ubisoft’s adaptation of “Tom Clancy’s The Division” starring Jessica Chastain and Jake Gyllenhaal. Directed by David Leitch, the new movie will come with a screenplay from Rafe Judkins, who’s also penning and showrunning Amazon’s adaptation of the “Wheel of Time” series. The story is apparently set in the […]

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was definitely my favorite game of 2018, and it’s getting even better thanks to a couple of new updates Ubisoft announced at E3 this year that help make the most out of the game’s incredibly detailed depiction of a mythically massaged Ancient Greek setting. Starting today via an open beta, players can […]

The Nintendo Wii still has some play left in it. It was already ridiculous that Just Dance 2019 supported the Nintendo Wii, even after axing PS3 support, but now the 2020 version of the dancing video game is still supporting the aged system, Ubisoft said onstage at its E3 press conference. Just Dance 2020 has […]

He’s no Keanu, but Rob McElhenney’s pretty good as far as E3 cameos go. The It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia star hit the stage at Ubisoft’s presser this afternoon to show off a trailer from his upcoming ridiculously named Apple TV+ series, Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet. The series was created by McElhenney and Sunny vets […]

One of the biggest problems in media today is so-called "fake news," which is so highly pernicious in part because it superficially resembles the real thing. AI tools promise to help identify it, but in order for it to do so, researchers have found that the best way is for that AI to learn to create fake news itself — a double-edged sword, though perhaps not as dangerous as it sounds.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has confirmed a data breach has exposed the photos of travelers and vehicles traveling in and out of the United States. The photos were transferred to a subcontractor’s network and later stolen through a “malicious cyberattack,” a CBP spokesperson told TechCrunch in an email. CBP’s networks were unaffected by the […]

Hey startuppers, it’s time to save the date and get your ticket to the best Silicon Valley soiree of the season. This year marks the 14th return of the TechCrunch Summer Party — a time to relax, connect and imbibe with your startup siblings. We’re excited to announce that we’re hosting more than 1,000 guests […]

The already complicated U.S./Huawei situation got a few more wrinkles this week. Acting director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell T. Vought sent a letter to VP Mike Pence and members of Congress requesting a delay in the implementation of the forthcoming Huawei ban. Sent June 4 and since obtained by The Wall […]

Cloud gaming is one of the big topics of excitement ahead of E3. The market is very niche but the technology feels exciting, allowing users to play graphically-complex titles on a bunch of low-powered devices thanks to server farms and fast internet connections. We had a chance to go hands-on with Google’s Stadia platform at […]

Audi today issued a voluntary recall in the U.S. for the E-Tron SUV due to the risk of battery fire. An Audi spokesperson told Bloomberg that no fires had been reported over the 1,644 E-Trons Audi has sold. According to the recall, Audi found moisture can seep into the battery cell through a wiring harness. […]

SpaceX’s next mission for its Falcon Heavy high-capacity rocket is set for June 24, when it’ll take off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida with 20 satellites on board that comprise the Depart of Defense’s Space Test Program-2. That’s not all it’ll carry however: There will also be cargo pertaining to four NASA missions […]

Just a few months ago, Innoviz became one of the better capitalized lidar startups when it announced it had raised $132 million in a Series C funding round. But that wouldn’t be the end of it. The company kept the funding doors propped open and ultimately captured another $38 million from investors. The round has […]

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. Salesforce is buying data visualization company Tableau for $15.7B in all-stock deal This is a huge deal for Salesforce as the […]

May has come and gone, and we’re nearly halfway done with June. All we seem to really know about the Galaxy Fold, on the other hand, is that it’s still coming…at some point. In a comment earlier today, Samsung promised a launch date for the delayed foldable “in the coming weeks.” It’s a familiar refrain […]

Holberton School, which sees itself as a college alternative for budding software engineers, today announced that it has opened a campus in Medellin, Colombia. With this, it now operates two schools in the country after opening its Bogota campus earlier this year. The idea behind Holberton School, which doesn’t charge any upfront tuition and uses […]

Just ahead of the 2016 presidential election, HBO announced its plans to carry a nightly news show courtesy of Vice News, called “Vice News Tonight.” That show is now being canceled, which puts an end to HBO’s seven-year-long relationship with the new media brand Vice Media, according to a report from The Hollywood Reporter out […]

A number of promising women’s health tech companies have popped up in the last few years, from fertility apps to ovulation bracelets — even Apple has jumped into the subject with the addition of period tracking built into the latest edition of the watch. But there hasn’t been much in the way of innovation in […]

Qubole, the data platform founded by Apache Hive creator and former head of Facebook’s Data Infrastructure team Ashish Thusoo, today announced the launch of Quantum, its first serverless offering. Qubole may not necessarily be a household name, but its customers include the likes of Autodesk, Comcast, Lyft, Nextdoor and Zillow . For these users, Qubole […]

Back in the 2010 timeframe, it was common to say that content was king, but after watching Google buy Looker for $2.6 billion last week and Salesforce nab Tableau for $15.7 billion this morning, it’s clear that data has ascended to the throne in a business context. We have been hearing about Big Data for […]