Crunch Hype

MIT researchers have created a new autonomous robot boat prototype — which they have named “roboats” to my everlasting glee — that can target and combine with one another Voltron-style to create new structures. Said structures could be bigger boats, but MIT is thinking a bit more creatively — it envisions a fleet of these […]

At its re:Mars conference, Amazon today announced that it is working on making interacting with its Alexa personal assistant more natural by enabling more fluid conversations that can move from topic to topic — and without having to constantly say “Alexa.” At re:Mars, the company showed a brief demo of how this would work to […]

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. Connected bike and treadmill-maker Peloton files confidentially for IPO While Peloton made the announcement of its filing in a press release, […]

Social Capital tried to disrupt VC and fell apart. Tribe Capital is picking up the pieces.

After a relatively quiet show last year, Computex picked up the pace this year, with dueling chip launches by rivals AMD and Intel and a slew of laptop releases from Asus, Qualcomm, Nvidia, Lenovo and other companies. Founded in 1981, the trade show, which took place last week from May 28 to June 1, is […]

For the first time, Amazon today showed off its newest fully electric delivery drone at its first re:Mars conference in Las Vegas. Chances are, it neither looks nor flies like what you’d expect from a drone. It’s an ingenious hexagonal hybrid design, though, that has very few moving parts and uses the shroud that protects […]

On its face, Amazon’s first re:MARS conference is all about far-out, world-changing ideas, but the company is still very much a retailer at heart. Fitting then, that one of the first big announcements from this morning’s event is all about using artificial intelligence to help people better shop for clothes. Amazon’s been talking about similar […]

Amazon kicked its first re:MARS conference off with some ringers last night, bringing Robert Downey Jr., Boston Dynamics’ Marc Raibert and Disney Research’s Morgan Pope and Tony Dohl during the opening keynote. This morning’s big event puts the focus back on its own offerings — namely the work the company’s been doing in robotics. Amazon […]

Netflix is testing a new way to help users find something to watch and stay connected with favorite shows with the introduction of an “Extras” tab in its mobile app. The tab, spotted first by Variety, is only a test at this time and is not showing to all users. If you are in the […]

After announcing plans in September 2018 to build a joint venture together, today Russian internet giant Mail.ru, Megafon and China’s Alibaba announced that the deal has closed. With support also from Russia’s sovereign wealth fund RDIF, the three are forming a new operation called AliExpress Russia JV — which will include business assets and investment […]

When starting a tech company, there seems to be a playbook that most entrepreneurs follow. While some may start with a bit of bootstrapping, most will dive straight into raising seed money through...

Google Cloud made two significant pricing announcements today. Those, you’ll surely be sad to hear, don’t involve the usual price drops for compute and storage. Instead, Googe Cloud today announced that it is extending its committed use discounts, which give you a significant discount when you commit to using a certain number of resources for […]

The Bentley Continental GT is iconic. The vehicle has long stood for excess and opulence, and I knew that going in. I expected the Continental GT to be over-engineered and capable of high-speed thrills. And it is, but there’s more. The tester I’m driving costs $279,000. Of course it’s beautiful and fast and dripping with […]

There’s lots of data in the world these days, and there are a number of companies vying to store that data in data warehouses or lakes or whatever they choose to call it. Old school companies have tended to be on prem, while new ones like Snowflake are strictly in the cloud. Yellowbrick Data wants […]

World View is a company focused on alternative methods of doing some of the work traditionally handled by satellites – but just a bit closer to Earth. Its ‘Stratollites’ are balloons that can ascend to heights in Earth’s stratosphere (basically at the edge of space) and one key ingredient towards making them more commercially viable […]

GM’s hands-free driver assistance system Super Cruise, has been lauded for its capabilities. But it’s also been criticized because of its severe limitations. So far, it’s only available in one Cadillac model, the full-size CT6 sedan, and its use is restricted to certain divided highways. That’s starting to change. GM’s luxury brand Cadillac said Wednesday […]

Skype is taking one of its most popular desktop features to mobile devices: screen sharing. The company announced on Tuesday that its mobile screen sharing feature is now out of beta testing, allowing both iOS and Android users to share their phone’s screen while on a call. The feature could be used for work-related purposes, […]

LinkedIn has long eyed China as an important country to offset slowing growth in more mature markets. But now it’s calling time on a localized effort after failing to see it pick up steam. The company has announced that it will be shutting down Chitu — a Chinese-only app it had built targeting younger people […]

Exercise tech darling and service provider Peloton has filed for IPO with a confidential draft submission of its S-1 statement to the SEC on Wednesday. The company announced the news in a press release, and did not disclose the terms of its initial public offering in the release. Peloton’s entry into the market was via […]

Aion Network, a non-profit dedicated to creating tools to promote blockchain technologies, announced a new virtual machine today that’s built on top of the popular Java Virtual Machine. Its ultimate goal is increasing the popularity of blockchain with developers. Aion CEO Matthew Spoke says one of the barriers to more widespread blockchain adoption has been […]

A new sci-fi movie called Ad Astra is heading to theaters on September 20, and it’s got some amazing star power behind it, including Brad Pitt in the lead role. It also brings Liv Tyler back to the space epic genre, after her excellent roles in both 1998’s Armageddon and the lesser-known but still wonderful […]

Motorcycle racing series Supercross will add e-motos and more digitization to its franchise (aided by startups) in the near future, according to Director of Operations David Prater. The sport—where riders race high-performance machines on jump filled stadium dirt tracks—currently fields only gas two-wheelers. This fall Supercross looks to launch its first EV class starting with […]

The National Security Agency has issued a rare advisory warning users to update their systems to protect against BlueKeep, a new security vulnerability with the capacity to rapidly spread between computers. The “critical”-rated bug affecting computers running Windows XP and later, can be exploited to remotely run malware at the system level, which has full […]

Chinese regulators might follow the European Union’s lead to make life harder for internet companies such as TikTok that closely track behavior of their users in a move that could significantly hurt their revenue. Last week, Beijing proposed a new set of measures to enforce data security for individuals and the nation overall. According to […]

Nintendo Switch has Pokémon games, but it doesn’t really have its own Pokémon games, not in the true sense. Pokémon Sword and Shield, coming November 15, 2019, will be the first real Pokémon games (don’t even mention Pokémon Let’s Go – don’t) for Nintendo Switch, and now we know more about them thanks to today’s […]

The houses along the tree-lined blocks of Josina Avenue in Palo Alto, with their big back yards, swimming pools and driveways are about as far removed from the snarls of traffic, sputtering diesel engines, and smoggy air of South America’s major metropolises as one can get. But it was in one of those houses, about […]

Zynga the casual games developer which once rode Facebook’s platform to popularity and riches is now turning its attention to Snap for growth. Today, the gaming company is launching its new battle royale game, Tiny Royale, exclusively on Snap’s gaming platform, Snap Games. A multiplayer shooting game first announced as part of the big unveiling […]

Rx3 Ventures is an investor in HIMS, Hydrow, VICIS, CorePower Yoga and others.

After announcing a year-long pilot of pop-up shops in the UK earlier this week to sell items from smaller marketplace merchants, Amazon has added another development to its brick-and-mortar efforts in the country. Starting today, the company is setting up physical kiosks, initially in train stations, to sell passers-by a rotating range of items at discounted […]

LabCorp is the latest laboratory testing giant this week to confirm it’s affected by the same third-party data breach. The Burlington, North Carolina-based medical giant said 7.7 million patients had their personal and financial data stolen by hackers, which hit the payment pages of the American Medical Collection Agency, a third-party vendor that processes payments […]

China’s National Space Administration recorded a first today as it launched one of its Long March 11 rockets from a launch pad on board a ship in the Yellow Sea. This is the first time China has launched a space-bound rocket from a seaborne platform, and it carried on board a cargo of seven total […]

The big social networks and video games have failed to prioritize user well-being over their own growth. As a result, society is losing the battle against bullying, predators, hate speech, misinformation and scammers. Typically when a whole class of tech companies have a dire problem they can’t cost-effectively solve themselves, a software-as-a-service emerges to fill […]

Like clockwork, Google has filed a legal appeal against the €1.49 billion ($1.7BN) antitrust penalty the European Commission slapped on its search ad brokering business three months ago. The Telegraph reported late yesterday that the appeal had been lodged in the General Court of the European Union in Brussels. A Google spokesperson confirmed the appeal […]

A startup that is attempting to significantly improve the way how Indians rent or buy an apartment just raised a substantially big amount to further pursue its mission. Bangalore-based real estate property operator NoBroker said today it has raised $51 million in a new round of funding. The Series C financing round for the five-year-old […]

Microsoft and Oracle announced a new alliance today that will see the two companies directly connect their clouds over a direct network connection so that their users can then move workloads and data seamlessly between the two. This alliance goes a bit beyond just basic direct connectivity and also includes identity interoperability. This kind of […]

Grow Mobility, the entity that consists of electric scooter startup Grin, and bike and scooter-share startup Yellow, has merged with payments startup Flinto. Flinto enables people to make peer-to-peer payments, add minutes and text messages to your phone, and pay bills and merchants. Flinto works for those with or without bank accounts. If someone doesn’t […]

Mirakl is launching a new product called Mirakl Connect. As the name suggests, this central dashboard lets you control which marketplace you’re working with, and which seller you want to list on your marketplace. Mirakl is a French startup that recently raised a $70 million funding round. The company works with e-commerce platforms so that […]

YouTube is a confusing mess of an internet platform. In what appears to be a moment that draws a line in the sand around how online platforms regulate content, YouTube has told a gay reporter that homophobic harassment he received from a prominent conservative channel does not violate its policies. The company told Vox reporter […]

Tier, the Berlin-based e-scooter rental startup that competes with the likes of Voi, Lime, Wind, Circ and a host of others, is rolling out new hardware today in a bid to further improve the usability and unit economics of its service. The new Tier scooters produced via a strategic partnership with Okai utilise a “modular” […]

Endpoint security — the branch of cybersecurity that focuses on data coming in from laptops, phones, and other devices connected to a network — is an $8 billion dollar market that, due to the onslaught of network breaches, is growing fast. To underscore that demand, one of the bigger startups in the space is announcing […]

Uber’s best hope to beat all its ride sharing and food delivery competitors is that it does both. Through cross-promotion, it can combine activities people might only do a few times per week or month into a product they open daily. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said cryptically on the company’s first earnings call last month […]

As expected, there was a lot at yesterday’s big WWDC keynote. In fact, you got the sense watching the whole thing unfold that Apple had to race through a number of its new features to cram everything into the two-hour-plus event. For many, the new Mac Pro was the star of the show, but for […]

Developer tools don’t tend to make headlines outside the tech ecosystem. But the developer tools announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference this week could have a significant impact on both the number of apps and, potentially, the quality of apps available to consumers across Apple’s numerous platforms — including all those that aren’t iPhone — […]

Move over, Starlink. SpaceX's global internet play might have caught the world's attention with its 60-satellite launch last month, but little did we know that it had already been upstaged — at least in terms of sheer numbers. The KickSat-2 project put 105 tiny "femtosats" into space at once months earlier, the culmination of a years-long project begun by a grad student.

Apple’s splashy new product announcements at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose also ushered in new rules of the road for its ecosystem partners that force hard turns for app makers around data ownership and control. These changes could fundamentally shift how consumers perceive and value control over the data they generate in […]

The Securities and Exchange Commission has sued Kik Interactive for the $100 million token sale the company announced two years ago. It’s an expansion of legal actions that began last year as the SEC seeks to rein in companies that the regulatory agency thinks issued securities illegally. In the lawsuit, the SEC claims that Kik […]

Troops helps sales teams communicate via Slack.

Our search continues for audacious early-stage startup founders to participate in Startup Battlefield at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. But the opportunity clock is running down quickly. You have just one more week to step up and apply to our legendary pitch competition — and launch your startup to the world. Don’t wait — fill out […]

There is “good dilution” and “bad dilution.” Whether your dilution ends up being good or bad (or ugly) generally depends on how well you execute.