Crunch Hype

YouTube star Kanghua Ren was just handed a 15 month prison sentence and 20,000 euro ($22,300) fine for a January 2017 video. The video, which generated widespread outrage online, found Ren giving a homeless man in Barcelona repackaged Oreo cookies filled with toothpaste. “Maybe I’ve gone a bit far, but look at the positive side: […]

Where are all the biotechnology companies raising these days? We crunched some numbers to arrive at an answer.

May was a momentous month, which marked a victory for sanity and pragmatism over irrational paranoia. I’m obviously not talking about politics. I’m talking about Microsoft finally — finally! but credit to them for doing this nonetheless! — removing the password expiration policies from their Windows 10 security baseline. Although NIST and others precede this […]

Hello, weekend warriors. This is Week-in-Review where I get hopped up on caffeine and scour the hundred of stories that emerged on TechCrunch this week and surface my favorites for your reading pleasure. First, an update on my newsletter last week: I dove into Trump’s Huawei ban and talked about some of the ill effects […]

We’re trotting out our lousy German to remind you that es ist jetzt oder nie — it’s now or never. This is your last chance to slash €200 off the super early-bird price on passes to Disrupt Berlin 2019. If you want to keep those euros in your pocket, you have to sign up for our […]

On Sunday, China released a comprehensive white paper to formalize its positions on trade negotiations with the U.S. The set of statements come as the trade war escalates and Beijing threatens to hit back with a retaliatory blacklist of U.S. firms. Here are some key takeaways from the press conference announcing the white paper: U.S. […]

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has selected Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines, and Orbit Beyond as the first three private companies to deliver science and technology payloads under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) as part of its Artemis program. In an announcement yesterday, the administration said that each lander will carry NASA-provided payloads to conduct science […]

Welcome back the latest transcribed edition of Equity, the TechCrunch podcast that takes a closer look at the startup headlines from the week. Kate Clark and Alex Wilhelm kick this week off by discussing comments on Twitter made by Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham about the tech press. They then took a look at Uber’s […]

Huawei, the Chinese technology giant whose devices are at the center of a far-reaching trade dispute between the U.S. and Chinese governments, is reducing orders for new phones, according to a report in The South China Morning Post. According to unnamed sources, the Taiwanese technology manufacturer Foxconn has halted production lines for several Huawei phones after […]

Twitter has suspended a large number of Chinese-language user accounts, including those belonging to critics of China’s government. It seems like a particularly ill-timed move, occurring just days before thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4. “A large number of Chinese @Twitter accounts are being suspended today,” wrote Yaxue Cao, founder and […]

Yesterday the U.S. State Department began implementing its requirement that nearly all U.S. visa applicants submit their social media usernames, previous email addresses and phone numbers as part of the application process. The new requirement, which could affect up to 15 million would-be travelers to the U.S., is part of a broad expansion of enhanced screening […]

The Slack Origin Story Slack is one of the most iconic enterprise companies to come out of Silicon Valley. Part of the reason is the mythos surrounding the startup’s founding as a games company and later pivot into workplace communication. But what’s the story behind the story of the high-flying company? Who supported the company […]

If you’re a basketball fan like me, you’ll be glued to the TV watching the NBA finals. In honor of the event, we took a shot at breaking down investment activities of the players off the court.

There’s some obvious overlap between “Tuca & Bertie” and “BoJack Horseman” — they’re both talking animal cartoons on Netflix; they have a similar look, courtesy of Lisa Hanawalt (designer on “BoJack Horseman” and creator of “Tuca & Bertie”); and “BoJack” creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg co-wrote the first episode of the new show. Plus, their respective first […]

In this week's newsletter: CrowdStrike readies its IPO, Brex eyes a $2B valuation and SoFi lands a whopping $500M.

Good news: Apple now allows you to download bigger apps over a cellular connection than it used to. Bad news: there’s still a cap, and you still can’t bypass it. As noticed by 9to5Mac, the iOS App Store now lets you download apps up to 200 MB in size while on a cell network; anything […]

There's a whole lot of ocean on this planet, and we don't have much of an idea what's at the bottom of most of it. That could change with the craft and techniques created during the Ocean Discovery Xprize, which had teams competing to map the sea floor quickly, precisely, and autonomously. The winner just took home $4 million.

Slack posted first-quarter revenues of $134.8 million on losses of $31.8 million weeks ahead of its NYSE direct listing.

Facial recognition startup Kairos, founded by Brian Brackeen, has settled its lawsuit with Brackeen following his ouster from the company late last year. In addition to forcing him out of the company he founded, Kairos sued Brackeen, alleging the misappropriation of corporate funds and misleading shareholders. In response, Brackeen countersued Kairos, alleging the company and […]

The shot clock on serious savings is running out. You have just 72 hours left to sign up for the mailing list to receive €200 off the super early-bird price on any pass to Disrupt Berlin 2019. The official registration opens in three days, and once that happens, the clock runs out. Sad! Here’s how […]

When serial entrepreneur Eric Lefkofsky grows a company, he puts the pedal to the metal. When in 2011 his last company, the Chicago-based coupons site Groupon, raised $950 million from investors, it was the largest amount raised by a startup ever. It was just over three years old at the time, and it went public […]

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. Once poised to kill the mouse and keyboard, Leap Motion plays its final hand Leap Motion raised nearly $94 million for […]

How much value do online publishers derive from behaviorally targeted advertising that uses privacy-hostile tracking technologies to determine which advert to show a website user? A new piece of research suggests publishers make just 4% more vs if they were to serve a non-targeted ad. It’s a finding that sheds suggestive light on why so […]

Jumia may be the first startup you’ve heard of from Africa. But the e-commerce venture that recently listed on the NYSE is definitely not the first or last word in African tech. The continent has an expansive digital innovation scene, the components of which are intersecting rapidly across Africa’s 54 countries and 1.2 billion people. […]

After a decade in the peculiar world of venture capital, Andreessen Horowitz managing director Scott Kupor has seen it all when it comes to the dos and don’ts for dealing with Valley VCs and company building. In his new book Secrets of Sand Hill Road (available on June 3), Scott offers up an updated guide […]

Amazon just announced that it’s acquiring Sizmek’s ad serving and dynamic content optimization businesses. “Sizmek and Amazon Advertising have many mutual customers, so we know how valued these proven solutions are to their customer base,” Amazon said. “Sizmek has been searching for a buyer for Sizmek Ad Server and Sizmek DCO, and we are both […]

According to the startups at Factory Berlin, it’s not just another co-working space. After all, the company took its name from Andy Warhol’s famous factory in New York City, and it describes itself as “Europe’s largest club for startups.” Late last year, we toured Factory Berlin’s five-story, 14,000-square-meter location in Görlitzer Park. Yes, it’s a […]

After weeks of sporting “Coming Soon” screens, the New York City MTA’s OMNY pilot finally launched today. The system augments the city’s MetroCard swipes with new contactless screens that work with contactless prepaid credit and debit cards and a variety of different smart devices. We’ve highlighted the latter already. For starters, the system will work […]

For a cybersecurity company, Bugcrowd relies much more on people than it does on technology. For as long as humans are writing software, developers and programmers are going to make mistakes, said Casey Ellis, the company’s founder and chief technology officer in an interview TechCrunch from his San Francisco headquarters. “Cybersecurity is fundamentally a people […]

Computex, which wrapped up today, is divided into two venues in Taipei. One, Nangang Exhibition Center, is where the big companies, including Asus and Microsoft, have their booths. The other, in Taipei World Trade Center, houses Innovex, the show’s exhibit for startups. While walking around them, I realized that there are no “booth babes” at […]

Want to rock out together even when you’re apart? Spotify has prototyped an unreleased feature called “Social Listening” that lets multiple people add songs to a queue they can all listen to. You just all scan one friend’s QR-style Spotify Social Listening code, and then anyone can add songs to the real-time playlist. Spotify could […]

Tinder this morning announced a second, more premium version of its most popular a la carte purchase, Boost, with the launch of Super Boost — an upgrade only offered to Tinder Plus and Tinder Gold premium subscribers. The idea with the new product is to extract additional revenues out of those users who have already […]

Microsoft has issued its second advisory this month urging users to update their systems to prevent a re-run of attacks similar to WannaCry. The software giant said Thursday that the recently discovered “wormable” vulnerability in Remote Desktop Services for Windows can allow attackers to remotely run code on a vulnerable computer — such as malware […]

Just over a month ago, Emtek announced the end of BlackBerry Messenger for consumers. The once mighty messaging service had a good run, outstripping the popularity of its hardware namesake. Launched in 2005, licensing rights for the service were acquired by Indonesia-based tech conglomerate Emtek 11 years later. For many years, BBM was considered BlackBerry’s […]

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

Odds of the U.S. and China cooling off their trade war further diminished on Friday after the world’s most populous nation said it would create a list of “unreliable” foreign firms of its own. Gao Feng, a spokesman of China’s commerce ministry, said today that the nation will create an “entity list” that will include, […]

Reeling from the ongoing U.S.-China trade war, Chinese technology giant Huawei has found itself in yet another dilemma: How to pursue internal communications with its own U.S. employees? For now, the company has ordered its Chinese employees to bar technical meetings with their U.S. contacts and sent home the American workers deployed in research and […]

Would you like $100,000 to fatten the bottom line of your early-stage startup? Could your company benefit from global media coverage and investor attention? Do you have what it takes to compete against the very best early-stage startup founders? Take your resounding “yes” and act quickly, because you have less than two weeks to apply […]

At first glance, Tibbits look like building blocks, but each one is a module or a connector that makes it easier to build connected devices and systems. Tibbits were created by Tibbo Technology, a Taipei-based startup that exhibited at Computex this week (it showed off a humanoid robot built from various Tibbits). The heart of […]

The light twinkle of an old-fashioned cylinder music box evokes many things: nostalgia, childhood memories, sometimes even horror (they are a trope in scary movie soundtracks). Most music boxes play one tune, but with the Muro Box, which exhibited at Computex this week, you can use an app to pick different songs or even compose […]

Tesla’s big bet on China-based production is key to a new effort to lure Chinese consumers with cheaper prices. Today the U.S. firm revealed that its incoming Model 3, which will be produced in China, will sell from 328,000 RMB — that’s around $47,500 and some 13 percent cheaper than its previous entry-level option. The […]

Foursquare just made its first acquisition. The location tech company has acquired Placed from Snap Inc on the heels of a fresh $150 million investment led by the Raine Group. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Placed founder and CEO David Shim will become President of Foursquare. Placed is the biggest competitor to […]

The company sought to completely change how we interacted with computers, but now Leap Motion is selling itself off. Apple reportedly tried to get their hands on the hand-tracking tech which Leap Motion rebuffed, but now the hyped nine-year-old consumer startup is being absorbed into the younger, enterprise-focused UltraHaptics. The Wall Street Journal first reported […]

If you’re a cannabis investor or a founder working on a cannabis-related startup, you’ve probably heard of Poseidon Asset Management. The San Francisco-based investment firm is one of very few that is focused narrowly on the industry, which remains fairly insular for now. Poseidon has also been at it longer than most outfits, having begun […]

Cloud infrastructure providers -- such as Amazon -- continue to pose an existential threat to the future of open source.

Uber’s ride-hailing business is growing more slowly than its newer bets. In Uber’s Q1 2019 earnings, the company reported gross bookings growth of 230% for its other bets, while ridesharing grew just 22% compared to the same quarter last year. Gross bookings are the revenue earned minus things like taxes, tolls, fees, wages paid to […]

Good news! Maine lawmakers have passed a bill that will prevent internet providers from selling consumers’ private internet data to advertisers. The state’s senate unanimously passed the bill 35-0 on Thursday following an earlier vote by state representatives 96-45 in favor of the bill. The bill, if signed into law by state governor Janet Mills, […]

Last year’s WWDC was a rare step away from hardware for the company, without a single device announcement. In fact, Apple’s gadget lines have largely been the subject of quiet releases over the past year. Ahead of the big Apple TV unveil, the company issued several press releases highlighting minor updates to flagship lines. Just […]

Uber shares its first earnings report as a public company.

Drawing inspiration from games of yore but with dog and cat protagonists that signal light adventures rather than grim, dark ones, Gato Roboto and Dig Dog are easy to recommend to anyone looking to waste a couple hours this weekend. Not only that, but the latter was developed in a fascinating and inspiring way.