Crunch Hype

Reports emerged a year ago that all the major cellular carriers in the U.S. were selling location data to third-party companies, which in turn sold them to pretty much anyone willing to pay. New letters published by the FCC show that despite a year of scrutiny and anger, the carriers have only recently put an […]

With last fall’s release of iOS 12, Apple introduced Siri Shortcuts — a new app that allows iPhone users to create their own voice commands to take actions on their phone and in apps. Today, Apple is celebrating Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) by rolling out a practical, accessibility focused collection of new Siri Shortcuts, […]

Amazon dominates the top ranking positions of Google for tens of thousands of ecommerce queries, but there are plenty of products in newer categories where Amazon has not yet achieved SEO supremacy.

Pinterest (NYSE: PINS) posted revenues of $202M on losses of $41.4M for the three months ending March 31, 2019.

Freelance marketplace Fiverr has filed to go public on the New York Stock Exchange. The company, which is headquartered in Tel Aviv, is losing money — its net losses grew from $19.3 million in 2017 to $36.1 million in 2018. At the same time, revenue grew by nearly 45%, from $52.1 million to $75.5 million. […]

Children with vision impairments struggle to get a solid K-12 education for a lot of reasons — so the more tools their teachers have to impart basic skills and concepts, the better. ObjectiveEd is a startup that aims to empower teachers and kids with a suite of learning games accessible to all vision levels, along with tools to track and promote progress.

Ticketmaster is turning to new technology to help fight ticket fraud. The ticketing giant today unveiled its next-generation digital tickets, “Safetix,” which are tied to the ticket holder’s mobile device through an encrypted barcode that automatically refreshes every few seconds. The tickets will also support NFC technology, allowing fans to enter venues through a “tap […]

For the last two decades, Sony and Microsoft's gaming divisions have been locked in all-out war against one another: on price, on hardware, on franchises, on exclusives... you name it. But it seems they've set their enmity aside temporarily that they might better prevent that filthy casual, Google, from joining the fray.

Smartphones have gotten more expensive over the last few years even though there have only been a handful of recent innovations that really changed the way you interact with the phone. It’s maybe no surprise then that there is suddenly a lot more interest in mid-range, sub-$500 phones again. In the U.S., Google’s new Pixel […]

Ahrendts, the former senior vice president fo retail at Apple, joins as Airbnb's third independent non-affiliated board member.

Kids need a good education to have the best chance of succeeding in the world, but in distant parts of developing countries that may be neither schools nor teachers. The Global Learning Xprize aimed to spur innovation in the tech space to create app-based teaching those kids can do on their own — and a tie means the $10M grand prize gets split in two.

Despite a $5.7 million FTC fine and changes to restrict its use by under 13-year-olds, TikTok retained its No. 1 position as the most downloaded app on the Apple App Store for the fifth consecutive quarter, according to a new report from Sensor Tower. The app saw more than 33 million App Store downloads during […]

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. Trump declares national emergency to protect US networks from foreign espionage While the U.S. already restricted government contractors and federal agencies […]

Gleb Kuznetsov refuses to settle for less. After spending years leading product design for startups and corporate clients, Gleb started a boutique branding agency, Milkinside, that helps clients translate new technologies into useful products. Gleb and his team of experienced creators are committed to serving the end user, which is why they love taking products […]

With 5G, when it rains, it pours. A few hours after Verizon officially started selling the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G, Sprint announced that it will be offering two 5G devices for its network by the end of the month. For now, it still feels like manufacturers are putting the cart before the horse here. There’s […]

MultiVu, a Tel Aviv-based startup that is developing a new 3D imaging solution that only relies on a single sensor and some deep learning smarts, today announced that it has raised a $7 million seed round. The round was led by crowdfunding platform OurCrowd, Cardumen Captial and Hong Kong’s Junson Capital. Tel Aviv University’s TAU […]

Tis the season to be raising in India and Southeast Asia. Hot on the heels of new funds from Strive and Jungle Ventures, so Singapore’s Vertex Ventures, a VC backed by sovereign wealth fund Temasek, today announced a first close of $230 million for its newest fund, the firm’s fourth to date. Vertex raised $210 […]

The enterprise software and services focused accelerator, Alchemist has raised $4 million in fresh financing from investors BASF and the Qatar Development Bank, just in time for its latest demo day unveiling 20 new companies. Qatar and BASF join previous investors including the venture firms Mayfield, Khosla Ventures, Foundation Capital, DFJ, and USVP, and corporate […]

Replex wants to help track cloud spending, but with a cloud native twist, and today it announced a $2.45 million seed round. The company previous raised $1.68 million in 2017 for a total of $4.15 million so far. As companies shift to a cloud native environment, and move ever more quickly, it is increasingly important […]

Facebook is updating the News Feed ranking algorithm to incorporate data from surveys about who you say are your closest friends and which links you find most worthwhile. Today Facebook announced it’s trained new classifiers based on patterns linking these surveys with usage data so it can better predict what to show in the News […]

Walmart’s investments in e-commerce are paying off. The retailer today announced its U.S. e-commerce sales grew by 37% in the first quarter, largely thanks to its booming online grocery business and growth in both the home and fashion categories on Walmart.com. The company also beat analyst estimates for the quarter, with earnings per share of […]

Startups are ultimately vessels of speculation, of new products, new markets, and innovations the world has never seen. While data and information are important components for exploring the frontiers of the possible, perhaps the best way is through stories and fiction, and especially speculative fiction. We’ve been fortunate at Extra Crunch to have noted novelist […]

SugarCRM announced today that it has acquired Atlanta-based Salesfusion to help build out the the marketing automation side of its business. The deal closed last Friday. The companies did not share the purchase price. CEO Craig Charlton, who joined the company in February, says he recognized that marketing automation was an area of the platform […]

February’s acquisition of Anchor was a savvy move on Spotify’s behalf. It’s a clever and rapidly growing company that will help the music service get a big leg up in its bid to build podcast operation. For the looks of it, however, the big buy out isn’t making Anchor complacent when it comes to building […]

Instagram’s pivot to Stories continues with an overhaul of Explore designed to let users dig deeper into their niche interests. Stories are now eligible to show up in the Explore tab for the first time, giving creators a way to get discovered through their intimate, silly, behind-the-scenes content instead of just their manicured feed posts. […]

Samsung’s been mostly quiet on the Fold front after recalling review units and indefinitely delaying the phone’s release. Understandably so. It couldn’t have been easy going back to the drawing board with one of buzziest handsets in recent memory. While we’ve been waiting word, the company has been exploring fixes and attempting to determine the […]

As we swing into the summer tourist season, a company poised to capitalise on that has raised a huge round of funding. GetYourGuide — a Berlin startup that has built a popular marketplace for people to discover and book sightseeing tours, tickets for attractions and other experiences around the world — is today announcing that […]

OpenFin, the company looking to provide the operating system for the financial services industry, has raised $17 million in funding through a Series C round led by Wells Fargo, with participation from Barclays and existing investors including Bain Capital Ventures, J.P. Morgan and Pivot Investment Partners. Previous investors in OpenFin also include DRW Venture Capital, […]

Openfinance, the secondary market for trading digital alternative assets, announced it will be opening up trading of third-party digital securities to US Investors, making it the first trading platform to do so. The company already supported the trading of third-party digital securities (securities that have been migrated onto the blockchain that are now traded on […]

Kapten, the French ride-hailing app backed by Daimler and BMW, has today launched in London, coupled with a feisty ad campaign taking a swipe at Uber’s tax arrangements. It follows Kapten (formerly called “Chauffeur Prive”) obtaining a license from TfL, London’s transport regulator, to operate its private-hire vehicle (PHV) service in the U.K. capital city. […]

Europol and the U.S. Justice Department, with help from six other countries, have disrupted and dismantled the GozNym malware, which they say stole more than $100 million from bank accounts since it first emerged. In a press conference in The Hague, prosecutors said 10 defendants in five countries are accused of using the malware to […]

As Facebook pushes ahead with its strategy to consolidate more of the backend of its various apps on to a single platform, it’s also doing a little simplifying and housekeeping. In the coming month, it will shut down Direct, the standalone Instagram direct messaging app that it was testing to rival Snapchat, on iOS and […]

TodayTix, a mobile ticketing company that makes it easy and relatively affordable to go to Broadway shows and other live performances, is announcing a new $73 million round of funding led by private equity firm Great Hill Partners. The company was founded in 2013, and it served initially as the mobile equivalent of New York’s […]

Google is gunning for India’s payment companies. The U.S. search giant entered India’s payment space in 2017, and now it is hatching an initiative that could boost usage of its Google Pay service by tying it tightly to Android apps in the country. The company has built an in-app engagement rewards platform that promises to […]

Calling all startup fans across Europe and around the world. The TechCrunch crew’s planning return-trip number seven to host Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. The official registration doesn’t open until June, but we’ve got a little sumpin’ sumpin’ to save you serious money right now. Are you in? Simply sign up for our mailing list before registration […]

Alibaba Group has acquired about RMB 4.36 billion ($635 million) worth of convertible bonds in Red Star Macalline, one of China’s biggest furniture retailers. If converted, this would give Alibaba about a 10 percent stake in the company. It also purchased 3.7 percent of Red Star Macalline’s publicly traded shares on the Hong Kong stock […]

There’re a lot of synergies between electric vehicles and ride-hailing. Drivers are able to save more steering an EV compared to a gas vehicle. Environmentally conscious consumers will choose to hire an electric car. And EVs are designed with better compatibility with autonomous driving, which is expected to hit the public road in the coming […]

AI would be useful for tons of everyday tasks for small businesses and other operations — if people just knew how to build and deploy their own machine learning agent. Unfortunately, few do. Edge-based AI startup Xnor aims to let non-experts put state of the art AI to work as easily as they might update their website.

The United States has been lobbying for months to prevent its western allies from using Huawei equipment in their 5G deployment, and on Wednesday, Washington made it more difficult for the Chinese telecom titan to churn out those next-gen products. The U.S. Department of Commerce announced that it will add Huawei and its 70 affiliates […]

Singapore-based startup YouTrip thinks consumers of Southeast Asia deserve a taste of the challenger bank revolution happening in the U.S. and Europe, and it has raised $25.5 million in new funding to bring its app-and-debit-card service to more parts in the region. Challenger banks have sprung up in Europe in recent years. Unicorns Monzo, Revolut […]

Lilium, the Munich-based startup developing an on-demand “air taxi” service, has unveiled a new five-seater prototype and is announcing to the world that a maiden flight for the new device was successfully completed earlier this month. It’s not the first time a Lilium Jet — the company’s all-electric vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) device — […]

Microsoft has selected seven lucky startups to receive grants from its AI for Accessibility program. The growing companies aim to empower people with disabilities to take part in tech and the internet economy, from improving job searches to predicting seizures.

XPRIZE, the non-profit organization developing and managing competitions to find solutions to social challenges, has named two grand prize winners in the Elon Musk-backed Global Learning XPRIZE . The companies, KitKit School out of South Korea and the U.S., and onebillion, operating in Kenya and the U.K., were announced at an awards ceremony hosted at […]

Update: An Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch “This afternoon we had an issue that impacted some Alexa customers’ ability to interact with the service. The Alexa service is now operating normally.” If your requests to Alexa are being met with answers like “I’m having some trouble, please try again later,” you are not alone. Multiple users […]

Forget all those whiskey brands from musicians and celebs — there’s A.I. whiskey now. Microsoft this week announced it has teamed up with Finnish tech company Fourkind and Sweden-based distillery Mackmyra Whisky to create the “world’s first whisky developed with artificial intelligence.” Oh no! Here’s how it will work. As part of the distillation process, […]

About a year ago, Valve announced that it was building an application called Steam Link. It’d let you play Steam games built for Mac/Windows/Linux on your iOS or Android devices through the magic of streaming, with a computer on your local network doing all the actual heavy lifting. Then Valve submitted it to the iOS […]

SpaceX's launch tonight is being performed for a very important client: itself. Yes, the Falcon 9 that will lift off at 7:30 PM Pacific time is loaded not with government or commercial payloads, but the first of SpaceX's own Starlink orbital communications satellites. You can watch this first-of-its-kind launch here.

On the heels of Romanian-founded enterprise startup UiPath raising at a $7 billion valuation, the startup’s biggest investor is announcing a new fund to double down on making more investments in Europe. VC firm Accel has closed a $575 million fund — money that it plans to use to back startups in Europe and Israel, […]

It’s no secret that the Trump administration has been at war with social media. In the past year, the president has accused several online giants of censoring conservative voices, in particular giants like Twitter, Google and Facebook. The Trump Administration is fighting for free speech online. No matter your views, if you suspect political bias […]