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An EC-exclusive interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook TechCrunch editor-in-chief Matthew Panzarino traveled to Florida this week to talk with Tim Cook about Apple’s developer education initiatives and also meet with high school developer Liam Rosenfeld of Lyman High School. Apple wants to attract the next set of app developers like Liam into the Xcode […]

If you’ve flirted with the idea of buying a robot vacuum you may also have stepped back from the brink in unfolding horror at the alphabetic soup of branded discs popping into view. Consumer choice sounds like a great idea until you’ve tried to get a handle on the handle-less vacuum space. Amazon offers an […]

With the look of someone betrayed, Facebook’s CEO has fired back at co-founder Chris Hughes and his brutal NYT op-ed calling for regulators to split up Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. “When I read what he wrote, my main reaction was that what he’s proposing that we do isn’t going to do anything to help solve […]

Despite its grandiose title, Netflix’s “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile” turns out to be surprisingly forgettable. In this week’s episode of the Original Content podcast, we’re joined by Brian Heater to review the film, which features Zac Efron as serial killer Ted Bundy and Lily Collins as his initially unsuspecting girlfriend Liz Kendall. The […]

In this week's newsletter: Uber goes public, Carta collects $300 million and a small team of eight shows VC isn't always the answer.

It’s time for another transcribed edition of Equity. This week for the regularly scheduled episode we had the whole crew pop into the San Francisco studio. Kate Clark, Connie Loizos and Alex Wilhelm were joined by Om Malik, former journalist and current VC at True Ventures. They convened just after Uber priced, so they had […]

Truecaller, an app that helps users screen strangers and robocallers, will soon allow users in India, its largest market, to borrow up to a few hundred dollars. The crediting option will be the fourth feature the nine-year-old app adds to its service in the last two years. So far it has added to the service […]

This morning, the SEC approved as the U.S.’s 14th stock exchange Long Term Stock Exchange (LTSE), an outfit that was conceived in 2012 by “Lean Startup” author Eric Ries as a place where public market shareholders who hold onto their shares through thick and thin would be rewarded for their loyalty. Ries thinks such rewards […]

Facebook might have another Cambridge Analytica on its hands. In a late Friday news dump, Facebook revealed that today it filed a lawsuit alleging South Korean analytics firm Rankwave abused its developer platform’s data, and has refused to cooperate with a mandatory compliance audit and request to delete the data. Facebook’s lawsuit centers around Rankwave […]

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

It’s been nine years since UberCab made its first appearance on the WordPress pages of this website. In the ensuing years, the startup has grown from an upstart looking to upend the taxi cab cartels, to a juggernaut that has its hands in every form of transportation and logistics service it can think of. In […]

Aspiring space tourism outfit Virgin Galactic has just announced its readiness to shift its operations to New Mexico's Spaceport America, from which the company's first commercial flights will take off. "Virgin Galactic is coming home to New Mexico where together we will open space to change the world for good," said Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson.

A defamation case filed last year against Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk after he repeatedly called a British cave diver “pedo guy” will go to trial on October 22, a U.S. district judge determined Friday. Vernon Unsworth, the British cave diver, filed a defamation lawsuit in September 2018 in the U.S. District Court for […]

GitHub today announced the launch of a limited beta of the GitHub Package Registry, its new package management service that lets developers publish public and private packages next to their source code. To be clear, GitHub isn’t launching a competitor to tools like npm or RubyGems. What the company is launching, however, is a service […]

Uber (NYSE: UBER) closed down nearly 8 percent after a rocky debut Friday.

Tinder is preparing to launch a version of its popular dating app aimed at users in emerging markets. The app, which will be called “Tinder Lite,” offers a smaller, more lightweight version of the current flagship app, the company says. Smaller app size is a defining characteristic of most of today’s “Lite” apps, which are […]

Uber finally made its debut Friday on the New York Stock Exchange, ending its decade-long journey from startup to publicly traded company. So far, it’s been a ho-hum beginning, with shares opening at $42, down from the IPO price. The share price is hovering just under $44. Thirteen people, including executives, early employees, drivers and […]

Every so often, a big corporation manages to play the news cycle just right. Generally such things aren’t recommended and can fairly easily backfire, but the MillerCoors-owned Blue Moon Brewery would have been silly not to have capitalized on yesterday’s big announcement from Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin. So👏🏽do👏🏽we👏🏽 https://t.co/jEHNRhHRHq — Blue Moon Brewing Co (@BlueMoonBrewCo) […]

Don’t like the idea of your baby guzzling down liquid candy all day? It may surprise you to find corn syrup is the main ingredient in most infant formulas in the U.S. That’s where Bobbie, a Bay Area-based baby formula delivery startup promising only wholesome ingredients, hopes to fill in. Just go down the baby […]

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. Uber opens at a disappointing $42 per share At long last, it’s lift-off for Uber . After pricing its initial public offering […]

Uber’s much heralded public offering has arrived not so much with a bang as with a whimper, thanks largely to the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China. Overnight, the U.S. government made good on the threat from President Donald Trump to hike tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods to 25% up […]

The sports-focused streaming service fuboTV will soon follow the rest of the industry by offering its own free and ad-supported streaming channel, in addition to its paid subscription, sometime later this year. The news was exclusively shared with The Wrap (paywalled) in an interview with fuboTV co-founder and CEO David Gandler. FuboTV confirmed the accuracy […]

Technology is very much in the business of, quite literally, changing the world. When I was deciding whether to write for TechCrunch, I tried to imagine a human life on this planet, in 20 or 30 years, that would not have been dramatically impacted in one way or another by the new technologies we’re creating […]

At long last, it's lift-off for Uber.

Grizzled TechCrunch reporter Matt Burns was onsite at yesterday’s big Blue Origin reveal, but if you’re reading this right now, odds are you weren’t. It was a small gathering, and Jeff Bezos, who tends to be fairly secret for such a public billionaire, opted not to live stream the fairly intimate press conference. The full […]

A year ago, Amazon -owned Audible announced a deal with Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine to develop exclusive audio productions for Audible Originals — the company’s entertainment offering that features audio content that’s longer than podcasts, but shorter than audio books. Now, the first set of these Hello Sunshine original productions are being announced, including performances […]

In security, nothing is “unhackable.” When it’s claimed, security researchers see nothing more than a challenge. Enter the latest findings from Pen Test Partners, a U.K.-based cybersecurity firm. Their latest project was ripping apart the “unhackable” eyeDisk, an allegedly secure USB flash drive that uses iris recognition to unlock and decrypt the device. In its […]

The U.K.’s data protection watchdog has issued the government department responsible for collecting taxes with a final enforcement notice, after an investigation found HMRC had collected biometric data from millions of citizens without obtaining proper consent. HMRC has 28 days from the May 9 notice to delete any Voice ID records where it did not […]

More than 95 percent of the smartphones that ship in India run Android, according to industry estimates. Now the Indian antitrust watchdog is convinced that the nation should investigate whether Google is abusing the dominant position of its mobile operating system to hurt local rivals. The Competition Commission of India (CCI), the local antimonopoly regulator, […]

For the past few years, Apple has been inviting student developers to attend its WWDC conference, which centers on development topics and software. A few students from this year’s batch are getting some more personal attention from Apple as it tries to raise awareness of the program and coding literacy via its Swift Playgrounds and […]

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

A popular GPS tracker — used as a panic alarm for elderly patients, to monitor kids, and track vehicles — contains security flaws, which security researchers say are so severe the device should be recalled. The Chinese manufactured white-label location tracker, rebranded and sold by over a dozen companies — including Pebbell by HoIP Telecom, […]

Binance has vowed to raise the quality of its security in the aftermath of a hack that saw thieves make off with over $40 million in Bitcoin from the exchange. The company — which is widely believed to operate the world’s largest crypto exchange based on trading volumes — said today that it will “significantly […]

Daye, a “femcare” startup developing a new type of tampon that uses CBD to help tackle dysmenorrhea, has quietly raised $5.5 million in funding from high-profile investors in the U.S. and Europe, TechCrunch has learned. Backing the seed round is Silicon Valley’s Khosla Ventures, along with London’s Index Ventures and Kindred Capital. The investment sees […]

Cambridge University has proposed setting up a research center tasked with coming up with scalable technological fixes for climate change. The proposed Center for Climate Repair is being co-ordinated by David King, an emeritus professor in physical chemistry at the university and also the UK government’s former chief scientific adviser. Speaking to the BBC this […]

Cloud kitchens are the big thing in food delivery, with ex-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s new business one contender in that space, with Asia, and particularly Southeast Asia, a major focus. Despite the newcomers, a more established startup from Singapore has raised a large bowl of cash to go after regional expansion. Founded in 2014, Grain […]

Chelsea Manning walked free today for the first time after spending two months in Virginia’s Alexandria Detention Center for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury probing her relationship with WikiLeaks. Gizmodo first reported news that Manning left the facility today. Manning was found to be in contempt of court, remaining in custody until the […]

Cisco announced today that it was open-sourcing the MindMeld conversation AI platform, making it available to anyone who wants to use it under the Apache 2.0 license. MindMeld is the conversational AI company that Cisco bought in 2017. The company put the technology to use in Cisco Spark Assistant later that year to help bring […]

'90s kids will remember this. Final Fantasy VII, the game that busted JPRGs out of their niche and helped make the original PlayStation the must-have console of the generation, is, as we all know, being remade. But until today it wasn't really clear just what "remade" actually meant.

Delta says it plans to eventually offer free Wi-Fi on flights. The first step to achieving that goal, however, involves testing it on a handful of planes, beginning later this month. Starting May 13, the carrier will begin offering free service on 55 domestic flights per day. The idea here is to test the strain […]

Unity Technologies, the company behind one of the world’s most popular game engines, could nearly double its reported valuation in a new round of funding. The company has filed to raise up to $125 million in Series E funding according to a Delaware stock authorization filing uncovered by Prime Unicorn Index and reviewed by TechCrunch. […]

Mark Zuckerberg recently argued for new internet regulation starting in four areas: harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability. Here are three more areas to consider.

The price, which falls at the low end of Uber's planned range, values Uber at $82.4 billion.

As part of his big reveal of Blue Origin’s new lunar lander, “Blue Moon,” Jeff Bezos announced Club for the Future, a new organization to inspire a new generation of space explorers and entrepreneurs. The new organization, open to educators, parents and children in kindergarten through high school, seems designed to integrate educational lessons with […]

Today at an intimate event in Washington, DC, Jeff Bezos took the wraps off some grand space plans. But that future, which includes trips to the lunar surface, isn’t much without the gear to get it there. Among the more impressive unveils was Blue Moon, a new lunar lander. Bezos unveiled the vehicle, which was […]

Today at a packed event blocks from the White House, Jeff Bezos took the stage in front of select members of the media, executives, government officials and a gaggle of middle schoolers to reveal new details of his plan to get to the Moon by 2024. Blue Origin is going to send humans to space […]

OneDegree, an insurance technology startup based in Hong Kong, announced today it has extended its Series A round to $30 million, up from the $25.5 million it announced in September. Its extension, which the company is calling its “A2” round, was led by BitRock Capital, an investment firm that focuses on financial tech. Cyberport Macro […]

U.S. prosecutors have brought charges against a Chinese national for his alleged involvement in the data breach at health insurance giant Anthem announced in 2015 that resulted in the theft of 78.8 million records. Fujie Wang, 32, and other unnamed members of a China-based hacking group, are charged with four counts of conspiracy to commit […]

It has to be a bit depressing to be in the cloud infrastructure business if your name isn’t Amazon. Sure, there’s a huge, growing market, and the companies behind Amazon are growing even faster. Yet it seems no matter how fast they grow, Amazon remains a dot on the horizon. It seems inconceivable that AWS […]

A massive SMS spamming operation kicked out tens of millions of text messages, pestering unsuspecting recipients with links to fake sites flogging loans and free money. The operation was simple but smart. The system processed vast batches of phone numbers and curated custom messages on the fly with links to the fake sites. These fake […]