Crunch Hype

The beauty of podcasting is that anyone can do it. It’s a rare medium that’s nearly as easy to make as it is to consume. And as such, no two people do it exactly the same way. There are a wealth of hardware and software solutions open to potential podcasters, so setups run the gamut […]

HBO has been releasing little glimpses of its adaptation of the classic graphic novel “Watchmen,” but now we’ve got a full teaser trailer. “Watchmen” has already been turned into a big-budget film by director Zack Snyder. While the movie wasn’t a complete disaster, the results were still disappointing, since the original graphic novel (written by […]

Many companies have struggled with competition, conditions of duopoly, price pressures and survival. Some survived, some did not. Others reached a profitable state and still exist.

Two years ago, Apple changed the way its app store ratings worked by allowing developers to decide whether or not their ratings would be reset with their latest app update — a feature that Apple suggests should be used sparingly. Today, Google announced it’s making a change to how its Play Store app ratings work, […]

“Drivers united, will never be defeated!” That’s the chant hundreds of drivers yelled outside Uber’s San Francisco headquarters this afternoon before heading to block Market Street. Ahead of Uber’s IPO, drivers are protesting for better wages, benefits, transparent policies and a voice, Uber driver and Gig Workers Rising member Mostafa Maklad told TechCrunch ahead of the […]

Months after revoking its award, the CTA has decided to re-award Lora DiCarlo the same day it planned to announce a $2 million funding.

U.S. prosecutors have formally brought charges against the alleged co-owners and administrators of Deep Dot Web, who were arrested Tuesday. Tal Prihar, 37, and Michael Phan, 34 — both Israeli citizens — were charged with one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, according to a newly unsealed indictment. Prihar, who resided in Brazil, was […]

Google unveils new Pixel 3 phones, Bird will start selling directly to consumers and PUBG takes a hit in China. Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 8, 2019. 1. Here’s everything Google announced today at the I/O 2019 Keynote Google’s developer conference is still underway, but we’ve rounded up everything they announced at their big […]

Google employees are still going strong and not letting up on their demands. Following a sit-in protesting retaliation last month, Googlers are making four demands. “Google seems to have lost its mooring, and trust between workers and the company is deeply broken,” Google walkout organizers wrote on Medium today. “As the company progresses from crisis […]

Facebook still won’t let you advertise for ICOs or binaries, and ads for cryptocurrencies and exchanges need prior approval. But a year after banning all blockchain-related ads, it’s reopening to ones for “blockchain technology, industry news, education or events related to cryptocurrency” without the need for pre-approval. The change could be a boon to an […]

Microsoft's yearly Imagine Cup student startup competition crowned its latest winner today: EasyGlucose, a non-invasive, smartphone-based method for diabetics to test their blood glucose. It and the two other similarly beneficial finalists presented today at Microsoft's Build developers conference.

We’re hunting for a cadre of exciting early-stage startups to attend and exhibit at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 as part of our TC Top Pick program — for free. Not only that, if your company makes the cut, you’ll get the VIP treatment and receive a ton of media and investor attention. Sounds great, right? […]

Roughly two years ago, as the gig-economy company TaskRabbit was nearing its eventual sale to Ikea, its founder, Leah Busque, headed into the venture world. More specifically, she joined Fuel Capital, a firm founded in 2013 by Chris Howard, a VC who’d spent nearly six years as a principal with Ignition Parters before deciding to […]

Where top VCs are investing in Media, Entertainment & Gaming Our media columnist Eric Peckham (who is hard at work on the Unity EC-1, which we will start to publish here shortly) pinged his network of media investors to figure out what the media VC world is up to in mid-2019: Here are the media […]

The future of mobility is the big topic driving TC Sessions: Mobility 2019, which takes place July 10 in San Jose, Calif. Will it include flying cars? Space tourism? Transporter beams? Before we can go where no person has gone before, we need to foster a deep bench of thinkers, makers and technologists. Students are […]

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy and a Core Faculty Member in Women’s Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is the lead “axion wrangler” and a social media team member for the NASA STROBE-X Probe Concept Study. The first Black woman in history to hold a faculty position in theoretical […]

Pandora’s integration with new owner SiriusXM continues today, as the music streaming service will now benefit from the numerous SiriusXM guests and artists who come through its New York studios on a regular basis. Now, those guests’ interviews will contribute to Pandora Stories — the recently launched product that combines music and podcasts in a […]

Rent The Runway's newest store shows its more than just a designer gown rental service

Sure, Google’s getting most of the smart home love this week, but you didn’t think Amazon would let an I/O pass without releasing a little news of its own, did you? The company just announced the latest version of its outdoor Blink security camera, the fittingly named Blink XT2. The new model brings a handful […]

One of China’s most ambitious artificial intelligence startups Megvii, more commonly known for its facial recognition brand Face++, announced Wednesday that it has raised $750 million in a Series D funding round. Founded by three graduates from the prestigious Tsinghua University in China, the eight-year-old company specializes in applying its computer vision solutions to a […]

2048 Ventures, a new early-stage firm founded and led by Alex Iskold and Paul Sethi, is announcing that it has raised a first fund of $27 million. Iskold spent five years as the managing director of Techstars NYC, and he previously founded Info Lab and GetBlue. Sethi, meanwhile, recently served as CEO of Redbooks while […]

TechCrunch has learned that Docker CEO Steve Singh will be stepping down after two years at the helm, and former Hortonworks CEO Rob Bearden will be taking over. An email announcement, went out this morning to Docker employees. People close to the company confirmed that Singh will be leaving the CEO position, staying on the […]

The stock market has already seen some wild fluctuations this week in anticipation of the latest volley in a trade war ramping up between the U.S. and China. Now it seems the President is making good on his promise to further increase tariffs on goods from the country. Documents posted to the Federal Register (via […]

A development lab used by Samsung engineers was leaking highly sensitive source code, credentials and secret keys for several internal projects — including its SmartThings platform, a security researcher found. The electronics giant left dozens of internal coding projects on a GitLab instance hosted on a Samsung-owned domain, Vandev Lab. The instance, used by staff […]

SoFi is one of the leading fintech startups to emerge from San Francisco and breach the financial markets. Originally started as a way to better finance student debt, it has since expanded to include products targeted at personal loans and home loans. Today, the company announced a new index fund product focused on the gig […]

Bird, recognizing the growing possibility that people will want to own electric scooters rather than share them, is launching a new scooter model available for purchase. Called the Bird One, it will be available for ownership and shared use cases. Bird is also ditching the Ninebot ES and relying on its own M365 model for […]

Sumo Logic, a cloud data analytics and log analysis company, announced a $110 million Series G investment today. The company indicated that its valuation was “north of a billion dollars,” but wouldn’t give an exact figure. Today’s round was led by Battery Ventures with participation from new investors Tiger Global Management and Franklin Templeton. Other […]

Founders in Seattle recently bemoaned a lack of capital and support when compared to Silicon Valley — what about those building startups in more remote markets? Kargo, a company that takes the spirit of Uber and brings it to the disorganized world of trucking, has raised a SG$800,000 (US$580,000) round of funding, giving TechCrunch an […]

Iguazio, an end-to-end platform that allows data scientists to take machine learning models from data ingestion to training, testing and production, today announced that it is bringing its solution to Microsoft’s Azure cloud and Azure Stack on-premises platform. The 80-person company, which has received a total of $48 million in funding to date, aims to […]

China’s new rules on video games, introduced last month, are having an effect on the country’s gamers. Today, Tencent replaced hugely popular battle royale shooter game PUBG with a more government-friendly alternative that seems primed to pull in significant revenue. The company introduced ‘Game for Peace’ in a Weibo post at the same time as […]

HeyJobs, a three year-old Berlin startup that helps large employers scale recruitment, has raised $12 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Notion Capital, with participation from existing investors Creathor Ventures, Rocket Internet’s GFC, and newly re-branded Heartcore Capital. Founded in 2016 and launched the following year, HeyJobs aims to tackle the […]

Match Group’s revenue saw solid growth in the first quarter thanks to an increase in Tinder subscribers. The company, whose portfolio of dating apps also includes Match.com, PlentyOfFish, OkCupid and Hinge, among others, said in its earnings report today that total quarterly revenue grew 14% year over year to $465 million. If the effects of […]

Indian edtech startup CollegeDekho, which helps students connect with prospective colleges and keep track of exams, has raised $8 million in Series B round. The new financing round for the four-year-old Gurgaon-based startup was led by its parent company Girnarsoft Education and London-based private equity investor Man Capital, which also participated in the startup’s Series […]

[Update: Changpeng Zhao’s comments on Periscope added to bottom of post] Cryptocurrency exchange Binance has confirmed a “large scale” data breach, in which hackers stole more than $40 million in cryptocurrency In a statement, the company said hackers stole API keys, two-factor codes and other information in the attack. Binance traced the cryptocurrency theft — […]

Google announced today it has launched a new page transition experience for the Chrome web browser called “Portals.” The technology is something the company has been developing for some time, and is designed to offer an alternative to using IFrames. In fact, the company described Portals as being more like “IFrames that you can navigate” […]

Stock markets declined today as investors worried about the potential for an escalating trade war with China sold off shares. Markets had been trading near or above all-time highs before President Donald Trump threatened to significantly increase tariffs on Chinese goods. The news sent stock markets into a free-fall in mid-day trading, but the markets […]

Mark Zuckerberg: “The future is private”. Sundar Pichai: ~The present is private~. While both CEO’s made protecting user data a central theme of their conference keynotes this month, Facebook’s product updates were mostly vague vaporware while Google’s were either ready to ship or ready to demo. The contrast highlights the divergence in strategy between the […]

Waymo is partnering with Lyft to bring self-driving vehicles onto the ride-hailing network in Phoenix as the company ramps up its commercial robotaxi service. Waymo will add 10 of its self-driving vehicles onto Lyft platform over the next few months, according to CEO John Krafcik. Once Waymo vehicles are on the platform, Lyft users in […]

Google seems to be waking up from its VR daydream. The company’s ambitious plans to leverage the smartphones that people already own to power VR experiences went unmentioned at its I/O developer conference. After spending 2016 and 2017 making big promises for how the company would shape the mobile VR market and ensure that its […]

Google today announced a change coming to Chrome that will help image-heavy websites load more quickly — but the addition for now is only available in the experimental version of the web browser, Chrome Canary. Explained Chrome Product Manager Tal Oppenheimer, speaking at the Google I/O conference on Tuesday, the company is rolling out a […]

Google’s Flutter UI toolkit for cross-platform development may only be two years old, but it has quickly become the framework of choice for many developers. Until now, though, ‘cross-platform’ only referred to Android and iOS. Late last year, Google announced that it would also take flutter beyond mobile and to the web. Today, at its […]

It won’t be long before Red Hat becomes part of IBM, the result of the $34 billion acquisition last year that is still making its way to completion. For now, Red Hat continues as a standalone company, and if to flex its independence muscles, it announced its second agreement in two days with Microsoft Azure, […]

In its first-ever earnings report as a public company, Lyft (NASDAQ: LYFT) failed to display progress toward profitability. The ride-hailing business, which raised $2 billion in a March initial public offering, posted first-quarter revenues of $776 million on losses of $1.14 billion, including $894 million of stock-based compensation and related payroll tax expenses. The company’s […]

Google today announced that the Kotlin programming language is now its preferred language for Android app developers. “Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first,” Google writes in today’s announcement. “Many new Jetpack APIs and features will be offered first in Kotlin. If you’re starting a new project, you should write it in Kotlin; code written in […]

At its I/O developer conference, Google today announced that it is opening up its Smart Display platform to developers. Until now, there was no real way for developers to target devices like the newly-renamed Nest Hub. Only Google’s own first-party services got full access to the display. Now, however, Developers will be able to start […]

At its I/O conference, Google today announced a slew of new tools for developers who want to build experiences for the company’s Assistant platform. These range from the ability to build games for smart displays like the Google Home Hub and the launch of App Actions for taking users from an Assistant answer to their […]

Google today announced the first preview of Jetpack Compose, a new open-source UI toolkit for Kotlin developers who want to use a reactive programming model similar to what React Native and Vue.js. Jetpack Compose is an unbundled toolkit that is part of Google’s overall Android Jetpack set of software components for Android developers, but there […]

Global M&A activity is exploding. The value of transactions in the first 8 months of 2018 reached $3.3 trillion worldwide, and the market can expect another record-setting year in 2019.

At the risk of sounding too optimistic, 2019 might be the year of the private web browser. In the beginning, browsers were a cobbled together mess that put a premium on making the contents within look good. Security was an afterthought — Internet Explorer is no better example — and user privacy was seldom considered […]

Half a year ago, at the Android Dev Summit, Google announced a new way for developers to force their users to update their apps when they launch new features or important bug fixes. It’s only now, at Google I/O, though, that the company is actually making this feature available to developers. Previously, it was only […]