Crunch Hype

Third time lucky — unless you’re Facebook . The social networking giant was hit Thursday by a trio of investigations over its privacy practices following a particularly tumultuous month of security lapses and privacy violations — the latest in a string of embarrassing and damaging breaches at the company, much of its own doing. First […]

Tesla is poised to open up orders for the Model 3 in the U.K. by early May, as well as other markets that have right-hand drive vehicles, according to a tweet from CEO Elon Musk. The Model 3 order page will go live May 1 or 2 in the U.K., followed by Japan, Australia, New […]

Amazon has made two-day shipping the new industry standard -- a standard most competitors can’t meet. Fortunately, some exciting new logistics startups are emerging to help them compete with Amazon.

The rumored IPO plans of $4 billion spinning brand Peloton marks the rise of a wave of interactive fitness startups like Mirror, Tonal, Hydrow and At Home 360 that combine a monthly subscription to recorded and/or live video classes with workout hardware. There’s opportunity beyond this initial “Peloton for X” model, however, when you look at […]

Last month, a New York Times piece heralded the arrival of Luminary. The story focused on the startup’s healthy funding (almost $100 million) and its “subscription-based business model that it hopes will push the medium into a new phase of growth.” You’d be hard-pressed to find better circumstances under which to launch your startup. A […]

Wing, a nine-year-old, Silicon Valley venture firm co-founded by veteran VCs Peter Wagner and Gaurav Garg, produces interesting research about its own industry every now and then, based on smaller data sets than firms like PitchBook or CB Insights tend to use. Instead of looking at funding activity broadly, the firm tracks deal-making at the […]

Have you ever wanted to hear a concerto for piano and harp, in the style of Mozart by way of Katy Perry? Well, why not? Because now you can, with OpenAI's latest (and blessedly not potentially catastrophic) creation, MuseNet. This machine learning model produces never-before-heard music basic on its knowledge of artists and a few bars to fake it with.

The Markup appears to be facing a staff revolt — and its financial backers may be reconsidering their support — following the firing of editor-in-chief Julia Angwin. When the site was announced last fall, it was backed by $20 million from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, with additional funding from the John S. and James L. […]

SOSV, a multi-stage venture firm that was founded as the personal investing vehicle of entrepreneur Sean O’Sullivan after his company went public in 1994, then re-launched as a traditional venture firm with outside backers in 2015, has raised $218 million for its third fund. The vehicle has a $250 million target that SOSV expects to […]

Apple is rolling out a fix for an App Store bug that was preventing users from downloading new iOS apps or app updates. The issue, which impacted an unknown number of users, involved a Terms & Conditions dialog box that would continue to pop up even when users tapped the “Agree” button. The issue had […]

Amazon is always looking for ways to increase the options it offers developers in AWS, and to that end, today it announced a bunch of new AMD EPYC-powered T3a instances. These were originally announced at the end of last year at re:Invent, AWS’s annual customer conference. Today’s announcement is about making these chips generally available. […]

If you're a student at UC Berkeley, the diminutive rolling robots from Kiwi are probably a familiar sight by now, trundling along with a burrito inside to deliver to a dorm or apartment building. Now students at a dozen more campuses will be able to join this great, lazy future of robotic delivery as Kiwi expands to them with a clever student-run model

Social media-fuelled anti-vaxxer propaganda is the latest online harm the U.K. government is targeting. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today program this morning health secretary Matt Hancock said he will meet with representatives from social media platforms on Monday to pressure them into doing more to prevent false information about the safety of vaccinations from […]

Huawei’s controversial status in North America and Europe stems from a lot of different factors. At the heart of most of them, however, is the hardware maker’s alleged ties to the Chinese government. The notion of government control has been enough to cause something approaching an outright ban on its products in the States, over […]

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. Facebook reserves $3B for FTC fine, but keeps growing with 2.38B users in Q1 A massive penalty hangs over Facebook’s head, […]

Comcast is in talks about selling its 30 percent stake in Hulu to Disney, according to a report from CNBC this morning. The discussions are still in early stages. Comcast is considering whether the timing is right for the sale, as Hulu’s valuation could still increase over time. But if Comcast is less certain about […]

The latest damning assessment of Facebook’s trampling of user privacy comes from the Canadian and Columbia privacy commissioners — which have just published the results of an investigation kicked off in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal last year. They found the social network company committed serious contraventions of local laws and […]

Long before there was an autonomous vehicle industry, there was Project Chauffeur — a secret endeavor staffed by about a dozen engineers and housed under Google’s moonshot factory X. That venture, popularly known as the Google self-driving car project, would eventually graduate from its project status to become a standalone company called Waymo in 2016 […]

A couple of weeks ago, when Pinterest filed its S-1, its AWS bills raised eyebrows and questions about cheaper alternatives for startups. Render is a small startup with a big idea to provide infrastructure services for developers, who might be looking for a cheaper and easier alternative to bigger more familiar names. The company launched […]

New Enterprise Associates, the 42-year-old venture capital firm, has invested in the $23 million Series B round for Mejuri, a startup capturing millennial women’s penchant for affordable and treat yo’ self type of jewelry rather than diamonds and precious stones for special occasions. It’s the latest instance of startups drawing investor interest with their direct-to-customer […]

The Entrepreneurs’ Roundtable Accelerator is today presenting yet another batch of startups to the world at its Demo Day in NYC. ERA has already launched a total of 180 startups which have raised more than $300 million and are collectively valued at more than $2 billion. This sixteenth class is comprised of 13 companies across […]

Adobe today used the OFFF festival in Barcelona to show off an experimental feature for its Illustrator vector drawing application. The basic idea here is to allow Illustrator users to easily experiment with color palettes based on photos and other images. That makes it incredibly easy to create new variations of an existing drawing, based […]

Walmart this morning unveiled a new “store of the future” and test grounds for emerging technologies, including A.I.-enabled cameras and interactive displays. The store, a working concept called the Intelligent Retail Lab — or “IRL” for short — operates out of a Walmart Neighborhood Market in Levittown, New York. The store is open to customers […]

For the last year or so, you could ask the Google Assistant on your Google Home device to read your kids a story. Today, just in time for National Tell a Story Day, Google is bringing this feature to Android and iOS phones, too. It’ll be available in English in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia […]

Analysts have been all too happy to discuss 5G’s cart and horse problem, even as they wax poetic about the wireless technology’s future. Networks require devices and devices require networks. And while many have positioned 2019 as the year of 5G, both seem to be trickling out at a 2G rate. Verizon (disclosure: our parent […]

Coursera, an online learning startup that offers free and paid short courses, skills certifications, and complete degrees in partnership with universities and businesses, has raised another $103 million to scale out its business into new geographies, subject areas and products — a Series E led by a strategic investor, the Australian online recruitment and course directory […]

Want your video game character to look just like you? Soon you’ll be able to scan an in-game code with Snapchat to play as your personalized Bitmoji avatar on PC, console, and mobile games. Today Snapchat announced is new Bitmoji For Games SDK that will let hand-selected partners integrate 3D Bitmoji as a replacement for […]

Shopify is expanding its efforts in brick-and-mortar retailer with the launch of its new retail hardware collection. The company is best-known as a platform for building online stores, but it also offers point-of-sale software for physical stores, and it launched a credit card reader a couple years ago. With the new collection — which includes […]

Nintendo’s Switch has now outsold its N64 console on lifetime sales, but prospects for the portable gaming system look mixed for the next year following a conservative sales forecast. Nintendo just announced its end of year financials, and in doing so it revealed that it sold 16.95 million Switch consoles in the last year, taking […]

Artificial intelligence and other tech for automating some of the more repetitive aspects of human jobs continues to be a growing category of software, and today a company that builds tools to address this need for salespeople has raised a tidy sum to grow its business. SalesLoft, an Atlanta-based startup that has built a platform […]

Two years after highly classified exploits built by the National Security Agency were stolen and published, hackers are still using the tools for nefarious reasons. Security researchers at Symantec say they’ve seen a recent spike in a new malware, dubbed Beapy, which uses the leaked hacking tools to spread like wildfire across corporate networks to […]

The recent global campaign showing Malaria survivors speaking through David Beckham to help raise awareness around the Malaria Must Die initiative spooked a lot of people: The campaign has already exceeded 400 million impressions globally. But a behind-the-scenes video explains how the video was made: The campaign was a joint collaboration between RG/A, Ridley Scott […]

Labster, the Denmark headquartered startup building virtual laboratory simulations for STEM students, has raised $21 million in Series B funding. Leading the round is Owl Ventures, with participation from Balderton Capital, Northzone and Swisscom Ventures. Previous backers Nordic Makers, David Helgason, EduCapital and Entangled Group also followed on, bringing the total raised by the company […]

Two futuristic projects are coming together to help increase global internet access after Loon, the Google spinout that uses a collection of floating balloons to bring connectivity to remote areas, announced it has raised money from a SoftBank initiative. HAPSMobile, a SoftBank project that is also focused on increasing global connectivity, is investing $125 million […]

Zack Burt Contributor Zack Burt is an American computer programmer. He founded Code For Cash, the tech recruiting firm. The competition is intense for great tech talent, and it’s even harder to find the most qualified people who are also the right fit for your company This article shares some practical processes that you can […]

Elon Musk would prefer if Tesla, which is known for its volatile share price and is among the most heavily shorted stock, were a private company, but acknowledged during an earnings call Wednesday that it wasn’t likely. Musk can dream, can’t he? “Unfortunately that ship had sailed,” Musk said flatly, in response to a question […]

Tesla is developing an insurance product, which could be launched in about a month, CEO Elon Musk said during a call with analysts Wednesday following its first-quarter earnings report. “It will be much more compelling than anything else out there,” he said. Musk didn’t provide further details on what the insurance product might look like, […]

In a feat that could eventually unlock the possibility of speech for people with severe medical conditions, scientists have successfully recreated the speech of healthy subjects by tapping directly into their brains. The technology is a long, long way from practical application but the science is real and the promise is there.

Great news for all you coders, hackers, developers and creative tech makers — our onsite Hackathon returns to Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. Applications to hack are open now and if you’re selected, you get to flex your mighty coding skills and go head-to-head against some of the world’s best developers to build […]

It looks like movies produced by Netflix and other streaming services will be able to compete for next year’s Academy Awards without any changes to eligibility. After the Netflix Original film “Roma” was nominated for Best Picture at this year’s ceremony and ultimately took home the awards for Best Director, Best Foreign Language Film and […]

Even as its solar business declined in step with its overall earnings, Tesla is bullish on the prospects for the energy side of its business over the course of the year. The energy business is an unheralded part of Tesla — overshadowed by its headline-grabbing (and much larger) auto exploits — that chief executive Elon […]

Tesla reported Wednesday wider-than-expected loss of $702 million, or $4.10 a share, in the first quarter after disappointing delivery numbers, costs and pricing adjustments to its vehicles threw the automaker off of its profitability track. The loss included $188 million of non-recurring charges. When adjusted for one-time losses, Tesla lost $494 million, or $2.90 a […]

You might think it’s redundant with Instagram Stories, or just don’t want to see high school friends’ boring lives, but ephemeral Snapchat-style Stories now have 500 million daily users across Facebook and Messenger. WhatsApp’s Stories feature Status has 500 million dailies too, and Instagram hit that milestone three months ago. That’s impressive, because it means […]

The Galaxy Fold has been the most polarizing product I can recall having reviewed. Everyone who saw it wanted to play with the long-promised smartphone paradigm shift. The results, on the other hand, were far more mixed. If nothing else, the Fold has a remarkably high Q-Rating. Each person who saw me using the product […]

As Slack gathered with its growing customer base this week at the Frontiers Conference in San Francisco, it announced several enhancements to the product, including extending collaboration to folks who want to stick with email instead of hanging with their co-workers in Slack . Some habits are tough to break, and using email as your […]

Microsoft reported its quarterly earnings for Q3 2019 today. Overall, Wall Street expected earnings of about $1 per share and revenue of $29.84 billion. The company handily beat this with revenue of $30.6 billion (up 14 percent from the year-ago quarter) and earnings per share of $1.14. With Microsoft focusing heavily on its cloud business, […]

A massive penalty hangs over Facebook’s head, but it otherwise had a very strong Q1 earnings report. Facebook reached 2.38 billion monthly users, up 2.5 percent from 2.32 billion in Q4 2018 when it grew 2.2 percent, and it now has 1.56 billion daily active users, up 2.63 percent from 1.52 billion last quarter when […]

When it comes to planning for a potential asteroid strike on planet Earth, The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Federal Emergency Management Agency don’t want to miss a thing. Alongside international partners like the European Space Agency’s Space Situational Awareness-NEO Segment and the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN), NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office […]

Forty-one percent of voice assistant users are concerned about trust, privacy and passive listening, according to a new report from Microsoft focused on consumer adoption of voice and digital assistants. And perhaps people should be concerned — all the major voice assistants, including those from Google, Amazon, Apple and Samsung as well as Microsoft, employ […]

Last week, at TechCrunch’s robotics event at UC Berkeley, we sat down with four VCs who are making a range of bets on robotics companies, from drone technologies to robots whose immediate applications aren’t yet clear. Featuring Peter Barrett of Playground Global, Helen Liang of FoundersX Ventures, Eric Migicovsky of Y Combinator and Andy Wheeler […]