Crunch Hype

Editors Note: This article is part of a series that explores the world of growth marketing for founders.

Reese Witherspoon’s media company Hello Sunshine already has its hands in movies, television, Apple TV+ shows, podcasts, Audible originals, books and more. Now it’s weighing an entry into the subscription box business to further capitalize on its brand and its appeal to women. The subscription boxes under consideration would operate out of Reese’s Book Club […]

Apple wants to add more iOS features to macOS according to a report from 9to5Mac’s Guilherme Rambo. And it starts with improvements to Siri. While Siri has been available on macOS for a while, it feels like a scaled-down version of Siri. Sure, you can ask for the weather, NBA scores or a word translation. […]

ProcessOut has grown quite a lot since I first covered the startup. The company now has a ton of small and big clients, from Glovo to Vente-Privée and Dashlane. The company has become an expert on payment providers and payment analytics. The core of the product remains the same. Clients sign up to get an […]

The French government just launched its own messaging app called Tchap in order to protect conversations from hackers, private companies and foreign entities. But Elliot Alderson, also known as Baptiste Robert, immediately found a security flaw. He was able to create an account even though the service is supposed to be restricted to government officials. […]

Back in January, Sequoia India announced plans for its first early-stage startup accelerator program in India and Southeast Asia, and today the firm revealed the first cohort of 17 startups. To recap, the program — which is called Surge — gives each startup a $1.5 million check and participation in a four-month program that’s split […]

Uber has confirmed it will spin out its self-driving car business after the unit closed $1 billion in funding from Toyota, auto-parts maker Denso and SoftBank’s Vision Fund. The development has been speculated for some time — as far back as October — and it serves to both remove a deeply unprofitable unit from the […]

Last year at our TC Sessions: Robotics conference, Boston Dynamics announced that SpotMini will be its first commercially available product. A revamped version of the product would use the company’s decades of quadrupedal robotics learnings as a basis for a robot designed to patrol office spaces. At today’s event, founder and CEO Marc Raibert took […]

Start spreading the news. Netflix is coming to New York City in a big way. The streaming media service has committed to invest up to $100 million to build a production hub and hire hundreds of new staffers in the Big Apple, according to a statement from Governor Andrew M. Cuomo. Netflix’s new production hub […]

Russian operatives successfully targeted and hacked “at least one” Florida county government in the run up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, according to new findings by the Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The report, published Thursday by the Justice Department, said the county was targeted by the Russian intelligence service, known as the GRU. The hackers […]

Ivan Poupyrev, the technical projects lead at Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects division, just gave a TED talk that was simultaneously a presentation and a demo of new technology. Poupyrev was showing off Jacquard, a device that allowed him to use the sleeve of his jacket as a controller for his presentation slides. Google has […]

San Francisco soft robotics startup Breeze Automation made its debut today onstage at TechCrunch’s TC Sessions: Robotics + AI event at UC Berkeley. Co-founder and CEO Gui Cavalcanti joined us onstage at the event to showcase the contract work the company has been doing for organizations like NASA and the U.S. Navy. Cavalcanti last joined […]

Oh golly does the new trailer for “Child’s Play” look good. Not only does it have appearances by Aubrey Plaza, Mark Hamill (as the voice of Chucky) and Bryan Tyree Henry (who’s awesome in Atlanta), but it’s giving Chucky a smart home makeover. The demonically possessed doll now has the power to control networked devices […]

The round values Pilot at $355 million.

Industrial automation is already streamlining the manufacturing process, but first those machines must be painstakingly trained by skilled engineers. Industrial robotics giant Fanuc wants to make robots easier to train, therefore making automation more accessible to a wider range of industries, including pharmaceuticals. The company announced a new artificial intelligence-based tool at TechCrunch’s Robotics + […]

The company’s vast power in e-commerce is only the initial, quick jab to an opponent’s face. Data-focused innovations in offline retail will be Amazon’s second, much heavier cross.

“We want your followers to focus on what you share, not how many likes your posts get. During this test, only the person who share a post will see the total number of likes it gets.” That’s how Instagram describes a seemingly small design change test with massive potential impact on users’ well-being. Hiding Like […]

A single paragraph in the Mueller report out Thursday offers an interesting look into how the Special Counsel’s investigation came head-to-head with associates of President Trump who used encrypted and ephemeral messaging to hide their activities. From the report: Further, the Office learned that some of the individuals we interviewed or whose conduct we investigated-including […]

If you want to build a robot that can fall hundreds of feet and be no worse the wear, legs are pretty much out of the question. The obvious answer, then, is a complex web of cable-actuated rods. Obvious to Squishy Robotics, anyway, whose robots look delicate but are in fact among the most durable out there.

Amazon today announced the launch of a free, ad-supported music service in the U.S. that will be available to anyone who wants to play free music on their Echo speaker. Until today, Echo owners who wanted to stream music from Amazon could either pay for an annual Prime membership for access to Prime Music or […]

Is reading the news feeling a little stressful today? Can’t imagine why. Don’t worry: you’re not alone. A Pew Research study found that seven of 10 Americans today suffer from “news fatigue” — meaning they feel worn out and like they can’t keep up. Meanwhile, an APA survey found that 56 percent of Americans want […]

On Thursday, Attorney General William Barr released the long-anticipated Mueller report. With it comes a useful overview of how Russia leveraged U.S.-based social media platforms to achieve its political ends. While we’ve yet to find too much in the heavily redacted text that we didn’t already know, Mueller does recap efforts undertaken by Russia’s mysterious […]

If you’re a SaaS business,  you’re likely overwhelmed with data and an ever-growing list of acronyms that purport to unlock secret keys to your success. But like most things,  tracking with you do has very little impact on what you actually do.

In one of the weirder revelations to come out of the Mueller report released this morning, it seems that Craigslist was yet another tech platform used in Russia’s election influence campaign. Facebook? Sure. Instagram? Yup, that too. YouTube? Twitter? Oh my, yes. Even Tumblr makes an appearance (LOL. Tumblr). But Craigslist? Apparently the Russians used […]

Uber and Lyft instituted new safety features and policies this week. The move follows the death of Samantha Josephson, a student at the University of South Carolina, who was kidnapped and murdered in late March. She was found dead after getting into a vehicle that she believed to be her Uber ride. The murder, which […]

Facebook has confirmed its password-related security incident last month now affects “millions” of Instagram users, not “tens of thousands” as first thought. The social media giant confirmed the new information in its updated blog post, first published on March 21. “We discovered additional logs of Instagram passwords being stored in a readable format,” the company […]

Pinterest is the latest high-profile tech unicorn to go public.

The Mueller report contains new information about how the Russian government hacked documents and emails from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee . At one point, the Russians used servers located in the U.S. to carry out the massive data exfiltration effort, the report confirms. Much of the information was previously learned […]

Microsoft has never been shy about being acquisitive, and today it announced it’s buying Express Logic, a San Diego company that has developed a real-time operating system (RTOS) aimed at controlling the growing number of IoT devices in the world. The companies did not share the purchase price. Express Logic is not some wide-eyed, pie-in-the-sky […]

Following reports that Amazon is preparing to launch a free, streaming music service for Echo owners, Google today announced YouTube Music will be free on its Google Home smart speakers and other Google Assistant-powered speakers — like those from JBL, Panasonic, Sony and others. The free service will be ad-supported, and available in select markets, […]

He invented modern social media, then had it stolen from him. So how does Evan Spiegel feel about it, and how will he turn Snapchat’s product leadership into a profitable business? We’ll bring you the answers at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, where Snap CEO Evan Spiegel will join us. Come learn how Spiegel analyzes behavior to […]

Today at TechCrunch’s TC Sessions: Robotics + AI event at UC Berkeley, Nvidia VP of Engineering Claire Delaunay announced that the company’s Isaac SDK is available for download. Announced last month, the software development kit is part of the chipmaker’s ongoing push to help make robotics development more accessible for a wider range of users. […]

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. Samsung responds to reviewer complaints about its Galaxy Fold phone Samsung has issued a statement about its new folding phone. Apparently […]

Over the past half a decade, the tidal wave of niche brands delivering new kinds of products to consumers and doing so online has changed the retail and CPG landscapes forever.

Venture investors, private equity, and corporations funneled $2 billion into digital health startups in the first quarter of 2019, down 19% from the nearly $2.5 billion invested a year ago. There were also 38 fewer deals done in the first quarter this year than last year, when investors backed 187 early stage digital health companies, […]

CloudBees, the enterprise continuous integration and delivery service (and the biggest contributor to the Jenkins open-source automation server), today announced that it has acquired Electric Cloud, a continuous delivery and automation platform that first launched all the way back in 2002. The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition, but CloudBees has […]

Soylent is leaving liquids behind as it journeys deeper into the packaged food business with a selection of snack sized bars. The 100 calorie bar has 5 grams of plant protein, 36 nutrients and probiotics for digestive health. Snack bars come in three flavors — chocolate brownie, citrus berry and salted caramel. It’s the second […]

Zoom, a profitable tech unicorn, has begun trading on the Nasdaq.

A new report from Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo obtained by 9to5mac details the cameras in the next-generation iPhones. The report confirms previous rumors — the successors of the iPhone XS and XS Max will have three camera sensors on the back of the device. In addition to the main camera and the 2x camera, Apple […]

The USDA this morning announced the launch of a pilot program that will open up online grocery shopping to those on public assistance. During a two-year pilot program, those receiving SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits — often referred to as “food stamps” — will be able to shop for groceries from online retailers, including […]

Pete Curley and Garret Heaton, who previously co-founded team chat app HipChat and sold it to Atlassian, are officially launching their new product Swoot today. The app makes it easy for users to recommend podcasts and see what their friends are listening to. This might seem like a big leap from selling enterprise software — and […]

The Mueller report has been published. It was posted at 11am ET, a month after Special Counsel Robert Mueller submitted his findings to the Justice Department examining Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Per remarks by U.S. attorney general William Barr speaking this morning, there are three major components to the report: How […]

Fuzzbuzz, a graduate of the most recent Y Combinator class, got the kind of news every early-stage startup wants to hear when it landed a $2.7 million seed round to help deliver a special class of automated software testing known as fuzzing in the form of a cloud service. Fuel Capital led the round. Homebrew […]

If there weren’t enough obstacles already standing between Congress and the results of the special counsel’s multiyear investigation, lawmakers are expecting to need an optical drive to read the document. A Justice Department official told the Associated Press that a CD containing the Mueller report would be delivered to Congress tomorrow between 11 and noon […]

Apple announced today a further investment in its recycling programs and related e-waste efforts, which includes an expansion of its recycling program for consumers and the announcement of a new, 9,000-square-foot Material Recovery Lab based in Austin, Texas, focused on discovering future recycling processes. The company also reported the success of its existing efforts around […]

After nearly two years of investigation and months of delays (not to mention partisan bickering the whole time), Special Investigator Robert Mueller's report on the President's campaign and Russian interference in the 2016 election is out. We're not a politics news site but we're still looking into it — tech has figured more prominently than ever in the last few years and understanding its role in what could be a major political event is crucial for the industry and government both.

It might be time to move on from BBM. The consumer version of the BlackBerry Messenger will shut down on May 31. Emtek, the Indonesia-based company that partnered with BlackBerry in 2016, just announced the closure. It’s important to note, BBM will still exist and BlackBerry today revealed a plan to open its enterprise-version of […]

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

Google and Amazon are burying the hatchet to better serve users of their respective streaming video platforms, the companies announced this morning. In the months ahead, the official YouTube app will come to Amazon Fire TV devices and Fire TV Edition smart TVs, while the Prime Video app will come to Chromecast and other devices […]

In an era of social media manipulation and disinformation, we could sure use some help from innovative entrepreneurs. Social networks are now critical to how the public consumes and shares the news. But these networks were never built for an informed debate about the news. They were built to reward virality. That means they are […]