Crunch Hype

Disney’s direct-to-consumer streaming strategy took center stage today at the company’s investor day. That strategy includes Hulu (where the recently-closed Fox acquisition has given Disney a contyrolling stake), ESPN+ and the Indian streaming service Hotstar, but executives spent most of their time hyping the upcoming launch of Disney+. The company said the service will launch […]

It's time for another Equity Shot, a quick-take episode centered around a breaking news event. This time, we dig into the Uber S-1. It's a huge, complex document, and we did our best to summarize it.

At today’s Disney Investor Day, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige outlined the superheroic side of the upcoming streaming service Disney+. That includes a number of original shows: “Wanda Vision,” which will star Elizabeth Olsen as Scarlet Witch and Paul Bettany as The Vision; “Falcon and the Winter Soldier” starring Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan as […]

Uber spent $457 million last year on research and development of autonomous vehicles, flying cars (known as eVTOLs) and other “technology programs” and will continue to invest heavily in the futuristic tech even though it expects to rely on human drivers for years to come, according to the company’s IPO prospectus filed Thursday. R&D costs […]

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy launch vehicle undertook its first commercial mission today, taking a communications satellite to orbit and proving the viability of its heavy-lift rocket platform. And as a piece de resistance, all three rocket cores autonomously landed themselves back on Earth and will soon be ready to fly again.

Alex Cornell Contributor Share on Twitter Alex Cornell is former Facebook employee whose still-in-stealth company was part of the Y Combinator 2019 Winter cohort. We just finished YCombinator. Surrounding Demo Day, we went to a lot of investor meetings. Such conversations are usually well-choreographed and methodical but their physical conditions can be variable and random. […]

If you’ve ever had a voicemail appear out of nowhere, there’s a good chance Stratics Networks was involved. The Toronto-based company is the self-proclaimed inventor of “ringless voicemails,” providing its customers a way of auto-dialing a list of phone numbers and dropping voicemails without leaving a missed call. The system uses a backdoor voicemail number […]

The human body "remains robust and resilient" after almost a year in space, according to a long-term, multi-institutional study of twins, one of whom lived aboard the International Space Station for 340 days while the other remained on Earth. These heartening results remove a potential barrier to crewed interplanetary missions — and just in time for us to start planning them.

Organic meal delivery service Trifecta is partnering with Beyond Meat to bring the company’s plant-based meat replacements to its prepared meal and à la carte delivery service, the companies said today. Unlike its biggest competitor, Impossible Foods (which chose to go a business-to-business route supplying its meat replacement to restaurants), Beyond Meat primarily went through […]

Most documentary filmmakers want to convince you that the story they’re telling is important. But Theo Love, director of the new Netflix documentary “The Legend of Cocaine Island,” said he was attracted to his subject matter for the opposite reason. “A lot of the documentary subject matter that we had been considering and that we […]

As Uber gears up for its highly anticipated public debut, the company is setting aside some dough for drivers that have logged some serious rides on the platform as a reward for sticking with the service. The company follows Lyft, which also rewarded drivers with one-time cash bonuses during its public offering. Uber files for […]

Here's who's making the most money from Uber's upcoming IPO.

PagerDuty debuted on the New York Stock Exchange today, and as we type, shares of the nine-year-old, San Francisco-based incident response software company are trading at nearly $39. That’s up more than 60 percent above their IPO range of $24 per share, which was itself adjusted from the range of $21 to $23 that had […]

TechCrunch Include is partnering with Salesforce Ventures to host this month’s Include Office Hours on April 30th. From 2:00pm – 4:00pm, Salesforce Ventures investors Matt Garratt, Phoebe Peronto, Spencer Chavez, and Claudine Emeott will meet with founders one on one, for 20 minutes, to offer guidance, advice and product feedback. You can apply here. TechCrunch […]

Uber has filed its S-1, setting the stage for the transportation company to go public next month. This comes less than one month after competitor Lyft’s debut on the public market. Uber is listing under the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “UBER,” but has yet to disclose the anticipated initial public offering price. […]

We’re a week out from our third-annual TC Sessions: Robotics event, and we still have some surprises left to announce. I know, we’re just as surprised as you are. We’ve already announced that Marc Raibert, Colin Angle, Melonee Wise and Anthony Levandowski will be joining us in Berkeley next week, and today we’re adding Claire […]

Israel's SpaceIL almost made history today as its Beresheet spacecraft came within an ace of landing on the surface of the Moon, but suffered a last minute failure during descent. Israel missed out on the chance to be the fourth country to make a controlled lunar landing, but getting 99 percent of the way there is still an extraordinary achievement for private spaceflight.

The beauty of the foldable in 2019 is that there’s no consensus yet on the “right” way to do things. We’ve seen a number of different takes on the space as the year has progressed, and no two are exactly the same. Keep in mind that this device from Sharp is still very much a […]

Amazon has a large and growing advertising business, but rival Walmart’s own ad business is much smaller. It’s now working to change that. Earlier this year, the retailer consolidated ad sales for its stores and websites and said it was ready to start monetizing its shopper data on a grander scale. Today, its efforts continue […]

RoCycle is, naturally, short for “recycling robot,” the latest offering out of MIT’s CSAIL lab. The pick and place ‘bot utilizes a unique combination of sensors to help distinguish the material differences of objects in order to sort them ahead of the recycling process. Built on top of a Rethink Robotics Baxter, the system utilizes […]

For the first time in years, Netflix is no longer the top grossing, non-game mobile app. Instead, that title now goes to dating app Tinder. The change in position is not surprising, given Netflix’s decision in December to stop paying the so-called “Apple tax.” That is, it no longer allows new users to sign up […]

GoFundMe.com has made a name for itself as a wildly successful platform for people to raise awareness virally and collect money for their personal causes, with $5 billion coming from 50 million donors since launching in 2010. More recently, it has been building out a wider presence working with charities. It is making the latter […]

The future of mobility can’t happen without cultivating the next generation of creative thinkers and makers. That’s why we’re inviting students with a passion for mobility-related tech to join us at TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 on July 10 in San Jose, Calif. If you’re in high school or college, this is your chance to learn […]

When it comes to competing for the hearts and minds of creatives pros, some (see: Huawei) attempt to beat Apple at its own game. Others go an entirely different route. Acer’s ConceptD 9 falls firmly in the latter camp. More so than the rest of the line announced at an event today in Brooklyn, the […]

Tesla and Panasonic have paused plans to add more battery production lines at Gigafactory 1, its massive factory outside of Reno, Nevada that is a cornerstone to the automaker’s business. The Nikkei Asian Review initially reported Thursday that Tesla and Panasonic were freezing plans to expand capacity. The partners had planned to increase capacity by […]

The SoftBank Vision Fund has been screaming from the venture headlines the last few months, driven by eye-popping rounds (and valuations!) into some of the most notable startups around the world. Yet, SoftBank isn’t the only player rapidly buying up the cap tables of top startups. Indeed, another firm, more than a century old, has […]

“It is our contention that the investment industry may be experiencing a peak of its own, in this case the point of the maximum rate at which it extracts value from its clients’ assets. Let’s call it Peak Gravy.” That’s a recent quote from Tom Coutts, who is one of a few dozen partners at […]

Today in “Facebook apps are too big to manage”, a glitch caused some users’ Instagram Stories trays to show Stories from people they don’t follow. TechCrunch first received word of the problem from Twitter user InternetRyan who was confused about seeing strangers in his Stories Tray and tagged me in to investigate. The screenshots below […]

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. WikiLeaks founder charged with hacking, now faces US extradition Following Julian Assange’s arrest inside the Ecuadorian embassy earlier today for breaching […]

Exposure. That’s a key ingredient for early-stage startup success. If you’re hungry for massive exposure — to a global audience, to the media and to tech investors — then be sure to apply to Startup Battlefield at Disrupt San Francisco 2019, which takes place October 2-4. Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF is a global phenomenon — […]

Google’s chief diversity officer, Danielle Brown, has left the company. Brown, who became Google’s CDO in June 2017 after serving in a similar role at Intel, announced today that she’s joined payroll and benefits startup Gusto to lead its chief people operations. In Brown’s LinkedIn post announcing the job change, she noted that she will […]

Character is celebrating its 20-year anniversary this year, and this SF-based branding and design agency has a lot to be proud of. Founded by Ben Pham, Tish Evangelista, and Rishi Shourie, Character has helped startups like Doordash, Glint, Molekule, and many others, launch their companies into the world. We interviewed co-founder Ben Pham about Character’s […]

Sometimes a “like” in social media doesn’t give the full picture, or you’re just not inspired enough to write a fuller response. Today LinkedIn addressed that issue on its own platform, with the introduction of four new reactions people can use in response to posts in their timelines. In addition to “like”, you can now […]

French startup ReachFive wants to become Stripe for account management. The company just raised a $10 million Series A funding round led by CapHorn Invest, with Dawn Capital and Ventech also participating — investment bank Avolta Partners handled the fundraising process. When you buy something on an e-commerce website or app, chances are those companies […]

LinkedIn, with nearly 600 million users, dominates the market today for recruiters headhunting suitable candidates for knowledge worker roles. But with minimal controls for guaranteeing that people are what they say they are, it opens up a gap in the market for startups to give recruiters a better steer with more verified information. Today, a […]

At TechCrunch, we write about AI all the time, whether the technology is being used to write books, make films or create a better McDonald’s drive-thru. But we here’s one we haven’t heard before: Using AI to invent a new sport. The sport in question is Speedgate, and it was developed by AKQA. Creative Director […]

There are early adopters, and then there are early adopters. Anyone who bites the bullet and picks up Samsung’s $1,980 and up Galaxy Fold falls into the former category. And then there are those who’ll be the first to Samsung’s site when the company opens up pre-orders on its inaugural foldable tomorrow. Samsung is really […]

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos challenged rival retailers to increase their minimum wages to $16 per hour, in his annual letter to shareholders released on Thursday. Amazon in November had raised its own minimum wage to $15 per hour, in response to the ongoing criticism around pay disparity and poor working conditions. Bezos suggested other retailers […]

The Sidewalk Labs spin-out provides personalized health and social services to low-income communities.

Yesterday, the Pentagon announced two finalists in the $10 billion, decade-long JEDI cloud contract process — and Oracle was not one of them. In spite of lawsuits, official protests and even back-channel complaining to the president, the two finalists are Microsoft and and Amazon. “After evaluating all of the proposals received, the Department of Defense […]

Conversational AI and the use of chatbots have been through multiple cycles of hype and disillusionment in the tech world. You know the story: first you get a launch from the likes of Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Google or any number of other companies, and then you get the many examples of how their services […]

Armis is helping companies protect IoT devices on the network without using an agent, and it’s apparently a problem that is resonating with the market, as the startup reports 700 percent growth in the last year. That caught the attention of investors, who awarded them with a $65 million Series C investment to help keep […]

Hanson Robotics announced this morning that it has hired Amit Kumar Pandey, Softbank Europe’s Chief Scientist, as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Chief Science Officer (CSO). In his six years at Softbank, Pandey ran a various robotics initiatives, including the company’s Social Interaction and Intelligence of the Robot program. At Hanson, he will be charged […]

Co-founder Dave Morin will no longer be making new investments.

Twitter’s new prototyping app twttr, which it created to test and get feedback on new features — and new approaches to old features — has been out in the wild for a month. Now, with Twitter taking in the first wave of responses from users, twttr is getting an update. The move highlights how Twitter continues to […]

In a fast-moving development since Julian Assange’s arrest inside the Ecuadorian embassy earlier today for breaching U.K. bail conditions, the WikiLeaks founder has been rearrested on behalf of the U.S. — confirming that he will face extradition proceedings. In an updated statement the Met Police said: Julian Assange, 47, (03.07.71) has today, Thursday 11 April, […]

Apple announced that there are now 44 suppliers that have committed to use clean energy for Apple production. It doesn’t mean all suppliers are using renewable energy, it also doesn’t mean that they use 100 percent clean energy for all their clients. But it’s still good news. All of Apple facilities already run on clean […]

GuestReady, a service that helps shared economy hosts manage their business on Airbnb and other rental sites, is getting into expansion mode again after it completed its fourth acquisition. The company, which has raised $3.7 million from investors to date, just announced that it has acquired France-based rival BnbLord, a startup that it claims is […]

London Metropolitan police has arrested WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in London. He has been holed up in the Embassy of Ecuador in London since 2012 in order to avoid a warrant against him. Ecuador withdrew Assange’s diplomatic asylum earlier today leading to his arrest. A video has emerged of the moment of the arrest which […]

Lemonade, the insurance startup founded by Daniel Schreiber and Shai Wininger, has today announced a $300 million Series D financing led by the SoftBank Group, with participation from Allianz, General Catalyst, GV, OurCrowd and Thrive Capital. Lemonade uses an AI-powered bot to digitize the insurance buying experience for renters and home owners. Users simply download […]