Crunch Hype

The Wing has made three key additions to its leadership team.

The HBO sci-fi blockbuster Westworld has been an inspiring look into what humanlike robots can do for us in the meatspace. While current technologies are not quite advanced enough to make Westworld a reality, startups are attempting to replicate the sort of human-robot interaction it presents in virtual space. Rct studio, which just graduated from […]

When Sinemia first came across our radar, the company was happily riding the wave of anti-MoviePass publicity. With its chief competition in the midst of what looked to be a historic collapse, Sinemia happily grabbed headlines as a what looked to be like a more stable alternative for movie ticket subscriptions. Last July, at the […]

Evan Spiegel has finally found a way to fight back against Mark Zuckerberg’s army of clones. For 2.5 years, Snapchat foolishly tried to take the high road versus Facebook, with Spiegel claiming “Our values are hard to copy”. That inaction allowed Zuckerberg to accrue over 1 billion daily Stories users across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook […]

Welcome back to this week’s transcribed edition of Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast that unpacks the numbers behind the headlines. Here we put the words of our wildly popular venture capital podcast, Equity, into Extra Crunch members’ eyes instead of their ears. This week, TechCrunch’s Kate Clark and Crunchbase News’s Alex Wilhelm get rapid-fire on […]

I feel like I get my news like I pick sushi plates off a passing boat. I sit down, the news streams by and I pick the articles I like. But I’ve been stuck at the sushi boat bar of news for too long.

Joanna Glasner Contributor More posts by this contributor Space tech rockets higher Corporate biotech venture funding rises again Insurance policies are confusing as hell, but the basic business proposition is pretty simple. For policyholders, it’s a way to get paid if something bad happens. And for insurers, it’s a way to make money charging people […]

It’s tax season, which has me thinking about one of decentralized technology’s holy grails: self-sovereign identities. It’s a stirring vision, of a world in which control over our driver’s licenses, passports, birth certificates, social security numbers — the table stakes to participate in the modern economy — rests in our hands, rather than that of […]

Tesla is preparing for a wider roll out a more capable and robust version of its “eventual” automated parking feature known as Enhanced Summon next week, CEO Elon Musk tweeted Saturday. The tweet comes just days after the company released a new version of Navigate on Autopilot, an advanced driving feature that is viewed as […]

The Global Positioning System time epoch is ending and another one is beginning, an event that could affect your devices or any equipment or legacy system that relies on GPS for time and location. Most clocks obtain their time from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). But the atomic clocks on satellites are set to GPS time. The […]

Editor’s Note: refocused newsletters It was another dizzying week here at Extra Crunch as you will shortly see in this newsletter. One change that we are making: we are simplifying our newsletters to keep you better informed on what is happening on Extra Crunch. We are merging the daily, weekly, and article editions of this […]

Joanna Glasner Contributor More posts by this contributor Corporate biotech venture funding rises again 2019 US VC funds take a more boutique approach Venture investment in space technology is hitting stratospheric heights in recent quarters. But investors in the sector are betting it will rocket higher still. The latest example of high-velocity funding is satellite […]

Extra Crunch offers members the opportunity to tune into conference calls led and moderated by the TechCrunch writers you read every day. This week, TechCrunch’s Kirsten Korosec and Kate Clark led a deep-dive discussion into Lyft’s IPO and the outlook for the business going forward. After skyrocketing nearly 10% on its first day hitting the […]

In this week's startups newsletter: What's the deal with A16z? Why is Lyft's stock sinking? And what's ahead for the e-scooter industry?

Photo-editing app-maker VSCO has filed a lawsuit against competitor PicsArt. The suit focuses on 19 PicsArt filters that were supposedly “reverse engineered from VSCO’s filters,” with VSCO alleging it has become a legal issue involving false advertising and violations of the app’s terms of service. “VSCO has invested significant time and resources in developing its presets […]

It’s getting bare-knuckled out there again in the ride-hailing wars. According to a report earlier today from The Information, newly public Lyft threatened Morgan Stanley with legal action earlier this week, demanding in a letter that the powerful investment bank stop marketing a short-selling product that it believed was disrupting trading in its stock. The […]

Carnegie Mellon’s Biorobotics Lab is probably best known as the birthplace of the modular snake robot. Initially designed to squeeze into tight spots for search and rescue missions and infrastructure inspections, the lab’s snake robot has given rise to an army of different projects, and at least one Pittsburgh-area startup. Several years ago, the robot […]

Today’s startups have a distinct advantage when it comes to launching a company because of the public cloud. You don’t have to build infrastructure or worry about what happens when you scale too quickly. The cloud vendors take care of all that for you. But last month when Pinterest announced its IPO, the company’s cloud […]

This morning, The WSJ reported Apple’s streaming music service overtook Spotify in paid subscribers in the U.S., and now it hopes to do the same in the Indian market by way of a big price cut. The company’s individual plan in India is now 99 rupees per month ($1.43 USD), versus the 120 rupees per […]

The Falcon Heavy has flown before, but now it's got a payload that matters and competitors nipping at its heels. It's the first of a new generation of launch vehicles that can take huge payloads to space cheaply and frequently, opening up a new frontier in the space race. Watch it lift off Sunday (we'll post a reminder).

Snap is taking a leaf out of the Asian messaging app playbook as its social messaging service enters a new era. The company unveiled a series of new strategies that are aimed at breathing fresh life into the service that has been ruthlessly cloned by Facebook across Instagram, WhatsApp and even its primary social network. […]

You might be surprised what you can buy on Facebook, if you know where to look. Researchers with Cisco’s Talos security research team have uncovered a wave of Facebook groups dedicated to making money from a variety of illicit and otherwise sketchy online behaviors, including phishing schemes, trading hacked credentials and spamming. The 74 groups […]

Just days ahead of the return of “Game of Thrones,” Roku has forged a deal with HBO that now gives the media device maker the ability to sell the premium channel as a subscription through its dedicated content hub, The Roku Channel. Originally a destination for free and ad-supported movies and TV, The Roku Channel […]

While Spotify dukes it out with Apple and other big tech names to target high-end users in mostly developed markets, a startup out of China has raised some money to expand its music streaming business in the massive but still nascent market of Africa. Boomplay, a service founded by Transsnet — a joint venture between […]

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. MacKenzie Bezos giving ex-husband Jeff 75 percent of Amazon stock, voting control MacKenzie Bezos noted in a tweet that her 26-year […]

About half a year ago, Google gave the Assistant on phones a major visual refresh. Today, the company is following up with a couple of small but welcome tweaks that’ll see the Assistant on Android provide more and better visual responses that are more aligned with what users already expect to see from other Google […]

Teachers are notoriously underpaid, and buying homes is notoriously expensive. This is where Landed, which just raised a $7.5 million Series A round led by Initialized Capital, comes in. Landed helps educators buy homes by providing them with down-payment assistance. That’s because many teachers leave their jobs due to a lack of stable housing. In […]

During my recent conversation with Peter Kraus, which was supposed to be focused on Aperture and its launch of the Aperture New World Opportunities Fund, I couldn’t help veering off into tangents about the market in general. Below is Kraus’ take on the availability of alpha generation, the Fed, inflation versus Amazon, housing, the cross-ownership […]

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 […]

Skype is capitalizing on Apple’s struggles with Group FaceTime to attract attention to its own group calling features. Today, the company announced it’s doubling the number of people who can simultaneously participate in a group audio or video call. It now supports as many as 50 people at once, up from 25, previously. With the expanded […]

Twitter continues to experiment with ways to make conversations on its platform easier to follow. In addition to its prototype app twttr, which is testing threaded replies, the company also recently tested labeling replies to highlight those from the “original tweeter” — meaning it would show when the person who first tweeted a post then […]

Bad news for home gardeners: criminals might have your credit card data. AeroGrow, the maker of the at-home garden kit AeroGarden, said in a letter to customers that its website had credit card scraping malware for more than four months. The company said anyone who bought something through its website between October 29, 2018 and […]

Relativity, the Los Angeles-based manufacturer of 3D-printed rockets, has signed its first public commercial contract with Telesat, the longtime vendor of satellite services for telecommunications and business information. The deal marks the first agreement between a major satellite operator and an entirely venture-backed company in the “New Space” industry and is a huge win for […]

Seemingly the sole government body policing tech platforms, the ol’ European Union, is now taking aim at desktop gaming’s biggest storefront, Steam, and its creator Valve. The commission sent a “Statements of Objections” to Valve and five other video game publishers, raising a fuss over the companies’ habits of “geo-blocking” purchases, i.e. prohibiting users from […]

Lotame is unveiling what it says is a new approach to the data management business, with what it calls an “unstacked” strategy. Adam Solomon, a former Time Inc. and Viacom executive who recently joined Lotame as chief marketing officer, said this new strategy is illustrated by the launch of Data Stream, which allows publishers and marketers […]

Celonis created the idea of process mining, the act of automating the understanding and improvement of internal processes. But understanding the process in and of itself only gets you so far. Ultimately, companies need to use that information to improve the customer experience and a new operational layer announced today could help them do that. […]

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

Nintendo’s Labo VR kit may just be a little cardboard experiment, but Nintendo is taking a chance on throwing its most beloved titles into the headset. Today, the company announced that they will be adding support to play two of the Switch’s flagship titles. Though Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild seems to just […]

TikTok needs a lot of music. A lot. The short-form video service began life as a lip-synching app in China, where it’s called Douyin, and although other categories of content, like skits and life hacks, later took off, music remains a key element to the app as its users in the hundreds of millions grow […]

It’s that time again folks, Samsung has reported guidance for its upcoming Q1 quarter — and things don’t look good. Samsung is forecasting that revenue for the quarter will reach 51-53 trillion KRW ($44.87-$46.63 billion), which would represent a drop of around 15 percent on one year previous. The Korean tech giant reported a record […]

On Thursday, Australia lawmakers ushered through what is perhaps the toughest legal measures to hold social media companies accountable for the content they share. Only a few weeks after the massacre of 50 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, Australia’s House of Representatives passed a law requiring social media platforms to “expeditiously” remove content […]

Google has abandoned an advisory board on ethics in AI after critics questioned the inclusion of Kay Coles James, leader of the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation, on the 8-person panel. Google employees and thousands more concerned people called for this mistake to be corrected, and in response the company has apparently chosen to drop the whole thing.

It's a big day for space: launches, tests, orbits, and now a distant probe is going to shoot an asteroid with its space gun and make a new crater to play in. It's Hayabusa 2, Japan's ambitious and so far highly successful sample return mission to an object called Ryugu.

As we saw from our recent TechCrunch Battlefield in Africa last year, the continent is producing bigger and bigger tech players, and one can see this in the consolidation in the market. Today Jiji, one of the largest marketplaces for classifieds in Africa, has acquired their main competitor on the African market, OLX, and their […]

Pressure is steadily mounting on U.S. lawmakers to implement comprehensive cannabis banking reform at the federal level, and that pressure is coming from all directions.

Yoshua Bengio, who last month won the prestigious Turing award, alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, for his work on AI, is worried about what the technology is being made into behind closed doors. In an interview with Nature, he explains his concerns but takes care to avoid sounding like a doomsayer.

Amazon is ready to challenge Apple with a cheaper, Alexa-powered set of wireless earbuds. If successful it would carve out a space for the popular digital assistant, and its deep connections to the rest of Amazon's ecosystem, in the mobile world Amazon has hitherto largely failed to penetrate. But that's a big if.

An apparent breakdown in talks between BuzzFeed management and the company’s newsroom union spurred expressions of solidarity from other unions — and even from New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. The employees of BuzzFeed News (the company’s journalistic arm) voted to unionize in February, following major layoffs. At the time, Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith reportedly […]

Welcome to this week’s transcribed edition of This is Your Life in Silicon Valley. We’re running an experiment for Extra Crunch members that puts This is Your Life in Silicon Valley in words – so you can read from wherever you are. This is your Life in Silicon Valley was originally started by Sunil Rajaraman and […]

Tesla, Elon Musk and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission have two weeks to work out their differences and come to a new resolution, a U.S. judge said Thursday at the conclusion of a hearing held to determine whether the automaker’s CEO should be held in contempt for his Twitter use. The SEC had asked […]