Crunch Hype

The Commercial Crew program is well on its way to changing the way the world accesses space, but SpaceX may hog the glory this year if rival Boeing keeps putting off the first tests of its complete Starliner system. The first uncrewed test flight, tentatively scheduled for May, has been pushed all the way out to August, Boeing confirmed yesterday.

Google confirmed its Google Assistant feature for booking restaurant reservations via the phone, powered by Duplex’s AI technology, has begun to roll out in English to more Android and iOS devices across the U.S. The expansion sets the stage for potential mainstream adoption — especially as it goes cross-platform for the first time. During its […]

Managed by Q, the office management platform based out of New York, has today been acquired by The We Company, formerly known as WeWork. Financial terms were not disclosed. The WSJ reports that it was a cash and stock deal. Managed by Q, which has 500 employees, will remain as a wholly owned separate entity […]

Hometalk, a DIY community site with just under 10 million monthly users and more than 21 million monthly visits, today announced that it has raised a $15 million growth round led by NFX, with participation from WeWork founder and CEO Adam Neumann and Altair Capital. If you’re not familiar with Hometalk, you can think of […]

Google today announced a few new workflow integrations for its Drive file storage service that’ll bring to the service support for some features from DocuSign and process automation platforms K2 and Nintex. None of these new integrations are all that unusual, but if you use a combination of Drive and the newly supported tools, they […]

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. RIP Google+ This is the end for Google+, Google’s failed social network that once tried to take on Facebook and Twitter. […]

Bye-bye, Altaba . The Yahoo spin-out created to house Yahoo’s lucrative stake in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan announced today that it will sell its lucrative stake in Alibaba and shut up shop. The entity has long existed as a proxy to Alibaba — some might argue Yahoo was the same in its final years — […]

What happens when you’re working behind the scene with French President Emmanuel Macron and you suddenly become a minister? This is what’s happening to Cédric O this week who was appointed Minister for the Digital Economy on Sunday. I was the first journalist to interview him after his appointment. While Cédric O has been talking […]

“We give them the power. That’s the bad part. We buy their products. We sign up for these websites. Delete Facebook, right?” That’s WhatsApp founder Brian Acton’s most recent quote about his former employer Facebook. Acton has seemingly been fueled by his experience running WhatsApp from within Facebook, which has been scrutinized for profiting from […]

Nvidia is partnering with TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics + AI to host a pre-conference workshop at UC Berkeley on April 17 titled Deep Learning for Robotics. In this eight-hour, instructor-led workshop you’ll get an overview of the Robot Operating System(ROS) and its associated architecture, followed by hands-on simulation and coding experience using a live GPU-accelerated environment. […]

The founders of Clearbanc don't want entrepreneurs giving up equity for ad spend.

Verizon (which owns the company that owns TechCrunch) announced today that it’s activated its 5G Ultra Wideband Network in parts of Minneapolis and Chicago. The news is the first step for the carrier’s plan to bring the technology to north of 30 U.S. cities at some point this year. It’s all still baby steps, of […]

T-Mobile and Viacom this morning announced a deal that will bring Viacom’s TV channels – like MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, BET, Paramount and others – to T-Mobile’s new mobile video service planned for later this year. The agreement will allow T-Mobile to offer live, linear feeds of the Viacom channels as well as on-demand viewing. […]

Reminder: Live conference call today at 2pm EDT / 11am PDT We have TechCrunch writers Kirsten Korosec and Kate Clark talking all things tech today — be sure to check your inboxes for dial-in details a bit later today, and come armed with questions! A roundtable conversation on tech ethics Our resident humanist and ethicist […]

The market for technology and services for clinical drug trials is expected to reach $68.9 billion over the next seven years. The trials, which are necessary to bring new healthcare treatments to market, are by necessity prolonged, complicated affairs. Several companies are vying for a piece of this multi-billion dollar pie with the offer of […]

When everyone always tells you “yes,” you can become a monster. Leaders especially need honest feedback to grow. “If you look at rich people like Donald Trump and you neglect them, you get more Donald Trumps,” says Torch co-founder and CEO Cameron Yarbrough about our gruff president. His app wants to make executive coaching (a […]

Scribd is moving into the original content business with the release of “Mueller’s War,” a book by journalist Garrett Graff looking at the prosecutor’s time as a marine in the Vietnam War. CEO Trip Adler revealed earlier this year that the subscription e-book and audiobook service would be moving in this direction. Today, Scribd is […]

Remember Fleksy? The customizable Android keyboard app has a new trick up its sleeve: It’s adding a store where users can find and add lightweight third party apps to enhance their typing experience. Right now it’s launched a taster, preloading a selection of ‘mini apps’ into the keyboard — some from very familiar brand names, […]

WhatsApp today announced another protection for users in an effort to clamp down on the spread of fake news and misinformation. Through a new feature, users can control who has permission to add them to groups. The company says this will “help to limit abuse” and keep people’s phone numbers private. Related to this, the […]

Batman’s greatest nemesis has never had a consistent backstory — and honestly, that’s always been part of his appeal. In a medium where origins are everything, the threads of the Joker’s tale are ever bit as twisted as the character himself. But in an era when even Batman’s butler gets a television show exploring his […]

After much anticipation, Lyft stock hit the public markets last week, with a nearly 10% pop on its first day of trading. However, concerns over the company’s lofty valuation, deep losses and uncertain path to profitability have caused the stock to fall flat in the days since. TechCrunch’s resident transportation expert Kirsten Korosec and venture capital ax […]

Parker Conrad’s last startup Zenefits drowned in busy work. Now with Rippling, he wants to boil that ocean. Instead of trying to nail one thing then expand, “very counter to conventional wisdom, we took on something that’s a lot broader and more ambitious.” That meant spending 2 years with 40 engineers working in stealth to […]

For many, Singapore is an idyllic and livable city in Asia. But there’s serious concern for the country and its five million population around a proposed law to curb ‘fake news’ on the internet that could have ramifications for free speech. The ‘Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Bill’ had its first reading on Monday […]

Okta Ventures wants to fund the next generation of identity, security and privacy startups.

Adobe today announced that it is bringing content-aware fill to After Effects, the special effects software that is part of its Creative Cloud offering. The company has long offered this feature in Photoshop, where you can use it to automatically remove objects from a photo, with the application filling in the blank space with appropriate […]

Two of the issues limiting blockchain adoption in the enterprise has been lack of scalability and privacy. Offchain Labs, a startup that spun out of research at Princeton, wants to help create more scalable smart contracts while shifting part of the process off of the public blockchain to increase privacy. Today, the company announced a […]

Barcelona-based Red Points has closed a $38 million Series C led by Summit Partners. Existing investors Northzone, Mangrove, Eight Roads Ventures and Banco Sabadell also participated in the funding round which follows a $12M Series B last year. The company’s software as a service platform targets brands wanting to protect products and their reseller network […]

Tel Aviv’s Run.AI, a startup that is building a new virtualization and acceleration platform for deep learning, is coming out of stealth today. As a part of this announcement, the company also announced that it has now raised a total of $13 million. This includes a $3 million seed round from TLV Partners and a […]

Adobe today announced the latest release of Dimension, the company’s 2D and 3D compositing tool and one of the newest members of its Creative Cloud suite. The two highlights of the new release are cloud rendering, which is now in beta, and the ability to import substance materials from Allegorithmic’s Substance Designer. Cloud Rendering in Dimension […]

Projects like Google’s Waymo, Uber, Cruise and Aurora are developing autonomous vehicles by throwing engineers at the problem, basing most of their platforms on rule-based systems that try to pre-empt and deal with every edge case, whilst also peppering the cars with more sensors to capture more data. This can work in relatively controlled environments […]

Security breaches, where malicious hackers obtain snippets of information that then get used to impersonate individuals in order to gain access to individuals’ and businesses’ sensitive financial and other private information, have become par for the course in the world of digital services. More than 2.7 billion records were breached in a single incident this year […]

Over ten years ago, OpenGamma emerged as one of London’s new breed of FinTech startups, launching an open source analytics and risk management platform for the financial services industry. Its open architecture allowed financial services firms to develop analytics applications aimed at traders and risk managers. This open-source approach was designed to disrupt the proprietary […]

Aqua Security, a startup that helps customers launch containers securely, announced a $62 million Series C investment today led by Insight Partners. Existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund), TLV Partners and Shlomo Kramer also participated. With today’s investment, the startup’s investments since inception now total over $100 million, according to the company. […]

Crypto has a new unicorn after exchange Liquid announced today it has raised capital from investors at a valuation of more than $1 billion as it goes after expansion opportunities. The company said the capital will be put to work expanding into new markets and offering new services, including — potentially — a platform for […]

ByFounders, a relatively new early-stage venture capital firm targeting the Nordic and Baltic regions of Europe, is officially launching its first fund today. The debut fund has closed at €100 million and will be used to back tech startups at pre-seed, seed and in some instances Series A. ByFounders will also do follow on investments […]

Uber exited Southeast Asia last year after it sold its local business to Grab but it continues to remain in Singapore, where it has now opened a new regional HQ for Asia Pacific and is hiring for staff. The company — which is headed for IPO imminently — won’t be restarting its service, however, which puts […]

Ford of Europe’s vision for electrification includes 16 vehicle models — eight of which will be on the road by the end of this year — the company announced at its Go Further event in Amsterdam. Those plans include a plug-in hybrid variant of its Kuga SUV, its Mustang-inspired crossover, and a commercial transit van. […]

This morning, Forbes wrote a lengthy profile of Andreessen Horowitz, the now 10-year-old venture firm that its rivals love to hate but nevertheless tend to copy. It’s a great read that revisits some of the firm’s wins and losses and, interestingly, regrets, including the founders’ early predisposition to talk trash about the rest of the […]

Ford plans to bring an electric Transit commercial van to the European market by 2021 as part of the automaker’s broader plan to electrify its global portfolio. The automaker announced the Transit EV, along with more than a dozen other electrified consumer-facing models that will be part of its European portfolio, at its Go Further […]

India's recent demonstration of its orbital defense capabilities scattered more than 400 pieces into various orbits, endangering the International Space Station and other emplacements, according to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. He called the test a "terrible, terrible thing" at a town hall event yesterday.

BuzzFeed and Eko have been working together to create a wide range of interactive videos, which they began launching in the past week or so — starting with this Tasty potato recipe that allows you to customize your ingredients, revealing a bit about your personality in the process. There’s also an interactive Tarot reading, a […]

Today’s teens missed the Foursquare era, so Snapchat is giving them another shot with a new feature to aid in-person meetups. Snapchat is now testing Status, an option to share to the Snap Map a Bitmoji depicting what you’re up to at a certain place. You could show your little avatar playing video games, watching […]

Apple this week lowered the price on a number key hardware lines in China, including AirPods, Macs, iPads and, most notably, the iPhone. The move, noted by CNBC, is believed to be the direct results of a 3 percent tax cut that took effect in the country yesterday. In many cases, however, the impacted products […]

The Green New Deal brings much needed urgency to the national conversation around the climate crisis, which is without a doubt the biggest threat to life on this planet. But it does not go far enough.

Bitcoin went on a tear in early morning trading earlier today, popping up to above $4,900 and reminding some investors of the good old days of 2017. The currency is still trading up above 15 percent at $4,782.60, which is a healthy jump for the cryptocurrency (which had been languishing at around $4,000 for the […]

Admittedly, Brain Corp. sounds a bit like an evil corporation in some superhero comic, but the San Diego-based startup has generated some serious funding in recent years, including a $114 million Series C, led by SoftBank back in 2017. The company’s been putting that money to work, announcing today the launch of an in-store autonomous […]

Mobileye, the Israeli-based automotive sensor company acquired by Intel in 2017 for $15.3 billion, is one of the companies at the center of the emerging world of autonomous vehicle technology. We’re excited to announce co-founder, president and CEO of Mobileye Amnon Shashua — who also is a senior vice president at Intel — will participate in […]

Emperor Akihito of Japan is abdicating and passing the office to his son, Crown Prince Naruhito, and as part of the transition comes a new gengo, or era name: "Reiwa." It's loaded with meaning and subtext, but because of the way text is sent and displayed over the internet, the name can't really be displayed properly. Unicode has issued an update making it possible, but for now there's just no character representing it.

That’s it for Google+, Google’s failed social network that once tried to take on Facebook and Twitter. As scheduled, the company has now started deleting user accounts and their data. Chances are you’re not going to feel all that sad about the end of Google+ since you probably haven’t used it for years. But if […]

It seems that the Department of Justice has thoughts on whether Netflix movies should be eligible for Oscars. Variety reports that the DOJ has sent the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences a letter expressing concern about potential changes to the eligibility requirements for the awards. Why is this something the DOJ would worry […]