Crunch Hype

Tyler Barriss, a prolific and seemingly unremorseful repeat swatter and bomb hoaxer whose fakery got a man killed in 2017, has been sentenced to 20 years in prison. This hopefully closes the book on a long and disturbing career of random and mercenary harassment and threats.

Viacom’s Nickelodeon is doubling down on the educational aspects of its preschooler-focused streaming service, Noggin, with the acquisition of the early childhood learning platform Sparkler. Announced on Friday, the deal will see Sparkler’s technology integrated into Noggin over the next year, and makes Sparkler’s co-founder and CEO Kristen Kane the new head of the Noggin […]

1stdibs began pushing the antiques business into the 21st century long ago. Apparently, investors think it can push further and faster with $76 million in new funding. That’s how much the now-18-year-old, New York-based company says it just closed on for its Series D round, led by T. Rowe Price Associates, with participation from earlier […]

How did Niantic happen? How did the company behind Pokémon GO and (soon) Harry Potter: Wizards Unite come to be? When anyone talks about Niantic, they generally mention that it’s “a Google spinout” and move on. As if that’s something that just happens every day. That dozens of people within a massive company come together, […]

Few software companies have transformed the way we think about moving through physical space like Niantic . The creators of Pokémon GO and soon Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, Niantic has become an incredible unicorn success story, with a reported valuation of nearly $4 billion. One part AR, one part gaming, one part location, and many […]

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. Lyft prices IPO at top of range Lyft raised more than $2 billion Thursday afternoon after pricing its shares at $72 […]

Ride-hailing startup Lyft may bear the distinction of having the highest net loss of any maiden public company ever going public, but despite that, it made its debut in a high gear this morning. Trading as LYFT on Nasdaq, the company’s shares opened at nearly noon today at $87.24, a pop of 21 percent on […]

Alphabet’s urban planning subsidiary announced today the launch of CommonSpaces. The new app was created to give park operators and community members a place to enter and organize observations about parks and other publics spaces. Interested parties can create a web portal for a space. The organizer defines the parameters of a study, outlining what […]

Political parties, campaigns, and brands can’t get an accurate and cost-effective understanding of opinion in small geographic areas, like the constituencies of lawmakers. This is a big problem in political campaigning. And all political campaigning now has a huge online element, as we know. We also know political turbulence is one of the defining themes […]

A year ago, Apple acquired the digital newsstand app Texture to form the basis of its new subscription-based service, Apple News+, which launched on Monday. As some have expected, the standalone Texture app will soon shut down as a result. According to emails sent to current Texture subscribers pointing to a FAQ on the company’s […]

Alibaba has made an acquisition as it continues to square up to the opportunity in enterprise services in China and beyond, akin to what its US counterpart Amazon has done with AWS. TechCrunch has confirmed that the e-commerce and cloud services giant has acquired Teambition, a Microsoft- and Tencent-backed platform for coworkers to plan and collaborate […]

The past couple of years have marked some steep ups and downs for Huawei. Just this morning, the company posted a 25 percent raise in profit to $8.84 billion in 2018. Yesterday, on the other hand, a UK oversight body issued a report noting “serious and systematic defects.” While it’s true that on-going security concerns […]

Nativo has acquired SimpleReach, a move that Nativo CEO Justin Choi said will pair his company’s distribution system for native ads with SimpleReach’s measurement tools. “If you can’t measure the impact of something, it’s difficult to scale spend in that area,” Choi told me. “When we say measurement we’re actually talking about connecting content to […]

From Extra Crunch I wrote a comprehensive look at the new norms around Form D filings, which are filed with the SEC after a venture round closes. Those who’ve read this newsletter for a while know that I’ve been researching this topic for some months now. This is the sort of story that I love: […]

As I walked the long halls of Adobe Summit this week in Las Vegas and listened to the company’s marketing and data integration story, I thought about the obvious disconnect that happens between brands and their customers. With tons of data, a growing set of tools to bring it together, and a desire to build […]

If you took the photos and videos out of pornography, could it appeal to a new audience? Caroline Spiegel’s first startup Quinn aims to bring some imagination to adult entertainment. Her older brother, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, spent years trying to convince people his app wasn’t just for sexy texting. Now Caroline is building a website […]

Crackle sells to Chicken Soup for the Soul. That’s not an early April Fool’s joke, but rather the news that Sony’s aging streaming service Crackle has now found a new home with Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, or CSS Entertainment – the same company that today runs the streaming service Popcornflix and other streaming […]

It’s not uncommon to hear CEOs and business leaders talk about focusing on the consumer. But the only way to build for the consumer is to hear what they want, which can be a resource-intensive thing to retrieve. User Interviews, an ERA-backed company out of New York, is looking to lighten that load with a […]

Every time we publish a story about about MoviePass competitor Sinemia, a funny thing happens: our Twitter mentions explode. Seriously, follow the reactions to this post and see for yourself. A number of folks have had cards canceled or have otherwise inactive accounts and are understandably not psyched. Recently, we reached out to the company […]

Daimler Trucks just announced that it’s acquiring a majority stake Torc Robotics, a deal that will see the two companies collaborating on the development of Level 4 self-driving trucks. Daimler Trucks is the world’s largest truck manufacturer and a division of the larger Daimler Group. Torc, meanwhile, was founded in 2005. For most of its history, it […]

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

I’ve never had a meeting quite like the one I had with Built Robotics. Within about ten minutes of meeting Built’s co-founder Noah Ready-Campbell, we’re steering an 80,000 pound construction excavator around what is basically his company’s back yard. He wants me to see what it’s like to drive one; how much skill and finesse […]

Despite an ongoing tussle with the U.S. government, signs look positive for Huawei. The Chinese firm just released its end of year report for 2018 and profit is up 25 percent to 59.3 billion CNY, or $8.84 billion, thanks to its fast-growing smartphone and devices business. Huawei isn’t a public company but it does release […]

The escalating crisis in Venezuela has seen sky-high hyperinflation, widespread hunger and a large-scale exodus out of the country. The desperate circumstances have led to more than three million Venezuelans leaving the country for a better life. According to recent numbers published by the UN, Latin American countries have doled out around 1.3 million residence […]

Grab, the $16 billion-valued ride-hailing firm that acquired Uber’s Southeast Asia business last year, is in talks with Alibaba’s Ant Financial and PayPal as it considers spinning out of its financial services unit to double down on its non-transportation business, TechCrunch has learned. The seven-year-old company’s coming-of-age moment was a deal to buy Uber’s regional […]

The race to give Chinese users their daily dose of news intensifies as Qutoutiao, a rival to TikTok parent Bytedance, net an installment of sizable backing. Alibaba is injecting $171 million in a convertible loan to Qutoutiao, the three-year-old news and video aggregation startup, according to an announcement released Thursday. The transaction will convert into about […]

The same day the Human Rights Campaign downranked the company in its index of the best LGBTQ-friendly employers, Google decided to yank a controversial app accused of promoting conversion therapy from the Play Store. On that list, known as the Corporate Equality Index, the HRC, a prominent LGBTQ rights organization, included a footnote that it […]

Fresh from picking up a majority stake in Europe-based The Next Web, the Financial Times is buying another new media startup. The newspaper, which was founded in 1888, is adding Singapore-based Deal Street Asia to its roster with a deal expected to close in April, according to three sources with knowledge of discussions. Founded in […]

Ellevest, a digital investment platform specifically focused on helping women meet their financial goals, has raised an additional $33 million in a new round led by Rethink Impact and PSP Growth. The funding includes a handful of notable, new investors including Melinda Gates’s investment fund Pivotal Ventures; PayPal; Wynn Resorts co-founder Elaine Wynn; former Google […]

A revealing cluster of emails reviewed by Business Insider and Channel 4 News offers a glimpse at the fairly chaotic process of how Facebook decides what content crosses the line. In this instance, a group of executives at Facebook went hands-on in determining if an Instagram post by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones violated the […]

Betaworks Studios, a subsidiary of New York seed fund Betaworks, has raised $4.4M.

Now you can search Facebook for how much Trump has spent on ads in the past year, which Pages’ ads reference immigration or what a Page’s previous names were. It’s all part of Facebook’s new Ad Library launching today that makes good on its promise to increase transparency after the social network’s ads were used […]

Rocket Lab, the Kiwi operation working on breaking into the launch industry with small but frequent launches, has its first launch of the year today, due to take off in just a few minutes. Tune in here!

Lightning Motorcycles finally unveiled the electric vehicle it had been teasing for months. With a $12,000 to $19,000 price range, the Strike electric motorcycle has options with a 200-mile range, 150 mph top speed and 35-minute DC fast-charge time. The new machine has a more upright riding position and friendlier price tag than Lightning’s debut […]

The Mars 2020 mission is on track for launch next year, and nesting inside the high-tech new rover heading that direction is a high-tech helicopter designed to fly in the planet's nearly non-existent atmosphere. The actual aircraft that will fly on the Martian surface just took its first flight and its engineers are over the moon.

DoorDash launched a new initiative today called Kitchens Without Borders, which it says is designed to promote business owners who are immigrants and refugees. It’s starting out with 10 restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area: Besharam, Z Zoul Cafe, Onigilly, Los Cilantros, Sabores Del Sur, West Park Farm & Sea, Little Green Cyclo, Afghan Village, […]

The shipping and logistics space is being rapidly transformed by technology -- so it's no surprise that this is a space ripe for significant disruption.

Lyft begins trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol "LYFT" tomorrow.

Present-day machine learning requires binary experiential training. The collected learning then becomes valuable. But how can that very valuable intellectual property be protected?

Setting up Elasticsearch, the open-source system that many companies large and small use to power their distributed search and analytics engines, isn’t the hardest thing. What is very hard, though, is to provision the right amount of resources to run the service, especially when your users’ demand comes in spikes, without overpaying for unused capacity. […]

You may have forgotten about Twitch Prime, but the company is adding an interesting new perk for Nintendo Switch owners. The company is giving out up to one year of Nintendo Switch Online, the subscription service that lets you play online multiplayer games and access NES games. If you’re an Amazon Prime or Prime Video […]

One of the most buzzy announcements on Apple’s stage this week was Apple Card, its in-house credit card powered by Goldman Sachs and Mastercard. Consumers, tech press, financial press and Wall Street were all intrigued for various reasons. But there are still a ton of questions around the way it works mechanically, the terms involved […]

Foundry Group has led the round for Boundless, an information platform providing immigrants tools and support.

Mobility is an expansive topic that includes drones, dockless scooters and autonomous cars — both terrestrial and aeronautic — plus all the ancillary tech required to get the job done. If Henry Ford and the Wright brothers were alive today, you can bet they’d be headed to TC Sessions: Mobility on July 10 in San […]

Dutch news organization The Correspondent surprised some of its supporters earlier this week when co-founder and CEO Ernst Pfauth posted an update on Medium saying that the company would not be opening a newsroom in New York City. Which was odd, because the organization raised $2.6 million in a crowdfunding campaign last fall with the express […]

Rob Blackie Contributor Share on Twitter Rob Blackie is a Digital Strategist based in London, England, who has contributed to The Guardian and The Independent newspapers. Mike Butcher Contributor More posts by this contributor Brandwatch turns its war chest on acquiring market research startup Qriously Meet the European startups that pitched at EF’s 11th Demo […]

Cloud-hosting company Scaleway is upgrading its entry-level instances today. These instances are now all equipped with DDR4 ECC RAM, NVMe SSD storage and AMD EPYC CPUs. As INpact Hardware noted, the company is betting on AMD across the board. The cheapest instance now costs €2.99 per month ($3.38). For that price, you get 2 CPU […]

Boston Dynamics deputed Handle two years back. Since then, however, the bipedal wheeled robot has taken a backseat to the rest of the company’s offering. While the ‘bot is no less impressive than the rest of its lineup, Boston Dynamics’ video output has almost exclusively been dedicated to Atlas and Spot/Spot Mini. Today, however, the […]

Fred traded cryptocurrencies last year. Unfortunately, his trading yielded a capital loss of more than $35,000. Filing taxes could add another headache in a few weeks if not done correctly.

Instant print cameras have been popular for a long, long time, but they're seeing a renaissance now — led by Fujifilm, whose Instax mini-films and cameras lead the pack. But Canon wants in, and has debuted a pair of new cameras to challenge Fuji's dominance — but their reliance on digital printing may hold them back.