Crunch Hype

Toyota is deepening its relationship with Nvidia as the automaker, and its research arms in Japan and the U.S., ramps up its autonomous vehicle development program. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced Monday during his keynote at the 2019 GPU Technology Conference that Toyota Research Institute-Advanced Development — the automaker’s Japan-based research arm — is using […]

Nvidia wants to be a cloud powerhouse. While its history may be in graphics cards for gaming enthusiasts, its recent focus has been on its data center GPUs for AI, machine learning inference, inference and visualization. Today, at its GTC conference, the company announced its latest RTX server configuration for Hollywood studios and others who […]

Today at Nvidia GTC 2019, the company unveiled a stunning image creator. Using generative adversarial networks, users of the software are with just a few clicks able to sketch images that are nearly photorealistic. The software will instantly turn a couple of lines into a gorgeous mountaintop sunset. This is MS Paint for the AI […]

In the coming weeks, AWS is launching new G4 instances with support for Nvidia’s T4 Tensor Core GPUs, the company today announced at Nvidia’s GTC conference. The T4, which is based on Nvidia’s Turing architecture, was specifically optimized for running AI models. The T4 will be supported by the EC2 compute service and the Amazon […]

In a way, I have the equivalent of a supercomputer in my pocket. But in another, more important way, that pocket computer is a joke compared with real supercomputers — and Intel and Cray are putting together one of the biggest ever with a half-billion-dollar contract from the Department of Energy. It's going to do exaflops!

Ray tracing has been a major topic of conversation at both GDC and GTC so it seems fitting that that the overlapping conventions would both kick off with an announcement that touches both industries. Today at GTC, Nvidia announced that it has built-out a number of major partnerships with 3D software makers including some apparent […]

General Catalyst is diving more seriously into the business of funding seed-stage startups. To wit, the venture firm is announcing today that it plans to invest at least $25 million each year in nascent teams that “can’t be too early” for the firm to see, according to Katherine Boyle, an investor with the firm who […]

With LeBron James hundreds of miles west plying his trade for the Los Angeles Lakers these days, Cleveland Cavalier fans haven’t had a lot to cheer about this season, but Aramark (the stadium food and beverage vendor) and the Cavs have teamed up with Apple Business Chat to let fans order drinks right from their […]

Atlassian today announced that it has acquired AgileCraft, a service that aims to give enterprises plan their strategic projects and workstreams. The service provides business leaders with additional insights into the current status of technical projects and gives them insights into the bottlenecks, risks and dependencies of these projects. Indeed, the focus of AgileCraft is […]

Homosexuality is illegal in a third of the planet, and in eight countries, it is punishable by death. In the febrile atmosphere of today’s politics, hate crime incidents in the US increased by 17% between 2016 to 2017, according to the FBI. Over 20 of those incidents were crimes against an individual’s sexual-orientation — the […]

As Lyft gears up to list its stock on the NASDAQ, the transportation company is facing ongoing litigation regarding driver wages in New York City. Today, a judge denied Lyft’s motion for an injunction blocking the recent ruling that sets a minimum wage for drivers. Still, the judge said she’ll think it over and file […]

Kevin Tsujihara is leaving his role as chairman and CEO of Warner Bros. Entertainment. He joined Warner Bros. back in 1994 and took charge of the film and TV studio in 2013. As part of broader leadership changes at WarnerMedia — which is now under the ownership of AT&T — his role was recently expanded […]

President Donald Trump is an automated-vehicle skeptic, a point of view that lies in stark contrast with agencies within his own administration, including the U.S. Department of Transportation . According to a recent scoop by Axios, Trump has privately said he thinks the autonomous-vehicle revolution is “crazy.” Trump’s point of view isn’t exactly surprising. His […]

Brew helps creators get paid to podcast with a subscription-based app complete with original shows.

Branch, the scheduling and pay management app for hourly workers, has added a new pay-on-demand service called Pay, which is now available to anyone who downloads the Branch app. It’s an attempt to provide a fee-based alternative to payday lending, where borrowers charge exorbitant rates to lenders on short-term loans or cash advances. Borrowers can […]

Following the successful launch and deployment of the first six satellites in a planned constellation of hundreds, OneWeb has raised $1.25 billion in funding to kickstart mass production. It’s a powerful endorsement of and ambitious plan to create an entirely new layer of global connectivity. To blanket the world in internet, OneWeb means to send […]

To accurately forecast the weather, you first need lots of data — not just to train your forecasting models but also to generate more precise and granular forecasts. Typically, this has been the domain of government agencies, thanks to their access to this data and the compute power to run the extremely complex models. Anybody […]

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. Apple launches new iPad Air and iPad mini The company is (finally) updating the iPad mini and adding a new iPad […]

A study of tracking cookies running on government and public sector health websites in the European Union has found commercial adtech to be operating pervasively even in what should be core not-for-profit corners of the Internet. The researchers used searches including queries related to HIV, mental health, pregnancy, alcoholism and cancer to examine how frequently […]

The past few years have been a bit of a dark age for budding social media startups. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snap and messenger apps took up all the time of their users, leaving little room for yet another social media platform. But the tide is shifting. Privacy scandals have shaken some users’ faith in giants […]

The search is in full swing for the most innovative, interesting and utterly disruptive early-stage tech startups to compete in Startup Battlefield, our premier pitch competition, at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. Founders, if you think your startup has the right stuff, then by all means, apply right here, right now. Not sure […]

Factory software tools are often out of reach of small manufacturers, forcing them to operate with inefficient manual systems. WorkClout, a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2019 class, wants to change that by offering a more affordable SaaS alternative to traditional manufacturing software solutions. Company co-founder and CEO Arjun Patel grew up helping out […]

Album exclusives are nothing new in the age of Tidal, of course. But Moby’s latest is taking a kind of circuitous route to the world’s mobile devices. The electronic artist has released his latest, Long Ambients 2, as an exclusive through the Calm meditation app. The album dropped over the weekend in celebration of World […]

Latin America continues to remain a focus for investors that are eyeing up its large population and growth potential. In the latest development, America Movil, the Latin American carrier that is part of the Carlos Slim empire, today announced that it would acquire Nextel in Brazil, owned by NII (formerly Nextel International), for $905 million. NII […]

It’s not as if the internet needed another cautionary tale about backing up data, but for many artists, this news is heartbreaking nonetheless. Myspace has issued a tersely worded message noting that a huge amount of user-uploaded music has been lost during a server migration. The once-dominant social network posted a note on its site […]

Apple has refreshed its iPad lineup. The company is (finally) updating the iPad mini and adding a new iPad Air. This model sits between the entry-level 9.7-inch iPad and the 11-inch iPad Pro in the lineup. All new models now support the Apple Pencil, but you might want to double-check your iPad model before buying […]

Slack announced today that it is launching Enterprise Key Management (EKM) for Slack, a new tool that enables customers to control their encryption keys in the enterprise version of the communications app. The keys are managed in the AWS KMS key management tool. Geoff Belknap, chief security officer (CSO) at Slack, says that the new […]

Leonard Kleinrock Contributor Share on Twitter Leonard Kleinrock is the Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. When my team of graduate students and I sent the first message over the internet on a warm Los Angeles evening in October, 1969, little did we suspect that we were at […]

Ride-sharing startup Lyft, as expected, announced this morning that it is kicking off the roadshow for its IPO — setting the clock ticking for its IPO likely in the next two weeks. Around that, it also filled in some more details. The stock will trade as “LYFT” on Nasdaq, and the IPO range is currently set for […]

European startup studio eFounders has been relentlessly building new startups over the past few years. In 2019, the company plans to launch Bonjour, a demo tool for sales teams, Chilli, a recommandation service to help small and medium companies leverage modern software-as-a-service products, and Swan, a banking API to generate banking services on demand. If […]

We already knew that serial entrepreneur Duane Jackson, who is best known for founding and exiting cloud accounting software KashFlow, was working on his third venture after recently selling Supdate to Crowdcube. And today Staffology, which Jackson tells me he began developing just over a year ago, is launching publicly. Dubbed Staffology Payroll, the U.K. […]

Ridehailing firm Lyft will reportedly make its Nasdaq debut as early as next week.

Welcome back to Transportation Weekly; I’m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch. We love the reader feedback. Keep it coming. Never heard of TechCrunch’s Transportation Weekly? Catch up by reading the first edition here. As I’ve written before, consider this a soft launch. Follow me on Twitter @kirstenkorosec to ensure you see […]

In the name of getting big quick, it seems like some of the most valuable private tech companies are turning to mergers and acquisitions (M&A) as a way to accelerate business growth. So-called “unicorns”—privately-held technology companies which achieve billion-dollar valuations sometime before (or as a direct result of) going public or exiting via M&A—are chomping […]

Months before the hard-fought battle for its second global headquarters in Queens, Amazon planted a massive, 855,000-square-foot flag in Staten Island. The $100 million JFK8 fulfillment center opened last fall, after an “on the spot” hiring spree, aimed at employing an eventual 2,250 people. The new factory smell still permeated the air when we visited […]

If you live in a big city, you’ve probably had your fair share of battles with apartment intercom systems. Those electronic gatekeepers with their tiny screens, sticky buttons, and seemingly endless lists of names to tap through in search of a friend who can buzz you in. Doorport wants to make those existing systems a […]

Benjamin Fernandes, the Tanzanian co-founder chief executive of Nala, spent hundreds of hours talking to local Tanzanians about their frustrations with mobile money payment services before he launched his new payment platform. While at least a hundred million Africans hold mobile money accounts, the process of transacting over the services is difficult, so Nala made […]

Facebook said it removed 1.5 million videos from its site within the first 24 hours after a shooter livestreamed his attack on two New Zealand mosques, killing 50 people. In a series of tweets, Facebook’s Mia Garlick said a total of 1.2 million videos were blocked at the point of upload. Videos that included “praise […]

A health tech company was leaking thousands of doctor’s notes, medical records, and prescriptions daily after a security lapse left a server without a password. The little-known software company, California-based Meditab, bills itself as one of the leading electronic medical records software makers for hospitals, doctor’s offices, and pharmacies. The company, among other things, processes electronic […]

Last week the Cosmos Network launched, which I believe to be a major event. Yes, it’s a blockchain initiative — but definitely not just another one. If I’m right, its repercussions will one day reach your life too, though it’s sufficiently bleeding-edge that those ripples probably won’t hit you for a decade. Maybe five years, […]

We’ve decided to step back from the breaking news for a minute to conduct a review of seed and early-stage funding trends over the last decade for U.S.-based companies. I’m fairly certain we can all agree that the environment for startups has changed dramatically in the past 10 years, specifically in two major ways: The […]

PC gaming has grown to be a pretty wide niche of people with some far-flung similarities and differences, one thing they all share are souped-up rigs that rely on beefy GPUs. This is fine for those with dedicated machines but PC gaming isn’t too friendly to those trying to pull double-duty on their everyday machine. […]

Welcome back to this week’s transcribed edition of Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast that unpacks the numbers behind the headlines. We’re running an experiment for Extra Crunch members that puts the words of our wildly popular venture capital podcast, Equity, in your eyes instead of your ears. This week, along with guest Anu Duggal, the […]

Jared Verzello Contributor Jared Verzello is a startup and venture capital lawyer and GM of Atrium Seed where he guides companies through formation, fundraising, hiring, and managing board meetings. With Y Combinator’s Demo Day taking place at Pier 48 in San Francisco next week, its largest batch of companies ever is getting ready to present […]

Apex Legends surprised the gaming world two months ago, bringing a new, frenetic dynamic to the Battle Royale genre of games that has already attracted 50 million players. That first huge milestone didn’t come at a cheap price — EA reportedly paid Ninja $1 million to stream the game. But now the question concerns whether […]

In recent years, data analysts have gone from optional to a career that holds great promise, but demand for quantitative skills applied in business decisions has raced ahead of supply as college curriculum often lags behind the fast-changing workplace. CareerTu, a New York-based startup launched by Ruiwan Xu, a former marketing manager at Amazon, aims […]

Lots of news and interesting tidbits to wrap up the week. Apple kerfuffles Apple has been vindicated (for a brief moment anyway) in its long-standing dispute with Qualcomm. From Stephen Nellis at Reuters: A U.S. federal judge has issued a preliminary ruling that Qualcomm Inc owes Apple Inc nearly $1 billion in patent royalty rebate […]

In this week's newsletter: The college admissions scandal engulfs TPG, Accel raises $2.5B for three funds and investing app Stash brings in $65M.

Mobile chipmaker Qualcomm has chalked up another small legal victory against Apple in another patent litigation suit. A jury in a U.S. federal court in San Diego found Friday that Apple owes Qualcomm about $31M for infringing three patents, per Reuters. As we reported earlier the San Diego patent suit relates to the power consumption […]

After a conspicuous stretch of silence ending with a mysterious teaser tweet on Thursday, No Man’s Sky creator Sean Murray revealed that another major free update is on the way. The new content, which is the first since last year’s Visions update, will hit the massive space exploration game this summer. The bundle of new […]