Crunch Hype

Valve doesn’t want to miss the cloud gaming bandwagon. As PC Gamer spotted, the company quietly released a beta version of Steam Link Anywhere. As the name suggests, it lets you turn your gaming PC into a cloud gaming server and stream games from… anywhere. The company’s strategy is a bit puzzling here as Valve […]

Twitter unveiled its latest diversity report and announced a new vice president of people experience and head of diversity and inclusion. In order to “unify I&D with critical People functions under one leader who owns the decisions for both,” Twitter CMO Leslie Berland tweeted today, the company promoted Dalana Brand to VP of People Experience […]

Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), who has already announced her presidential campaign, has introduced a bill that would double down on one of the rare successful tech upgrade programs in the government today: the U.S. Digital Service. Ultimately she wants this quietly effective program to go from federal to state and local level, and command a much larger $65 million yearly budget.

The amount of data that the big cloud computing providers now store is staggering, so it’s no surprise that most store all of this information as compressed data in some form or another — just like you used to zip your files back in the days of floppy disks, CD-ROMs and low-bandwidth connections. Typically, those […]

Tesla is scheduled to reveal the Model Y — the next electric vehicle in electric automaker’s lineup — tonight at an event in Los Angeles after, not months, but years of teasers and hints from CEO Elon Musk . Tesla will live stream the Model Y unveiling event at 8 pm PT via its website. […]

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. Telegram gets 3M new signups during Facebook apps’ outage In a message sent to his Telegram channel, founder Pavel Durov wrote, […]

Facebook has finally released its assessment of what was responsible for yesterday’s massive outage of its Instagram, Messenger, and core Facebook service. Contrary to the thesis circulating yesterday that it was a route leak, the company said that a misconfigured server was to blame. Yesterday, as a result of a server configuration change, many people […]

Nested, the London-based “data-driven” estate agency that provides a cash advance to help you buy a new home before you’ve sold your old one, has laid off 20 percent of its workforce, TechCrunch has learned. According to sources, the more than 15 staff being let go were informed earlier today. The majority of departures are […]

The shot clock’s running out on serious savings to TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics + AI. You have just one more day to score an early-bird ticket and save yourself $100. Improve your ROI the easy way and buy your ticket now before the price increases. We can’t wait to have you join us on April 18 […]

With the announcement today that Mammoth Biosciences has received the exclusive license from the University of California, Berkeley to the new CRISPR protein Cas14, the company now has the last piece of its diagnostics toolkit in place. Cas14 is a newly discovered protein from the lab of Jennifer Doudna, a pioneer in gene-editing research and […]

Apple’s annual developer conference is returning to San Jose for the third year in a row, at the McEnery Convention Center. This year, WWDC will take place on June 3-7. As always, you should expect a keynote on the first day of the event with consumer-focused announcements. This year marks the 30th year anniversary of […]

Microsoft today announced a new initiative that combines all of the company’s gaming-related products for developers like Xbox Live, Azure PlayFab, Direct X, Mixer, Virtual Studio, Simplygon and Azure under a single umbrella. That umbrella, Microsoft Game Stack, is meant to give game developers, no matter whether they are at a AAA studio or working […]

Sources confirm Accel has nabbed $2.5 billion -- its largest pool of capital yet -- for three new funds.

Gearbest, a Chinese online shopping giant, has exposed millions of user profiles and shopping orders, security researchers have found. Security researcher Noam Rotem found an Elasticsearch server leaking millions of records each week, including customer data, orders, and payment records. The server wasn’t protected with a password, allowing anyone to search the data. Gearbest ranks […]

ProdPerfect, a New York-based startup focused on automating QA testing for web apps, has announced the close of a $2.6 million Seed round co-led by Eniac Ventures and Fika Ventures, with participation from Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator. ProdPerfect started when cofounder and CEO Dan Wilding was VP of engineering at WeSpire, where he saw firsthand the […]

IPO-bound Lyft has employed a head of diversity and inclusion before, but this time, the person in this role has a more holistic mission. Today, Lyft is announcing Monica Poindexter, formerly Facebook’s global head of diversity business partners, has joined the company to lead the transportation company’s inclusion and diversity efforts. “I’m in a unique […]

Competition is the core of capitalism. Competition between companies lowers prices — on average — and ensures that they are forced to innovate lest they lose their markets to others. Competition between workers ensures that people strive to do their best work lest their jobs go to more qualified or faster or cheaper replacements. Obviously, […]

Coupang, the unicorn that is defining e-commerce in Korea, announced today that it has hired Jay Jorgensen, Walmart’s former global chief ethics and compliance officer, to serve as its general counsel and chief compliance officer. Jorgensen will relocate to Seoul for the position. Founded in 2010, with a total of $3.4 billion raised from investors […]

Bay Area photography startup Polarr announced this morning that it has raised an $11.5 million Series A. The new round of funding, led by Threshold Ventures with participation from Pear Ventures and Cota Capital, brings the startup’s total funding to around $12.5 million, according to the latest Crunchbase figures. At the moment, the company is […]

On the heels of its massive $940 million funding from the SoftBank Vision Fund, Nuro is launching in its second market. Nuro first launched its self-driving grocery delivery service in Scottsdale, Ariz. in August. Now, Nuro is expanding its partnership with grocer Kroger to launch in Houston, Texas. The service will be available through two […]

Cities are seemingly down for this new era of transportation, which entails micromobility services and ride-hailing, and operators are increasingly more down to share their data with cities. Now, cities just have to find out what to do with this data and how to extract learnings from it. This is where Populus comes in. Populus, […]

The UK government has written to the country’s competition authority to ask the watchdog to respond to concerns about the lack of transparency in the digital advertising market and carry out a formal market study “as soon as possible”. In a letter to the Competition and Markets Authority, chancellor Philip Hammond writes that the online […]

WeWork Labs, the coworking giant’s startup program that relaunched just over a year ago, is announcing a new initiative focused on food and agriculture startups — WeWork Food Labs. Roee Adler, the global head of WeWork Labs, told me that there will be two main pieces to the Food Labs program. First, there will be […]

Former Google and Dropbox executive Dennis Woodside has joined the meat replacement developer Impossible Foods as the company’s first President. Woodside, who previously shepherded Dropbox through its initial public offering, is a longtime technology executive who is making his first foray into the food business. The 25-year tech industry veteran most recently served as the […]

Messaging platform Telegram claims to have had a surge in signups during a period of downtime for Facebook’s rival messaging services. In a message sent to his Telegram channel, founder Pavel Durov’s just wrote: “I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours.” It’s probably not a coincidence that […]

Rakuten TV, the Japanese e-commerce giant’s effort to take on Netflix and Amazon in the world of video streaming, has been a minor player when it comes to market share for online entertainment, with a mere 7 million users of its service. But today, it’s unveiling two key pieces of news that it hopes will […]

China’s new tech force Pinduoduo is continuing its race to upend the ecommerce space, even at the expense of its finances. The three-year-old startup earmarked some big wins from the 2018 fiscal year, but losses were even greater, dragging its shares down 17 percent on Wednesday after the firm released its latest earnings results. The […]

Breedr, a U.K. startup that wants to help farmers make better use of their livestock data to improve profitability, has raised £2.2 million in funding. The seed round is led by London-based LocalGlobe, with participation from Mons Investment and a number of angel investors. They include Ian Hogarth, Darren Shapland, and Jonathan McKay. The company […]

Google is a tech powerhouse in many categories, including advertising. Today, as part of its efforts to improve how that ad business works, it provided an annual update that details the progress it’s made to shut down some of the more nefarious aspects of it. Using both manual reviews and machine learning, in 2018, Google […]

Google is shutting down its Emmy Award-winning VR film division, Spotlight Stories, after six years of building out content, Variety reports. We’ve reached out to Google for confirmation. “Google Spotlight Stories means storytelling for VR. We are artists and technologists making immersive stories for mobile 360, mobile VR and room-scale VR headsets, and building the […]

Soft, biologically inspired robots have become one of the field’s most exciting offshoots, with machines that are capable of squeezing between obstacles and conforming to the world around them. A joint project between MIT CSAIL and Harvard’s Wyss converts those learnings into a simple, soft robotic gripper capable of handling delicate objects and picking up […]

Drones are useful in countless ways, but that usefulness is often limited by the time they can stay in the air. Shouldn't drones be able to take a load off too? With these special claws attached, they can perch or hang with ease, conserving battery power and vastly extending their flight time.

As soon as Mark Zuckerberg said in a lengthy 3,225-word blog post to not build data centers in countries with poor human rights, he had already broken his promise. He chose to ignore Singapore, which the Facebook founder had only months earlier posted about, declaring the micro-state home to the company’s first data center in […]

Keith Wright Contributor Share on Twitter Keith Wright is a Villanova School of Business instructor of Accounting and Information Systems, founder of Simplicity On-Demand LLC and former Senior Vice President for Global Sales Operations for SAP. There is no question that the arrival of a fragmented and divided internet is now upon us. The “splinternet,” […]

The SoftBank Vision Fund is in talks to invest directly in Uber's autonomous vehicle business, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Ford is preparing to open an autonomous vehicle program in Austin as the automaker continues to ramp up testing ahead of launching a self-driving taxi and delivery service in 2021, according to sources familiar with the development. A new job listing for an autonomous vehicles “market specialist” based in Austin validates the information. Austin is […]

When you live with roommates or go out often with friends, it’s common for someone to front the payment — be that for utilities, the cable bill, rent or the restaurant bill — and have everyone else pay them back via cash, Venmo or Apple Pay. But Ysplit, a company launching out of Y Combinator, […]

This week, security reporter Zack Whittaker discussed his exclusive report about Tufts University veterinary student Tiffany Filler who was expelled on charges she hacked her grades. Being Canadian and therefore in the U.S. on a student visa, she had to immediately leave the country.

On-demand food delivery startup DoorDash has been under fire as of late for its practices around paying drivers. In an email to drivers today, obtained by TechCrunch, DoorDash said drivers received an average of $17.50 or more per hour on deliveries in 2018. That figure, of course, does not take into account cost of mileage, […]

Including a meal kit for authentic gourmet ramen, a millennial-focused platform for buying affordable fine-art and a benefits platform for gig workers.

Apple Music is launching on Amazon Fire TV in the U.S. today, after rolling out in December to Amazon’s Echo line of smart speakers. The news is notable as it’s yet another example of the eased tensions between the two rivals following Apple CEO Tim Cook’s 2017 announcement of Apple’s agreement with Amazon. Their deal […]

As part of TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics + AI, we are happy to announce a partnership to deliver a brand new course from NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Institute (DLI). Called the NVIDIA Deep Learning for Robotics Workshop, this brand new, never before offered workshop will provide training in a new 3D accelerated remote desktop environment on April […]

The Opportunity Mars Rover may be officially offline for good, but its legacy of science and imagery is ongoing — and NASA just shared the last (nearly) complete panorama the robot sent back before it was blanketed in dust.

After consulting with the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Transportation Safety Board, and airlines, Boeing is throwing its support behind a decision to ground its 737 Max planes. “Boeing has determined — out of an abundance of caution and in order to reassure the flying public of the aircraft’s safety — to recommend to the […]

You’ve probably noticed: design has become central for many businesses that might have once considered it an afterthought. Indeed, with sales and marketing so thoroughly optimized at this point — and companies wondering how else to trounce the competition — there’s now a race afoot for numerous startups looking to become the Salesforce of design. […]

James Williams may not be a household name yet in most tech circles, but he will be. For this second in what will be a regular series of conversations exploring the ethics of the technology industry, I was delighted to be able to turn to one of our current generation’s most important young philosophers of […]

The FDA has drafted new guidance for the regulation of e-cigarettes, particularly with regards to flavored nicotine products. The first big change is that the FDA has bumped up the application due date by one year for FDA approval of flavored products. Manufacturers of all flavored ENDS (electronic nicotine delivery system) products will now have […]

Facebook and its related family of apps appear to be down for most users right now. There’s not much more information to share at this point, but the web is freaking out (as is to be expected). Facebook has confirmed the outage and we’ll update as we get more information. We’re aware that some people […]

As schools continue to look for new ways to cut costs while at the same time reboot their curriculum to better tap new innovations and improved understandings of how children learn, e-learning startups are attracting attention, both from educators and the VCs that fund them to fuel growth. In the latest development, Newsela — which […]

Among the growing field of indie games, one truly stands alone: Dwarf Fortress. The unbelievably rich and complex and legendarily user-unfriendly title has been a free staple of awe and frustration for years. But the developers, in a huge shift to the status quo, have announced that the game will not only soon have a paid version on Steam — it'll have... graphics.