Crunch Hype

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. Spotify files a complaint against Apple with the European Commission over ‘Apple tax’ and restrictive rules Spotify is taking off its […]

After the Federal Aviation Administration issued a statement late yesterday doubling down on its decision to keep the Boeing 737 Max planes at the heart of two accident investigations flying, Canada has become the latest nation to ground the plane. “There are — and I hasten to say not conclusive — but there are similarities,” […]

YouTube Music is coming to the next critical battlefield for streaming music services: India. The company announced this week it’s launching its ad-supported version of YouTube Music for free in the country, as well as YouTube Music Premium, its subscription that offers background listening, offline downloads and an ad-free experience for ₹99 a month. In […]

Deep learning involves a highly iterative process where data scientists build models and test them on GPU-powered systems until they get something they can work with. It can be expensive and time-consuming, often taking weeks to fashion the right model. Determined AI, a new startup wants to change that by making the process faster, cheaper […]

Last month’s Gimlet was a watershed moment for podcasting. Spotify acquired the network for a reported $230 million, in a pricey bid to get serious about the format. But what of all the folks employed by Gimlet? It’s tough to know how these deals will shake out for those not involved in the closed door […]

For the love of robots, don’t miss your chance to save $100 on admission to TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics + AI. Our annual, day-long event goes deep on all things related to robotics and artificial intelligence, and you’ll hear from the greatest tech and investment minds and makers. Danger, Will Robinson, danger! The early-bird price — […]

Wattpad is further expanding into Asia with a new partnership and undisclosed strategic investment from Times Bridge, the global investment arm of the Times Group in India. The deal aims to help the storytelling community establish a larger presence in the country where it already counts over 2.6 million monthly users who have shared more […]

Newly released documents reveal Immigration and Customs Enforcement is tracking and targeting immigrants through a massive license plate reader database supplied with data from local police departments — in some cases violating sanctuary laws. The documents, obtained by a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and released Tuesday, reveal the […]

Automation Hero, formerly SalesHero, has secured $14.5 million in new funding led by Atomico, with participation by Baidu Ventures and Cherry Ventures. As part of the deal, Atomico principal Ben Blume will join the company’s board of directors. The automation startup launched in 2017 as SalesHero, giving sales orgs a simple way to automate back-office […]

In an update to the chromium engine, which underpins Google’s popular Chrome browser, the search giant has quietly updated the lists of default search engines it offers per market — expanding the choice of search product users can pick from in markets around the world. Most notably it has expanded search engine lists to include […]

Twitter’s video streaming app, Periscope, is cracking down on spam and, specifically, fake engagements. The company says it’s updating its policies around how it enforces its anti-spam rules, and is making improvements in terms of how those rules are enforced. This means users will see increased enforcement actions, Periscope notes — and these may even […]

Indian agriculture tech startup AgroStar announced today that it has raised a $27 million Series C for its platform, which helps farmers increase crop production, manage orders and buy supplies online. The round was led by Bertelsmann India Investments, with participation from returning investors Accel, Chiratae Ventures and Aavishkaar Bharat Fund. AgroStar bills its app […]

Verizon today announced the launch details of its first standards-based 5G wireless service. Starting on April 11 5G will be available throughout areas of Chicago and Minneapolis. Current subscribers can expect to pay an additional $10 a month for access, and at launch, the only supported device is the Motorola Z3 with the 5G Moto […]

F5 Networks took a dive yesterday after the company announced it was acquiring open-source web server NGINX. While media coverage of the deal was largely positive, the public markets appeared much more skeptical, as F5 stock finished the day down nearly 8%. As most analyses noted, the logic behind the deal is clear. F5’s existing […]

Email app Spark added collaboration features back in May 2018. And Readdle, the company behind the app, is going one step further with a new feature specifically designed to delegate an email to one of your colleagues. While you can already collaborate with your team by sharing emails in Spark, the app is still not […]

Roboticists have the strangest pet projects. For Colin Angle, it’s vacuuming up lionfish. The iRobot CEO is also the cofounder of RSE (that’s Robots in Service of the Environment), a volunteer-based organization designed to create what it says in the name. The organization’s first project, announced back in 2017, is a robot designed to capture […]

Twitter is rolling out the redesign to its camera feature TechCrunch reported on a month ago that’s designed to let you capture photos, videos, and live footage and connect them to global conversations. Starting today when you swipe left from the Twitter timeline, you’ll get the new camera that’s no longer buried in the tweet […]

Security researchers have found a new kind of mobile adware hidden in hundreds of Android apps, and downloaded more than 150 million times from Google Play. The malware masquerading as an ad-serving platform, dubbed SimBad by researchers at security firm Check Point, infected more than 200 apps which, likely unbeknownst to the app developer, would […]

Jack Dorsey, known for making tone-deaf statements on the platform he co-founded, is in the middle of another controversy. This time it is for plugging a podcast he recorded with fitness writer Ben Greenfield. Greenfield has espoused anti-vaccination views on Twitter and other platforms, continuing to do so despite measles outbreaks in the United States. […]

Tetrate, a company bringing commercial services and support to the open source projects –Istio and Envoy — providing network management functions for the microservices that make up modern mobile applications, has launched with $12.5 million in new financing. The company, founded by top engineers at Google who started the Istio project, raised its initial financing […]

A independent report commissioned by the UK government to examine how competition policy needs to adapt itself for the digital age has concluded that tech giants don’t face adequate competition and the law needs updating to address what it dubs the “novel” challenges of ‘winner takes all’ platforms. The panel also recommends more policy interventions […]

A report from Bloomberg shares some of the details about the long-rumored video streaming service from Apple. The company should unveil this service at a press conference in Cupertino on March 25. While Apple has been working on a ton of original content for its new streaming service, Bloomberg says that most of them won’t […]

Acko — a startup out of India that has taken on the country’s antiquated insurance industry with a digital-first product for drivers and others in transportation-related scenarios (for example, cancelled ticket insurance) — has raised more funding as it passes 20 million customers on its books. The company has closed a Series C of $65 million […]

Spotify is taking its gloves off in what has up to now been a behind-the-scenes tug-of-war with Apple, where it competes against Apple Music but also relies heavily on the company for distribution in its app on iOS devices. Today CEO Daniel Ek announced that his company has filed a complaint against the iPhone giant […]

Microsoft has shared some more information and the first look at Project xCloud. The company has been working on a cloud game streaming service for a while. Microsoft is preparing the future of gaming platforms with a device-agnostic service that lets you stream games made for the Xbox One. And the first demo is Forza […]

Drivezy — the startup out of India that wants to turn private car usage on its head through a car-sharing network where people lend their cars and two-wheeled vehicles but also have options to use vehicles from a fleet managed by Drivezy — said it is raising more money as it gears up for the […]

Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana and Bixby–almost all virtual assistants have something in common. Their default voices are women’s, though the role that plays in reinforcing gender stereotypes has been long documented, even inspiring the dystopian romance “Her.” Virtue, the creative agency owned by publisher Vice, wants to challenge the trend with a genderless voice […]

CXA Group, a Singapore-based startup that helps make insurance more accessible and affordable, has raised $25 million for expansion in Asia and later into Europe and North America. The startup takes a unique route to insurance. Rather than going to consumers directly, it taps corporations to offer their employees health flexible options. That’s to say […]

On the heels of its groundbreaking foray into interactive storytelling with the choose-your-own-adventure style “Black Mirror” episode, Bandersnatch, Netflix will look to produce much more interactive entertainment, according to vice president of content, Todd Yellin. Speaking at the FICCI-Frames conference for Indian media and entertainment in Mumbai, Yellin said in a keynote that audiences could […]

Microsoft's Seeing AI is an app that lets blind and limited-vision folks convert visual data into audio feedback, and it just got a useful new feature. Users can now use touch to explore the objects and people in photos.

Bill McGlashan, who built his career as a top investor at the private equity firm TPG, has been put on “indefinite administrative leave, effective immediately,” says the firm after McGlashan was caught up in what the Justice Department said today is the largest college admissions scandal it has ever prosecuted. McGlashan is among 49 others […]

Vungle founder Zain Jaffer filed a lawsuit today accusing the mobile advertising company of wrongfully terminating him from the role of CEO. The lawsuit cites a section of the California labor code that it says “expressly and specifically prohibits discrimination and retaliation by employers based upon an arrest or detention that did not result in […]

In the wake of FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb’s abrupt resignation, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex M. Azar III announced that Dr. Ned Sharpless will serve as interim commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. Since October 2017, Dr. Sharpless served as director of the National Cancer Institute and, before that, worked as a […]

Watching our democracy function (or malfunction) over the past few years, I have come to the conclusion that there is a slow-moving crisis developing for our democracy — and our economy.

Uber thought it would have 75,000 autonomous vehicles on the roads this year and be operating driverless taxi services in 13 cities by 2022, according to court documents unsealed last week. To reach those ambitious goals, the ridesharing company, which hopes to go public later this year, was spending $20 million a month on developing […]

Yesterday, Twitter rolled out its much-anticipated prototype application to the first group of testers. We’ve now gotten our hands on the app and can see how the current version differs from the build Twitter introduced to the world back in January. While the original version and today’s prototype share many of the same features, there […]

The origin story of BlackBird, a startup that links travelers to planes and commercial pilots through an app, didn’t begin with air travel. It was prompted by car sickness. BlackBird CEO and founder Rudd Davis, who was getting his pilot’s license at the time, asked his flight instructor if he would fly his family to […]

In the wake of the second fatal crash in six months involving Boeing 737 Max 8 airplanes, the European Aviation and Safety Administration is grounding the planes as Boeing said it was taking additional steps to address an issue that may have contributed to the crash. On Sunday, a Boeing 737 Max 8 plane operated […]

Your startup will not succeed unless you, the founder, build an exceptional team. Great teams are built on top of great culture. Yet any venture-backed startup founder will tell you, myself included, that developing a positive corporate culture is more art than science, requiring constant and creative recalibration as your company grows. What then does […]

Cloud-hosting company Scaleway refreshed its lineup of high-performance instances today. These instances are now all equipped with AMD EPYC CPUs, DDR4 RAM and NVMe SSD storage. The more you pay, the more computing power, RAM, storage and bandwidth you get. High-performance plans start at €0.078 per hour or €39 per month ($44.20), whichever is lower […]

Voice recognition is a standard part of the smartphone package these days, and a corresponding part is the delay while you wait for Siri, Alexa, or Google to return your query, either correctly interpreted or horribly mangled. Google's latest speech recognition works entirely offline, eliminating that delay altogether — though of course mangling is still an option.

Pan-African e-commerce company Jumia filed for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange today, per SEC documents and confirmation from CEO Sacha Poignonnec to TechCrunch. The valuation, share price and timeline for public stock sales will be determined over the coming weeks for the Nigeria-headquartered company. With a smooth filing process, Jumia will become […]

More than a year after the deal was first announced, it looks like Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox is about to close. Disney announced today that the deal is “expected to become effective at 12:02 a.m. Eastern Time on March 20, 2019,” suggesting that it has obtained the final approval needed, specifically from regulators […]

We can’t wait to see all of you at TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics + AI, which takes place April 18 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. That’s still slightly more than a month away, but your opportunity to buy an early-bird ticket — and save $100 — disappears in just three short days. When that day arrives, […]

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. Facebook’s ad team shoots itself in the foot by pulling Elizabeth Warren campaign ads Facebook’s advertising department pulled Elizabeth Warren campaign […]

At a time when the gig economy is under heavy scrutiny around its practices of classifying workers as 1099 independent contractors, IPO-bound Uber has officially settled a six-year-long case regarding this exact topic. Today, Uber agreed to pay $20 million to settle the class-action lawsuit, brought forth by Douglas O’Connor and Thomas Colopy way back […]

Artificial intelligence, or what passes for it, can be found in practically every major tech company and, increasingly, in government programs. A joint Harvard-MIT program just unloaded $750,000 on projects looking to keep such AI developments well understood and well reported.

Firefox Send, Mozilla’s free, encrypted file-transfer service, is officially launching to the public today following its debut as a “Test Pilot” experiment back in August 2017. The service allows web users to share files up to 2.5 GB in size through the browser, while protecting them with end-to-end encryption and a link that automatically expires […]

When the bubble burst in the year 2000, Tanya Van Court lost over $1 million in stock and options over the course of a few minutes. Then and there she vowed to never let something like that happen to her children. Five years later, her daughter Gabrielle was born. At the time, she was a […]

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