Crunch Hype

The 2019 edition of a popular annual survey shows usage of social media by Americans is stalling while ownership of smart speakers and tablets has soared over the last year, as has consumer engagement with podcasts. The results are promising for Amazon and Spotify in particular. Earlier today, Edison Research and Triton Digital presented their […]

Google showed off virtual reality designed around cardboard in 2014, but it looks like Nintendo is ready to get in on the action now as well with a new Labo VR kit for the Switch that puts the system inches from your face. In Labo fashion, there are some pretty outlandish projects to be built […]

Huawei has decided to go on the legal offence against the United States government after defending itself against alleged espionage and bank frauds linked to American sanctions on Iran. During a press conference late Wednesday, Huawei announced that it has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government, arguing that a ban on the use of […]

Wine buying is daunting for most people, whether it’s online or off a menu or in an aisle filled with so many brands that it’s hard not to buy the same products time after time, just to stay sane. Therein lies the opportunity for Bright Cellars, a nearly four-year-old, 40-person Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based startup that sells […]

After twelve years spent investing in impact-oriented financial services startups around the globe, the Omidyar Network, which serves as the family investment office for eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, is spinning off its financial inclusion investment arm as Flourish Ventures. Equipped with up to $300 million in capital for operations and investments, the new Flourish will […]

The president has to remember a lot of names! Some he remembers, some he forgets. But we will never forget today in the Year of Our Lord 2019 when President Trump called Apple CEO Tim Cook “Tim Apple.” Maybe we’re just losing our minds waiting for a good meme, but there’s something relentlessly good and […]

How the startup studio's "validation engine" has made it one of the best company builders in the business.

With the swelling confidence of a colonial power happening upon a long-settled distant land, today Mark Zuckerberg discovered the concept of privacy. In a ballooning 3,225 words — a roughly average word count for the terminally verbose Facebook founder — Zuckerberg informed his miserably loyal 2.3 billion plus subjects that his company has happened upon […]

Elon Musk’s Boring Company could land a deal to construct and operate a “people mover” for the Las Vegas Convention Center that will theoretically shuttle people in autonomous electric vehicles at high speeds in a loop of underground tunnels. It’s not a done deal quite yet. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority has recommended […]

Sonos is launching the most minor of minor updates. The company is launching a revision to its flagship speaker, the Sonos One. Sonos is calling this new speaker the Sonos One Gen 2, and it is nearly identical to the existing Sonos One. When it comes to sound and design, the second generation looks just […]

A court in Paris has dismissed a case against Airbnb, as Le Monde reported. Last month, the City of Paris sued Airbnb for 1,010 illegal listings. According to the mayor’s office, Airbnb failed to comply with regulation in Paris. Paris has been trying to limit the effect of Airbnb on the housing market in Paris. […]

Google today is introducing a new way for Android developers to generate revenue from their mobile applications. And no, it’s not subscription-related. Instead, the company is launching a new monetization option for apps called “Rewarded Products.” This will allow non-paying app users to contribute to an app’s revenue stream by sacrificing their time, but not […]

On feed-based “broader social networks, where people can accumulate friends or followers until the services feel more public . . . it feels more like a town square than a more intimate space like a living room” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained in a blog post today. With messaging, groups, and ephemeral stories as the […]

TechCrunch is profiling great startup lawyers wherever they may be working — and that includes within new companies built from the ground up around tech. Today, we’re interviewing Jared Verzello of Atrium. While even the most old-line of law firms have begun integrating document automation and analysis software, Atrium started that way. Around two years […]

No moment wowed the audience at last year’s I/O more than Duplex. The demo of the artificial intelligence restaurant and appointment booking program left many in the audience wondering whether Google had just pulled a fast one over on them. Turns out, it’s real. Over the summer, I got a chance to test drive Duplex […]

The net neutrality rules established in 2015 were a triumph decades in the making, but their undoing was rather a quick bit of work. So it is hoped, by Democratic leadership in the House and Senate, that it will be equally quick to nix the new administration's rules and restore the old ones — via a very simple piece of legislation known as the "Save the Internet Act."

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. The Silicon Valley exodus continues Many of the investors that touted the exclusivity of “The Valley” have moved north to San […]

Farming incubator Square Roots is announcing a new partnership today with food distribution giant Gordon Food Service. Square Roots has built urban farming facilities in refurbished, climate-controlled shipping containers, which it uses to grow food and train farmers in a year-long program. Until now, it has operated out of a single location in Brooklyn, which […]

Amazon today is launching a new feature called “Song ID” that aims to help users discover music they like, using Alexa. When enabled, Alexa will announce the title and the artist name before playing each song while you’re listening to a radio station, playlist or new release on Amazon Music over your smart speaker. The […]

TechCrunch is elevating networking to a whole new level at TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics + AI, which takes place at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on April 18. This day-long event features discussions, demos and workshops with some of the leading minds in these fields. With more than 1,000 attendees in the house, a tool that simplifies […]

Homeland Security could do more to protect election infrastructure ahead, according to a new report by the department’s watchdog. The report from the inspector general, out Wednesday, said progress had been made but Homeland Security, the department charged with protecting elections and the back-end voting machine infrastructure, still “does not have dedicated staff” focused on […]

So, like, maybe you had a bad 2018. But ask yourself: was it MoviePass bad? The company was flying high over the summer with a popular movie ticket subscription service that appeared too good to be true. It was, of course, as it swiftly came down to earth on a pair of melted wax wings. […]

In January at CES 2019 in Las Vegas, Twitter announced that it was developing new tools that would make it easier for publishers to better understand what sort of content is resonating with their readers. Through a new analytics dashboard, publishers would be able to see who’s engaging with content and when, and what’s performing […]

Waymo, the Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet, will start selling its custom LiDAR sensors — the technology that was at the heart of a trade secrets lawsuit last year against Uber . The company announced Wednesday in a blog post that it will sell is light detection and […]

Google is expanding its suite of apps designed for the Indian market with today’s launch of a new language-learning app aimed at children, called Bolo. The app, which is aimed at elementary school-aged students, leverages technology like Google’s speech recognition and text-to-speech to help kids learn to read in both Hindi and English. To do […]

That port and button-free phone Meizu showed off earlier this year? It didn’t even get half of its $100,000 Indiegogo pre-order campaign. But that’s fine, says the company. Turns out it was “messing about.” That’s according to a post by CEO Jack Wong on Meizu’s official forum. “This crowdfunding project was just the marketing team […]

Red Cat, a startup that wants to store drone flight data on the blockchain to guarantee immutability, announced the second Beta of its drone data platform today. Jeff Thompson, CEO of Red Cat says in 2017 he was looking at what was holding back the commercial drone business and the need for a black-box kind […]

Yesterday’s analysis of the ethical tradeoffs faced by engineers working in the Valley certainly lit up my inbox with responses. The general thesis of that piece is that startups and tech companies face more — and worse — tradeoffs as they have migrated from the “purity” of the early internet into more socially and ethically […]

Two years ago, Fitbit was in a rough spot. The company had ridden the wearables boom to an IPO and become virtually synonymous with the fitness tracker space, only to watch its fortunes dwindle as the market shifted almost entirely toward smartwatches. “That shift happened very rapidly over a year and a half,” CEO James […]

Fitness should be its own reward, but sometimes you need a little extra push. Fitbit today announced that it’s been testing a new Rewards program in beta, with plans to launch a premium paid version of the service at some point this year. The limited beta, which will close at the end of next month, […]

There are few things kids love more in this world than a good sequel. As such, Fitbit has returned a year after launching its children’s fitness tracker the Ace with the predictably named Ace 2. The new version of the product has a bumper designed to protect the display from all of the things that […]

Clari started out as a company that wanted to give sales teams more information about their sales process than could be found in the CRM database. Today, the company announced a much broader platform, one that can provide insight across sales, marketing and customer service to give a more unified view of a company’s go-to-market […]

Facebook has refused to provide the British parliament with the names of individuals behind a shadowy network backing an extreme ‘no deal’ Brexit outcome over a government-negotiated compromise. Since the June 2016 EU referendum vote, politics in the UK has been consumed by the question of how to implement a close vote to leave. And […]

Joe Apprendi Contributor Joe Apprendi is a general partner at Revel Partners. More posts by this contributor The new era in mobile Big data’s humble beginnings Data collection through mobile tracking is big business and the potential for companies helping governments monetize this data is huge. For consumers, protecting yourself against the who, what and […]

A big selling point of ordering food to the doorstep in China is price, which, in the early years, could be much cheaper than eating in-house. That’s arguably indulged a demographic of lazy, indoorsy eaters, but that may not last for much longer. Over the past few months, users in China have noticed incremental price […]

5G kit maker Huawei opened a Cyber Security Transparency center in Brussels yesterday as the Chinese tech giant continues to try to neutralize suspicion in Western markets that its networking gear could be used for espionage by the Chinese state. Huawei announced its plan to open a European transparency center last year but giving a […]

Efficient computer vision systems are a critical component of autonomous and assisted driving vehicles, and now a startup that has developed a way to deliver computer vision technology without relying on costly and bulky hardware — by building deep learning software that can run even on low-end processors — has secured a round of funding […]

One of Israel’s single largest venture capital funds is a new later stage vehicle focused on healthcare. The aMoon investment firm launched its second vehicle in April 2018 and it just announced its final close with $660 million in assets under management — making it one of the largest (if not the largest) firm in […]

Kenyan communications hardware company BRCK acquired the assets of Nairobi based internet provider Surf and its U.S. parent EveryLayer in a purchase deal of an undisclosed amount in February. Based in Nairobi, Surf is a hotspot service provider aimed at offering affordable internet to lower income segments. BRCK is a five year old venture that pairs its rugged WiFi routers […]

Alibaba is about to get a jolt from its largest rival in Southeast Asia. Sea, the Nasdaq-listed business, is raising as much as $1.5 billion from a new share offering that’s sure to be funneled into its Shopee e-commerce business. Singapore-based Sea said in a filing that it plans to offer 60 million American Depositary […]

In one of the most significant milestones for depression treatment in decades, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced today that it has approved a new drug with esketamine, a derivative of ketamine. Made by Johnson & Johnson under the brand name Spravato, the drug is meant to be taken as a nasal spray in […]

Grab has become the newest addition to the SoftBank Vision Fund after it announced today that it has pulled in a $1.46 billion investment from the super fund. The Southeast Asian ride-sharing company said the new money will be used to further its super app strategy, which is aimed at making its service a daily […]

Yavapai County prosecutors said today that Uber is not criminally liable in a crash last year when one of its self-driving cars fatally struck a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona. The autonomous SUV, which had a backup driver behind the wheel, collided with Elaine Herzberg while she was walking across the street. She later died as […]

Minnie Ingersoll has already had an enviable career. After 12 years at Google, working as product manager and later principal with Google.org, she co-founded the venture-backed online car marketplace Shift in 2013, then she left to join the nonprofit Code for America, where she learned entirely new skills, including managing finance and marketing and recruiting. […]

Your startup needs customers to survive. If and when you make sales or generate installs, you are wading into the fast moving stream of commerce and exposing yourself to risk. Well-drafted customer contracts limit your liability and create legally enforceable rights to get paid for your work. In fact, contracts are actually dispute prevention mechanisms, […]

In 2017, when Tesla announced incredibly ambitious Model 3 production targets of 5,000 Model 3s per week and the beginning of "production hell," analysts were wary.

Y Combinator, a longtime resident of Silicon Valley, is planning to move its HQ to San Francisco.

That was unexpected, including by the FDA, apparently. FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb resigned today, an administration official tells The Washington Post, adding that Gottlieb will relinquish the office in one month. Unlike many people who leave the Trump administration, the resignation wasn’t sought or expected, reports the Post, which notes Gottlieb has recently hired senior […]

Kobalt, a 19-year-old, London-based music services company that operates as both a music publisher and a service-based music company — among other things, it helps artists collect the royalties owed them — is reportedly raising a new round of funding that could surpass $100 million. Music Business Worldwide (MBW) reported on the round yesterday, with […]