Crunch Hype

Redis Labs, fresh off its latest funding round, today announced a change to how it licenses its Redis Modules. This may not sound like a big deal, but in the world of open-source projects, licensing is currently a big issue. That’s because organizations like Redis, MongoDB, Confluent and others have recently introduced new licenses that […]

Last year Microsoft introduced several mixed reality business solutions under the Dynamics 365 enterprise product umbrella. Today, the company announced it would be moving these to smartphones in the spring, starting with previews. The company announced Remote Assist on HoloLens last year. This tool allows a technician working onsite to show a remote expert what […]

Spotinst, the startup that helps customers automate selecting the cheapest set of resources to complete a job, announced a strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services today, joining the AWS Partner Network (APN) Global Startups program. Under the agreement, Amazon will help with Spotinst’s go-to-market efforts, bringing their considerable financial and sales and marketing resources to […]

A privacy complaint targeting the behavioral advertising industry has a new piece of evidence that shows the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) shedding doubt on whether it’s possible to obtain informed consent from web users for the programmatic ad industry’s real-time bidding (RTB) system to broadcast their personal data. The adtech industry functions by harvesting web users’ data, […]

Carpooling is heralded to be environmentally friendly and money-saving, but in smog-stricken China, the transportation option became a source of public concerns after two female passengers got murdered during their lifts with Didi Chuxing drivers. The ride-hailing app has suspended its Hitch service to this date under government command, and its peers were also directed […]

Update: an earlier version of this story positioned the €160 million fund as newly announced, when in actual fact it was disclosed in late 2017 and consists of a combination of Heartcore Fund III (seed and series A) and Heartcore Progression Alpha (growth fund following through on Heartcore’s most successful companies). Sunstone Technology, the tech arm […]

Gartner’s smartphone marketshare data for the just gone holiday quarter highlights the challenge for device makers going into the world’s biggest mobile trade show which kicks off in Barcelona next week: The analyst’s data shows global smartphone sales stalled in Q4 2018, with growth of just 0.1 per cent over 2017’s holiday quarter, and 408.4 […]

Chinese e-commerce company JD.com is taking its drone delivery system to Japan. Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce giant, just announced a partnership with JD that will see its drones and unmanned vehicles become a part of Rakuten’s own unmanned delivery service efforts. JD has been operating drones in its native China for a number of years, […]

There’s plenty of speculation right now around apparently disgruntled investors in SoftBank’s Vision Fund, but the drum continues to beat and the checks continue to be written. The latest deal for the $100 billion mega-fund is Clutter, an on-demand storage company that pulled in $200 million in new financing for growth. Eagled-eyed viewers will recall that […]

Days after a YouTube creator accused the platform of enabling a “soft-core pedophilia ring,” several companies have suspended advertising on the platform, including Nestle, Epic, and reportedly Disney and McDonald’s. Nestle told CNBC that all of its companies in the U.S. have paused advertising on YouTube, while a spokesperson for Epic, maker of the massively […]

Lalamove, a Hong Kong-based on-demand logistics startup, has closed a $300 million Series D round as it seeks expansion across Asia. In doing so, the company has officially entered the unicorn club. Founded in 2013 by Stanford graduate Shing Chow, Lalamove provides logistics and delivery services in a similar style to ride-hailing apps like Uber […]

The planned Robot Science Museum in Seoul will have a humdinger of a first exhibition: its own robotic construction. It’s very much a publicity stunt, though a fun one — but who knows? Perhaps robots putting buildings together won’t be so uncommon in the next few years, in which case Korea will just be an […]

Pressed to explain who is using them, and why, 99 percent of cryptocurrencies let out all their air, go flying around the room making a raspberry sound, hit the wall and fall behind the couch forever. The party is over. A few, however, can present a credible use case. “Tokenized securities” could be one of […]

Computers have recently gotten much, much better at a somewhat unsettling skill: generating fake human faces. As in, creating an image of a human who has never existed before. We saw the concept go a bit viral this week with ThisPersonDoesNotExist, a website hooked to a machine that generates a new face every few seconds. […]

Via, the on-demand shuttle startup backed by Daimler, has expanded into South America. The company launched a service in Goiânia, Brazil with HP Transportes Coletivos, one of the country’s largest public transportation operators. Via says the service, called CityBus 2.0, is the first on-demand shuttle system operated by a public transit operator to launch in Latin […]

Review site Trustpilot says it’s creating more transparency around how businesses respond to consumer reviews. Founder and CEO Peter Mühlmann told me that while “the vast majority of companies” are using their ability to flag questionable reviews in “exactly the right way,” there’s a small minority that are potentially “ruining it for everyone” by aggressively […]

If you're doing ordinary photography and videography, there's rarely any need to go beyond extreme wide angle lenses — but why be ordinary? This absurd and unique custom fisheye lens has a 270 degree field of view, meaning it can see behind the camera it's mounted on — or rather the camera mounted on it.

Mark Zuckerberg says it might be right for Facebook to let people pay to not see ads, but that it would feel wrong to charge users for extra privacy controls. That’s just one of the fascinating philosophical views the CEO shared during the first of his public talks he’s promised as part of his 2019 […]

Missed today’s Samsung Unpacked event in San Francisco? In all, we have five new phones — one of them a foldable — some new earbuds, a virtual assistant and a watch. Here’s everything you need to know. Samsung’s Galaxy Fold launches April 26, starting at $1,980 The last time we saw Samsung’s foldable onstage, it was, […]

Ride-hailing company Lyft plans to file its initial public offering in March, possibly beating rival Uber to the milestone. Two reports, one from Reuters, the other from WSJ, indicate Lyft plans to list its shares on Nasdaq next month. The WSJ, citing unnamed sources, reported Lyft may make the filing public as early as next […]

Twitter today is opening up applications for its new testing program, first announced at CES in January. The program potentially can cover any and every aspect of the Twitter experience, but the first set of tests will focus on how interactions between people, and specifically replies, appear on Twitter. They will include a new design […]

Samsung announced a lot today. Like a lot, a lot. But the company was pretty quiet on the Bixby side of things, and the Galaxy Home smart speaker it announced mid-last year was nowhere to be seen. In an interview with mobile CEO DJ Koh, however, CNET was able to get a bit of a […]

Uber has fixed a bug that allowed access to the secret developer tokens of apps that integrated with the ridesharing service, according to the security researchers who discovered the flaw. In a blog post, Anand Prakash and Manisha Sangwan explained that a vulnerable developer endpoint on Uber’s back-end systems — since locked down — was […]

Hole punches aside, Wireless PowerShare is the S10 line’s marquee feature. Samsung’s new flagship isn’t the first handset with the feature — the Huawei Mate 20 Pro beat it to it by a few months — but it’s a cool new addition, nonetheless. And perhaps more importantly, Samsung’s beat Apple to the punch here. From […]

You’ve got to hand it to Samsung. The company sure threw a LOT at us during today’s Unpacked event — five phones (including the foldable), earbuds, a fitness track and the Galaxy Watch Active, the company’s latest smartwatch. The biggest news on the watch front finds the company embracing user health, much like the rest […]

Reports of the headphone jack’s death are greatly exaggerated. Or more accurately, premature. All of the latest versions of Samsung’s Galaxy phones are equipped with a 3.5mm port, bucking the trend set by Apple and followed by Google. While the headphone jack might eventually die, right now, in 2019, it’s alive and could be a […]

Facebook is updating its privacy settings on Android to make it easier for users to control what location data is sent to and stored by the company. In its announcement, Facebook acknowledged that Android users have expressed concern over the app’s ability to continuously log location data in the background. Due to Android’s all-or-nothing system of […]

After weeks of leaks, Samsung still managed to save some surprises for today’s event. One of the most interesting among them is a partnership with Instagram that brings Stories directly to the camera app. It’s an interesting partnership and mutually beneficial for both parties. For some, it could signal a kind of return to pre-loaded […]

Samsung just announced not one, not two, but four new additions to its flagship Galaxy line: the S10e, S10, S10+, and S10 5G. Want a quick at-a-glance breakdown of how they all compare? We've got you covered.

Somewhat similar to Uber’s Express Pool option, Lyft just launched Shared Saver to help people spend less money for shared rides. But what makes Lyft’s option more attractive is that riders will never experience surge pricing. “You’ll lock in the lowest prices, always — even when it’s busy,” Lyft wrote in a blog post today. […]

After a seemingly endless stream of leaks over the past few weeks, there was essentially zero doubt that Samsung was announcing — amongst a bunch of other things — a new pair of wireless earbuds called the “Galaxy Buds” today. Here they are. Samsung says the Galaxy Buds should be able to pull around 5 […]

The last time we saw Samsung’s foldable on-stage, it was, quite literally, shrouded in darkness. The company debuted a prototype of the upcoming device at a developer conference, showing its folding method and little else. As promised, the Galaxy Fold (not to be confused with the Ford Galaxie, mind) got a lot more face time […]

While James Alonso has worked at big law firms for much of his career, he’s been working with startups the entire time. He’s also an engineer by training — and by practice. He recently founded a new startup-focused law firm (Magnolia) that incorporates document automation software (Docasaurus) that he built himself and also licenses to other […]

Longtime investor Keith Rabois is joining Founders Fund as a general partner, the firm let us know today. He brings its total number of partners to nine. According to Founders Fund, Rabois will invest across sectors and stages, like all members of its investment team. The move is wholly unsurprising in ways, though the timing […]

Citymapper is becoming a fintech startup, sort of. The company announced a prepaid card called Citymapper Pass for users based in London. This new product is both a subscription service to aggregate all your transportation subscriptions and a plastic card to pay for your rides. According to Wired, Citymapper will start with two weekly subscription […]

TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019 returns to the Moscone North Convention Center for three action-packed days devoted to early-stage startups. On October 2-4, more than 10,000 tech founders, investors, developers, engineers and startup fans from around the world will converge and create a veritable breeding ground of opportunity. And here’s the best part — you […]

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. Google says Nest’s secret microphone was ‘never intended to be a secret’ When Google announced earlier this month that its Nest […]

Meet Typology, a new Paris-based startup that designs and sells directly to consumer quality skincare and cosmetics products. The startup has been founded by Made.com co-founder Ning Li and is officially launching today. “Typology is a relatively ambitious project. We want to challenge FMCG [fast-moving consumer goods] brands with a digital pure player,” Ning Li […]

Mixmax today introduced version 2.0 of its Gmail-based tool and plugin for Chrome that promises to make your daily communications chores a bit easier to handle. With version 2.0, Mixmax gets an updated editor that better integrates with the current Gmail interface and that gets out of the way of popular extensions like Grammarly. That’s […]

Last July, at its Cloud Next conference, Google announced the Cloud Services Platform, its first real foray into bringing its own cloud services into the enterprise data center as a managed service. Today, the Cloud Services Platform (CSP) is launching into beta. It’s important to note that the CSP isn’t — at least for the […]

Timing is the single most valuable skill of the modern economy, but I would argue its’s the least understood and also the least practiced. Capitalism is fundamentally about timing, since market competition is about finding opportunities before others. When should you start a company? What company should you start? When should a VC invest? When […]

Menlo Ventures, the 43-year-old venture firm with offices in Menlo Park and San Francisco, is currently investing a $450 million fund to invest primarily in early-stage consumer, enterprise and frontier technologies that it closed in 2017. Now, it has a $500 million later-stage fund, too, the firm is announcing this morning. Dubbed by its “inflection” fund, […]

Today’s the day we finally see the Galaxy S10 — well, officially, at least. As is the tradition with Samsung product launches, the news has already been leaking out at a furious pace. Here’s a decent breakdown of what we expect from the new flagship — though to be fair, plenty more leaks have surfaced […]

For months, the drama has been steady in the Pentagon’s decade long, $10 billion JEDI cloud contract procurement process. This week the plot thickened when the DOD reported that it has found new evidence of a possible conflict of interest, and has reopened its internal investigation into the matter. “DOD can confirm that new information […]

Sports streaming service fuboTV and Viacom this morning announced a new carriage deal that will see fuboTV carry Viacom’s entertainment networks as a part of its TV packages. The deal includes channels like MTV, Nickelodeon, Nick Jr., BET, CMT, Comedy Central, VH1, Paramount Network, TeenNick and many others. A selection of these will be added […]

Google said there’s absolutely, positively, nothing to worry about the secret microphone in your Nest Secure smart home hub that it didn’t tell you about. Nope, not at all. Just an oversight, said Google. No need to be alarmed. Everything is just fine. When Google announced earlier this month that its Nest Secure would double-up as […]

At the end of 2016, Plain Vanilla founder Thor Fridriksson left the company he founded with the intent to take at least a year off of work. His product QuizUp, a social trivia game that raised more than $40 million and said it had more than 100 million users, never truly found a way to […]

Mike Sepso has joined the board of directors for 100 Thieves, an esports and content creation brand. Sepso cofounded Major League Gaming in 2002, bringing the first true semblance of infrastructure to competitive gaming. MLG became the biggest independent esports league in the world, and played a big part in the evolution of esports as […]

For the longest time, Arm was basically synonymous with chip designs for smartphones and very low-end devices. But more recently, the company launched solutions for laptops, cars, high-powered IoT devices and even servers. Today, ahead of MWC 2019, the company is officially launching two new products for cloud and edge applications, the Neoverse N1 and E1. […]

Traditional industries like oil and gas and manufacturing often use equipment that was created in a time when remote access wasn’t a gleam in an engineer’s eye, and hackers had no way of connecting to them. Today, these devices require remote access and some don’t have even rudimentary authentication. Xage, the startup that wants to […]