Crunch Hype

Bud, the U.K. fintech that helps banks connect their apps and data to other fintech companies and financial service providers, has closed over $20 million in further funding. The Series A round sees the company pick up backing from a number of banks: HSBC (which, via First Direct, it also counts as a customer), Goldman […]

Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Relativity Space, Slingshot Aeropsace, SpaceX and Virgin Orbit have raised billions of dollars to create new vehicles to launch payloads into space, but as the private space industry develops in the U.S. investors are beginning to back enabling technologies boost the next wave of innovation. Whether it’s satellite manufacturers, new propulsion […]

The electric scooter CEO shed light on the issues plaguing the micromobility industry and what's next for the high-flying startup.

Another year, another batch of Super Bowl commercials from tech giants like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. In fact, Amazon will have different ads focusing on different areas of the business: one highlighting products that won’t be taking advantage of its voice-powered assistant Alexa, and another previewing “Hanna,” an upcoming show on Amazon Prime. Microsoft, meanwhile, […]

Early-stage startups throughout much of the U.S. are able to raise larger sums today than any other point in at least a decade, and there are more early-stage rounds than ever.

I’m flying back to the USA today, and as an infrastructure aficionado, it’s nice to be going home, but I’m dreading the disappointment. I just spent two weeks in Singapore and Thailand; last year I spent time in Hong Kong and Shenzhen; and compared to modern Asia, so much American infrastructure is now so contemptible […]

Sony Pictures is taking audiences back to Punxsutawney… this time in virtual reality. Whether it’s an abomination and a perversion of one of the best movies in the Bill Murray oeuvre or a great way to immerse a viewer in one of the most perfectly realized worlds brought to the silver screen (I unrepentantly love […]

2019 has been good to the Austin startup scene so far.

Facebook’s lead data protection regulator in Europe has asked the company for an “urgent briefing” regarding plans to integrate the underlying infrastructure of its three social messaging platforms. In a statement posted to its website late last week the Irish Data Protection Commission writes: “Previous proposals to share data between Facebook companies have given rise […]

This week in startups: Celebrities mingle with VCs at the Upfront Summit, Pinterest preps banks for IPO and Sam Altman has a grand new idea.

Mark Minevich Contributor Share on Twitter Mark Minevich is a digital fellow at IPSoft. Japan, still suffering the consequences of its ‘Lost Decade’ of economic stagnation, is eyeing a transformation more radical than any the industrialized world has ever seen. Boldly identified as “Society 5.0” Japan describes its initiative as a purposeful effort to create […]

The man who has headed up Siri at Apple since 2012 is no longer at the helm, according to The Information. Bill Stasior remains at the company in a different role, the report states. We’ve reached out to Apple for comment. Stasior joined Apple to take over Siri in 2012 after being poached from Amazon’s A9 […]

Two of Facebook's four fact-checking partners in the U.S. have left the program as of the beginning of this year: Snopes, which recently rebuffed reports that its relationship with Facebook was strained, and the Associated Press. Both confirmed they are leaving the program, but left the possibility of future collaboration open.

3D printing has changed the way people approach hardware design, but most printers share a basic limitation: they essentially build objects layer by layer, generally from the bottom up. This new system from Berkeley, however, builds them all at once more or less by projecting a video through a jar of light-sensitive resin.

New York City open-source maker startup LittleBits began to lay off staff last month, TechCrunch has learned. The loss of jobs comes as the company looks to shift more focus toward the K-12 market. Education-specific offerings have been lucrative for the company in its eight-year existence, but recent products have found the company embracing licensed […]

A number of Twitter users have been complaining that tweets that were retweeted by people they don’t follow are now showing in their timeline. The issue, thankfully, is not related to a new Twitter algorithm or recommendation system, as some had feared. Instead, the company confirmed that a bug affecting Android users was mislabeling the […]

It seems Foxconn’s plans for a $10 billion Wisconsin plant are back on. After a couple of years of back and forths, the manufacturing giant says it’s recommitting to plans for a plant in the upper Midwest. A statement today cited a phone call between chairman/founder Terry Gou and Donald Trump. “After productive discussions between […]

Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick may have been nudged out of one of the world’s most highly valuable private companies by investors frustrated over its troubled culture, but his moves remain of great interest given how far he’d driven the rideshare giant. One such move, according to a new report in the South China Morning […]

Amazon, Dish, Comcast and others are hoping to turn Super Bowl 2019 into a way to show off the potential for their voice technologies and TV integrations. The companies this week have been touting new features and a variety of voice commands that will allow viewers to get prepared for the big game, learn about […]

Facebook and Google landed in hot water with Apple this week after two investigations by TechCrunch revealed the misuse of internal-only certificates — leading to their revocation, which led to a day of downtime at the two tech giants. Confused about what happened? Here’s everything you need to know. How did all this start, and […]

Machine learning and all its related forms of "AI" are being used to work on just about every problem under the sun, but even so, stemming the alarming decline of the bee population still seems out of left field. In fact it's a great application for the technology and may help both bees and beekeepers keep hives healthy.

While blockchain emerged first as a platform for currency and value, its employment in the tokenization of data and information has become recognized as being of at least, if not more, underlying value. You could perhaps even use it to track movements on a grid associated with mobility. That was the underlying idea behind the […]

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. We dismantle Facebook’s memo defending its ‘Research’ The fallout continues following TechCrunch reporting about a Facebook app that was paying people […]

While it appears that overall economic activity could be slowing down, one area that continues to soar is the cloud business. Just this week, Amazon and Microsoft reported their cloud numbers as part of their overall earnings reports. While Microsoft’s cloud growth was flat from the previous quarter, it still grew a healthy 76 percent […]

The sheer scale of global financial crime is not to be underestimated. The UK’s National Crime Agency recently observed that it’s “in the hundreds of billions of pounds” annually, and that’s just in the UK. In the US, domestic financial crime, excluding tax evasion, generates approximately $300 billion of proceeds each year for potential laundering. […]

Huawei mobile chief Richard Yu has already made mention of the company’s upcoming foldable phone amid talks of smartphone world domination. This morning, however, we caught our first glimpse of the handset in profile, along with the promise of more, arriving February 24, during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Foldables are very much heating up […]

Amazon had a record-breaking holiday quarter, with revenue of $72.4 billion and profits of $3 billion, but it’s not making much money off its top-selling item, the Alexa-powered Echo Dot. While the e-commerce giant said the device was its 2018 holidays best seller across all products, it also reminded investors on yesterday’s earnings call that […]

Vice Media plans to cut 250 jobs — about 10 percent of its total workforce. The Hollywood Reporter broke the news. When contacted by TechCrunch, a Vice spokesperson confirmed the story but declined to comment further. This comes after a brutal couple of weeks in the media business, as companies began the year with major […]

Sony posted record quarterly earnings this week on the strength of very strong music profits. Those numbers were catapulted thanks to the company’s $2.3 billion acquisition of EMI as part of an ever-consolidating music industry. The electronics giant’s operating profit rose to $3.46 billion for the quarter — up from $3.21 billion a year prior, […]

Juul Labs, the e-cig company under fire for its product’s popularity with young people, has brought on a new VP of Intellectual Property Protection with Adrian Punderson, formerly of PwC and Apple. Punderson’s job is all about working alongside government agencies, as well as Juul Labs Intellectual Property VP Wayne Sobon, to combat the sale […]

Twilio’s bid to become the go-to platform for all of a business’s external communication needs took a big step ahead today. The company said that it has closed its acquisition of email specialist SendGrid. First announced four months ago, Twilio today said the all-stock deal is valued at $3 billion — up from a $2 billion […]

The federal government yesterday published the final rule for changes to the H-1B visa program, which is one of the primary conduits for technical talent to come and work in the United States. There are two key changes coming with the rule. First, the government will require applicants for an H-1B visa to electronically register […]

Just in time to ride the last of the pre-Super Bowl buzz, Carbon today announced that it’s teaming up with sports equipment giant Riddell to 3D print customized football helmet padding. Referred to as “Diamond technology,” the collaboration creates lattice design pads of resin that are custom built to a player’s dimensions and position. Carbon […]

I know first-hand how frustrating it is to get locked out of your Google account and to lose access to much of your online life. I’m hoping this simple work-around will help get you get through the account recovery process much faster than the manual method, which takes a minimum of 3-5 days (and in my […]

Three days after Apple pulled its new Group FaceTime feature offline after users found they could eavesdrop on people before accepting a call, the company says it’s fixed the bug on its end. “We have fixed the Group FaceTime security bug on Apple’s servers and we will issue a software update to re-enable the feature […]

The UK’s data protection watchdog has issued fines against a pro-Brexit campaign, Leave.EU, and an insurance company owned by the largest individual donor to the leave cause, Arron Banks’ Eldon Insurance. The penalties have been handed down for what the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) dubs “serious breaches of electronic marketing laws” during the 2016 referendum on […]

 Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week we recorded as a trio: Connie Loizos holding down the studio with our guest, the ever-present Jeff Clavier of Uncork Capital. I dialed in from the what was the East Coast, back before it froze […]

Amazon has been forced to pull an estimated 400,000 products in India after new regulation limiting e-commerce businesses went into force in the country today. First announced at the end of 2018, the new regulation imposes a ban on exclusive sales, prevents retailers from selling products on platforms they count as investors, and it applies restrictions […]

Besides binge-watching TikTok videos and battling enemies in the magical land of mobile games, many Chinese people may also pass time during the upcoming Lunar New Year on Xuexi Qiangguo, a news and chat app developed by the country’s top ideology officials. The app managed to top the Chinese App Store between January 22 and […]

Asia’s venture capital-backed startups are gunning for Starbucks . In China, the U.S. coffee giant is being pushed by Luckin Coffee, a $2.2 billion challenger surfing China’s on-demand wave, and on the real estate side, where WeWork China has just unveiled an on-demand product that could tempt people who go to Starbucks to kill time or […]

Fourteen years after unveiling its first location in New York, Nintendo is finally opening an official store in Japan, too. Nintendo Tokyo will be located in Shibuya Parco, the new flagship of the Parco department store chain. Nintendo Tokyo is scheduled to open at the same time as the shopping center in fall. In an announcement, […]

Facebook said today it has removed hundreds of Facebook and Instagram counts with links to an organization that peddled fake news. The world’s fourth largest country with a population of over 260 million, Indonesia is in election year alongside Southeast Asia neighbors Thailand and the Philippines. Facebook said this week it has set up an ‘election […]

A lapse in security has led to the leaking of over a hundred thousand Aadhaar numbers, TechCrunch can reveal. One of the web systems used to record attendance of government workers for the Indian state of Jharkhand was left exposed and without a password as far back as 2014, allowing anyone access to names, job […]

Facebook published an internal memo today trying to minimize the morale damage of TechCrunch’s investigation that revealed it’d been paying people to suck in all their phone data. Attained by Business Insider’s Rob Price, the memo from Facebook’s VP of production engineering and security Pedro Canahuati gives us more detail about exactly what data Facebook was […]

Go-Jek, the Indonesia-based ride-hailing company that is challenging Grab in Southeast Asia, has announced the first close of its Series F round, as TechCrunch reported last week. The company isn’t revealing numbers. Sources told us last week that it has closed around $920 million, but we understand that today that the round is at over $1 […]

Screen time for kids, corporations allegedly not paying people from underrepresented groups and IBM offers some hope for the future of facial recognition technology: These are the topics that Megan Rose Dickey and I dive into on this week’s episode of Mixtape. According to research by psychologists from the University of Calgary, spending too much […]

The actor's artist-collaboration platform raised the cash from Javelin Venture Partners, Crosslink Capital and Advancit Capital.

Nintendo held off on building smartphone games for years, but now they just can’t stop. They started with a little stumble with the short-lived Miitomo, but then found an audience with Super Mario Run. Then came Fire Emblem Heroes. Then Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, and Dragalia Lost. Next up? Dr. Mario. Nintendo announced this afternoon […]

After TechCrunch caught Facebook violating Apple’s employee-only app distribution policy to pay people for all their phone data, Apple invalidated the social network’s Enterprise Certificate as punishment. That deactivated not only this Facebook Research app VPN, but also all of Facebook’s internal iOS apps for workplace collaboration, beta testing and even getting the company lunch or […]

On Thursday, detectives in Portland, Ore. announced that a long-cold local murder case finally came to a resolution, 40 years after the fact. In 1979, 20-year-old Anna Marie Hlavka was found dead in the Portland apartment she shared with her fiance and sister. According to police, she was strangled to death and sexually assaulted. Police […]