Crunch Hype

Amazon posted its bi-annual report Thursday detailing the number of government data demands it receives. The numbers themselves are unremarkable, neither spiking nor falling in the second-half of last year compared to the first-half. The number of subpoenas, search warrants and other court orders totaled 1,736 for the duration, down slightly on the previous report. Amazon still […]

Remember when the rumor mill suggested that Nintendo was already working on a sequel to the Switch? Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa shut that down pretty quickly, saying that no successor was in the works. Now the rumor mill has shifted gears: Rather than a whole new generation, the whispers suggest Nintendo is tinkering with a […]

The venture firm Kleiner Perkins has enjoyed many iterations over its 47-year-old history. Today, in some ways, it kicks off its newest. According to a new SEC filing, the firm has just closed its eighteenth early-stage fund with $600 million in capital commitments. It’s the first fund that Kleiner has announced since June 2016. Investors […]

As of late 2018, the top 10 tech companies in the U.S. spent $4.7 billion on healthcare acquisitions since 2012. What are their intentions? And what are the ramifications for the health industry?

Apple has blocked Google from distributing its internal-only iOS apps on its corporate network after a TechCrunch investigation found the search giant abusing the certificates. “We’re working with Apple to fix a temporary disruption to some of our corporate iOS apps, which we expect will be resolved soon,” said a Google spokesperson. A spokesperson for Apple […]

If you’ve got any gear from Lowe’s Iris line of smart home products, it’s time to start looking for alternatives. Lowe’s has announced that the line is toast, with plans to flip the switch on “the platform and related services” at the end of March. In other words: much of this once smart connected gear […]

“KP used to be a small team doing hands-on company building. We’re moving away from being this institution with multiple products and really just focusing on early-stage venture capital,” Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman tells me. Indeed, 47 years after its founding, the storied venture fund is going “back to the future” with today’s announcement […]

Amazon had a heck of a holiday. The online retail giant posted Q4 earnings today, reporting $72.4 billion in revenue, topping last year’s $60.45 billion and besting the analysts’ forecast of $71.92 billion. Extremely wealthy individual Jeff Bezos singled out Alexa’s record holiday season as a source of the robust quarter. “Alexa was very busy […]

Keeping its spot among the top countries competing in the space race, China is planning to launch 30 missions this year, according to information from the state-run China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., reported by the Xinhua news agency. Last year, China outpaced the United States in the number of national launches it had completed […]

Notification spam ruins social networks, diluting the real human interaction. Desperate to gain an audience, users pay services to rapidly follow and unfollow tons of people in hopes that some will follow them back. The services can either automate this process or provide tools for users to generate this spam themselves, Earlier this month, a […]

Houzz, a $4 billion-valued home improvement startup that recently laid off 10 percent of its staff, has admitted a data breach. A reader contacted TechCrunch on Thursday with a copy of an email sent by the company. It doesn’t say much — such as when the breach happened, or if a hacker to blame or if […]

More than a year after net neutrality was essentially abolished by a divided Federal Communications Commission, a major legal challenge supported by dozens of companies and advocates has its day in court tomorrow. Mozilla v. FCC argues that the agency's decision was not just dead wrong, but achieved illegally.

Like many modern digital innovations, “crowdsourcing” is a concept borrowed from the commercial tech industry.

Facebook just announced its latest round of “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” this time out of Iran. The company took down 262 Pages, 356 accounts, three Facebook groups and 162 Instagram accounts that exhibited “malicious-looking indicators” and patterns that identify it as potentially state-sponsored or otherwise deceptive and coordinated activity. As Facebook Head of Cybersecurity Policy Nathaniel […]

UltraViolet, an older “cloud movie locker” service, is shutting down. The service, which allowed consumers to unlock a digital copy of their DVDs and Blu-Rays, was something of a transitional step between the age of physical media and today’s streaming video landscape. Over time, it’s become less necessary for consumers, as movie marketplaces and subscription […]

New research out of Stanford and New York University took a look at what happens when people step back from Facebook for a month. Through Facebook, the research team recruited 2,488 people who averaged an hour of Facebook use each day. After assessing their “willingness to accept” the idea of deactivating their account for a […]

It seems inevitable that the high seas will eventually play host to a sort of proxy war as automated vessels clash over territory for the algae farms we'll soon need to feed the growing population. But this rocket-launching robo-boat is a peacetime vessel concerned only with global weather patterns.

SiriusXM this week offered a few more details on how it plans to leverage its newest asset, Pandora, following its $3.5 billion acquisition of the streaming music service last year, which officially closes on Friday. At the time of the deal, the company spoke about the potential for cross-promotion opportunities between the services and new […]

Marie Kondo’s rise as a cultural icon shows there’s big business to be had in sorting out a mess. And startups are also hoping to get in on the action. TechCrunch has learned that Clutter, a storage-on-demand service that packs up, takes away, stores and returns your possessions at the click of an app, is raising […]

TechCrunch’s third robotics event is just over two and a half months away, and it’s already shaping up to be a doozy. We’ve already announced Anca Dragan, Melonee Wise, Hany Farid and Peter Barrett for our event and have an exciting pair of new names to share with you. UC Berkeley’s Alexei Efros and Affectiva CEO […]

Animated characters are as old as human storytelling itself, dating back thousands of years to cave drawings that depict animals in motion.

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 shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach Facebook managed to beat Wall Street’s estimates in its Q4 […]

Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) announced today that its engineering school received its largest single donation in history. The donation was offered by Square co-founder and WashU alumni Jim McKelvey, for whom the school will be renamed, from the School of Engineering & Applied Science to The James McKelvey School of Engineering. WashU did […]

Uber, after announcing its intentions to get into public transit last April, is ready to launch in Denver. In partnership with the Regional Transportation District and transit data provider Moovit, residents of Denver will now be able to navigate public transportation within the Uber app. For transit, Uber is serving two sets of customers: agencies […]

Google today announced that Cloud Firestore, its serverless NoSQL document database for mobile, web and IoT apps, is now generally available. In addition, Google is also introducing a few new features and bringing the service to ten new regions. With this launch, Google is giving developers the option to run their databases in a single […]

Sarahah, the anonymous messaging app founded in Saudi Arabia that became an unexpected viral sensation with teens, clocking up over 300 million registered users before getting banned by Apple and Google over bullying, is making a return to the App Store — but not as you might think. The startup has launched a new, free […]

A new mobile banking startup called Step wants to help bring teenagers and other young adults into the cashless era. Today, cash is used less often, as more consumers shop online and send money to one another through payment apps like Venmo. But teenagers in particular are still heavily burdened with cash — even though […]

Once upon a time, people had to wait for the Super Bowl to watch the ads. Those dark days are over. Now you can have companies sell you products on-demand, any time, day or night. Amazon has already debuted its latest Alexa ad, and now Microsoft’s getting in on the action — and this one’s […]

An advertising pitch deck used by fast-growing short form video sharing app TikTok has leaked, providing a snapshot of usage in its biggest markets in Europe. The pitch deck was obtained by Digiday which says it was sent to a large (unnamed) European ad agency. Metrics and gender breakdowns for the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy are […]

South Park famously annoyed the world by triggering Echo and Google Home devices with familiar wake words. When Amazon’s at the wheel, however, the company is able to ensure that Alexa stays quiet using a method called acoustic fingerprinting. In the lead-up to the Super Bowl, the company’s offered a (relatively) easy-to-understand breakdown of why […]

Foxconn is even more aggressively cutting back its growth ambitions around the world than we previously thought. In addition to the news yesterday that Foxconn intends to scale back its plans for a $10 billion factory in Wisconsin, leaving that state in something of a lurch, we have now learned that the Taiwanese company intends […]

Intel, it seems, didn’t have to look too hard to find its new CEO. Half a year after being named interim CEO, Bob Swan is taking the job full-time. Swan, the seventh CEO in Intel’s 50-year history, will also be joining the chipmaker’s board of directors. Prior to this gig, Swan had been Intel’s CFO, […]

Just to get this out of the way: Yes, Hulu is introducing an ad unit that will show up when you pause a video. But no, the ad won’t be a video. Hulu says it has 25 million subscribers, the majority of them on an ad-supported plan — so they’re used to seeing TV-style commercial […]

On the back of a strong showing for portfolio company Spotify going public last year and several biggies like Airbnb also slated to list very soon, VC firm TCV has announced its latest and biggest-ever fund, the $3 billion TCV X, which has now closed and will start getting invested “soon,” the company tells me. […]

China’s internet firms are getting pally with giant state-owned automakers as they look to deploy their artificial intelligence and cloud computing services across traditional industries. Ride-hailing startup Didi Chuxing, which owns Uber China, announced earlier this week a new joint venture with state-owned BAIC. Hot on the heels came another entity set up between Tencent and the […]

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange based on trading volume, will now let you spend money you don’t have after it added support for credit cards from Visa and Mastercard. Credit card usage in crypto is controversial. Aside from the risk — ask anyone who bought crypto last year… — top exchanges have gone back and […]

Social media platforms are being urged to be far more transparent about how their services operate and to make “anonymised high-level data” available to researchers so the technology’s effects on users — and especially on children and teens — can be better understood. The calls have been made in a report by the UK parliament’s […]

We’ve written extensively about LG’s struggling mobile business, which has suffered at the hands of aggressive Chinese Android makers, and now that unit has dragged its parent company into posting its first quarterly loss for two years. The Korean electronics giant is generally in good health — it posted a $2.4 billion profit for 2018 […]

Backed by firstminute capital and Third Kind Ventures, Dadi wants men to be more aware of their biological clock.

Uber is suspending its professional taxi service in Barcelona from tomorrow almost a year after it re-entered the Catalan capital. The move follows the regional government agreeing new regulations for the vehicle for hire (VTC) sector aimed at making sure they do not compete directly with taxis. “The new restrictions approved by the Catalan Government […]

Nintendo has cut its ambitious annual Switch sales forecast despite enjoying a strong Christmas Q3 quarter. The Japanese games giant recorded a 104.21 billion JPY ($958 million) net profit on revenue of 608.39 billion JPY ($5.59 billion) between October and December 2018. Revenue was up 26 percent year-on-year, which is an impressive feature given that quarter was […]

Meet Sencrop a French startup that wants to empower farmers using sensors, a data platform and a service marketplace. The company recently raised a $10 million funding round. The Series A round was led by Bpifrance with NCI Waterstart, Nord Capital and The Yield Lab also participating. Existing investors Demeter and Breega Capital also reinvested. […]

It’s been a long year for Nintendo fans waiting on Mario Kart Tour to come to mobile and, unfortunately, more patience is required after the game’s launch was moved back to this summer. Nintendo announced plans to bring the much-loved franchise to smartphones one year ago. It was originally slated to launch by the end of […]

Jake Bright Contributor Jake Bright is a writer and author in New York City. He is co-author of The Next Africa. More posts by this contributor Zimbabwe’s government faces off against its tech community over internet restrictions Flutterwave and Visa launch African consumer payment service GetBarter Partech has doubled its Africa VC fund to $143 million […]

Samsung Electronics reported its largest quarterly profit decline in two years during its earnings report today. As the Galaxy maker warned in its earnings guidance earlier this month, its results were hurt by slower-than-expected demand for semiconductors, which had bolstered its earnings in previous quarters even when smartphone sales were slow. Samsung’s forecast was also […]

Grab’s fundraising push continues unabated after the Southeast Asian ride-hailing firm announced that it has raised $200 million from Central Group, a retail conglomerate based in Thailand. Central’s business covers restaurants, hotels and more than 30 malls in Thailand, while it has operations in markets that include Vietnam and Indonesia. Its public-listed holding companies alone are worth more […]

On Wednesday New York Attorney General Letitia James announced that her office had reached a settlement with Devumi, a company that made millions selling fake followers to unsuspecting customers. The state of New York found that Devumi had engaged in illegal deception and illegal impersonation in the course of fluffing up social media profiles with its […]

The Tesla Model Y — the SUV electric vehicle that CEO Elon Musk has been teasing and talking about since 2015 — will begin volume production by the end of 2020, the company said Wednesday in a letter to shareholders. The automaker, which has yet to show a prototype of the vehicle, said it will […]

In a bid to show that it’s getting ready for the electrification of American roads, Royal Dutch Shell is buying Greenlots, a Los Angeles-based developer of electric vehicle charging and energy management technologies. Shell, which is making the acquisition through its Shell New Energies US subsidiary, snatched the company from Energy Impact Partners, a cleantech-focused […]

At the tail end of Tesla’s earnings call today, Elon Musk dropped a surprise bit of news: the company’s CFO, Deepak Ahuja, will be retiring. “There is no good time to make this change,” said Ahuja, but noted that after two back-to-back profitable quarters, now might be the best time. Ahuja first served as Tesla’s […]