Crunch Hype

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 […]

Tesla is building a pickup truck. We’ve known that for a few years now. But when? In an earnings call this afternoon, Elon Musk said that he’s hoping to unveil the truck this summer. “It will be… unique,” he added. Note, of course, that “unveil” doesn’t mean “ship.” That, presumably, won’t happen for a while. […]

The Criterion Collection’s streaming service has a launch date: April 8. The company had previously made its library of classic art-house and international films available through streaming partners — first Hulu, then FilmStruck. However, FilmStruck shut down last fall, apparently a victim of its corporate parent WarnerMedia’s bigger streaming plans. Criterion subsequently announced that it […]

At the end of last year, Grand Central Tech announced plans to work with the Milstein real estate family to transform a midtown Manhattan high-rise into a tech hub called Company. And startups remain an important part of the mix — in fact, Company is unveiling a list of 20 startups participating in this year’s […]

Consolidation in the micromobility space has arrived — in Brazil, at least. A few months after Y Combinator-backed Grin merged its electric scooter business with Brazil-based Ride, it’s now merging with Yellow, the bike-share startup based in Brazil that has also expressed its ambitions to get into electric scooters. If Yellow sounds familiar to you, […]

Roughly half of Instagram’s users 1 billion users now use Instagram Stories every day. That 500 million daily user count is up from 400 million in June 2018. 2 million advertiseres are now buying Stories ads across Facebook’s properties. CEO Mark Zuckerberg called Stories the last big game-changing feature from Facebook, but after concentrating on […]

It’s no secret that Google planned to pull life support from the consumer version of Google+, its failure of a social network, in April. Until now, though, we didn’t know the exact date. That date, Google announced today, is April 2. On that date, Google will start deleting all content, including Google+ pages, photos and […]

PayPal revenues missed, but strong growth from its recent iZettle and Hyperwallet acquisitions and booming business at Venmo point to a strong outlook for the payments giant. In all, PayPal saw revenues for the quarter of $4.23 billion against analysts’ estimates of $4.24 billion, according to data from Yahoo Finance. Earnings per share at the […]

In November, AT&T opened up about its plans for its forthcoming WarnerMedia streaming service, which aims to leverage the entertainment properties AT&T gained by way of its Time Warner acquisition last year. The company said the service will have three tiers — an entry-level, movie-focused service; a premium tier with original programming and blockbusters; and a […]

Microsoft announced its quarterly earnings today. For the most part, those earnings came in around Wall Streets expectations, without any major surprises and a total revenue of $32.5 billion. Given the company’s bets on cloud computing, what’s maybe most important, though, is that Azure recorded revenue growth of 76 percent. That’s the same growth the […]

Facebook managed to beat Wall Street’s estimates in its Q4 earnings amidst a constant beat down in the press. Facebook hit 2.32 billion monthly users, up 2.2 perecent from 2.27 billion last quarter, speeding up its growth rate. Facebook climbed to 1.52 billion daily active users from 1.49 billion last quarter for a 2 percent […]

Earlier this week, a bug was found in FaceTime that could let others listen in to your Apple device’s microphone (or, in specific cases, view video from the camera) without you accepting the FaceTime call. Apple disabled the Group FaceTime feature that enabled this bug server-side, thus preventing its future misuse while they worked on […]

Spin, the electric scooter company recently bought by Ford, still won’t be able to operate in San Francisco. Well, at least for now. This comes after Spin appealed the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s decision regarding electric scooter permits in the city. A neutral officer, James Doyle, has since denied Spin’s appeal. “The SFMTA is […]

In response to TechCrunch’s investigation of Facebook paying teens and adults to install a VPN that lets it analyze all their phone’s traffic, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) has sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg. It admonishes Facebook for not spelling out exactly what data the Facebook Research app was collecting or giving users adequate information […]

You may think that the worst you'll risk by buying a bargain-bin smart bulb or security camera will be a bit of extra trouble setting it up or a lack of settings. But it's not just while they're plugged in that these slapdash gadgets are a security risk — even from the garbage can, they can still compromise your network.

If you just tried to turn on your Xbox One and were met with nothing but a black screen: you’re not alone. A particularly bad outage in Xbox Live’s core services is causing the console to get stuck at boot. Microsoft is aware of the outage, and says they’ve “identified the cause.” We are aware […]

Turns out training a robotic arm to play Jenga is a surprisingly complex task. There are, so to speak, a lot of moving parts. Researchers at MIT are putting a modified ABB IRB 120 to work with the familiar tabletop game, utilizing a soft gripper, force-sensing wrist joint and external camera to design a bot […]

Rigetti Computing, one of the leading startups in the quantum computing space, today announced the public beta of its Quantum Cloud Services (QCS) platform. With this, developers can get access to Rigetti’s quantum processors, as well as all the classical computing resources necessary to build and test quantum algorithms on this hybrid platform. Beta users […]

It looks like Facebook is not the only one abusing Apple’s system for distributing employee-only apps to sidestep the App Store and collect extensive data on users. Google has been running an app called Screenwise Meter, which bears a strong resemblance to the app distributed by Facebook Research that has now been barred by Apple, […]

Free TV and movie streaming service Tubi is preparing to double down on content acquisitions this year, the company announced this morning. The service today offers over 12,000 movies and TV series, totaling 40,000 hours of content. All of this can be streamed for free as the content is paid for not via customer subscriptions, […]

Braving 20-degree weather, protesters crowded the steps of New York City Hall this morning with signs highlighting a “crumbling MTA” and rising tuition. Several held pro-union placards, while a man in a bright yellow warehouse vest claimed, “Amazon doesn’t let me pee.” This morning, New York’s City Council held a hearing examining Amazon’s proposed HQ2 […]

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. Apple bans Facebook’s Research app that paid users for data In the wake of TechCrunch’s investigation, Apple blocked Facebook’s Research VPN […]

A day after Amazon detailed plans to fund computer science classes in New York area high schools, in an effort to expand its tech pipeline for its new HQ2 location in Queens, the company this morning announced a second educational initiative that sees it teaming up with New York City and state colleges. Amazon says […]

Well that didn’t last long. In 2017, Foxconn announced the largest investment of a foreign company in the United States when it selected Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin for a new manufacturing facility. Buttressed by huge economic development grants from Wisconsin, an endorsement from President Trump, and Foxconn CEO Terry Gou’s vision of a maker America, the […]

Facebook could face fresh scrutiny in Europe following a TechCrunch report on its use of a VPN app to monitor people’s smartphone activity — including teenagers as young as 13. The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) told us it’s asked Facebook to provide more information on what data is collected via the market research program, codenamed ‘Project […]

It’s been just about a year since the relaunch of WeWork Labs, an accelerator-type program operating under the WeWork umbrella. Since then, it’s grown to 37 locations in 22 cities. And it’s truly international, operating in 12 countries, including Brazil, China, Germany and India. These Labs offices are often — but not always — housed […]

AT&T’s live TV streaming service, DirecTV Now, is not doing so well. Along with AT&T’s fourth quarter earnings released this morning, the company reported a sizable loss of 267,000 DirecTV Now subscribers. This left AT&T with fewer DirecTV Now customers at the end of the year (1.6 million), than it had in Q2 (1.8 million). The […]

In the wake of TechCrunch’s investigation yesterday, Apple blocked Facebook’s Research VPN app before the social network could voluntarily shut it down. The Research app asked users for root network access to all data passing through their phone in exchange for $20 per month. Apple tells TechCrunch that yesterday evening it revoked the Enterprise Certificate […]

If you’re interested in Meizu’s insane smartphone that doesn’t have any port or button, you can now pre-order it on Indiegogo for $1,299. Supply is limited as the company is only selling 100 units for now. The Meizu Zero looks like any modern phone at first sight. But if you look beyond the display, you’ll […]

If you are a web developer, you know how complex many of the traditional web content management systems have been. One of the big problems has been managing the underlying infrastructure for the system. Cosmic JS, a member of the Winter 2019 Y Combinator class, wants to simplify that by taking care of the infrastructure […]

India’s largest bank has secured an unprotected server that allowed anyone to access financial information on millions of its customers, like bank balances and recent transactions. The server, hosted in a regional Mumbai-based datacenter, stored two months of data from SBI Quick, a text message and call-based system used to request basic information about their bank […]

Sinemia’s ticket plans change about as often as box office receipts — but at least they appear to be a bit of good news for customers. The movie subscription service, which has made a name for itself in the wake of MoviePass’s on-going struggles, announced. this morning that it has dropped the pricing on its […]

Sibjeet Mahapatra Contributor Share on Twitter Sib Mahapatra first explored VR at Redfin. He is co-founder of Recess Labs and a Venture Fellow at Notation Capital, where he researches frontier tech including AR and VR. More posts by this contributor VR, presence and the case of the missing killer app The bull case for Snapchat […]

American Airlines and Apple Music have closed a deal that would give passengers access to the full library of Apple Music songs on AA flights. Apple Music’s more than 50 million songs will be available on any domestic American Airlines flight equipped with Viasat satellite wifi at no extra cost to customers, marking the first […]

Nine years after launching its online magazine, and three years after diversifying into the subscription box business, FabFitFun has raised $80 million in a growth round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from its previous investors Upfront Ventures and NEA. The Los Angeles-based company has steadily expanded its retail and lifestyle empire through […]

China’s Alibaba continues to see slowing expansion in the latest quarter, but the e-commerce giant’s effort to spur new growth from new arenas have started to bear fruit. The Hangzhou-based firm rang up $17 billion in revenue during the third quarter of 2019. That’s a 41 percent increase from the previous year but it also […]

One of 3D printing’s biggest selling points has always been the ability to create objects that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to build with more traditional methods. A new collaboration between Google and industrial 3D printer manufacturer Stratasys, however, finds the companies working to re-create the familiar. The latest addition to the Open Heritage […]

AT&T just released its earnings report for the fourth quarter of 2018. The company generated $47.99 billion in revenue with adjusted earnings per share of 86 cents that exclude special items. Wall Street analysts had expected earnings per share of 86 cents and $48.5 billion in revenue. In other words, earnings per share are right […]

Well, that was short-lived: Just 36 hours after Curve, the London fintech that lets you consolidate all of your bank cards into a single Curve card, re-instated support for Amex, the feature has once again been unceremoniously blocked by American Express. This time, however, the context feels very different from 2016 when the startup was […]

China will fast-track the issuance of commercial licenses for 5G as part of a national plan to boost consumer spending, said a notice published this week by the National Development and Reform Commission. The move appears to be multifaceted, for 5G plays a key role in China’s bid to lead the global technology race and one […]

Wannaby, a startup out of Belarus that is building “AR commerce” experiences, has launched a beta of its latest app, which aims to make it easier to find the perfect sneakers. Dubbed “Wanna Kicks,” the iOS app uses augmented reality to let you “try on” various pairs of sneakers. You simply choose a pair of […]

Sick of filling the limited space on your phone with apps, photos and videos? Sometime in the near future, your smartphone could ship with more than one-terabyte (1TB) of internal storage and run 10 times faster than a standard memory card. Samsung is best known for making smartphones but the company’s memory division — one of its […]

Brown, Cony and the gang are coming to a credit card near you in Japan. Line, the messaging app company behind the cute sticker characters, announced today that it is bringing its payment service to plastic through a tie-in with Visa. Line is Japan’s largest chat app with an estimated 50 million registered users. The cards […]

Telecom company Altice is about to close a significant investment in French startup Molotov — the two companies have entered into exclusive negotiations. While terms of the deal are undisclosed, Altice is investing a large sum of money and should end up with a majority stake in Molotov — it’s more like a fundraising round […]

Meet Terra, the latest product line from iRobot destined to be forever known as the “Roomba for lawns.” There are worse names, of course. After all, with the Roomba line, iRobot was able do what countless startups have tried and failed before and after — introduce a truly mainstream home robot. If the Massachusetts-based hardware […]

Pandora announced today that shareholders have approved its $3.5 billion acquisition by SiriusXM. After the transaction closes, several key Pandora executives will leave, including CEO Roger Lynch, general counsel Steve Bene, CFO Naveen Chopra, and chief human resources officer Kristen Robinson. SiriusXM CEO Jim Meyer will lead the combined company. Pandora and SiriusXM announced the […]

Pinterest, the nearly nine-year-old, San Francisco-based site known for the images and links that its users post about everything from wedding to beauty trends, has hired Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase as lead underwriters for an IPO that it’s planning to stage later this year. Reuters first reported the news. TechCrunch sources have since confirmed […]