Crunch Hype

Microsoft today announced that it has acquired Citus Data, a company that focused on making PostgreSQL database faster and more scalable. Citus’ open source PostgreSQL extension essentially turns the application into a distributed database and while there has been a lot of hype around the NoSQL movement and document stores, relational database — and especially PostgreSQL […]

Putting political divisions and affiliations aside, the government partially shutting down for the third time over the last year is extremely worrisome, particularly when considering its impact on the nation’s cybersecurity priorities. Unlike the government, our nation’s enemies don’t ‘shut down.’ When our nation’s cyber centers are not actively monitoring and protecting our most valuable assets and critical infrastructure, threats magnify and vulnerabilities become further exposed.

AWS isn’t exactly known as an open-source powerhouse, but maybe change is in the air. Amazon’s cloud computing unit today announced the launch of Neo-AI, a new open-source project under the Apache Software License. The new tool takes some of the technologies that the company developed and used for its SageMaker Neo machine learning service and brings […]

What if instead of just accepting Uber rides, gig workers could pick from higher paying skilled tasks around town like stocking shelves, checking inventory, or driving a forklift at a local grocer? When they work quickly and accurately or learn new trades, they get to choose between more complex jobs. That’s the idea that’s racked […]

Google today announced that it has partnered with Sony Pictures Imageworks, Sony’s visual effects and animation studio, to launch OpenCue, an open source render manager. OpenCue doesn’t handle any of the actual rendering processes but it provides all the tools to break down those different steps and then schedule and manage the different rendering jobs across […]

Google today announced the launch of four new certifications and training programs for cloud developers and engineers: Professional Cloud Developer, Professional Cloud Network Engineer (beta) and Professional Cloud Security Engineer (beta), as well as a new G Suite certification. The G Suite certification stands out a bit because its cheaper ($75) and far less technical than its […]

Salesforce today dominates the world of CRM with its cloud-based, wide-ranging portfolio of software as a service. Now, a company founded by one of its alums thinks it can take it on with a more modern approach. Kustomer — an “omni-channel” customer support platform that can call in data from just about any other software and […]

Five small businesses are collateral damage after a well-funded startup failed to overcome the brutal economics of the central kitchen model.

SoundCloud’s Eric Wahlforss is stepping away from the music and podcast streaming platform he co-founded after more than a decade at the company, most recently in the chief product officer role. Wahlforss announced the decision to step back from day-to-day ops — and “transition into an advisory role” — in a post on social media, writing: “After […]

No one likes to think about death (least of all startup founders), but wills, trusts and estate planning are crucial for ensuring that your material assets get passed to whatever people or organizations you care about. Yet, few processes are more paper-driven than the legal process of getting your affairs in order. Finally, the estate […]

Astro, the company behind Luna Display and Astropad, is releasing a major software update that will drastically improve performances. According to the company’s own testing, you should expect as much as a 100 percent performance increase when it comes to latency and refresh rate. Luna Display lets you use your iPad as a second monitor […]

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 cuts 200 staff from its Project Titan autonomous car division Apple’s secretive efforts to develop a self-driving car — its […]

As a frequent podcast host/producer/editor, I found very few things to quibble with when I reviewed Rode Microphone’s Rodcaster Pro. There was, however, one very big issue: multitrack recording. For all of the great things you can do on the fly, the podcasting mixing board wasn’t great when it came to post-production. Regardless of how […]

Verily Life Sciences, the healthcare subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is expanding the investment and collaboration program — called Partner Space — that it launched in 2017 to work with startups. The Partner Space already houses somewhere between six and eight companies (of which only two are publicly disclosed). That number could almost double to […]

Subscriptions are booming on the app stores, and particularly subscription video apps thanks to the growing number of cord cutters who are choosing to stream their TV shows and movies, instead of paying for cable or satellite. In the U.S., the top 10 subscription video apps by revenue pulled in $1.27 billion in 2018 across […]

Inventive packaging is more crucial than ever when it come to launching a new brand into a world already clogged with every product imaginable. Think, for example, of the sugary energy drinks that began to appear on the scene roughly 20 years ago — Rockstar, Monster, and Red Bull — that are stuffed with so […]

In the future everything will be a screen. Glasses, hats, shoes, windows. You’ll turn on the faucet and bath in screens. Sure, most of us have, at best, a love-hate relationship with the things, but we’ll probably never be able to quit them. The Apex 2019 is Chinese smartphone maker Vivo’s latest bid to go […]

Postmates has made two new hires, both of which hail from Pinterest, in the form of Eric Edge and Andreas Lieber. Edge joins Postmates as the SVP of Brand & Communications while Lieber joins as SVP of business development and corporate development. Both come to Postmates from Pinterest where they served as Head of Global […]

Just this morning robotic process automation (RPA) firm, Blue Prism, announced enhancements to its platform. A little later the company, which went public on the London Stock Exchange in 2016, announced it was raising £100 million (approximately $130 million) by issuing new stock. The announcement comes after reporting significant losses in its most recent fiscal […]

The Samsung Galaxy S10 is slowly being revealed through unofficial means. Several leaks have revealed key details and the latest report is the most detailed yet. According to All About Samsung, the upcoming Samsung flagship will have tiny bezels, front-facing cameras that poke through the display, a USB-C port and a headphone jack. This report […]

When Verizon stealthily launched a new startup called Visible last year, it operated under a bring-your-own-device model — to sign up, you needed to already have an unlocked iPhone, and Visible would send you a new SIM card. Today, however, Visible is announcing that it’s partnering with Affirm and Apple to sell iPhones with 0 […]

Humio, a startup that provides a real-time log analysis service for on-premises and cloud infrastructures, today announced that it has raised a $9 million Series A round led by Accel. It previously raised its seed round from WestHill and Trifork. The company, which has offices in San Francisco, the U.K. and Denmark, tells me that […]

Blue Prism helped coin the term robotic process automation (RPA) when the company was founded back in 2001 to help companies understand the notion of automating mundane business processes. Today, it’s releasing updates to that platform including an updated marketplace for exchanging connectors to extend the main product, and in some cases, adding a layer of […]

A year ago, Facebook-owned WhatsApp officially introduced its standalone app aimed at small business customers. Today, the WhatsApp Business app has grown to reach 5 million business customers, the company says. And now it’s making the app easier to use on the desktop and the web by porting over several of the most popular features […]

Leveraging years of building out white-labeled fitness applications for the health and wellness spokesmodels made Instagram famous, wellness startup, Plankk, is now launching a digital app called The Plankk Studio where fans can take lessons from their favorite Instagram stars. The company spent years building apps for the Instagram set, putting up 37 white-labeled applications which contained […]

Apple’s secretive efforts to develop a self-driving car — its so-called ‘Project Titan’ — have taken a hard turn in 2019 after it emerged that the iPhone-maker has reassigned 200 employees previously involved in its development. That’s according to CNBC which, citing sources, reported that a portion of the 200 staff were moved to other […]

Tencent has finally come out of a prolonged freeze on game approvals as Beijing granted licenses to two of its mobile games this month. According to a notice published by China’s State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television on Thursday, Tencent is one of nearly 200 games assigned licenses in January. That’s big […]

Singapore’s digital fintech companies are attracting investor attention and dollars in 2019. Fresh from Singapore Life — a digital-only insurer — raising $33 million across two recently closed rounds, so Credit Culture, a digital loan specialist — has banked SG$40 million ($29.5 million) ahead of its imminent launch. Credit Culture has raised its capital from […]

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 Harley Davidson reveals more about its push into electric vehicles After days of intermittent blackouts at the order […]

Twitter is testing a new tag that will make it easier to parse who started a thread. The new feature, which is starting to pop up for some users, makes it easier to find posts from the original tweeter within a thread, but may also help curb (some types of) abuse on the platform, making […]

Microsoft’s Bing is down in China, according to users who took to social media beginning Wednesday afternoon to complain and express concerns. The Seattle-based behemoth has confirmed that its search engine is currently inaccessible in China and is “engaged to determine next steps,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch Thursday morning. Citing […]

It’s a dark day to work in media. On the heels of news that TechCrunch parent company Verizon Media Group (formerly Oath) would lay off roughly 800 workers, BuzzFeed has announced its own substantial staffing cuts. And though they were anticipated, Gannett also made substantial cuts to newsrooms around the US on Wednesday. In a memo […]

If your company uses a VPN and/or a mobile device management service to give you access to its intranet and internal web apps, then you know how annoying those are. AWS today launched a new product, Amazon WorkLink, that promises to make this process significantly easier. WorkLink is a fully managed service that, for $5 […]

Sunil Nagaraj, who’d studied computer science as an undergrad at UNC Chapel Hill, landed two pretty nice gigs after deciding to pursue an MBA at Harvard Business School. First, he founded a venture-backed company called Triangulate — though he recognized when it was time to shut it down two years later. He then wound up […]

Nineteen startups presented to investors at Alchemist's 20th demo day.

The freezing waters underneath Antarctic ice shelves and the underside of the ice itself are of great interest to scientists... but who wants to go down there? Leave it to the robots. They won't complain! And indeed, a pair of autonomous subs have been nosing around the ice for a full year now, producing data unlike any other expedition ever has.

Sequoia India is going deep into early-stage investing after it announced an accelerator program, Surge, which is focused on fledging startups in India and Southeast Asia, the two regions that it covers. It’s been nearly six months since Sequoia India closed its newest $695 million fund — its fifth since its establishment 12 years ago […]

In 2019, we still don’t really know what to do about fake news. With nothing to disincentivize viral hyperpartisan headlines and other exercises in confirmation bias, online misinformation seems to run as rampant as ever. It’s a tricky problem, particularly because it’s one that requires the readers most drawn to too outrageous to be true […]

After spending eight months in an immigration facility in the United States, Abimael Hernandez made the tough decision to return to Mexico.

Oracle says the racial discrimination lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs is “meritless.” This comes after Oracle declined yesterday to comment on the OFCCP’s filing that alleges Oracle withheld $400 million in wages from underrepresented employees. “This meritless lawsuit is based on false allegations and a seriously flawed […]

The Verizon division formerly known as Oath is laying off 7 percent of its workforce, which amounts to roughly 800 employees. Oath was created after Verizon acquired AOL, followed by Yahoo, bringing them together two years ago as a combined digital media entity with a new name. However, it seems that the organization hasn’t performed […]

I wanted to love the new Aibo. Really, I did. But once I actually spent some time with it, it turned out that it was a $3,000 dog with only a handful of tricks. It seems the days of buying true robot dog companionship are still a long ways away. A few months after bringing […]

Facebook today announced changes to the way it handles the removal of content from Facebook Pages that’s in violation of the social network’s Community Standards, as well as when the Page has posted items that are rated false by a third-party fact-checking service. It says it will also make it harder for those whose Pages […]

News is exhausting. Mexican murders are sky-high. Ebola is ravaging the eastern Congo. China is erasing an entire culture of Islam from its Western hinterlands. That news — negative and intense though it is — can easily occlude the many positive, longer term stories that are fundamental drivers of the world. Africa is reaching new […]

The rise and fall of Theranos, the blood-testing company whose technology never worked despite its promises otherwise, has already been covered extensively. Most notably, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who broke open the story of Theranos’s secrets and lies, John Carreyrou, went on to author a best-selling book about the saga in “Bad Blood.” Still, […]

When we think of the AI platforms that are shaping how we use voice to interact with phones, home devices and other services, we tend to think of Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google and Microsoft’s Cortana. But there are other players that may prove to have a compelling value proposition of their own. Sherpa.ai, a […]

NEXT plans to use the investment to fill 150 positions in 2019, as well as complete the launch Relay, a new service targeting the "systemic congestion" at shipping ports.

A trove of more than 24 million financial and banking documents, representing tens of thousands of loans and mortgages from some of the biggest banks in the U.S., has been found online after a server security lapse. The server, running an Elasticsearch database, had more than a decade’s worth of data, containing loan and mortgage […]

It was, of course, just a matter of time before Amazon deployed delivery robots. The company has had a robotics wing for a number of years now, though much of its public-facing side has been focused on warehouse logistics. Today, however, it took the wraps off Scout. The six-wheeled robot looks a fair bit like […]

Travis CI, the popular Berlin-based open source continuous integration service, has been acquired by Idera, a company that offers a number of SQL database management and administration tools for both on-premises and cloud applications. The move comes at a time where other continuous integration services, including the likes of Circle CI, seem to be taking […]