Crunch Hype

Have a stationary lifestyle and a penchant for lasagna left your cat overweight and sluggish? Sure, kicking dogs off the sides of tables and mailing cats to Abu Dhabi are decent legwork, but what about the full-body workout your furry friend deserves? That, dear reader, is where The Little Cat comes in. This $1,800 hamster […]

Do you frequently record super-slow-motion 8K video? Do you want to back up your entire computer to your coin pocket? Then these measly 512-gigabyte SD cards probably aren’t cutting it. Fortunately, Lexar has a 1-terabyte card for you. Only $500! Terabyte cards have been promised for years — SanDisk said it was going to, but […]

AWS launched DocumentDB today, a new database offering that is compatible with the MongoDB API. The company describes DocumentDB as a “fast, scalable, and highly available document database that is designed to be compatible with your existing MongoDB applications and tools.” In effect, it’s a hosted drop-in replacement for MongoDB that doesn’t use any MongoDB […]

A bug that anyone can easily exploit in Google makes it easy to kick out manipulated search results that look entirely real. The search manipulation bug was documented by Wietze Beukema, a London-based security specialist, who warned that a malicious user could use this bug to generate misinformation. This is done by splicing together values […]

Seed deal activity declined again in 2018, marking the fourth consecutive year in which deal count shrank and deal sizes swelled.

Twitter is already working with the NBA to stream video of pre-game warm-ups, in-game and post-game highlights and post-game behind-the-scenes content. Now, the company will for the first time ever stream live NBA action — with a twist. In partnership with the NBA, Twitter will introduce an alternate camera angle view during the second half […]

Two and a half years after doing pushups onstage at Disrupt New York, Bay Area-based sports health company Halo Neuroscience is back with the second generation of its brain stimulating headphones. The biggest update to the spiky wearable this time around is a newfound focus on the headphone aspect of the product. The Halo Sport […]

The scooter "unicorn" is said to be fundraising on a flat pre-money valuation of $2 billion.

Handheld retro gaming machines come and go, but few go so simply and effectively to the point as My Arcade's Retro Champ. You stick in your NES cartridge, hit the power button, and assuming you blew on it beforehand, it powers up. This one sets itself apart with a big ol' screen, Famicom compatibility, and a whopping 35-hour battery life.

The Shield TV, Nvidia’s Android TV streaming box, is still getting regular updates, but the Shield Tablet, which launched in 2014, was last refreshed in 2015 and officially discontinued last year, wasn’t quite the same success. As Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during a small press gathering at CES in Las Vegas today, the company […]

It’s now 18 days since the U.S. government unceremoniously shut down because Congress couldn’t agree on a bill to fund a quarter of all federal departments — including paying their employees. But federal workers are starting to feel the pinch after not getting paid for two weeks, and this will have a knock-on effect to […]

Instagram is swaying the balance toward simplicity but away from originality. It’s adding the ability to publish feed posts to different accounts you control at the same time by toggling them on within the composer screen. An Instagram spokesperson confirms this option is becoming available to all iOS users, telling TechCrunch, “We are rolling out […]

As Twitter continues to look for ways to monetize its platform beyond basic advertising, it is building more tools for businesses that turn Twitter into more of a utility that helps them do their jobs. Today at CES, Twitter said it’s going to make it easier for publishers to better understand what sort of content is […]

A new drone from the NIMBUS group at the University of Nebraska can fall out of a plane, parachute down, fly to a certain place, dig a hole, hide sensors inside it and then fly away like some crazy wasp. Robots are weird. The goal of the project is to allow drones to place sensors […]

This light makes the smart home even more accessible. Installed as any other ceiling downlight, the June AI downlight features Amazon Alexa through integrated JBL speakers. There’s a light in there, too. The idea is great: make the smart home invisible. Instead of having an Amazon Echo sitting on a table, this device sits in […]

Conventional wisdom would suggest that in 2019, the public cloud dominates and enterprise data centers are becoming an anachronism of a bygone era, but new data from Synergy Research finds that the enterprise data center market had a growth spurt last year. In fact, Synergy reported that overall spending in enterprise infrastructure, which includes elements […]

At CES, the Chinese tech giant Baidu today announced OpenEdge, its open-source edge computing platform. At its core, OpenEdge is the local package component of Baidu’s existing Intelligent Edge (BIE) commercial offering and obviously plays well with that service’s components for managing edge nodes and apps. Because this is obviously a developer announcement, I’m not […]

Most of the time, commercial and personal drones are not allowed to fly over groups of people. For safety, obviously. Indemnis’ drone parachute changes that. The company’s product was just certified to allow operators to legally fly drones over small groups of people. This is the first time such a device received the certification. Indemnis […]

We will be holding a small event during CES in Las Vegas and we want to see you! We’re looking to meet some cool hardware and crypto startups, so the good folks at Work In Progress have opened up their space to us and 200 of you all to hold a meetup and pitch-off. We’ll […]

Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos are to divorce after 25 years of marriage. The Amazon founder and his award-winning novelist wife announced the news in a joint post on social media, writing they had made the decision to divorce after a trial separation and now intend to “continue our shared lives as friends”. pic.twitter.com/Gb10BDb0x0 — Jeff […]

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 is the new crapware Well Facebook, you did it again. Fresh off its latest privacy scandal, the troubled social media […]

Square today announced the launch of its in-app payments SDK that allows developers to build Square-powered payments right into their mobile apps. While Square remains best known for its offline payments solutions that grace virtually ever independent coffee shop and quirky corner store, the company has long offered APIs for taking online payments on the […]

Amazon has hired Disney SVP Kyle Laughlin to head its Alexa Gadgets division, TechCrunch has learned. Laughlin spent eight years at Disney, most recently as the SVP and General Manager of Games, Apps and Connected Experience at the entertainment giant’s Consumer Products and Interactive Media division. According to his LinkedIn profile, the role found Laughlin […]

Collaboration tools tend to be geared towards workers who are sitting at a desk for much of the day, but there are plenty of shift workers, also known as first line workers, who rarely use a computer, but still need to communicate with one another and management. Microsoft released several new features today aimed at […]

Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Elections, has been fined £15,000 in a UK court after pleading guilty to failing to comply with an enforcement notice issued by the national data protection watchdog, the Guardian reports. While the fine itself is a small and rather symbolic one, given the disgraced political analytics firm went into administration last […]

Looks like August’s big news for the show wasn’t doorbell, after all. Rather, the smart lock maker announced this morning that it will be bringing its technology to three new locks from Emtek. Like August, Emtek is a part of the Swedish conglomerate Assa Abloy. The implementation of the technology will be similar to August’s […]

Last year, four of the largest U.S. cell carriers were caught selling and sending real-time location data of their customers to shady companies that sold it on to big spenders, who would use the data to track anyone “within seconds” for whatever reason they wanted. At first, a little-known company LocationSmart was obtaining (and leaking) […]

Thailand has joined Japan in regulating crypto exchanges after it issued its first licenses to four applicants. The four that were approved as licensed brokers and dealers of cryptocurrencies in the country are Bx, Bitkub, Coins and Satang Pro. One other exchange — Coin Asset — is under extended review after replacing its management team in a […]

Few outside of the food service industry know about Olo a 13.5-year-old, New York-based mobile and online ordering platform for 250 restaurant chains, from Applebee’s to Cheesecake Factory, Chipotle to Denny’s, and Jamba Juice to Chili’s. Tiger Global has been tracking the company’s growth, however. In fact, in a new secondary transaction, Tiger just snapped […]

Well, that didn’t take long. We’re less than ten days into 2019 and already Vietnam is aiming threats at Facebook after it violating its draconian cybersecurity law which came into force on January 1. The U.S. social network stands accused of allowing users in Vietnam to post “slanderous content, anti-government sentiment and libel and defamation […]

A lot of people that will say that traditional retail is dying. They’ll point to the rising prominence of e-commerce, which accounts for under 10% of total retail in the U.S. and a whopping 15% or more of total retail in China, as diminishing opportunities for traditional retail. But the reality is that, thanks to […]

Welcome to 2019 where we learn Facebook is the new crapware. Sorry #DeleteFacebook, you never stood a chance. Yesterday Bloomberg reported that the scandal-beset social media behemoth has inked an unknown number of agreements with Android smartphone makers, mobile carriers and OSes around the world to not only pre-load Facebook’s eponymous app on hardware but render […]

LinkedIn’s China site looks and functions just like LinkedIn everywhere else, except now it asks users in the country to verify their identities through phone numbers. The American company is requiring both new and existing users with a Chinese IP address to link mobile phone numbers to their accounts, TechCrunch noticed this week. LinkedIn had […]

An intriguing new startup is out from under the radar in Southeast Asia after BasisAI, a Singapore-based company, revealed itself this week. The startup disclosed a seed investment from two prestigious investors in the region and some impressive credentials to back it up. Started by twin brothers Linus and Silvanus Lee and Liu Feng-Yuan — all Singapore […]

Baidu made several big announcements about Apollo, its open-source autonomous vehicle technology platform, today at CES. The first is the launch of Apollo Enterprise for vehicles that will be put into mass production. The company claims that Apollo is already used by 130 partners around the world. One of its newest partners, Chinese electric vehicle […]

Southeast Asian ride-hailing challenger Go-Jek has expanded into three new markets as it bids to expand beyond its native Indonesia, but it is having major issues getting into a fourth. The company — which rivals Grab, is valued at over $6 billion and is backed by the likes of Google and Tencent — this week […]

Meituan Dianping, China’s largest on-demand food delivery company, announced today at CES that it has signed three new major partners for the development of its autonomous delivery open platform. They are Nvidia, Italian automotive design company Icona, and French automotive supplier Valeo. This is the first time Meituan Dianping, which went public four months ago […]

Matrix India, one of India’s highest-profile tech VCs, is loading up for new deals after it announced a new $300 million fund for early stage investments. This is the third fund for the Indian firm, which is associated with U.S-based Matrix Partners. Matrix India has backed over 60 startups to date, including Uber rival Ola, ambitious medical […]

Depending on your portable power needs and propensity for lower-back pain, the Omni Ultimate is either a godsend or something wholly ridiculous. The new power pack from L.A.-based Omnicharge has certainly charged up its fans, however, having raised north of $1 million on Indiegogo — nearly 2,000 percent of its initial goal. The Ultimate appears […]

People have been talking about foldable smartphones for years, but it’s finally happening. Chinese company Royole was showing off the FlexPai at CES in Las Vegas, and we got to play with it for a few minutes. It’s hard to say if it’s a phone or a tablet as you can basically use it as […]

Like many small companies at CES, most of Nura’s time this week will be spent in meetings behind closed doors. Among other things, the Australian startup seems confident that it will be in a lot more stores by the time it releases its second product in May of this year. Distribution for the Nuraphones was […]

If you’re tired of firing up Photoshop for lightweight image editing tasks, this little tool is good news for you. Called Remove.bg, it can clear out the background of an image in seconds, no lassoing or any other editing hassle required. Because it uses AI trained on images of people, Remove.bg only works on photos […]

At Amazon’s event in September, the company announced the Echo Auto, an aftermarket product designed to bring Alexa to cars. But the device has remained in pre-order status, even as other products also unveiled at the same event — like the Fire TV Recast, AmazonBasics microwave and various Echo devices for the home — went […]

Here’s a quick tidbit buried beneath today’s deluge of Google Assistant news (not to mention the bizarre waking nightmare that is the CES Small World ride). The company announced today that the smart assistant will be accessible on more Android phone lock screens. The feature was first announced back at Google’s hardware event in October, […]

Bowery Valuation, a New York-based company that we told you about last year, has raised $12 million in Series A funding for its tech-enabled real estate appraisal platform. The 3.5-year-old company raised the capital from Corigin Ventures, Camber Creek, Navitas Capital, Fika Ventures and Builders. Bowery caught our attention initially because, like a lot of […]

Facebook has confirmed it has removed the pages and profiles of a far-right political activist in the U.K. after concerns were raised in parliament about aggressive intimidation of politicians and journalists trying to go about their business in and around Westminster. PayPal has also closed an account that was being used to solicit donations for […]

The road to consumer robots is littered with the remains of failed startups. Jibo and Kuri mark two recent examples of just how hard it is bringing such a device to market. In fact, with the exception of the single-minded Roomba line, you’d be hard-pressed to name a product that has truly hit mainstream acceptance. […]

Early last year, LinkedIn co-founder and prolific venture capital investor Reid Hoffman called Chris Urmson “the Henry Ford of autonomous vehicles (AV).” The vote of confidence and big check from Hoffman, coupled with a team of deeply knowledgable AV entrepreneurs, has catapulted his company, Aurora Innovation, squarely into “unicorn” territory. Aurora, the developer of a full-stack […]

CES 2019 is here and there has been a lot of technology announced at the show. From the latest autonomous vehicle technology to the coolest personal gadgets, here’s a roundup of the best from the show so far. Autos I used VR in a car going 90 mph and didn’t get sick The 2019 Mercedes […]

We will be holding a small event during CES in Las Vegas and we want to see you! We’re looking to meet some cool hardware and crypto startups, so the good folks at Work In Progress have opened up their space to us and 200 of you all to hold a meetup and pitch-off. We’ll […]