Crunch Hype

Cloudera and Hortonworks, two of the biggest players in the Hadoop big data space, today announced that they have finalized their all-stock merger. The new company will use the Cloudera brand and will continue to trade under the CLDR symbol on the New York Stock Exchange. “Today, we start an exciting new chapter for Cloudera […]

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. Magic Leap and other AR startups have a rough 2019 ahead of them 2018 was supposed to be the year where […]

The NFL is giving voice assistants a go. Earlier this year, the organization tested the waters with the launch of a flash briefing called “NFL in :60,” but today the company is debuting its first standalone voice-enabled app. The new Alexa skill, “A Rookie’s Guide to the NFL,” is designed to serve as a companion that […]

Apple stock was down more than 9 percent overnight and continued the downward trend in trading this morning. In fact, the company’s stock price is down a total of 38 percent since October. This, after the company halted trading yesterday afternoon to provide lower guidance for upcoming earnings. As the iPhone upgrade market softened, it was […]

This year’s CES is already shaping up to be another big show for smart home devices, with the Amazon Alexa/Google Assistant showdown in the center ring. GE bought into the Alexa ecosystem fairly early on and got on-board with Google Assistant more recently. At the Pixel 3 event back in October, the company announced that […]

Netflix is giving viewers a look behind the scenes at the making of its first interactive story aimed at adults, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. In a featurette published today, the streaming service highlights the efforts that went into making this “choose-your-own-adventure”-style film, which tells the story of a young programmer who begins to question reality while […]

LG announcing all — or, at least, most — of its launches ahead of CES has become something of a time honored tradition. That’s one way to get noticed. This first week of the year tends to be among the slowest, and the same can’t be said for next, when we’ll be in the belly […]

While Facebook continues to repair its image with consumers disenchanted with the social network’s role in disseminating misleading or false information and mishandling their personal data, it’s ironically been finding some traction for its enterprise-focused service, Workplace. Today, the company announced that it has added another huge company to its books today: Nestle, the coffee, chocolate […]

Since the advent of bluetooth earbuds, charging case have been utilitarian, at best. Understandable. I suspect few, if any, purchase the things based on how their cases look. For many of us, however, headphones are the one piece of tech aside from a smartphone (and, perhaps, wearable) we never leave the house without. When they’re […]

Wear and tear is a major issue in the realm of electric scooters, resulting in a short lifespan of individual scooters and poor unit economics. At the Consumer Electronics Show today, Segway -Ninebot unveiled the Model Max scooter that is designed to help services like Bird and Lime, for example, reduce their respective operating and […]

Social media has become a primary conduit for getting the word out, in some cases proving to be an even stronger force for publicity than more traditional media outlets and paid advertising, and so today, a company that has grown its business around public relations services has acquired a social media management company to make […]

A one-year-old Chinese startup called Luckin is busy waging war against Starbucks as the new year unfolds. At an event on Thursday, Luckin announced that it aims to be the largest coffee chain in China by number of cups sold and outlets by 2019. Caffeinated drinks are taking off in the tea-drinking nation. Average coffee […]

CarDekho, an online marketplace for car sales in India, has pulled in a new $110 million Series C funding round from a clutch of existing investors to push deeper into financial services and insurance. Sequoia India, Hillhouse and Alphabet’s CapitalG led the round which also saw participation from Axis Bank, one of CarDekho’s financing partners. […]

Chinese internet giant Tencent just lost a leading artificial intelligence figure. Zhang Tong, who previously worked at Yahoo, IBM and Baidu, has stepped down after directing Tencent’s AI Lab for nearly two years. The scientist will return to academia and continue research in the AI field, Tencent confirmed with TechCrunch on Thursday, adding that it […]

It’s not Lunar New Year yet, but there is something new on the moon. In a major milestone for space exploration, China announced that its lunar program has successfully soft-landed a probe on the far side of the moon, making it the first country to do so. The historic landing was reported by Xinhua, China’s […]

Vengo, a six-year-old, Bethpage, New York-based startup that makes touchscreen vending machines for a wide variety of uses and clients, has raised $7 million in new equity funding, shows a new SEC filing. That roughly doubles the amount of money the company has raised over the years, including from such notable investors as Brad Feld, […]

Global investor Lightspeed is starting 2019 with its largest-ever fund for China, where it has backed a number of new internet challengers. The firm announced this week that its fourth China fund has closed with a total capital commitment of $560 million. The firm had a massive 2018, with no fewer than five of its portfolio holding IPOs […]

The Senate has officially confirmed the incoming FCC commissioners, Brendan Carr and Geoffrey Starks have been officially confirmed by the Senate for their five-year terms. This completes the five-seat commission, which is required to be balanced between the two parties — today's additions bring it to three Republicans and two Democrats.

Very rarely does an early technology garner such an air of inevitability like AR has in the past few years. 2018 was supposed to be a year where the foundational tech for augmented reality was built out a bit and the industry took a couple big leaps. Things started off well-enough, but momentum really doesn’t […]

Apple had some bad news tonight. It was so bad, in fact, that it had to halt trading for a time while posting a grim report that its numbers would be lower than it had forecast at the last quarterly earnings report in November. Apple blamed faltering sales in Asia, particularly in China, for the adjustment, […]

Amazon Alexa had a good year as a developer platform – at least in terms of the number of voice apps being built for Alexa, if not yet the monetization of those apps. According to new data published today by Voicebot, the number of Amazon Alexa skills in the U.S. more than doubled over 2018, […]

As one Congress ends and another begins, many are looking forward to a rebalancing of power — especially in the House of Representatives, which Democrats handily retook in November. But FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is more pleased with what the House failed to do — namely, roll back his repeal of net neutrality rules. To […]

Hackers have hijacked thousands of exposed Chromecast streaming devices to warn users of the latest security flaw to affect the device. But other security researchers say that the bug — if left unfixed — could be used for more disruptive attacks. The culprits, known as Hacker Giraffe and J3ws3r, have become the latest person to figure […]

Apple CEO Tim Cook issued a letter today, revising guidance for the company’s Q1 fiscal results. Per the letter, revenue has been shifted from an initial projection of between $89 billion and $93 billion to $84 billion. The note highlights a number of reasons for dropping the number, including, perhaps most notably, lower than expected results […]

2019 promises to be a great year in games. Innovation and competition will elevate the industry’s offerings and drive more inclusivity among a broader range of audiences.

Atlas Venture, the Cambridge, Mass.-based early-stage, biotech-focused venture firm, has for the first time raised an opportunity fund designed to help it support its most promising, maturing portfolio companies. The $250 million fund, announced by the firm this morning, is pretty well-timed, as these things go. Though the public markets have bounced back a bit […]

Twitch superstar Tyler “Ninja” Blevins has finally settled the debate over just how much he earned in 2018. CNN reports that the gaming phenom pulled in close to $10 million last year, a little tidbit that he revealed to CNN during his press campaign on New Year’s Eve in New York City. (He also tried […]

It’s on like Donkey Kong! We’ll be seeing you next week, on January 9, 2019 at 6:00 PM, where we’ll mingle and run a full TC pitch-off with a bunch of great hardware companies. I’ve added 40 extra tickets, so hurry! The event will be held at Work In Progress, 317 South 6th Street. Special […]

Netflix has issued a warning to its customers thanks to a meme challenge that has gone viral in which people are choosing to put blindfolds on and navigate the world around them just like the characters in the horror movie “Bird Box.” Let the hilarity and the hospital visits begin. For those who spent the […]

The New Horizons probe has just sent back its first real shots of Ultima Thule, a 21-mile-long rock or planetesimal deep in the reaches of the solar system — and now the most distant object ever visited up close by mankind. The principal investigator of the mission, Alan Stern, called the accomplishment "a technical success beyond anything ever attempted before in spaceflight."

Mary Meeker's Bond will be the first >$1 billion fund led by a woman.

Netflix has officially confirmed the hiring of its new Chief Financial Officer Spencer Neumann, formerly CFO at Activision Blizzard. The announcement directly follows reports from Reuters and The Wall Street Journal, which said Netflix had poached Neumann from Activision and would start him in his new position this year. CNBC on Wednesday reported Neumann had been fired from Activision two days […]

Just in time for the new year, a report from Net Marketshare puts Windows 10 in the top spot for desktop operating systems. It’s the first time Microsoft’s OS took the top spot since hitting the market three and a half years ago. At 39.22 percent of the market, Windows 10’s rise isn’t an overnight […]

USV co-founder Fred Wilson expect U.S. venture capitalists will "take a more cautious stance in 2019."

Thunderbird, Mozilla’s desktop email client, doesn’t have anywhere near the amount of mindshare of the organization’s Firefox browser, yet even in this age of web-based email services, it still has a sizable user community. For 2019, those users can look forward to a faster and more beautiful application, Thunderbird community manager Ryan Sipes announced today. […]

Shine, one of the many apps capitalizing on the growing self-care trend, has now brought to Android devices its app used by 3 million people. Originally launched as a simple messaging bot that doled out life advice and motivation, Shine has grown over the years to become a larger self-help platform aimed largely at the […]

The aerospace industry took flight with ambitious civilian and military projects over the course of 2018, and private investors took notice. Rockets are flying to the far side of the moon. Entrepreneurs are creating new propulsion technologies to take rockets deeper into space and to make flying on Earth more electric. Finally, plans are afoot from […]

Hackers are using a decade-old flaw to target and hijack dormant Twitter accounts to spread terrorist propaganda, TechCrunch has learned. Many of the affected Twitter accounts appeared to be hijacked in recent days or weeks — some longer — after years of inactivity. A sudden shift in tone or the language used in tweets often […]

Tesla is starting out 2019 in the red following news it missed Wall Street’s delivery estimates. The company said in a letter to investors that it delivered 90,700 vehicles during the fourth quarter. That’s a bit shy of what analysts expected. This, in part, caused the company’s stock to open nearly 8 percent down on […]

The Roku Channel — Roku’s home to free, ad-supported content like movies, TV, sports and news — is expanding to include subscriptions. Essentially Roku’s own take on Amazon’s Prime Video Channels, users can now opt to add some 25 premium video subscriptions within the Roku Channel, centralizing their access to streaming services in one destination […]

Google has won U.S. regulatory approval to go ahead with a radar-based motion sensor that could make touchscreens look obsolete in the coming years. Known as the Soli Project, the initiative began in 2015 inside Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects unit, a group responsible for turning the giant’s cutting-edge ideas into products. We’ve seen a […]

If you’ve conquered China, then India — the world’s second-largest country based on population — is the obvious next port of call, and that’s exactly what has happened in the world of consumer apps. Following the lead of Chinese smartphone makers like Xiaomi and Oppo, which have dominated mobile sales in India for some time, […]

Over the last few years, millions of Chinese workers managed to earn extra money by being ride-hailing drivers. Many picked the gig because of its flexible schedule. For those who could not otherwise afford to own a car in China’s pricy metropolises, driving around is also a status symbol, even if they are paying off […]

After a limited rollout, Go-Jek said today that it will extend its ride-hailing service to all of Singapore tomorrow while continuing its beta phase. The Indonesian-based company began offering rides in Singapore at the end of November, but only for passengers riding to and from certain areas. It introduced dynamic pricing there, which increases prices […]

The Federal Communications Commission said on Monday that it will need to suspend most of its operations by the middle of Thursday if the partial government shutdown continues. The FCC will continue “work required for the protection of life and property,” as well as work related to spectrum auctions, since those are funded by the […]

Jesse Lawrence Contributor Jesse Lawrence has been in media and tech for 20 years. Prior to TicketIQ, he worked at MediaMath and IAC. He started his career as a writer. More posts by this contributor The Golden Knights, live gambling and the future of live sports attendance After years of chasing brokers and bots, ‘slow […]

Depending on how paranoid you are, this research from Stanford and Google will be either terrifying or fascinating. A machine learning agent intended to transform aerial images into street maps and back was found to be cheating by hiding information it would need later in "a nearly imperceptible, high-frequency signal." Clever girl!

Happy New Year! The folks over at Epic Games have a special treat in store for players hopping on Fortnite today. In celebration of New Year’s Eve all around the world, Fortnite is having an in-game live event where a massive, dropping disco ball descends on the map each hour, on the hour. The virtual […]

This was the year Amazon went all-in on the Alexa. September saw the announcement of a new Echo Dot, Show and Plus, a subwoofer, an audio input device, an auto dongle and an amplifier. That would have been plenty, but the company also started dipping its toes into the other side of things. 2018 also […]

Some Tesla employees will ring in the New Year on a sales floor this year as the automaker tries to liquidate its inventory of Model 3 sedans — and even its more expensive Model S and Model X vehicles — before the federal tax credit for EVs is cut in half. In a list of updated […]