Crunch Hype

Elon Musk has filed a motion to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed against him by the British cave rescuer who sued the billionaire entrepreneur for calling him a pedophile. Musk’s motion presents numerous reasons to dismiss the defamation lawsuit, all of which come back to a two main points: Twitter is “infamous for invective and […]

Carta, formerly known as eShares, has raised $80 million from Meritech and Tribe Capital.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is making some audacious promises again for the company’s network of electric fast chargers, known as Superchargers. This time, he’s aiming for 100 percent Tesla Supercharger coverage in Europe by next year. In response to a question on Twitter, Musk said Tesla’s Supercharger coverage will extend to 100 percent of Europe […]

Alexa wasn’t the only thing that crashed over Christmas due to an influx of new users. Apparently, Philips Hue has been having an outage, as well. A multi-day outage, in fact. The company confirmed on Wednesday that customers were experiencing issues creating new accounts, logging in and linking their account to third parties. It blamed […]

Instagram confirms that a bug this morning mistakenly rolled out a massive change to its feed that replaced the traditional scrolling with horizontal tap-to-advance, like with Stories. In October, TechCrunch reported Instagram was testing tap-to-advance for browsing through Explore posts. But many users woke up to a shock this morning when their familiar vertical swipe […]

Grove Collaborative, a four-year-old, San Francisco-based startup that sells household, personal care, baby, children’s and pet products, has been busy raising money in 2018, shows two new SEC filings that lists representatives from the company’s earlier investors, including Mayfield, Norwest Venture Partners and MHS Capital, as well as apparent new investor General Atlantic, represented by partner Catherine […]

Gfycat, a home for GIF-making tools and an online community, is rolling out a new way to create GIFs — it will now let you keep the sound on. With “Gfycat Sound,” as the feature is called, GIF makers will have the option to retain the audio from the video file they’re using to create […]

Epic Games had as good a year in 2018 as any company in tech. Fortnite became the world’s most popular game, growing the company’s valuation to $15 billion but it has helped the company pile up cash, too. Epic grossed a $3 billion profit for this year fuelled by the continued success of Fortnite, a […]

What the heck is “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch”? It’s probably not just a regular episode of the critically acclaimed science fiction anthology series. Netflix has been pretty cryptic about it, only announcing its existence last week, ahead of a December 28 release. Given the reported 5 hour, 12-minute runtime, “Bandersnatch” may be the choose-your-own-adventure episode that […]

Google has scrambled to remove third-party apps that led users to child porn sharing groups on WhatsApp in the wake of TechCrunch’s report about the problem last week. We contacted Google with the name of one these apps and evidence that it and others offered links to WhatsApp groups for sharing child exploitation imagery. Following […]

A popular smart security system maker has ignored warnings from security researchers that its flagship device has several serious vulnerabilities, including allowing anyone access to the company’s central store of customer-uploaded video recordings. The researchers at 0DayAllDay found that Guardzilla’s top-selling indoor wireless security system contains a set of hardcoded keys that can be easily […]

The Indian government is playing the role of festive party pooper for Walmart and Amazon after it announced new regulations that look set to impede the U.S. duo’s efforts to grow their businesses in India. Online commerce in the country is tipped to surpass $100 billion per year by 2022 up from $35 billion today […]

People in China have a host of reasons not to go outdoors these days. They may be too busy to leave their office, wary of air pollution or have chosen to live isolated lives. Among them is an expanding young consumer base who prefers to dwell in the virtual world of video games, animes and […]

Some of you out there may be lucky enough to have received over the holidays a fancy new robot vacuum. Turns out it's even more useful than you'd think: in addition to cleaning your home, it can scan its surroundings and produce a Doom level of your home! Just the right thing to ring in the new year: Hell on Earth.

Epic Games is having its own Christmas hangover. On Wednesday, a number of Fortnite players reported long queues that time out and problems logging in to Fortnite’s servers. The company is aware of the issue and tweeted that it’s investigating the cause behind the outage that some users are running into when they try to […]

SpaceX’s futuristic Starship interplanetary craft may embody the golden age of sci-fi in more ways than one: in addition to (theoretically) taking passengers from planet to planet, it may sport a shiny stainless steel skin that makes it look like the pulp covers of old. Founder and CEO Elon Musk teased the possibility in a […]

Cyber breaches have been a gigantic thorn in the global economy for years. But expect them to be even more rampant in the new year.

Hans Morris is a name to know in fintech, and as finance and tech sectors prepare for tougher time next year, he has some incisive thoughts to share about the kinds of companies that will succeed (or not) in a financial downturn. The managing partner of investment firm Nyca Partners, Morris also serves as the […]

A look at the U.S. companies that brought in the largest VC fundings of the year.

Across the globe, a clutch of companies from Oxford, England to Redwood City, Calif. are working to commercialize a new solar technology that could further boost the adoption of renewable energy generation. Earlier this year, Oxford PV, a startup working in tandem with Oxford University, received $3 million from the U.K. government to develop the technology, […]

A new app offers Apple Music subscribers a way to look back at their favorite music of the year and other streaming highlights, similar to Spotify’s annual “Wrapped” feature. The app, from developer NoiseHub, is simply called “Music Year in Review,” and its sole purpose is to offer Apple Music customers their own set of […]

With hundreds of millions of people home for the holidays, now is a better time than ever to spread good tidings and cheer, and — well, some much-needed security advice for all the family. Security sounds complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. Privacy is more important than ever. With an ever-changing and evolving landscape […]

Bitmain, Huobi, ConsenSys and Steemit are among the cryptocurrency startups to complete layoffs in the last month.

Amazon this morning said its Alexa devices were among the holiday season’s best-sellers, particularly the Echo and Echo Dot. But the influx of new users setting up their devices for the first time on Christmas Day appeared to be more than Alexa could handle. The service crashed briefly on Christmas, as thousands of new Alexa […]

Amazon had another record-breaking holiday season, the retailer announced this morning. The company says it added “tens of millions” of people who signed up for Prime memberships, both paid and on a trial basis. Its worldwide customers also shopped and ordered more items than ever before, including “millions more Amazon devices” compared with this time […]

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. The […]

Researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, while testing the “station keeping” functions of the glass knifefish, have created an augmented reality system that tricks the animal’s electric sensing organs in real time. The fish keeps itself hidden by moving inside of its various holes/homes and the researchers wanted to understand what kind of […]

Academic exams are a big deal in China, as they determine the kind of universities, high schools and elementary schools that students get into and, to some degree, the future that awaits them. Parents are thus willing to invest generously to help their children get ahead in school. One startup capitalizing on this is Yuanfudao, […]

Bluetooth? Whoops, forgot to charge them. Or whoops, they're trying to pair with my laptop, which is turned off and in my backpack. Dongle? Whoops, left it on my other pair of headphones at work.

The warning signs are flashing faster and more furiously now, and investors are increasingly urging their startups to take notice. With the Dow Jones Industrial Average enduring a Christmas Eve rout of historic proportions, and other indices entering bear market territory, the long-predicted end of the latest bull market is upon the technology industry. Stock […]

At the beginning of this year, I was using my iPhone to browse new titles on Amazon when I saw the cover of “How to Break Up With Your Phone” by Catherine Price. I downloaded it on Kindle because I genuinely wanted to reduce my smartphone use, but also because I thought it would be […]

If you thought passwords will soon be dead, think again. They’re here to stay — for now. Passwords are cumbersome and hard to remember — and just when you did, you’re told to change it again. And sometimes passwords can be guessed and are easily hackable. Nobody likes passwords but they’re a fact of life. […]

If you find passwords annoying, you might not like two-factor authentication much. But security experts say it’s one of the best ways to protect your online accounts. Simply put, two-factor authentication adds a second step in your usual log-in process. Once you enter your username and password, you’ll be prompted to enter a code sent […]

Assuming you have your strong passwords in place and your two-factor authentication set up, you think your accounts are now safe? Think again. There’s much more to be done. You might think your Social Security or bank account numbers are the most sensitive digits in your life. Nowadays, hackers can do far more damage with […]

So you want to browse the web securely and privately? Here’s a hard truth: it’s almost impossible. It’s not just your internet provider that knows which sites you visit, it’s also the government — and other governments! And when it’s not them, it’s social media sites, ad networks or apps tracking you across the web […]

Text messaging has been around since the dawn of cellular technology, and sparked its own unique language. But it’s time to put sending regular SMS messages out to pasture. If you have an iPhone, you’re already on your way. iPhones (as well as iPads and Macs) use iMessage to send messages between Apple devices. It’s […]

Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg obsessed over the wrong bit of history. Or else didn’t study his preferred slice of classical antiquity carefully enough, faced, as he now is, with an existential crisis of ‘fake news’ simultaneously undermining trust in his own empire and in democracy itself. A recent New Yorker profile — questioning whether the Facebook founder can fix […]

The good times kept on rolling this year for Salesforce with all of the requisite ingredients of a highly successful cloud company — the steady revenue growth, the expanding product set and the splashy acquisitions. The company also opened the doors of its shiny new headquarters, Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, a testament to its […]

‘Twas the night before Xmas, and all through the house, not a feature was stirring from the designer’s mouse . . . Not Twitter! Not Uber, Not Apple or Pinterest! On Facebook! On Snapchat! On Lyft or on Insta! . . . From the sidelines I ask you to flex your code’s might. Happy Xmas […]

As early and late-stage funding becomes more abundant, founders and their early VC backers need to get smarter about how to position their companies for a looming valley of death in-between.

Twas the last trading day before Christmas, and on the trading floor, Most stocks were falling, and then falling some more, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin all the banks had called, In hopes that full coffers were still in their vaults. Bruising #stock selloff continues, as Treasury sec #Mnuchin tries to calm jittery #markets https://t.co/Ejcurl74nV via […]

Tech companies have always branded themselves as the good guys. But 2018 was the year that the long-held belief that Silicon Valley is on the right side of progress and all things good was called into question by a critical mass. As startups grow bigger and richer, amassing more power and influence outside of the […]

Malta, the renewable energy storage project born in Alphabet’s moonshot factory X, is now on its own and flush with $26 million from a Series A funding round led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures . Concord New Energy Group and Alfa Laval also invested in the round. Project Malta launched last year in Alphabet’s X (formerly Google X) with […]

When founder Bobby Farahi met Shaudi “Shoddy” Lynn, it was at a rave in L.A. Farahi has said he was immediately drawn to the fashion sense of Lynn, who was a DJ at the time; she, meanwhile, might have appreciated the business acumen of Farahi, who had already sold a broadcast monitoring service called Multivision […]

North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, has been tracking Santa’s progress around the globe every Christmas Eve for more than 60 years. Even a government shutdown won’t prevent NORAD from completing its once-a-year mission. Now, General Motors is getting in on the annual tradition. On December 24, owners of the company’s Chevrolet -branded vehicles, […]

There are few things in this world more difficult than launching a successful startup. It takes talent, know-how, money and a hell of a lot of good timing and luck. And even with all of those magical components in place, the odds may still be against you. At TechCrunch, we take pride in covering the […]

Captiv8, a company offering tools for brands to manage influencer marketing campaigns, has released its 2018 Fraud Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report. The goal is to give marketers the data they need to spot fake followers — and thus, to separate the influencers with a real following from those who only offer the illusion of engagement. […]

Facebook isn't responsible for government decisions to clamp down on free expression. But the question remains: How can companies stop assisting authoritarian governments, inadvertently or otherwise?

My aunt and uncle lived up the hill from Martins Ferry, Ohio, high above the river. My uncle ran a used car lot — Snezek’s — and so it was understood that they had a little bit of money and a bigger house than the rest of the family in the Valley. We would drive […]