Crunch Hype

It’s the end of an era. Earlier this month, Tumblr announced that it would delete all adult content from its platform on December 17. That day, friends, is today. The blogging platform has been furiously flagging posts as explicit since announcing the ban on December 3. Starting today, all of those flagged posts will be […]

France’s Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire held a press conference earlier today to announce that France will tax big tech companies starting on January 1st, 2019. This has been a long-rumored tax reform, and it looks like France is changing the scope of the new tax. After a couple of years of negotiations at the […]

If you are a mother who has taken a break from full-time employment to raise kids, you may have also experienced the challenge that is jumping back into the working world after your break. You may find you need more time flexibility; you have been out of the job market for years and so your […]

Fintech startup N26 recently launched in the U.K. with a single product offering. You could sign up to a free account that gives you free payments around the world, but no insurance and no free withdrawals in foreign currencies. The company just added a second tier to its lineup in the U.K. And N26 is […]

RightHand Robotics announced a $23 million Series B this week. That brings the pick and place robotic arm manufacturer’s total funding up to around $34 million, including last year’s $8 million Series A. The robotics startup has impressed investors with the dexterity and speed of its robotic picking system, having recruited some big VC names […]

Late last week, onlookers captured video and images of a Kiwi delivery robot moments after catching fire on the U.C. Berkeley campus. The startup has been piloting the robots on the University campus for around two years now (we profiled them back in May), largely without incident, but this is no doubt not how it […]

Intel’s loss, it seems, is North’s game. As first noted by The Verge, the startup has picked up the “technology portfolio” behind Vaunt, the AR glasses shuttered by the chipmaker in April this year after a couple of glowing previews. North (nee Thalmic Labs) debuted its own take on the category around six months after […]

Just when you didn’t think there could be any more drama over the Pentagon’s decade-long, $10 billion JEDI contract RFP, the plot thickened again last week when Amazon Web Services (AWS) joined the U.S. government as a defendant in Oracle’s lawsuit over the Pentagon’s handling of the contract RFP process. Earlier this month, Oracle filed […]

I’ve been living for the past few years in a limbo between journalist and entrepreneur, trying to build startups the way I saw them being built on stage at Disrupt and discovering that my skill and will to win are no match against the world. That’s fine. These days I’ll take it. But for a […]

B-Social, a London fintech that currently offers a ‘social finance’ app and beta debit Mastercard, has raised £3.2 million in Seed round funding from undisclosed high-net-worth individuals. However, the fundraise is just the first step in a journey in which B-Social want to eventually become a fully licensed bank that reimagines banking around everyday social […]

The ride-hailing giant Careem is now in the delivery business as the company seeks new verticals in its ever-increasing fight against other services in the Middle East including Uber. Starting with food delivery in Dhabi and Jeddah, the company sees the delivery service expanding to pharmaceuticals according to a report by Reuters. Careem is investing […]

K Health, the startup providing consumers with an AI-powered primary care platform, has raised $25 million in series B funding. The round was led by 14W, Comcast Ventures and Mangrove Capital Partners, with participation from Lerer Hippeau, BoxGroup and Max Ventures – all previous investors from the company’s seed or Series A rounds. Other previous investors include Primary Ventures […]

The UK government has set out a labor market reform package it bills as a major upgrade to workplace rights in the era of disruptive gig economy platforms. The reforms, which include new legislation, are intended to take account of changes in working practices including those flowing from tech platforms. But despite some gig economy platforms standing […]

Days after Apple announced a major expansion to its operations in the U.S. — including a new $1 billion campus in Austin — fellow tech giant Google has announced that it too will invest $1 billion as it sets up a new campus at Hudson Square in New York. Google already has 7,000 staff located in New […]

They say imitation is the highest form of flattery, but in the increasingly competitive world of banking, perhaps poaching your best people also counts. In a move that is bound to raise eyebrows in London’s fintech ecosystem and beyond, Megan Caywood, who up until this week was Starling Bank’s Chief Platform Officer, is joining banking […]

India-based educational startup Byju’s was widely reported to have raised a massive $400 million round and now the company is making things official. The ten-year-old company revealed today it has pulled in a total of $540 million from investors to go after international opportunities. The round is led by Naspers, the investment firm famous for […]

Meeshkan, a Finnish startup that made quite a splash at the recent Slush conference, has quietly raised €370,000 in pre-seed funding to continue developing its “ChatOps” product for machine learning developers. Deployed on Slack, the bot allows developers to “rapidly stop, restart, fork, tweak, monitor, deploy and test machine learning models” without interrupting the collaborative […]

BMW has joined a handful of automakers to compete with transportation upstart Didi Chuxing, which bought Uber’s Chinese business in 2016. Last Friday, the German luxury carmaker launched a premium ride-hailing service in Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan Province with over 14 million people. The new offer is part of BMW’s ReachNow carsharing brand that kicked […]

Maggie Lane Contributor Share on Twitter Maggie Lane is a writer and producer of virtual reality experiences and covers the industry for various publications. More posts by this contributor Inside Nickelodeon’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles VR Interview Experience Does Ready Player One reveal the future of VR? You need to stop procrastinating. Maybe it’s time […]

At first, “Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle” might seem like an afterthought — or maybe a failed exercise in franchise-building. This new take on the story of Rudyard Kipling’s “Jungle Book” comes just two years after Disney’s version made nearly a billion dollars at the worldwide box office. Plus, it seemed a little strange for director […]

Colin Kroll, the 34-year-old co-founder and CEO of the HQ Trivia app, has been found dead of an apparent drug overdose in his apartment, TechCrunch has confirmed. A spokesman for the NYPD told us that a female called 911 for a wellness check on Kroll’s apartment and he was found dead inside at 08:00 hours […]

There’s a lot you can make with a 3D printer: from prosthetics, corneas, and firearms — even an Olympic-standard luge. You can even 3D print a life-size replica of a human head — and not just for Hollywood. Forbes reporter Thomas Brewster commissioned a 3D printed model of his own head to test the face […]

David Frankel Contributor David Frankel is a managing partner at Founder Collective. More posts by this contributor Startups should read this checklist before they go ‘whale hunting’ for big partners You earn a million dollars a year and can’t get funded? I’ve been fortunate to have been part of half a dozen exits this year, […]

Well, it was surreal while it lasted, by which I mean the 2017-18 cryptocurrency bubble. For a while there, Coinbase was #1 in the App Store, Bitcoin was above $10K, and there were more notional crypto zillionaires out there than you could shake a Merkle tree at. Those were the crazy days. Now, though, a […]

Epic, the maker of the insanely popular, cross-platform third-person shooter online game Fortnite, has ‘fessed up to a gameplay misstep when it dropped a super powerful new weapon into the battle royale arena earlier this month — triggering a major fan backlash. Complaints boiled down to it being unfair for the overpowered weapon to exist […]

Zack Kanter Contributor Zack Kanter is the co-founder of Stedi. More posts by this contributor Why Amazon is eating the world While serverless is typically championed as a way to reduce costs and scale massively on demand, there is one extraordinarily compelling reason above all others to adopt a serverless-first approach: it is the best […]

Years after becoming one of the go-to destinations for iOS jailbreaks, Cydia’s app store is disabling purchases. Users will be able to access existing downloads through the store and access purchases via third-parties, but beginning this week, they’ll no longer be able to buy apps through the store. Founder Jay “Saurik “ Freeman revealed the […]

It feels like there’s a WeWork on every street nowadays. Take a walk through midtown Manhattan (please don’t actually) and it might even seem like there are more WeWorks than office buildings. Consider this an ongoing discussion about Urban Tech, its intersection with regulation, issues of public service, and other complexities that people have full […]

On the heels of a dire government report published last month about climate change and its devastating impacts, many cities and states are scrambling to find ways to curb the greenhouse gas emissions that threaten their air quality, not to mention their economies. As is often the case, California is leading the charge, yesterday becoming […]

For three years, Tony Hawk has been conspicuously absent from the video store shelves. For most game developers, that’s little more than a blip between titles. When your name and face are attached to 16 titles in 15 years, however, everyone starts to notice when you’re gone. “It’s usually the first topic of discussion with […]

Yesterday afternoon, Somali-American workers marched outside of Amazon’s Shakopee, Minnesota fulfillment center, chanting “hear our voice.” Estimates of the exact number of marches vary from source to source, but The Minneapolis Star Tribune puts it at around 100. It’s a fairly familiar refrain for the company, after years of reports about questionable working conditions. Some […]

After gaming chat app startup Discord announced in August that they were building out a games store, today, they’ve detailed that they’ll be pursuing a very competitive 90/10 revenue split for self-published titles in 2019. In addition, the company revealed that they now have 200 million active users on their chat app, up from 130 […]

Apple has signed a deal with DHX Media that will see the Canadian broadcaster producing new shows, specials and short films about Snoopy, Charlie Brown and the rest of the Peanuts gang. That includes exclusive short-form content for Apple starring astronaut Snoopy, aimed at getting kids excited about STEM. Peanuts was created by Charles Schulz, […]

Facebook is restructuring its experimental hardware efforts and giving its moonshot projects a home within its AR/VR research division. The restructuring, reported by Business Insider (paywalled), didn’t result in any layoffs but did see some shifts of teams as the old Building 8 group rebranded to Portal and some projects moved to the former Oculus […]

Propel, maker of the Fresh EBT app for managing food stamps and other benefits, announced today that it has raised $12.8 million in Series A funding. Fresh EBT (the EBT stands for the Electronics Transfer Benefit card, which is how food stamp participants receive their benefits) allows users to check their food stamp/SNAP balance and […]

Amazon recently said Apple Music would find its way onto Amazon Echo devices sometime soon — and sure enough, it appears to be rolling out now.

Almost 10 percent of people on the interwebs used at least one of the 25 worst passwords on SplashData’s annual list, which was released this week. And nearly three percent of you are still using “123456,” the worst password of the entire ranking. The eighth annual list of worst passwords of the year is based […]

In recent months, pressure has been mounting for major tech firms to develop strong policies regarding facial recognition. Microsoft has helped lead the way on that front, promising to put in place stricter policies, calling for greater regulation and asking fellow companies to follow suit. Hidden toward the end of a blog post about using […]

Electric scooter and bike-share company Lime is not giving up on San Francisco. This afternoon, Lime plans to protest on the steps of SF City Hall to petition the city’s scooter selection process. “We are calling the SFMTA to expand equitable transportation options throughout the City by allowing more choice and greater options, by requiring […]

When Kahoot, the startup that operates a popular platform for user-generated educational gaming, raised $15 million in October of this year, we mentioned that Disney had a stake in the company by way of the Disney Accelerator, and it had an option to become a larger shareholder if it exercised its warrants. Now with some […]

Pokémon Go creator Niantic is raising a $200 million Series C at a valuation of $3.9 billion according to a report from Katie Roof at the WSJ. The round is expected to be led by IVP with participation from Samsung and aXiomatic Gaming. The upcoming raise would bring the company’s total funding to $425 million according to […]

Although many of the milestones of the digital revolution have sprung directly from the research output of America’s colleges and universities, on the instructional side, American higher education has taken a laid-back approach.

Pimcore, an open-source platform for data and customer experience management which has emerged out of Austria, has closed $3.5 million in a Series A funding led by German Auctus Capital Partners AG. The funding will be used for its US expansion. Pimcore is aimed at any channel, device, or industry that wants to manage its […]

Goldex, a trading app that claims to power so-called ‘ethical pricing’ for retail gold investments, says it has now raised over £1M ($1.25M) in a pre-series A round led by a group of angels and institutional investors. Amongst those participating in the round are Prepaid Financial Services (a European payment card issuer); Gaël de Boissard, […]

Another round of followups on Nvidia, and then some short news analysis. TechCrunch is experimenting with new content forms. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the author (Danny at danny@techcrunch.com) if you like or hate something here. Nvidia / TSMC questions Following up on my analyses this […]

Robinhood’s new high-interest, zero-fee checking and savings feature seems to be too good to be true. Users’ money may not be fully protected. The CEO of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, a non-profit membership corporation that insures stock brokerages, tells TechCrunch its insurance would not apply to checking and savings accounts the way Robinhood claims. “Robinhood […]

The iPod Classic still looms larger as my favorite gadget of all time. Sure, plenty have lapped the device in terms of technology, while any lingering concerns about not owning the music I listen to have faded for the ubiquity of Spotify, but the iPod lives on in the perfect sweet spot for my own […]

Facebook AI Research is open sourcing some of the conversational AI tech it is using to power its Portal video chat display and M suggestions on Facebook Messenger. The company announced today that its PyTorch-based PyText NLP framework is now available to developers. Natural language processing deals with how systems parse human language and are […]

Starbucks is expanding its partnership with Uber Eats to more than 2,000 stores in the United States next year, about a quarter of all of the company’s locations in the country. The relationship bolsters Uber’s mission for its on-demand food delivery service, Eats. Uber has said it plans to cover more than 70 percent of […]

When I visited the GE Global Research Center in Niskayuna, New York in April 2017, I thought I saw a company that was working hard to avoid disruption, but perhaps the leafy campus, the labs and experimental projects hid much larger problems inside the company. Yesterday GE announced that it is spinning out its Industrial IoT […]