Crunch Hype

How do other dating apps compete with Tinder? By further distancing themselves from Tinder’s “hot-or-not” user interface design to focus on differentiating features — like conversation starters, commenting and richer profiles. Today, another anti-Tinder app is doing the same. On the heels of its $12 million Series B announced earlier this year, the oddly named […]

Google today announced an update to GKE, the Google Kubernetes Engine, that brings integrated support for the Istio service mesh to service. Istio support is currently in beta. While Istio isn’t yet the household name that Kubernetes has become in recent years, for many enterprises it’s an important building block for building their cloud-native platforms. […]

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the open-source home of projects like Kubernetes and Vitess, today announced that its technical committee has voted to bring a new project on board. That project is etcd, the distributed key-value store that was first developed by CoreOS (now owned by Red Hat, which in turn will soon be […]

National Geographic and YouTube are launching a new series of virtual reality experiences starting today with a virtual exploration of the Okavango Delta in Botswana. Dubbed one of the “last wild places on earth,” the virtual reality trip through Okavango is the first of three immersive experiences that National Geographic has planned with YouTube . The […]

French startup Lydia announced a partnership with Banque Casino today for small credit lines. Starting tomorrow, Lydia users in France will be able to borrow as much as €1,000 in just a few seconds. While Lydia started as a peer-to-peer money transferring app, fintech startups always end up offering credit at some point. It’s hard […]

Google CEO Sundar Pichai thinks Android users have a good understanding of the volume of data Google collects on them, when they agree to use the Android mobile operating system. The exec, who is testifying today in front of the House Judiciary committee for a hearing entitled “Transparency & Accountability: Examining Google and its Data […]

It’s KubeCon/CloudNativeCon this week, the world’s largest confab for all things cloud-native, containers, Kubernetes and DevOps. Every company that’s doing anything remotely related to those topics is announcing news at the sold-out event. That includes the popular cloud hosting service DigitalOcean, which is announcing the launch of its Kubernetes-as-a-Service offering to all developers today. This […]

Daimler plans to buy $23 billion worth of battery cells by 2030 as the maker of Mercedes-Benz vehicles and commercial trucks prepares to bring dozens of electric and hybrid vehicles to market. The German automaker didn’t disclose which companies would supply them with batteries. However, Daimler does have supply deals with LG Chem and SK […]

The defining question of the 21st century is pretty simple: who owns what? Who owns the telecommunications infrastructure that powers our mobile devices? Who owns the OS that powers those devices? Who owns our data? Today, we see these intersecting arcs with two prominent tech leaders mired in legal and political processes. TechCrunch is experimenting […]

Verizon, the telecoms giant that is the parent of Oath (and therefore owns TechCrunch), has been through the re-organizational ringer in recent quarters and today it announced the full financial effect of that process. According to an SEC filing, the company will take charges of up to $6.7 billion as a result of a voluntary […]

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has managed to avoid the public political grillings that have come for tech leaders at Facebook and Twitter this year. But not today. Today he will be in front of the House Judiciary committee for a hearing entitled: Transparency & Accountability: Examining Google and its Data Collection, Use and Filtering Practices. […]

Dell just announced that it has agreed to buy back the VMware tracking stock from the EMC acquisition. The company confirmed the buy-back price of $120 per share for a total of $23.9 billion. With today’s move, Dell will return to being publicly traded starting on December 28th. Sixty-one percent of shareholders voted in favor […]

Pitching app developers with a new way to convert app browsers into actual customers, AppOnboard has raised $15 million in a new round of funding, the company said. Based in Los Angeles, AppOnboard sees itself as one of a new breed of LA startup that’s steeping itself in the local ecosystem and trying to be […]

Spotinst has made a living finding budget resources on cloud platforms and reselling them to developers at a deep discount over cloud vendor retail pricing. Today, it announced a new budget serverless product for containerized workloads. The new product called Ocean gives developers deploying containers a cheaper option. Much like any serverless product, you deploy […]

Chatbots and other AI-based tools have firmly found footing in the world of customer service, used either to augment or completely replace the role of a human responding to questions and complaints, or (sometimes, annoyingly, at the same time as the previous two functions) sell more products to users. Today, an Israeli startup called TechSee […]

Three dimensional modeling used to be hard. It used to require something at least as big as the Xbox Kinect to get really high quality scans you needed high-powered laser sensor systems. Now all you need is your phone and Capture. Capture is a proof-of-concept for a company called Standard Cyborg led by Jeff Huber […]

“The screen is becoming the most important place in the world,” says InVision CEO and founder Clark Valberg . In fact, it’s hard to get through a conversation with him without hearing it. And, considering that his company has grown to $100 million in annual recurring revenue, he has reason to believe his own affirmation. […]

Supermicro has sent a letter to its customers saying that it has found no evidence of malicious chips on its motherboards. The company asked third-party company Nardello & Co to audit Supermicro’s hardware. On October 4, a Bloomberg report claimed that China’s spies managed to conceal tiny malicious chips on Supermicro motherboards. Those chips would […]

In the latest instalment of VC revolving doors, Carolina Brochado, a Partner at European venture capital firm Atomico, is joining Softbank’s Vision Fund. According to sources, Brochado informed Atomico portfolio companies earlier this week that she was joining Softbank where she’ll be based at the mega-fund‘s London office. Noteworthy, Brochado came to prominence in the […]

A string of bugs when chained together created the perfect attack to gain access to someone’s Microsoft account — simply by tricking a user into clicking a link. Sahad Nk, an India-based bug hunter, discovered that a Microsoft subdomain, “success.office.com,” had not been properly configured, allowing him to take it over. He used a CNAME […]

Apple’s mobile payment technology has finally launched in Germany, some four years after it debuted in the U.S. On its newly launched Apple Pay website for Germany, Apple lists partner banks and credit card companies at launch, with customers from the likes of Deutsche Bank, O2 Banking, N26, Comdirect, HypoVerensbank, Bunq and Boon able to tap […]

Southeast Asia is a growing digital marketplace and increasingly a focus for startups across the world but there haven’t been many exits. So it’s notable, then, that struggling Chinese discount e-commerce service LightInTheBox has closed its acquisition of Singapore-based Ezbuy, which operates a cross-border selling service in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Pakistan. The all-stock deal was […]

Vroom, an online platform for buying and selling cars, has raised $440 million to date.

Mary Meeker, the author of the Internet Trends report, has led the round for Plaid via Kleiner Perkin's growth fund.

First it was the notch, now the hole-punch has emerged as the latest tech for concealing selfie cameras whilst keeping our smartphones as free of bezel as possible to maximize the screen space. This week, Samsung and Huawei both unveiled new phones that dispense with the iconic ‘notch’ — pioneered by Apple but popularized by everyone — […]

There is no shortage of up-and-comers jostling for a spot in China’s massive ecommerce industry, and oftentimes they pick a niche market and present a novel business model different from the establishment of Alibaba or JD.com . Chinese social ecommerce app Fresh Buddy announced on Tuesday that it has raised $100 million in a series B funding […]

French VC firm Hardware Club just announced the final closing of its first fund. The firm will invest $50 million in total in hardware startups (as the name suggests). Hardware Club first started as a community of hardware startups sharing knowledge, tips and contacts in the hardware community. If you’re launching a hardware product, chances […]

French startup Molotov is slowly becoming the leading platform to stream TV in France. With a single account, you can watch TV on your phone, tablet, computer and set-top box. The company is about to release a VR app that lets you watch TV using a virtual reality headset — but there’s a twist. The […]

At 9:30 AM local time, we kick off TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa, where 15 companies will take the stage, along with panels from industry investors, Main One, and speakers from Facebook (our partner on the event through the FB Start program). If you can’t be here with us in Lagos, Nigeria, we’ve got you covered. Check […]

Apple has filed an appeal to overturn a court decision that could ban iPhone sales in China, the company said on Monday, adding that all of its models remain available in its third-largest market. The American giant is locked in a legal battle in the world’s biggest smartphone market. On Monday, Qualcomm announced that a […]

Walmart is continuing its strategy of revamping its businesses in Asia after the U.S. retail giant opened its first e-commerce store in Japan, where it is working with local retail giant Rakuten. The companies first announced a collaboration in January when they agreed to team up on the launch of an online grocery service in Japan […]

Less than a week before a Uber self-driving SUV prototype struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona last March, a manager sent executives an email cautioning that its autonomous vehicle unit needed to “work on establishing a culture rooted in safety,” reports The Information. Robbie Miller, then a manager in the unit’s testing operations, […]

China and the United States have been slapping each other with massive tariffs and more may come if the trade war continues to escalate, prompting some companies to move manufacturing out of China. One of the latest is GoPro, which announced it will move production of most U.S.-bound cameras out of China by summer 2019. […]

Google is bringing its Lens visual search feature to the iOS Google app, giving iPhone users a new way to search the web on mobile. By tapping on the Google Lens icon, you dive straight into the camera at which point if Google recognizes something in the space that you tap on, the app will […]

I’ve been thinking hard about the concept of sponsored content — you can find some of it on TechCrunch if you look hard enough, and it appears almost everywhere else. It’s an important consideration, because as an online journalist I’ve heard everything from “How much did Apple pay you to post this?” to “How much […]

25 years ago, anyone old enough to navigate DOS was likely playing Doom every spare minute, assuming their parents weren't around. A quarter century after its release, the game's legacy is unquestionable — but it could always use a few new levels. So co-creator John Romero made some. They come with a silver statue of his head on a pike.

If there was any doubt about YouTube’s power to influence children, look no further than this year’s list of the hottest holiday toys, based on Google shopping search data. According to the search giant, at least four of the top 10 most searched toys were among those heavily featured in YouTube unboxing videos — subsequently […]

SoftBank continues to invest in the future of transportation — this time in ParkJockey, a startup that has built a technology platform aimed at monetizing parking lots. And ParkJockey, which was founded in 2013, is already using that capital to scale up. Along with the SoftBank investment news, ParkJockey also announced that it was acquiring two […]

A House Oversight Committee report out Monday has concluded that Equifax’s security practices and policies were sub-par and its systems were old and out-of-date, and bothering with basic security measures — like patching vulnerable systems — could’ve prevented its massive data breach last year. It comes a little over a year after Equifax, one of […]

The race to replace the mouse and keyboard has yielded a lot of weird tech, but as various hardware startups try to find the missing link between what we have now and some sort of embedded brain chip, we’re seeing some fascinating solutions surface. New York-based CTRL-labs just announced its first developer kit that’s aiming to […]

On the heels of an employee-led protest against Google, a group of 35 Google employees is banding together to take it a step further and end the practice of forced arbitration across the entire tech industry. Forced arbitration ensures workplace disputes are settled behind closed doors and without any right to an appeal. These types of […]

A group of U.S. tech giants, including Apple, Google and Microsoft, have collectively denounced the new so-called “anti-encryption” law passed by the Australian parliament last week. The bill was passed less than a day after the ruling coalition government secured the votes from opposition Labor lawmakers, despite strong objection from tech companies and telcos. “The […]

Google Fit, Google’ s activity-tracking app for Android, is getting a small but meaningful update today that adds a few new features that’ll likely make its regular users quite happy. Some are pretty basic, like the launch of a Fit widget for your Android home screen, while others introduce new features like a breathing exercise […]

If your luck is anything like mine, as soon as you jump on an important call, someone decides it's a great time to blow some leaves off the sidewalk outside your window. 2Hz's Krisp is a new desktop app that uses machine learning to subtract background noise like that, or crowds, or even crying kids — while keeping your voice intact. It's already out for Macs and it's coming to Windows soon.

It’s not true that everyone gets their news from Facebook and Twitter. But it is now true that more U.S. adults get their news from social media than from print newspapers. According to a new report from Pew Research Center out today, social media has for the first time surpassed newspapers as a preferred source […]

Blippar, the U.K.-based AR startup that raised more than $130 million, may be nearing the end of the road. The company has been burning through cash in a bid to pivot in search of a profitable AR business model, and now shareholders are in dispute over whether to throw Blippar any more money to aid […]

Voyager 2, the multi-planetary exploratory probe launched in 1977, has finally entered interstellar space, some six years after its twin, Voyager 1, did the same. It's now about 11 billion miles from Earth, the second-farthest-out human-made object in space.

You’d think Facebook would be faster at copying itself. Five years after Facebook Messenger took a cue from WhatsApp and Voxer to launch voice messaging, and four months after TechCrunch reported Instagram was testing its own walkie-talkie feature, voice messaging is rolling out globally on Instagram Direct today. Users can hold down the microphone button […]

Google+ was a bit of a disaster for the company when it was still alive, and now that it’s walking dead, it’s becoming even more of a stone around its neck. After disclosing a major security bug in October that affected just under half a million users, it announced that the service would shut down […]

API platform Kong, which you may remember under its previous name of Mashape, is launching its new Kong Cloud service today. Kong Cloud is the company’s fully managed platform for securing, connecting and orchestrating APIs. Enterprises can deploy it to virtually any major cloud platform, including AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, and Kong will handle […]