Crunch Hype

The humble business card is a target for disruption in Southeast Asia after Japanese contacts management startup Sansan raised JPY 3 billion ($26.5 million) to expand its business into the region. Founded way back in 2007, Sansan helps bring business intelligence to companies through a system that helps build connections between users and both internal employees […]

Update: Bird tells us it is not in discussions with Uber. The company declined to comment on reports that there have been recent talks between the two companies. Our piece from earlier today reflects what we were told by sources, which is that Bird was engaged in advanced discussions to be acquired. Five months ago, […]

“嘿 Siri!” Apple’s HomePod will be available for sale in China early next year. A listing is already up on Apple’s China site, with the smart speaker priced at RMB 2,799 (about $407), or about 17% more than its $349 price in the United States. Though Apple doesn’t list an exact shipping date for Chinese […]

Scott McCorkle has spent most of his professional career thinking about business to business software and how to improve it for a company’s customers. The former President of ExactTarget and later chief executive of Salesforce Marketing Cloud has made billions of dollars building products to help support customer service and now he’s back at it […]

Magic Leap’s executive team is pretty heavy on the dudes these days. The augmented reality startup’s two female C-suite executives, Chief Marketing Officer Brenda Freeman and Chief Business Officer Rachna Bhasin, have recently both stepped back into advisory roles at the company, TechCrunch has learned. Freeman joined the startup two years ago from National Geographic. […]

Despite the rise in electric scooters in the U.S., you’d be forgiven for thinking that Asia — the region where bike-sharing foreshadowed the rise of e-scooters — has been left off the party. But e-scooters have quietly been in the region for some time and now they are beginning to ramp up. Singapore-based Neuron Mobility is […]

Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, awaits a bail hearing upon suspicion she violated U.S. trade sanctions against Iran.

Duet Display is an app that lets you turn your iPad into a second Mac monitor. And the team behind it just released a major update that makes it much more efficient — it consumes less CPU resources and is now recognized as a true external display. If you’ve used Duet Display over the past […]

Video won’t start rolling on Meg Whitman and Jeffrey Katzenberg’s new bite-sized streaming service with the billion-dollar backing until the end of 2019, but talent keeps signing up to come along for their ride into the future of serialization. The latest marquee director to sign on the dotted line with Quibi is Catherine Hardwicke, who […]

Five years is an awful lot of time in the tech industry. Darling startups find ways to crash and burn. Trends that seem unstoppable sputter-out. In the field of artificial intelligence, the past five years have been nothing short of transformative. Facebook’s AI Research lab (FAIR) turns five years old this month, and just as […]

Welcome to TechCrunch’s 2018 Holiday Gift Guide! Need more gift ideas? Check out our Gift Guide Hub. Since digital product designer Ryder Carroll’s list-based method for organizing his life first went viral five years ago, bullet journaling has become a movement of its own, helping people take charge of their time with a notebook and […]

A number of app developers building third-party screen time trackers and parental control applications are worried that Apple’s increased scrutiny of their apps in recent weeks is not a coincidence. With Apple’s launch of iOS 12, the company has implemented its own built-in screen time tracking tools and controls. Not long after, developers’ third-party screen […]

Laco is a small German watch company famous for its Flieger watches — pieces featuring big crowns and legible faces designed for pilots. Now the brand has teamed up with A Blog To Watch on a Fallout-themed watch that looks like something pulled out of a deserted vault. The $2,950 watch contains ETA 2824.2 movement […]

The latest Falcon 9 mission launched successfully, but its reusable booster just missed sticking the landing thanks to a stalled hydraulic pump on the grid fin, according to a tweet by Elon Musk. Grid fin hydraulic pump stalled, so Falcon landed just out to sea. Appears to be undamaged & is transmitting data. Recovery ship […]

With the release of iOS 12, Apple hid the button that lets you jump from front camera to rear camera (or vice versa) during a FaceTime call. Previously a one-click thing, it was suddenly shoved away into a menu as if it wasn’t something you might use a half dozen times per call. Don’t like […]

Apple’s new iPhone XR comes in a half dozen colors, including blue, yellow, red and coral. In fact, the colors are sufficiently fresh that it’d be kind of silly to buy a traditional phone case that would protect it but also hide if from plain view. It’s for this reason that Apple just began selling […]

First some notes on SoftBank’s rumored expansion into China and its weird fund math, then Foxconn and then quick notes on tech depression, Huawei and more. 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 […]

Workato, a startup that offers an integration and automation platform for businesses that competes with the likes of MuleSoft, SnapLogic and Microsoft’s Logic Apps, today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series B funding round from Battery Ventures, Storm Ventures, ServiceNow and Workday Ventures. Combined with its previous rounds, the company has now received investments […]

Current, the app-controlled teen debit card that’s managed by parents, is starting to look more like a bank. Today, the startup announced it’s now adding to its debit account for teens support for routing and account numbers. That means working teens will be able to direct-deposit to their Current account their paychecks from after-school and […]

A UK parliamentary committee has published the cache of Facebook documents it dramatically seized last week. The documents were obtained by a legal discovery process by a startup that’s suing the social network in a California court in a case related to Facebook changing data access permissions back in 2014/15. The court had sealed the documents […]

Content recommendation company Revcontent has a new chief executive: Omar Nicola, formerly the CEO of mobile advertising company Kixer. Revcontent’s founder and outgoing CEO John Lemp will remain involved as chairman of the board of directors. “Omar is the perfect choice to take over as CEO of Revcontent, because of his wealth of experience and […]

Spotify arrived on the Xbox One back in August 2017 to give gamers the option of streaming their own tunes while in a gaming session. Today, Spotify is upgrading its app with a few key additions, including most notably support for Cortana voice control, along with other personalization features. With Cortana, gamers will be able […]

Four months ago, when two commercial DJI-made drones loaded with 1 kilogram each of plastic explosive detonated during a speech from Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro at a military event in Caracas, the world at large was introduced to the newest threat from our automated, dystopian present — cheap weaponized drone technology. For Luke Fox, the […]

Mobile intelligence and data firm App Annie is today releasing its 2019 predictions for the worldwide app economy, including its forecast around consumer spending, gaming, the subscription market and other highlights. Most notably, it expects the worldwide gross consumer spend in apps — meaning before the app stores take their own cut — to surpass […]

“The Google of Russia” is a fairly apt description, as far as those things go. Yandex has its hand in just about everything internet in its native Russia. Recent additions include a Prime-style service, a smart speaker and, yes, self-driving cars. So it was really only a matter of time before the company unleashed a […]

The European Union has announced a package of measures intended to step up efforts and pressure on tech giants to combat democracy-denting disinformation ahead of the EU parliament elections next May. The European Commission Action Plan, which was presented at a press briefing earlier today, has four areas of focus: 1) Improving detection of disinformation; 2) […]

Camunda, a Berlin-based company that builds open source workflow automation software, announced a €25 million (approximately $28 million) investment from Highland Europe today. This is the company’s first investment in its 10-year history. CEO and co-founder Jakob Freund says the company has been profitable since Day One, but decided to bring in outside capital now […]

Leave it to Samsung to talk up its second 5G smartphone before most companies have tipped their first. A few days after announcing its first 5G handset via Verizon, the company is already onto number two. This one comes via an AT&T press release with that qualifies the handset a bit more, calling it “another […]

Shannon Farley Contributor Shannon Farley is co-founder and executive director at Fast Forward. More posts by this contributor Legal tech is opening the system to those who need legal representation the most Why we need diverse founder and funding teams and how to find them In the past year, we’ve seen tech platforms called out […]

As a former Arby’s sandwich artist I understand the value of a background check. Had I not been investigated back at age 16 no one at the restaurant would have known I was a lapsed Boy Scout and read Stephen King novels. But what would have happened had I taken up a life of petty […]

When it comes to how humans communicate with each other or with machines, voice is a major interface, with growth in the latter fuelled by the rise of artificial intelligence, faster computing technology and an explosion of new devices — some of which only, or primarily, work with voice commands. But the supreme reign of voice has […]

Salesforce has been talking about the Internet of Things for some time as a way to empower field service workers. Today, the company announced Field Service Lightning, a new component designed to deliver automated IoT data to service technicians in the field on their mobile devices. Once you connect sensors in the field to Service […]

Waymo, the former Google self-driving project owned by parent company Alphabet, is launching a commercial robotaxi service in the Phoenix area dubbed Waymo One. This milestone, for the company and nascent self-driving technology industry, comes with caveats. The Waymo One self-driving car service, and accompanying app, won’t be available to just anyone. And for now, […]

Australia’s controversial anti-encryption bill is one step closer to becoming law, after the two leading but sparring party political giants struck a deal to pass the legislation. The bill, in short, grants Australian police greater powers to issue “technical notices” — a nice way of forcing companies — even websites — operating in Australia to […]

A UK union that has been fighting to win collective bargaining rights for gig economy riders who provide delivery services via Deliveroo’s platform has had its claim for a judicial review of an earlier blocking decision dismissed by the High Court today. Six months ago the IWGB Union was granted permission to challenge Deliveroo’s opposition to collective […]

Google has made a rare investment in Japan after the company led a follow-on round for AI and machine learning startup ABEJA. The deal amount is undisclosed but a little digging suggests that it is likely a single-digit million US dollar figure. That’s because six-year-old ABEJA did confirm that it has now raised JPY 6 billion ($53 […]

China’s largest ride-hailing operator Didi Chuxing announced on Wednesday a major restructuring, which trails a series of tweaks to its core businesses following two separate passenger murders that happened in May and September. The reshuffle will see Didi — which owns Uber’s China business — knit three key platforms into a new overarching Ride-hailing Business Group […]

Google contract workers, internally referred to as Temporary, Vendor and Contractors (TVCs, are seeking better, equal treatment. That entails better pay and access to benefits, as well as better access to company-wide information. In a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, they allege Google “routinely denies TVCs access to information that is relevant to our jobs […]

India finally has its answer to Spotify after Reliance Jio merged its music service with Saavn, the startup it acquired earlier this year. The deal itself isn’t new — it was announced back in March — but it has reached its logical conclusion after two apps were merged to create a single entity, JioSaavn, which is […]

Facilio, an IoT startup that focuses on facility management software, announced today that it has raised a $6.4 million Series A led by Tiger Global and returning investor Accel. The funding will be used to expand further in India, where Facilio has an office in Chennai, the United States, and the Middle East, as well […]

Welcome back to the latest edition of politicians don’t get technology! Our latest guest is Rudy Giuliani, former New York mayor and current cybersecurity adviser to President Trump. Rudy Giuliani doesn’t understand Twitter or the internet. It’s embarrassing enough that Giuliani inadvertently tweeted a link to a website criticizing Trump, but now he is doubling down on […]

Despite a year-end goal of 30 percent broadband internet penetration in Nigeria, the country is unlikely to hit that target. As of 2017, internet penetration in Nigeria was at 22 percent — among the lowest in the world, according to the ICT Development Index, which is published by the United Nations International Telecommunication Union. MainOne, […]

It’s been quite the tumultuous year in the tech industry, most notably for companies like Facebook. Google, Tesla and Salesforce. And, based on Glassdoor’s latest ranking of the best companies to work for — in addition to employee protests and walkouts — it’s clear that employees are paying attention. Unsurprisingly, Facebook is no longer ranked […]

Consumer credit giant Experian is continuing to back Asian fintech startups after it led a $10 million investment in Southeast Asia’s Jirnexu . Jirnexu, which is headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, operates financial comparison services in Malaysia and Indonesia. Those services aggregate offerings and deals from banks and financial services companies, effectively acting as a user acquisition […]

Facebook will now freely allow developers to build competitors to its features upon its own platform. Today Facebook announced it will drop Platform Policy section 4.1, which stipulates “Add something unique to the community. Don’t replicate core functionality that Facebook already provides.” That policy felt pretty disingenuous given how aggressively Facebook has replicated everyone else’s […]

For a company with such a forward-looking name, the road ahead has been looking pretty bleak for Faraday Future. Debts, fleeing executives and payroll delays have clouded the last year of the automaker’s history — with ultimately very little to show for it. Faraday took to Twitter today to note the latest in its continued […]

With Big Dog busy pulling Santa’s sleigh, what horrible robotic hybrid is left to haunt our dreams? How about Elowan! Elowan is a project out of the MIT Media Lab and it’s essentially a mobile houseplant. The plant sends signals to a wheeled transport that rolls back and forth trying to find light. Created by […]

Commercial insurtech startups have been woefully underfinanced relative to insurtech companies addressing personal lines, distribution and other areas. As a result, commercial insurtech is heavily under-penetrated relative to the broader insurtech movement.

If you’ve been on an electric scooter from Bird, Lime, Lyft, JUMP via Uber, Skip, Scoot or others, you’re probably familiar with that feeling of impending doom. Superpedestrian, makers of the Copenhagen Wheel, is today emerging with a sturdier, safer and smarter electric scooter. But instead of operating a shared electric scooter network, the plan […]