Crunch Hype

Walmart has just begun testing same-day grocery delivery called Walmart To Go in one of its stores in China, months after the American retail titan expanded grocery delivery in its homeland. The service is accessed through a mini-program within WeChat – the Tencent-owned messaging platform Walmart partnered with earlier this year, in order to better […]

TechCrunch has obtained an internal memo published by Facebook’s outgoing head of public policy Elliot Schrage in which he blames himself for hiring PR firm Definers. He admits to having the company push negative narratives about competitors, but says Facebook did not ask or pay Definers to publish fake news. COO Sheryl Sandberg left a […]

In a short but amply-hyped interview with CNN, Facebook’s founder and chief executive again responded to criticism over the company’s most recent crisis. The interview, excerpted from a longer Q&A for a CNN series called “Human Code,” hit most of the main questions that critics have raised about Facebook’s failings and Zuckerberg’s unilateral control over […]

Since taking the reins as chief executive of Kindred at the beginning of the year, Jim Liefer has been focused on commercializing his company’s autonomous robots. But unlike forward-projecting use-cases for robots that may (or may not) one day take over for human beings in a wide swath of functions, Kindred’s current robots are purpose-built […]

Shaun Moore and Nezare Chafni didn’t initially intend to develop a new standalone facial recognition technology, when they first got started developing the technology that would become their new company, Trueface.ai. When the two serial entrepreneurs were planning their next act five years ago, they wanted to ride the wave of smart home technologies with […]

The Morgan Stanley Multicultural Innovation Lab, Morgan Stanley’s in-house accelerator focused on companies founded by multicultural and female entrepreneurs, hosted its second Annual Showcase and Demo Day. The event also featured companies from accelerators HearstLab, Newark Venture Partner Labs and PS27 Ventures. (Note: I was formerly employed by Morgan Stanley and have no financial ties.) The showcase represented […]

It was November 20, 1998, when an unprecedented international coalition of astronomers, engineers, and rocket scientists saw years of collaboration come to fruition with the launch of the International Space Station's first component. Since then the largest spacecraft ever built has hosted innumerable astronauts, experiments, and other craft. Here are a few notable moments in the history of this inspiring and decades-spanning mission.

Autodesk announced plans to acquire PlanGrid for $875 million today. The San Francisco startup helped move blueprints from paper to the iPad when it launched in 2011. This digitization of construction fits with Autodesk’s vision of digitizing design in general, and CEO Andrew Anagnost certainly recognized the transformational potential of the company he was buying. “There […]

Eduardo Gomez started with Bitcoin in 2012, though he didn’t quite understand what he was getting himself into nor how it would change his life.

Nearly every online publisher has launched or announced a paywall — but of course, even the ones that are successful won’t convince every reader, or even the majority of readers, to sign up. Now Piano and True[x] say they’ve found a more effective way to monetize the rest of the audience, without threatening crucial subscription […]

Apple always has an interesting ad for the holiday season. This time, it’s a cute little animated short film. It feels like a hybrid between a Pixar movie and a Wes Anderson creation. Named “Share Your Gifts,” the ad focuses on a dreamy teenager who spends a lot of time on her MacBook. She regularly […]

A ruling in late October against a little-known French adtech firm that popped up on the national data watchdog’s website earlier this month is causing ripples of excitement to run through privacy watchers in Europe who believe it signals the beginning of the end for creepy online ads. The excitement is palpable. Impressively so, given […]

Four days ago the crypto markets were crashing hard. Now they’re crashing harder. Bitcoin, which hasn’t fallen past $6,000 for months, has dumped to $4,413.99 as of this morning, and nearly everything else is falling in unison. Ethereum, flying high at $700 a few months ago, is at $140. Coinbase, that bastion of crypto stability, […]

Elon Musk’s dabble with the doobage in a September radio interview may have sparked more than just an outpouring of adulation from his acolytes (and a fairly interesting conversation around artificial intelligence, social media, invention and space). The Washington Post reports that the folks at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration were less than amused with […]

More than half a million users have installed Android malware posing as driving games — from Google’s own app store. Lukas Stefanko, a security researcher at ESET, tweeted details of 13 gaming apps — made by the same developer — which were at the time of his tweet downloadable from Google Play. Two of the apps […]

The social media singularity continues with the arrival of Snapchat Stories-style slideshows on LinkedIn as the app grasps for relevance with a younger audience. LinkedIn confirms to TechCrunch that it plans to build Stories for more sets of users, but first it’s launching “Student Voices” just for university students in the U.S. The feature appears […]

Black Friday is, for the most part, bad. People are awful, retailers pull all sorts of shenanigans to make it seem like you’re getting a better deal than you are and a lot of people end up buying junk they don’t need to make the day feel like a “success.” But you know that. If […]

Another day, another stock market setback for once high-flying technology companies, which have lost roughly $1 trillion in the latest stock market slide. Shares of the core group of consumer technology companies, including Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet and Netflix, are falling again — contributing to the big indexes like the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the […]

FedEx is turning to a relatively new and unknown startup as it ramps up its efforts to electrify its fleet of delivery vans. The company announced Tuesday plans to add 1,000 electric delivery vehicles from Chanje Energy, a California-based and China-backed startup founded in 2015. FedEx is purchasing 100 of the vehicles from Chanje Energy. It will lease […]

Fifteen weeks after Facebook announced its “Your Time on Facebook” tool that counts how many minutes you spend on the app, the feature is finally rolling out around the world. Designed to help you manage your social networking, the dashboard reveals how many minutes you’ve spent on Facebook’s app on that device each day for […]

Valve has quietly updated the Steam page for the Steam Link. The message says that Valve is discontinuing the Steam Link. The device will become unavailable once all units have been sold. When Valve introduced the Steam Link in 2015, your TV setup was completely different. Google, Amazon and Apple just released Android TV, the […]

On Black Friday, YouTube says it’s teaming up with Warner Bros. Pictures to allow viewers to watch “The Lego Movie” for free as part of a promotion for the upcoming sequel. YouTube recently (and quietly) began making certain movies like “Rocky,” “The Terminator” and “Legally Blonde” available for free, with advertising. This campaign is an […]

Agora, a developer of cloud communication APIs, will create products for new markets and verticals after raising a $70 million Series C led by Coatue Management. Existing investors SIG, Morningside Capital and Shunwei Capital also returned for the round, which brings Agora’s total funding so far to $125 million. The startup’s APIs are used by […]

Uber has long received flack for its lack of widely available wheelchair-accessible rides. Today, Uber is taking steps to ensure riders who rely on wheelchairs can get rides when they need them, and without having to wait more than 15 minutes. That’s thanks to a partnership with MV Transportation, a paratransit service provider that operates […]

PlayVS, the company bringing esports infrastructure to high schools across the country, has today announced the close of a $30.5 million Series B financing. The round was led by Elysian Park Ventures, the investment arm of the L.A. Dodgers, with participation from five existing investors, including New Enterprise Associates, Science Inc., Crosscut Ventures, Coatue Management […]

Just days after a CIA report concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, SoftBank’s Vision Fund — the gargantuan investment vehicle anchored by a $45 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s PIF sovereign fund — is back in check-writing action. Coupang, Korea’s largest e-commerce firm, revealed today that it has […]

Eventbrite has hired a chief commercial officer and chief data strategy officer.

One of the biggest problems for the mainstream adoption of crypto is the need for memorizing seed phrases, the inability to get your cryptocurrency back if something goes wrong, the list goes on. Until major issue like this are solved, crypto is going to remain a pretty elite game. Argent is a project which recently […]

Going once, going twice for tables in Startup Alley! Disrupt Berlin is less than two weeks away, and registration is about to close for startups looking to showcase their product or company to thousands of people on the Disrupt floor. According to Crunchbase, startups that exhibited in Startup Alley at Disrupt Berlin 2017 raised more […]

Imagine any surface, such as a wooden table, car door or glass wall, could be turned into a user interface without the need for physical buttons or a touch screen. That’s the ambition of HyperSurfaces, the London startup originally behind the Mogees line of music devices and software, which today is unveiling what it claims […]

Feedr, a food tech startup that delivers healthy and personalised meals to office workers as an alternative to companies setting up their own canteens, has picked up just over £1.5 million in pre-Series A funding. The round is led by London early-stage venture capital firm Episode 1. Also participating is Brent Hoberman’s Founders Factory, and […]

Tumblr’s app was booted out of the iOS App Store a few days ago due to an issue with child pornography getting its way past the app’s filtering technology, according to a report from CNET, which Tumblr then confirmed. The app’s disappearance was first spotted on November 16, and Tumblr’s help documentation had also confirmed […]

Vietnam is one of the most rapidly-expanding tech ecosystems in Southeast Asia.

Video chat was always one of Echo Show and Spot’s biggest selling points. But until now, the products have been tethered to Amazon’s own software. This week, however, the company took another big step in its ongoing relationship with Microsoft by adding Skype calling to mix. Now just about every Echo device past and present […]

BFR, the monster rocket that will cost SpaceX roughly $5 billion to develop, has a new name. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted late Monday night that he has renamed the company’s largest (and yet to be built) BFR rocket to Starship. Or more precisely, the spaceship portion will be called Starship. The rocket booster used […]

Timekettle was eager to show us the progress it’s made on the WT2 since it first showed us its wearable translation device at TechCrunch Shenzhen, this time last year. Unlike their 3D printed state at last year’s event, the crowdfunded earpieces are now ready to ship. They’ve already started going out to early backers and […]

Facebook’s latest PR crisis has cast a lurid spotlight on a GOP-led publicity firm called Definers Public Affairs, after a New York Times investigation revealed last week the firm had sought to discredit Facebook critics by, in one instance, linking them to the liberal financier George Soros — a long-time target of anti-semitic conspiracy theories. The […]

Xiaomi is diversifying into a new range of phones as the Chinese smartphone maker announced impressive growth with its latest financials. The company announced it will take over selfie app maker Meitu’s smartphone business to go after new demographics, particularly women, while it lodged impressive 49 percent revenue growth in Q3. Xiaomi posted a net profit of 2.481 […]

The Exodus 1 didn’t make its global debut on stage at TechCrunch Shenzhen. That was the plan, but stuff, as the saying goes, happens. It simply didn’t make its way from Hong Kong to China in time. I won’t lie, I was a bit suspicious of this latest turn of events. After month of teasing […]

Alice Lloyd George Contributor Alice Lloyd George is an investor at RRE Ventures and the host of Flux, a series of podcast conversations with leaders in frontier technology. More posts by this contributor Thomas Reardon and CTRL-Labs are building an API for the brain Solving the mystery of sleep Last week Sketchfab, the 3D content […]

Drone delivery really only seems practical for two things: take-out and organ transplants. Both are relatively light and also extremely time sensitive. Well, experiments in flying a kidney around Baltimore in a refrigerated box have yielded positive results — which also seems promising for getting your pad thai to you in good kit.

Radio giant iHeartMedia announced today that it’s reached an agreement to acquire Jelli, a company bringing programmatic ad-buying to radio broadcasters. In fact, iHeartMedia was already working with Jelli to allow businesses to use programmatic tools to buy advertising on the company’s 850 broadcast radio stations. iHeartMedia also invested in Jelli’s most recent funding round. […]

The only thing that's crazier than the fact that Half-Life was released exactly 20 years ago is that I wrote up its 10th anniversary on this very website... well, 10 years ago. We've both aged well, I like to think. But Half-Life has already left a legacy.

In a blockbuster deal for Fanatics and Ticketmaster, the two companies have agreed to sell verified tickets and merchandise on each others’ sites. According to a statement from the two companies, the partnership will give leagues, teams and universities an integrated e-commerce experience from the two companies’ customer databases to create fan rewards programs, as […]

It was a stormy Monday for cloud stocks today with the general trend pointing way down. Okta stock took the biggest beating, down over 15 percent to $48.67, and even mighty Salesforce had its worst day since 2016, according to CNBC, down 8.7 percent to $121.01. Wall Street was apparently disenchanted with just about every […]

Shares of technology companies were battered in today’s trading as fears of an increasing trade war between the U.S. and China and rising interest rates convinced worried investors to sell. The Nasdaq Composite Index, which is where many of the country’s largest technology companies trade their shares, was down 219.4 points, or 3 percent, to […]

Sometimes, it’s hard to imagine a product or industry that a new e-commerce startup hasn’t tried to remake already, from slippers to mattresses, from luggage to lipstick. Yet two childhood friends in New York have seemingly struck on a fresh idea: taking on the stodgy and often expensive world of cookware, where one’s options out of college are usually limited to […]

Crypto news got a little boost last week after a dark month of crashes, stablecoins and birthdays. The SEC ruled that two ICO issuers, CarrierEQ Inc. and Paragon Coin Inc., were in fact selling securities instead of so-called utility tokens. “Both companies have agreed to return funds to harmed investors, register the tokens as securities, […]

Back in September, Microsoft announced a virtual desktop solution that lets customers run Office 365 and Windows 10 in the cloud. They mentioned several partners in the announcement that were working on solutions with them. One of those was FSLogix, a Georgia virtual desktop startup. Today, Microsoft announced it has acquired FSLogix. It did not […]

Five years and 60 potential locations later, NASA has chosen the Jezero Crater as the landing site for its Mars 2020 rover mission. Slated to launch in July, the Mars 2020 rover mission will touch down at the Jezero Crater as NASA’s exploration of the Red Planet enters its next phase. The rover will be looking for […]