Crunch Hype

Uber is back in court in the UK today and tomorrow to try once again to overturn a two year old employment tribunal ruling that judged a group of Uber drivers to be workers — meaning they’re entitled to workers benefits such as holiday pay, paid rest breaks and the national minimum wage. Uber lost its first […]

Earlier this year omni:us, an AI-driven service which is able to process digital documents (some of which contain handwriting) by classifying them and extracting the valuable data, revealed it was working with over half of the top 10 insurance providers in the German-speaking DACH region. It’s now closed a Series A round of funding bringing […]

Listen up, Menschen. In German, it’s time to Himmel und Hölle in Bewegung setzen — put heaven and hell in motion. In English, it’s time to move heaven and earth. Say it anyway you like, you still have only four days left to save up to €500 on passes to Disrupt Berlin 2018. The early-bird […]

One of the longest-standing crypto exchanges has new owners after Europe-based Bitstamp was sold to South Korea’s Nexon, marking the gaming firm’s second such acquisition. The acquirer is NXMH, a Belgium-based PE and investment firm owned by NXC — the parent of Nexon — and it will take a majority 80 percent stake in the business for […]

Former TokBox head Ian Small is replacing Chris O’Neill as CEO of Evernote, the note-taking and productivity app company said this morning. In a blog post, Small said that the leadership change was announced to employees this morning by Evernote’s board. “We are all hugely appreciative of the energy and dedication Chris has shown over […]

Lime has tapped David Richter, Uber's former vice president, to lead its business operations.

Social e-commerce startup Goxip raised $5 million in January, and now the Hong Kong-based business has brought in more cash with a strategic $1.4 million investment from financial services company Convoy. Existing backers including Chinese photo app company Meitu also took part. Convoy offers a range of services that include asset management, insurance and other […]

Google and a group of game cetologists have undertaken an AI-based investigation of years of undersea recordings, hoping to create a machine learning model that can spot humpback whale calls. It's part of the company's new "AI for social good" program that's rather obviously positioned to counter the narrative that AI is mostly used for facial recognition and ad targeting.

iHeartMedia announced today that its streaming radio app iHeartRadio is coming to Mexico. In fact, a beta version of the app is already live, with plans for an official launch on November 3. As part of this launch, the company is partnering with Mexican broadcaster Grupo ACIR, which owns the Amor, Mix and La Comadre […]

She may not have the name recognition of former colleague Beth Seidenberg, but Lynne Chou-O’Keefe, who has spent the last five-plus years investing in healthcare on behalf of the venture firm Kleiner Perkins, is raising her own debut fund. According to a newly processed SEC filing, the firm is called Define Ventures, and it has […]

Observant has found a new way to use the fancy infrared depth sensors included on the iPhone X, XS and XR: analyzing people’s facial expression in order to understand how they’re responding to a product or a piece of content. Observant was part of the winter batch of startups at accelerator Y Combinator, but was […]

Kodak isn’t feeling very well. The company, which sold off most of its legacy assets in the last decade, is licensing its name to partners who build products like digital cameras and, most comically, a cryptocurrency. In that deal, Wenn Digital bought the rights to the Kodak name for an estimated $1.5 million, a move […]

Daimler-owned ride-hailing company mytaxi will release a fleet of e-scooters in Southern Europe later this year.

A U.S. government network was infected with malware thanks to one employee’s “extensive history” of watching porn on his work computer, investigators have found. The audit, carried out by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s inspector general, found that a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) network at the EROS Center, a satellite imaging facility in South […]

Looks like Apple’s not saving all of its news for the big event in Brooklyn tomorrow. The company just revealed that the latest version of iOS is arriving tomorrow in time for the iPad reveal. The biggest addition here is the long-awaited arrival of Group FaceTime, something the company’s been talking up since WWDC. The […]

The new iPhones have some great new photography features, but the XR lacks a couple, for instance portrait mode for non-people subjects, owing to its sadly having only the one camera. So last year! Fortunately third party camera app Halide is here to help you get that professional-looking bokeh in your doggo shots.

The women's walk is planned for Thursday, according to a BuzzFeed News report.

Following an alarming week of domestic terrorism, the U.S. Department of Justice has consolidated into a single online hub resources and reporting tools for hate crimes. According to a DOJ press release, the new portal is meant to “provide a centralized portal for the Department’s hate crimes resources for law enforcement, media, researchers, victims, advocacy groups, […]

Airware desperately sought cash for 18 months before running out of money and shutting down last month, leaving about 120 employees without jobs after the startup had burned $118 million in funding. Bandaid strategic investments from construction company Caterpillar and others kept Airware alive as it looked for a $15 million round, according to a […]

After months of work, a set of guidelines designed to protect humanity from a range of threats posed by artificial intelligence have been proposed. Now, a privacy group wants the U.S. government to adopt them too. The set of 12 universal guidelines revealed at a meeting in Brussels last week are designed to “inform and […]

Two weeks before the 2016 election, Bloomberg’s Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg published a story about Trump’s brash, self-aggrandizing digital team. Democrats treated the story as evidence of the Trump campaign’s utter cluelessness, until he won.

At launch, the long-awaited (and much hyped) western adventure that is Red Dead Redemption 2 is only available on the PS4 and Xbox One. That might not be the case forever, though. Code hidden within the game’s mobile companion app suggests that a PC version could be in the works. Last week, we wrote about […]

German startup Unu raised a $12 million funding round led by Ponooc with existing investors Capnamic Ventures, Iris Capital, Michael Baum and NRW.BANK also participating. The company has been building electric scooters (the motorcycle kind) and is working on new products and services. For the past five years, Unu has sold 10,000 scooters. The market […]

It’s not broke, but Google is fixing it. As it announced last month, Google is rebranding Google Feed, its news landing page on Android and in the Google app, to be called Google Discover. Throwing minimalism out the window, Google Discover will replace the iconically spartan Google.com homepage on mobile. Discover is rolling out now […]

As you look at the $34 billion IBM-Red Hat deal announced yesterday, if you follow the enterprise closely, it seems like a good move, at least on its face. It could be years before we understand the true value of it for IBM (or lack thereof, depending on how it ultimately goes). The questions stands […]

Of all the features and hardware that dropped at Google’s event earlier this month, one that felt particularly glossed over was Playground, the new augmented reality mode that’s arrived on the Pixel 3 camera. For a company that has been investing in phone-based AR for quite a while, it launched rather quietly and in a […]

If you’ve ever wanted to own your own open-source cat, this cute Indiegogo project might be for you. The project, based on something called the Open Cat, is a laser-cut cat that walks and “learns” and can even connect to a Raspberry Pi. Out of the box a complex motion controller allows the kitten to […]

You think you own your phone, but you don't. Copyright law prohibits you from modifying its software in certain ways, opening you up to a voided warranty, cancelled service, or even a lawsuit — but that's slowly changing as the government acknowledges the need (and arguably right) to repair our own devices. A favorable decision from the Copyright Office gives you considerably more freedom with your gadgets, but it's far from an ideal solution.

Craft Ventures has led the round for WAYV.

Signal, regarded as the gold standard of end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, is rolling out a new feature that will further protect the identities of message senders. “While the service always needs to know where a message should be delivered, ideally it shouldn’t need to know who the sender is,” Signal revealed in a blog post Monday. […]

Naspers announced a $100 million Naspers Foundry fund to support South African tech startups. This is part of a $300 million (1.4 billion rand) commitment by the South African media and investment company to support South Africa’s tech sector overall. Naspers Foundry will launch in 2019.The initiatives lend more weight to Naspers’ venture activities in Africa as the company has received greater attention for investments off the continent (namely Europe, India and China).

Today’s kids are too young to remember Disney’s read-along books and records, which combined narration and sounds with physical books to make reading more entertaining. But they may have laid their hands on more modern sound books that have buttons you press at various parts of the story to punctuate the action. Now, Google is […]

In 2013 LoopMe was a start-up which started out trying to solve the problem of intrusive ads on a mobile screen by consolidating them into an “ad inbox”. In 2014 they dumped that idea to become a mobile video ad business, using AI to retarget ad campaigns instead of ad teams. The pivot worked and […]

The UK government has announced a new “digital services” tax of two percent that it plans to start levying on the UK revenues of tech giants like Amazon, Google and Apple based on the money they make on digital services like advertising and streaming entertainment (but not online sales). Announced as part of the 2018 […]

Red Dead Redemption 2 has set a high bar for the next generation of open world games, and as much as we’ve already discussed it, we’ll be addressing the deeper themes of the story as we continue to work through the game. However, there are a few points that I got hung up on in […]

This year marks an interesting turning point for OnePlus. In December, it will hit the five year mark. The Oppo-backed company has managed to grow significantly in that relatively short window. Back in June, it noted that it had sold one million units of its latest smartphone in the first 22 days. Continued growth will […]

This could be OnePlus’s moment. Back in June, the Oppo-backed Chinese smartphone maker announced that it had sold one million units of its latest handset in 22 days. These aren’t Apple or Samsung numbers we’re talking about here, of course. But they’re impressive for a less than five-year-old company odds are pretty good you’ve never […]

Shield TV, Nvidia’s streaming media set-top box introduced last year, is going hands-free by way of Alexa. The company announced this morning the launch of a new Amazon Alexa skill which will enable Shield TV owners in the U.S. to navigate their device with voice commands, including those to turn on or off the Shield, […]

Twitter’s like button — the heart at the bottom of a Tweet — is one of the more enduring and popular parts of the Twitter experience. So it took some by surprise to see a story published earlier today claiming that Twitter would “soon” be removing the feature. Not so soon, it seems. Twitter today […]

Vimeo announced today a new feature that will allow videos to be published directly to LinkedIn. The added support is a part of the company’s “Publish to Social” feature, which already offers publishing to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and is available to paid subscribers. The expansion to LinkedIn is another example of the company’s shift […]

A little good press goes a long way for a company like Amazon. The company routinely gets knocked for things like warehouse conditions, tax breaks and impact on smaller retail outlets. AmazonSmile’s helped to counteract that a bit, raising money for legitimately good causes, skimmed off purchases from the site. The online retail giant announced […]

After announcing earlier this year that it planned to shut down HipChat and Stride and sell the IP of both to Slack, today enterprise software company Atlassian made another move related to its retreat from enterprise chat. It is selling Jitsi, a popular open-source chat and videoconferencing tool, to 8X8, a provider of cloud-based business […]

The PlayStation Classic already has a release date (December 3) and price ($100), but before today, Sony’s neglected to announce one key bit of information: games. The electronics giant has finally seen fit to reveal the full list of 20 titles for its answer to the wildly popular NES Classic edition. It’s a pretty solid […]

DJI announced today at an event in Texas a modified version of its well-received Mavic 2 aimed squarely at business ranging from government to education. The base of the folding drone is the same as the commercial one that launched a few months back, but there are a few updates on-board aimed specifically at enterprise […]

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. That explains a coming-together between two startups today after Jet.com announced it will give beleaguered Blue Apron a leg-up by introducing its meal kits for customers in New York. The deal will an initially rotating selection of four meal kits from Blue Apron made available as part of Jet’s […]

Who expects a $34 billion deal involving two enterprise powerhouses to drop on a Sunday afternoon, but IBM and Red Hat surprised us yesterday when they pulled the trigger on a historically large deal. IBM has been a poster child for a company moving through a painful transformation. As Box CEO (and IBM business partner) Aaron […]

China’s largest ride-hailing app Didi Chuxing is entering the hotel-booking business as it strives to recover from two highly publicized murders of female passengers by drivers on its platform. That’s according to Chinese business magazine Caijing and tech news site 36kr (links in Chinese). R-Lab, the unit in charge of Didi’s new venture, is aptly […]

Fresh from a strategic investment from Microsoft, Southeast Asia’s ride-hailing leader Grab is back in the money again after it closed $200 million in fresh capital from Booking Holdings, the travel firm formerly known as Priceline. The investment is part of an ongoing round of funding that Grab said is on course to reach $3 […]

The Red Hydrogen One is real. I’ve held it in my hands. It’s sitting face down on my desk right now as I type these words. None of this is to say, of course, that it needs to or even should exist. The Hydrogen One is less a phone than an idea that manifested its […]

Today at the Firebase Summit in Prague, Google announced a number of updates to its Firebase app development platform designed to help it shift from an environment for individuals or small teams into a full-blown enterprise development tool. Google acquired Firebase 4 years ago to help developers connect to key cloud tools like a database […]