Crunch Hype

This is it, startup fans. We’re in the homestretch for big savings on tickets to Disrupt Berlin 2018. That means you have just five days left to save up to €500 on two action- and opportunity-packed days with some of the best and brightest minds in the tech startup world. The early-bird price becomes extinct […]

Last month, Instagram co-founders CEO Kevin Systrom and CTO Mike Krieger announced that they would be leaving Instagram and Facebook. All eyes are now on Instagram to figure out what’s going to happen to the photo and video app. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Instagram Product Director Robby Stein is joining us at […]

AnyMind Group, a Singapore-based company that uses AI in online advertising, HR and marketing, has pulled in a strategic $13.4 million investment to go after growth in Japan and other Asian markets. This Series B round was led by Line, the Japanese messaging app firm, and Mirai Creation Fund, which is backed by Toyota among others. Previous […]

Gab, the far-right social network that the suspect in Saturday’s mass shooting at Pittsburgh synagogue used to share anti-Semitic posts, has gone offline after GoDaddy gave it 24 hours to find a new domain provider. GoDaddy’s decision comes after PayPal, Medium, Stripe, and Joyent banned Gab’s accounts over the weekend. Bowers may face the death penalty […]

Walmart’s warehouse club, Sam’s Club is preparing to open the doors at a new Dallas area store that will serve as a testbed for the latest in retail technology. Specifically, the retailer will test out new concepts like mobile checkout, an Amazon Go-like camera system for inventory management, electronic shelf labels, wayfinding technology for in-store […]

John Vrionis Contributor Share on Twitter John Vrionis is the founder of Unusual Ventures. It’s time to bring the conversation about where Silicon Valley gets its money from out into the open. Following recent revelations into Saudi Arabia’s extensive reach and influence in the US technology sector, the willful ignorance that has defined the relationship […]

With its latest $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, IBM may have found something more elementary than “Watson” to save its flagging business. Though the acquisition of Red Hat is by no means a guaranteed victory for the Armonk, N.Y.-based computing company that has had more downs than ups over the five years, it seems […]

Earlier this week, in a beautiful garden in Woodside, Ca., the team at the five-year-old, seed-stage venture firm Pear hosted it fifth annual demo day. It’s an event that’s limited to roughly 100 VCs who year after year happily fill the space to see what Pear — which has written early checks to the “unicorn” […]

At a price typically reserved for semiconductor companies, telecoms, and pharmaceutical giants, IBM announced today it would pay a record $34 billion in cash and debt to acquire enterprise open source provider Red Hat. Eclipsing Microsoft’s $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, this is the biggest software acquisition in history. It’s not the biggest tech acquisition […]

The new Netflix series “The Haunting of Hill House” is based on the classic Shirley Jackson novel of the same name, but fans will probably have a better time if they put the book out of their mind. Yes, the show opens with the same famous passage that begins the novel, and show and book […]

After rumours flew around this weekend, IBM today confirmed that it would acquire open source, cloud software business Red Hat for $190 per share in cash, working out to a total value of $34 billion. IBM said the deal has already been approved by the boards of directors of both IBM and Red Hat but is […]

Perry Hewitt Contributor Share on Twitter Perry Hewitt works at the intersection of marketing, technology, and mission-driven organizations. Startups salivate at the prospect of entering the enterprise – and for good reason. The enterprise is rife with legacy systems and circuitous processes that frustrate employees and hinder results — and the startup has just the […]

Building web services and smartphone apps, which is most of what I’ve been doing professionally at HappyFunCorp1 for the last decade or so, used to be pretty straightforward. Not easy, but straightforward, especially when the client was a consumer startup, which so many of them were. The more we did the better we got at […]

There’s some turmoil brewing over at Miami-based facial recognition startup Kairos . Late last month, New World Angels President and Kairos board chairperson Steve O’Hara sent a letter to Kairos founder Brian Brackeen notifying him of his termination from the role of chief executive officer. The termination letter cited willful misconduct as the cause for […]

Chinese startups rule the roost when it comes to total reported venture dollars raised so far in 2018. That is, mostly. In one key category at least — software-as-a-service, better known as SaaS — they do not.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s visage loomed large over the European parliament this week, both literally and figuratively, as global privacy regulators gathered in Brussels to interrogate the human impacts of technologies that derive their power and persuasiveness from our data. The eponymous social network has been at the center of a privacy storm this year. And […]

Justine and Olivia Moore like to introduce themselves together, otherwise, it can be a little confusing. They live together in an apartment in Menlo Park. They share clothes. They both wear Rothy’s sustainable ballet flats and are big fans of Glossier. Their desks are only inches apart, because yes, they work together too — and […]

Snapchat needs a sugar daddy. Its cash reserves are dwindling from giant quarterly losses. Morale is poor from a battered share price and cost-cutting measures sap momentum. And intense competition from Facebook is preventing rapid growth. With just $1.4 billion in assets remaining at the end of a brutal Q3 2018 and analyst MoffetNathanson estimating it […]

What’s fascinating about the project as it’s developed is that, at the time, it was considered quite radical, perhaps even odd, to bring tech people into the equation. But simply watching the footage of refugees clutching smartphones as they fled war-torn regions and natural disasters made the tech world realize it can be part of […]

During early voting in some Texas counties, a handful of voters reported seeing their straight-ticket votes changed to endorse the opposing party. Others reported that an issue with the voting machines appeared to remove any selection for U.S. Senate altogether. The Texas Secretary of State’s office told TechCrunch that it has received “15-20 calls” from […]

Self-driving startup Waymo, a Google spin -off owned by parent company Alphabet, has started to test pricing models for rides in its autonomous vehicles in Phoenix, the latest indication that the company is preparing to launch a commercial robotaxi service. Waymo has not launched a wide-scale commercial robotaxi service in Phoenix — or anywhere — just yet. But it is […]

At least two Twitter accounts linked to the man suspected of sending explosive devices to more than a dozen prominent Democrats were suspended on Friday afternoon. Cesar Sayoc Jr., 56, was apprehended by federal law enforcement officers in Florida on Friday morning. “Though we’re still analyzing the devices in our laboratory, these are not hoax […]

Travel booking site Expedia wants to better compete with Airbnb.

The question of whether a machine can create art, or anything at all, is at the heart of many a philosophical debate and has been for decades. But whether it's worth something on the market? That point has been settled definitively today as a portrait-like image issuing from an AI sold for nearly half a million dollars at auction.

Avery Haskell says he first knew he wanted to be an astronaut ever since he was a boy growing up in Houston near NASA’s Johnson Space Center. The 24-year-old Stanford graduate who counts Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan as his heroes grew up in an entrepreneurial family. In the early days of the internet his […]

Digitalundivided's latest report highlights the disparity in funding for Latinx female-founders.

The Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI cloud contract bidding process has drawn a lot of attention. Earlier this month, Google withdrew, claiming ethical considerations. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos responded in an interview at Wired25 that he thinks that it’s a mistake for big tech companies to turn their back on the U.S. military. Microsoft president Brad Smith agrees. […]

Google Docs just rolled out a time-saving trick that’s sure to be welcomed by heavy users of Docs, or any of Google’s other productivity tools like Sheets, Slides, Sites or Forms. The company this week introduced its “.new” domain, which can be used to instantly create a new file across any of these services, it […]

Grin, the Mexico City-based electric scooter company backed by Y Combinator, is merging with São Paulo-based Ride to further the company’s expansion across Latin America. This comes shortly after Grin raised a ~$45 million Series A round. Currently, Grin only operates in Mexico City, but it has plans to expand to other cities throughout Latin […]

California's much-anticipated net neutrality rules, which were signed into law last month, are being put on ice until a challenge to the FCC's own rules at the federal level is resolved. It's unfortunate, but logical — if the FCC rules are undone or modified, the necessity and legality of California's will also be affected.

Snapchat is launching its first Mac and Windows software that takes over your webcam and brings its augmented reality effects to other video streaming and calling services. Snap Camera can be selected as a camera output in OBS Skype, YouTube, Google Hangouts, Skype, Zoom and more, plus browser-based apps like Facebook Live so you can […]

The teens were out in force today in San Jose for the annual TwitchCon game-streaming conference. There, Twitch announced that at any given time, 1 million people are watching it (up from 746,000 last year), and it seemed like many game lovers were at TwitchCon in person to meet some of the nearly half-million web […]

At a time when engineers must meet the needs of a vast population of users with diverse opinions and backgrounds, the engineering workforce continues to suffer from gender disparity.

Facebook has removed 82 pages, groups and accounts for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” that originated out of Iran. The social networking giant discovered the “inauthentic behavior” late last week, according to a blog post by the company’s cybersecurity policy chief Nathaniel Gleicher. He said the operation relied on posing as U.S. and U.K. citizens, and “posted about politically charged […]

Sad news for movie fans: FilmStruck, the streaming service developed by Turner Classic Movies, is shutting down. A message on the FilmStruck website says it’s no longer accepting new subscribers, with plans to shut down on November 29. Meanwhile, The Hollywood Reporter suggests that this was an expected move — now that it’s part of […]

Reelgood, a startup aimed at helping cord cutters find shows and movies to watch on the services they subscribe to, has made an acquisition in the hopes of bringing Reelgood’s data to more places. The company has bought Guidebox, a streaming availability data provider which powers Roku, TVGuide, Metacritic and others. Deal terms weren’t disclosed, […]

Move aside Uber, China’s ByteDance is now the world’s highest-valued tech startup. That’s according to reports from Forbes and Bloomberg both of which claim that the company has completed a $3 billion investment that values the company at $75 billion. A source with knowledge of the deal confirmed the round to TechCrunch and suggested that […]

Chat fiction startups have been exploring the types of stories you can tell in the form of text message conversations, and now Hooked is taking that exploration one step further with the launch of “Dark Matter.” The company describes this as its first feature-length story. “Dark Matter” tells the story of Tasneem (Taz) Singh, a […]

MakeSpace founder and former CEO Samuel Rosen is ready to launch his next venture, and it has little or nothing to do with the on-demand economy. This time, Rosen is setting his sights on the world of water. Tap aims to be the world’s first public index and global search engine for drinking water. Plastic […]

It pays to have the most popular game in the world. Epic Games, the creators of the runaway gaming smash hit Fortnite, have raised $1.25 billion in a new round of financing. via GIPHY It’s been 20 years since Epic Games first released its Unreal game development engine in concert with its first person shooter, […]

Blockchain startup Blockchain shared its roadmap for the coming months. The company is launching a hardware wallet in partnership with Ledger. Blockchain is also launching a new trading platform called Swap — this platform will find the best trading prices across a variety of exchanges and liquidity pools so that you can exchange tokens at […]

Thrills? Chills? iPads? Definitely yes on that last one, at least. The invites are out and the rumors have been pouring in, fast and furious. On Tuesday October 30, the company will be wrapping up hardware season with one final event, hitting all of the points that didn’t quite make it into September’s big iPhone […]

In a clever bit of sleuthing by Corin Faife at Breaker, we find that over half of the most popular crypto blogs offer pay-for-play posts including “CEO interviews” that are not labelled as sponsored. Further, many sites offer premium services in which blog writers will repost PR content without a sponsored tag. As I noted […]

Samsung’s foldable phone has been floating around the company under the codename “Winner” for some time now. That bit of info isn’t new. It’s understandably taken the company a while to get the thing just right. After all, we’re talking a new paradigm here in terms of form factor. It’s an exciting process, indeed — […]

Amazon is making it easier to use Alexa to do more than launch apps and streaming services on Fire TV devices, but to also navigate once inside them. The company confirmed it quietly launched an update specifically for Fire TV Cube devices that allows device owners to use Alexa instead of a remote control for […]

After getting EU approval a week ago, today Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub, the Git-based code sharing and collaboration service with 31 million developers, has officially closed. The Redmond, WA-based software behemoth first said it would acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock in June of this year, and after the acquisition closed it would continue to […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week the normal band was together, with Connie Loizos, Danny Crichton, and myself on hand along with IVP investor Jules Maltz. We had yet another episode of market turmoil, that was again reversed to some extent before […]

WhatsApp is finally adding stickers to its hugely popular messaging app. The company said today that support for stickers will roll out to Android and iOS users over “the coming weeks.” Initially, the app’s 1.5 billion users will have a seemingly limited selection with the first packs provided by WhatsApp’s own design team and some “other […]

We couldn’t put together a conference in Berlin without inviting Valentin Stalf from N26, the co-founder and CEO of one of Europe's most promising startups. A few years ago, few people would have bet on a startup creating a bank from scratch. N26 now has over 1.5 million clients and a ton of funding. N26 […]