Crunch Hype

The bigger these massive GTA-style sandbox games get, the harder it becomes to remember where the hell everything is. Even with Spider-Man, a game set in a loose recreation of a city I’ve been to a bunch of times, I found myself pausing to see the map and reorient myself every other mission. Rockstar doesn’t […]

Facebook wants to make YouTube-style monologue videos the new way for politicians to talk straight with their constituency. Today, Facebook launches Candidate Info, featuring thousands of direct-to-camera vertical videos where federal, state and local candidates introduce themselves and explain their top policy priority, qualifications and biggest goal if they win office. Elizabeth Warren (D – […]

It’s possible that St. Expeditus, the patron saint of procrastinators, has taken a shine to time-stressed startuppers. Call it whatever you like — divine intervention, planetary alignment or darned good luck — we’re extending the deadline for early-bird tickets to Disrupt Berlin 2018. That means you have 10 days until the 2 November deadline to […]

“Yeah! Well of course we’re working on it,” Facebook’s head of augmented reality Ficus Kirkpatrick told me when I asked him at TechCrunch’s AR/VR event in LA if Facebook was building AR glasses. “We are building hardware products. We’re going forward on this . . . We want to see those glasses come into reality, […]

Tesla reported a profit in the third quarter, reversing seven consecutive quarters of losses. It is only the third time in its history that it has achieved this milestone. The third quarter earnings, which were reported after the market closed Wednesday, rocketed shares up nearly 12 percent to above $320. Tesla reported a profit of […]

Vote.org and Y Combinator graduate Outvote have co-launched a social app to encourage people to hit the polls this election season.

Last year, Amazon announced a new initiative, Alexa for Business, designed to introduce its voice assistant technology and Echo devices into a corporate setting. Today, it’s giving the platform a big upgrade by opening it up to device makers who are building their own solutions that have Alexa built in. The change came about based […]

Chinese AI company Mobvoi has consistently been one of the best also-rans in the smartwatch game, which remains dominated by Apple. Today, it launched a sequel to its 2016 TicWatch, which was a viral hit raising over $2 million on Kickstarter, and it unveiled a cheaper take on Apple’s AirPods. The new TicWatch C2 was outed at a […]

Cathay Pacific, one of the main airlines in Hong Kong, says records on as many as 9.4 million passengers may have been stolen in a data breach. The airline said in a statement Wednesday that there was “no evidence” that passenger data had been misused, but warned that passenger names, dates of birth, nationalities, phone numbers, email and […]

Two years ago, Kickstarter acquired Drip, an indie musician crowdfunding platform, on the eve of the service’s untimely demise. After relaunching Drip last year, Kickstarter is again reinventing the Patreon-like artist platform. This time, by placing it under the stewardship of two guys who love indie creators so much they dreamed up a whole festival […]

NBC is looking to reach a younger audience with today’s announcement of a new streaming news network, NBC News Signal. Instead of airing on traditional pay TV platforms, Signal will be available through NBC’s news mobile and over-the-top apps, as well as on other services including PlutoTV, YouTube, and Twitter. The focus will be on […]

Ride-hailing firm Grab branched out into payments last year and now the $11 billion-valued company, which acquired Uber’s Southeast Asia business earlier this year, has given its fintech division a major boost after it announced plans to introduce virtual pre-paid debit in partnership with Mastercard. The move is the largest digital payment push in Southeast […]

Italy's Autorità garante della concorrenza e del mercato, roughly equivalent to this America's FTC, has fined Apple and Samsung a total of $15 million for the companies' practice of forcing updates on consumers that may slow or break their devices. The amount may be a drop in the bucket, but it's a signal that governments won't always let this type of behavior fly.

AT&T has begun beta testing a streaming device that seems to be something of its own Roku competitor, according to a statement made by John Donovan, CEO of AT&T Communications, during the company’s third quarter earnings call. The device, first scooped a year ago by Variety is an Android TV-based set-top box which integrates other streaming apps and […]

Larry Ellison gave his Oracle Openworld keynote on Monday and of course he took several shots at AWS. In his view, his company’s cloud products were cheaper, better and faster than AWS, but then what would you expect him to say? He rolled out a slide with all the facts and figures in case you […]

Facebook will let friends learn about you by streaming clips of your favorite songs from your profile in a throwback to MySpace Music. You’ll be able to choose tracks to add to a revamped Music section of your profile that now actually plays songs instead of just showing what artists you Like, and you can […]

We already knew the intensifying trade war between the U.S. and China was set to have an impact on consumer electronics like Fitbit trackers and the Apple Watch. It seems that tariffs are also starting to take their toll on the world of robotic vacuums — namely iRobot. As CNBC notes, the company’s shares took […]

Researchers at the University of Maryland A. James Clark School of Engineering have been working on the so-called Robo Raven for years. The ongoing project resulted in the first flying drone with independent wing movement, a feature that made these U of M UAV’s closer to birds than ever before. Now Lena Johnson, a Ph.D. […]

In a speech discussing ethics and the Internet, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has tasked the technology industry and its coder army with paying continuous attention to the world their software is consuming as they go about connecting humanity through technology. Coding must mean consciously grappling with ethical choices in […]

OnePlus has made its mark with a measured approach. The company has shied away from big, flashy features, in favor of offering well-rounded, budget devices. That’s changed a bit over the past year. Take the upcoming 6T, which is rumored to be among the first to sport an in-screen fingerprint reader — one of the […]

For obvious reasons, Facebook’s looking to up political advertising transparency ahead of the midterms. Back in May, the social network introduced Ad Archive, a searchable database of political ads in the U.S. It’s following up the feature with a new Ad Archive Report, a weekly snapshot of political spending. The survey offerings a breakdown of […]

TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin is right around the corner, and I’m excited to announce that we invited Threads founder Sophie Hill to talk about her innovative vision of luxury shopping. Threads is like nothing out there. It isn’t an e-commerce website with warehouses and suppliers. It isn’t a marketplace website for second-hand luxury goods. It isn’t […]

RevenueCat, a startup that helps developers manage their in-app subscriptions, has raised $1.5 million in new funding. The company was part of the most recent batch at Y Combinator, and CEO Jacob Eiting said growth has been “a rocket ship” for the past few months. As of this week, RevenueCat is working with 100 live […]

Take that, Amazon and Walmart. Target has just come out swinging with news that it’s launching free, two-day shipping on hundreds of thousands of items across its site without requiring a minimum purchase or an annual membership fee. This challenge to Amazon Prime comes at a time when Prime membership is at highest – Prime […]

For Dash Radio founder Scott Keeney, streaming music and radio are two very different things. On the streaming side, Apple and Spotify dominate, and “there’s not going to be room for much else.” But when it comes to radio, he argued, “It’s the wild, wild west.” Keeney, a.k.a. DJ Skee, was already one of the […]

TechCrunch's own Josh Constine and Sarah Buhr talk about some of the coolest tech-enabled baby products helping tired parents, why it might be possible to beat unhealthiness with convenience, the future of work and education, how AR and VR will transform education, how automation will affect the workplace, and all things Facebook.

Spotify is taking its playlist submission feature for all artists out of beta, starting today. The feature, which was first introduced into beta this summer, offers musicians and labels a way to reach Spotify’s playlist editors – the increasingly important tastemakers who can make or break a new track or help an emerging artist reach […]

Legitimate augmented reality use cases are hard to come by. Spatial, which dubs itself as a cross-reality platform, is launching today with $8 million in seed funding from iNovia Capital, Uber co-founder and Expa founder Garret Camp, Samsung Next, Joi Ito of MIT Media Lab, Mark Pincus and Andy Hertzfeld to bring augmented reality to enterprise customers. […]

For weeks, a small team of security researchers and developers have been putting the finishing touches on a new privacy app, which its founder says can nix some of the hidden threats that mobile users face — often without realizing. Phones track your location, apps siphon off our data, and aggressive ads try to grab […]

Access to timely, quality mental health services can be a struggle. Octave, a mental health studio founded by Sandeep Acharya, One Medical’s former head of strategy, is launching today to help with just that. “The mission of Octave is to create a society where people are as proactive about their mental well-being as they are […]

A patent filed by Apple Inc. shows a new method to print 3D models using triangular tessellation. The patent office approved the method, which breaks smooth surfaces into little triangles that approximate the shape of the original model, on October 23, 2018. The unique aspect of the patent involves the infill and surface. The infill […]

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has joined the chorus of voices warning that data itself is being weaponized again people and societies — arguing that the trade in digital data has exploded into a “data industrial complex”. Cook did not namecheck the adtech elephants in the room: Google, Facebook and other background data brokers that profit […]

Firefox parent Mozilla is returning to back the Tor Project, its long-time ally, after it committed to matching all donations made to fund Tor, the open source initiative to improve online privacy which has just started its annual end of year funding drive. Tor announced Mozilla’s support today, extending the pair’s partnership which last year helped […]

Heiliger Strohsack — holy smokes! Today’s the last day you can score early-bird pricing on tickets to Disrupt Berlin 2018. If you want to save up to €500 to attend the best tech startup conference in Europe — and why wouldn’t you — you’d better grab your wallet and buy your pass right now. The […]

Startup Battlefield Africa is set for December 11 in Lagos and investor Marieme Diop and ICT expert Shikoh Gitau will be there to lend their perspective and expertise. The Lagos TechCrunch event is a return to Africa for the Startup Battlefield series after its debut on the continent in Nairobi, Kenya. Diop — who is a […]

Neat, a Hong Kong-based startup that gives startups and SMEs access to credit cards and banking services has pulled in $3 million in fresh funding. The new round is led by China-based VC Linear Capital with participation from Hong Kong’s Sagamore investments and existing backers Dymon Asia Ventures and Portag3 Ventures . Neat previously landed a $2 million […]

One of the largest consumer internet hacks has bred one of the largest class action settlements after Yahoo agreed to pay $50 million to victims of a security breach that’s said to have affected up to 200 million U.S. consumers and some three billion email accounts worldwide. In what appears to be the closing move to […]

With their loud noises and hard plastic flanges, breast pumps are the bane of many a new mother’s existence. Founded in 2013, Naya Health is one of the most notable tech startups working on a better pump. But the company’s support site is now shutdown and it’s stopped updating its social media accounts. In a […]

Cloudflare is reportedly preparing for an initial public offering with a potential valuation of more than $3.5 billion. According to Reuters, the IPO would take place in the first half of 2019 and be led by Goldman Sachs. This year is expected to be a strong one for cybersecurity stock debuts, thanks in part to […]

Some Amazon Alexa users are currently having problems reaching the voice assistant. Instead of reacting to commands, Alexa simply says “sorry, something went wrong.” Amazon hasn’t commented publicly yet on the issue. Based on tweets and Down Detector, users began having trouble reaching Alexa around 7AM PST. While some had their connection issues resolved quickly, […]

More and more, the internet is delivered wirelessly, but as bandwidth demand grows in each home — multiple TVs, smart devices, tablets and phones — current Wi-Fi standards are starting to fall short. Fortunately the FCC and wireless industry are prepared for this, and the former has just officially proposed opening up a wide swathe of spectrum to bring our Wi-Fi systems up to gigabit level.

Marketplace businesses are intrinsically linked to the technologies that enable them. As enabling technologies have evolved, marketplaces have become able to facilitate increasingly complex exchanges in new environments and industries. The next level? They will get smart.

Teamable, a provider of hiring software that leverages employees’ social networks, has brought in $5 million from new investor Foundation Capital and existing backers True Ventures and SaaStr Fund. The startup also announced its acquisition of Simppler‘s referral recommendation engine and matchmaking recruiting software. Teamable’s co-founder and chief executive officer Laura Bilazarian declined to disclose the […]

Citron Research, an influential short-seller that has been an staunch critic of Tesla, reversed its position on the electric automaker. The about-face, which Citron Research outlined in a research note Tuesday, helped pushed Tesla shares up 12.7% to close at $294.14.

A team of developers have made something called PlusOneCoin, a clever cryptocurrency that essentially allows owners to upvote content on two financial sites, ADVFN and Investorshub. The idea — to reward people for accessing content and, more importantly, interacting with it — is something many services like Steemit have tried and failed to pull off. […]

SOSV, a 20-year-old fund with $500 million in assets under management, has been running accelerators for years. Their oldest one, HAX, is the premier hardware accelerator in San Francisco and Shenzhen, and they’ve recently launched a food accelerator in New York and a pair of biology accelerators. Now, however, they’ve just announced DLab, a crypto […]

If you’ve ever bought a movie on Google Play and decided to save a few bucks by buying it in standard definition, you might’ve just lucked out. Google just announced that it’s upgrading all previously purchased movies to 4K (if a 4K version is available) free of charge. Even if you bought SD instead of […]

Apple’s still-untitled morning show drama already has some serious star power, with Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon as its leads. Now it’s adding Steve Carell to the cast. This will be Carell’s first regular role on a TV show since his seven seasons starring in the U.S. version of “The Office.” He’ll be playing Mitch […]

A few weeks after Circle announced the launch of USD Coin (or USDC for short), Coinbase also announced that customers can now buy, sell, send and receive USDC on Coinbase. A USDC is a token that is worth exactly 1 USD. Its value is going to stay stable against USD — hence the name stablecoin […]

We already knew that the electronic scooter space in Europe was heating up, with Berlin’s Tier announcing today it has raised €25 million in a round led by Northzone, and rumours circulating that Delivery Hero founder Lukasz Gadowski has ventured into the space — all within the context of U.S. companies Bird and Lime recently […]