Crunch Hype

Twitter is trying out a small new change to Moments that would provide contextual information within its curated stories. Spotted by Twitter user @kwatt and confirmed by a number of Twitter product team members, the little snippets appear sandwiched between tweets in a Moment. 👀Annotations adding context 🧐 https://t.co/ks6TUw8uYF — Gasca 🔥🦉 (@gasca) October 18, […]

Virtually every modern computer processor was thrown under the bus earlier this year when researchers found a fundamental design weakness in Intel, AMD and ARM chips, making it possible to steal sensitive data from the computer’s memory. The Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities — which date back to 1995 — punched holes in the walls that […]

Oh My Green has raised $20 million from Initialized Capital, Powerplant Ventures and others to bring healthier foods to offices around the U.S.

Many entrepreneurs assume that an invention carries intrinsic value, but that assumption is a fallacy.

It’s amazing how quickly things can change. Exactly a week ago, we wondered if Saudi Arabia’s money might finally become radioactive in light of the disappearance of Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Almost no one we reached for comment wanted to participate in the story, though behind the scenes, we heard the same […]

3D printing for manufacturing is one of those things that gets talked about a lot, but we’ve yet to see a lot of truly mainstream applications for the technology. A new partnership between Gillette and MIT-born startup Formlabs offers an interesting potential peek into such a future. Granted, customized razor handles is probably more of […]

It’s been four months since Facebook launched IGTV, with the goal of creating a destination for longer-form Instagram videos. Is it shaping up to be a high-profile flop, or could this be the company’s next multi-billion-dollar business? IGTV, which features videos up to 60 minutes versus Instagram’s normal 60-second limit, hasn’t made much of a […]

HTML5 almost ruined Facebook when baking in the mobile web standard to speed up development slowed down the performance of the social network’s main iOS and Android apps. For a brief moment in 2011, Facebook even tried to build an HTML5 gaming platform codenamed Sparta to escape the taxes of Apple and Google’s mobile operating […]

The big accounting firms are under pressure from digital disruption just like every industry these days, but PwC is trying a proactive approach with a digital accelerator program designed to train employees for the next generation of jobs. To do this, PwC is not just providing some additional training resources and calling it a day. […]

Homebodies across the U.S. have reason to celebrate. Postmates — the on-demand food delivery service so popular in major cities that it’s a verb now — just launched in 134 new markets. Those 134 additional cities mean that Postmates has a presence in 550 cities total across the U.S, including places like Lubbock, Texas; Athens, […]

Lensabl, the company that has built a business putting prescription lenses into any style of glasses frame, has raised $3.7 million in a new round of funding. Lensabl makes it easy to put new lenses in a favorite pair of shades or glasses Based in Los Angeles, Lensabl already has an agreement inked with the […]

Layoffs are never an easy pill to swallow, but for Essential, it seems the writing was on the wall for a while with this one. After months of reports highlighting its struggles, the Andy Rubin-led smartphone startup has announced some major layoffs. All told, the company will be losing around 30 percent of its staff. […]

Tesla has secured the rights to about 210 acres of land in Lingang, Shanghai, the site of the electric automaker's planned factory and its first outside of the U.S.

Prosthetic limbs have come a long way from the heavy, solid hands and legs of yesteryear, but it's still difficult to pack a range of motion into them without complex or bulky machinery. But new research out of Cornell uses a cleverly designed 3D-printed mechanism to achieve speed and strength with simple construction — and it costs a lot less, too.

The EduCreator Incubator will seed 25 to 40 "emerging video creators" with $25,000 to $75,000 in seed funding.

At what point do we just give up and admit we’re living in exactly the dystopian nightmare speculative fiction warned us about? It probably ought to be these horse blinders for people, which look like something straight out of a Terry Gilliam movie. Panasonic design studio Future Life Factory designed the things, but open space […]

French startup Alan wants to be a bit better than your good old health insurance. That’s why the company is trying something new and now covers part of your Petit Bambou subscription. Petit Bambou is a popular meditation app. It’s a sort of Headspace, but with French content. You download an app, put your earphones, […]

On the heels of raising new funding on a $20 billion valuation, payments and financial services startup Stripe is making a key hire to reinforce its message to the world that it’s taking security of its cloud-based services seriously. Today the company is announcing that it has hired Niels Provos as its new head of […]

It’s been a long, bumpy road for the Skully augmented reality motorcycle helmet brand. But under the leadership of Ivan Contreras, who acquired the assets of Skully in 2017, the helmet is finally shipping to its early backers. That means anyone who paid $1,800 as part of the original Skully crowdfunding campaign will finally receive their […]

Bots went through the hype cycle faster than a speeding roller coaster, as the promise of chatting with a computer quickly turned sour. Now, Twilio wants to take another stab at this market with the launch of Autopilot, a new developer service for building omnichannel bot experiences. “Omnichannel” is a word only a marketer could […]

Making a payment over the phone, maybe because you are trying to change an airline ticket or to pay a last-minute bill, still feels like an antiquated process. You read your credit card number to an agent, then your expiration date and your security code. In the process, some number will inevitably get mixed up […]

Jessica Santana and Evin Robinson were riding the subway home from a college leadership conference when they realized they were getting off at the same stop. It turned out, they had grown up in the same neighborhood, no more than 5 blocks apart. Years later, both Santana and Robinson were working six-figure jobs in the tech […]

“I think any company scaling today has to have a crypto strategy. This is the start of ours,” Omni founder and CEO Tom McLeod tells me. His on-demand property storage and rental marketplace raised $25 million in XRP coins back in January in what some saw as an opportunist move to capitalize on the cryptocurrency […]

Fintech startup N26 is growing quite rapidly. Building a startup is hard, but building a startup that manages your bank account is even harder given the increased scrutiny. German weekly magazine Wirtschaftswoche published an article that questioned N26’s identification processes. According to Wirtschaftswoche, it’s quite easy to create an account with a fake ID document. […]

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the company’s largest shareholder, intends to buy another $20 million in common stock, a move that appears to be in response to a recent settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, according to a filing Wednesday. The 8-K document detailed a settlement agreement between Musk, Tesla and the SEC over allegations […]

With Gartner estimating that there will be 150 billion connected devices by 2030 — many of them mission critical, such as powering major national infrastructure — the risk and realisation that these devices aren’t secured properly is leading some cyber security experts to predict that there is a large-scale disaster waiting to happen. And the […]

The UK’s still fairly new in post minister for health, Matt Hancock, quickly made technology one of his stated priorities. And today he’s put more meat on the bones of his thinking, setting out a vision for transforming, root and branch, how the country’s National Health Service operates to accommodate the plugging in of “healthtech” […]

Lyft has brought on former United Airlines Chief Commercial Officer Julia Haywood to serve as its VP of Strategy. The plan is for her to own Lyft’s market expansion efforts and accelerate growth. “I’m excited to see Julia make a huge impact here at Lyft,” said Jon McNeill, Chief Operating Officer at Lyft. “We are in a […]

Spotify has taken a minority stake in music distribution service, DistroKid, a popular tool used by artists for uploading their music across platforms. The company didn’t confirm the size of its stake, only saying that it made a “passive minority investment.” As a result of the deal, Spotify will also upgrade its Spotify for Artists […]

Good news! Apple now allows U.S. customers to download a copy of their data, months after rolling out the feature to EU customers. But don’t be disappointed when you get your download and find there’s almost nothing in there. Earlier this year when I requested my own data (before the portal feature rolled out), Apple […]

A look at the 20 most successful companies to come out of Y Combinator.

Rejoice, dark mode fans. Hulu is joining YouTube and YouTube TV as the streaming video service to embrace a dark theme – something that gives video sites a more cinematic look and feel (as Netflix already knows). The company says it will begin to roll out its new “Night Mode” starting today to all users of Hulu on the […]

When we first started writing about startups at TechCrunch the idea of a startup – a small business with global ambitions – was a pipe dream. How could a side hustle like Twitter turn into a mouthpiece for heroes and villains? How could a video uploading service like YouTube destroy the media industry? How could […]

Apple has refreshed and expanded its privacy website, a month after its most recent iPhone and Mac launches. You’re not going to see much change from previous years — the privacy pages still state the same commitments that Apple’s long held, like that privacy is a “fundamental human right” and that your information is largely […]

Hulu is planning to change up its live TV service by dropping channels from its core offering to instead create smaller “bundles” of sports, news, and entertainment programming, according to an interview with Hulu CEO Randy Freer in The Information. The changes, which would make Hulu more of a direct competitor to skinny bundle providers […]

After getting hauled into Washington to be grilled over how its social media platform was exploited to influence public opinion around elections and politics in the US and elsewhere, Twitter vowed that it would be more open with its data, in an attempt to do better in the future — the idea partly being that […]

In this episode of Product Hunt Radio, I'm recording from my home in San Francisco to talk to two young entrepreneurs, Tiffany Zhong and Drake Rehfeld.

Last year, Roku lost a legal battle in Mexico over piracy which resulted in a ban on sales of its devices in the country. Now, that ban has been lifted, the company says, following a favorable ruling from the 11th Collegiate Court in Mexico City. This will allow Roku to resume sales of its devices in […]

Epsagon, an Israeli startup, launched today with a new serverless tool that helps customers monitor infrastructure, even when they don’t know where or what that is. That’s the nature of serverless of course. It involves ephemeral resources. Developers build a series of event triggers and the cloud vendor spins up the necessary resources as needed. […]

Hot on the heels of raising $20 million in Series C funding led by Japan’s Rakuten Capital, London-based money transfer service Azimo is launching a new service aimed at small and medium-sized businesses. Dubbed “Azimo Business,” it lets SMEs across the U.K. and Europe send payments to an impressive 189 countries — including many emerging […]

With a few taps, you can now direct Skydio‘s $1,999 autonomous drone from your Apple Watch allowing you to fulfill the geeky dream you never knew you had, directing an expensive autonomous drone with your little wrist computer. The very cool R1 self-flying drone will also be going up for sale in US Apple Stores, a […]

Open source software — a $14 billion market — has become a cornerstone for building apps and other IT services, with some 97 percent of developers today using using open source components of one form or another in their work. That popularity, however, belies a critical challenge: some of the most ubiquitous open source packages around are […]

London-based startup Applied has bagged £1.5M (~$2M) in seed funding for a fresh, diversity-sensitive approach to recruitment that deconstructs and reworks the traditional CV-bound process, drawing on behavioural science to level the playing field and help employers fill vacancies with skilled candidates they might otherwise have overlooked. Fairer hiring is the pitch. “If you’re hiring for […]

Those of you familiar with the incredible rise of Twilio, which came along to utterly disrupt the communications world, will be interested to hear that another player plans to do the same, but this time in the staid and tricky area of emerging markets. Unifonic, which has been dubbed “the Twilio of emerging markets” has […]

Cognata has raised $18.5 million in a funding round led by Scale Venture Partners, fresh capital that the Israeli autonomous simulation startup will use to meet demand for technology that will help companies speed up the deployment of self-driving vehicles. Cognata founder and CEO Danny Atsmon told TechCrunch the company, which has 28 employees, will […]

App maker turned music social network Smule has raised another $20 million. The latest round follows a $54 million raise in May of last year, led by Tencent, intent on helping the company expand Asia operations. This time out, funding is arriving via Times Bridge, the VC wing of India media conglomerate The Times Group. […]

Memory, a startup out of Norway and maker of time tracking app Timely, has raised $5 million in further funding. Leading the round is Concentric, and Investinor, with participation from existing investor SNÖ Ventures. The company had previously raised $1 million in 2016 from 500 Startups, and SNÖ. Founded by Mathias Mikkelsen, a designer by […]

The world’s first hit reality show “The Real World” is being reimagined for Facebook Watch 26 years after it debuted on cable. Come Spring 2019, fans will get a chance to vote on who’ll join as the final cast member and connect with the housemates through Facebook Watch Party’s synchronized viewing chat rooms as they […]

Formula E is so 2017. This year, it's all about Roborace, an upcoming F1-style competition. And the big new thing is that it's all about self-driving cars. I'm excited to announce that Roborace CEO Lucas DiGrassi will come to TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin to talk about this crazy idea. DiGrassi may sound like a familiar name […]