Crunch Hype

Samsung Electronics is betting that acquiring Zhilabs, a real-time networks analytics startup based in Barcelona, will ease its transition from 4G to 5G technologies. Financial details of the deal, which was announced today, have not been disclosed. Zhilabs will be fully owned by Samsung, but it will continue to operate independently under its own management. […]

If you want to subscribe to both Scribd and The New York Times, you can now do it for a combined price of $12.99 per month — particularly impressive when you consider that a standard NYT digital subscription costs $15.99 on its own. You sign up and pay through Scribd, but once you do, you’ll […]

No, it’s not just you. As of Tuesday evening Pacific Time, YouTube was down for many users. The outage appears to have begun some time around 6:15 p.m., making this a pretty long outage for such a major site. Thanks for your reports about YouTube, YouTube TV and YouTube Music access issues. We're working on […]

Many doubted The Civil Media Company's ambitious plan to sell $8 million worth of its cryptocurrency, called CVL. The skeptics, as it turns out, were right.

Google has announced changes to the licensing model for its Android mobile operating system in Europe, including introducing a fee for licensing some of its own brand apps, saying it’s doing so to comply with a major European antitrust ruling this summer. In July the region’s antitrust regulators hit Google with a recordbreaking $5BN fine for […]

It’s hard for entrepreneurs to know the trade-offs required when making the tough decisions -- especially early on. Here are some suggestions.

After a disappointing second quarter, Netflix is back in Wall Street’s good graces. The company just released its third-quarter earnings report, and as of 5:30pm East Coast time, the stock is up 12 percent in after-hours trading. The most important number here is subscriber growth, and that’s where Netflix came in way ahead of expectations, […]

Founders building a brand today are largely relying on new infrastructure to do it, though they’re still heavily reliant on legacy carriers like FedEx and DHL when it comes to international shipping. In fact, prohibitively high prices, along with not a lot of support or tools, are a few reasons why more American products aren’t […]

Facebook is demoting trashy news publishers and other websites that illicitly scrape and republish content from other sources with little or no modification. Today it exclusively told TechCrunch that it will show links less prominently in the News Feed if they have a combination of this new signal about content authenticity along with either clickbait […]

Google Maps is beefing up its app to help electric vehicle owners find the most suitable and closest place to charge up. Google Maps said Tuesday it’s adding an EV charging feature to the app that will give users information about charging stations. Google has featured charging stations for a number of years now. But […]

Coinbase’s newest asset is live. On Tuesday the popular U.S.-based cryptocurrency platform added support for ZRX, the token representing the 0x Project. On Coinbase, ZRX joins the rarified ranks of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic and Litecoin. The addition doesn’t come as a surprise. Last week, Coinbase added ZRX to Coinbase Pro, the so-called “evolution […]

It’s going to be harder for trolls to disrupt Periscope broadcasts. The Twitter-owned live streaming app has offered chat moderation capabilities for years, but it has so far relied on group moderation. That means when users flagged a comment as abuse, spam or harassment, Periscope would randomly select a few other viewers to take a […]

“Conversational marketing” is a phrase that I hear a lot, but when the team at AdLingo uses it, they mean something specific — namely, bringing chatbots and other conversational assistants into online advertising. The startup is part of Google’s Area 120 incubator, and co-founder and general manager Vic Fatnani said he’s worked on advertising at Google […]

Twitter users on iOS were hit with a strange bug today. Instead of receiving notifications that included the tweet itself, they received a string of alphanumeric characters. The issue only affected iOS users, we confirmed with the company, and has since been resolved. Twitter was quick to address the problem, following complaints from Twitter users […]

Lyft and Uber’s race to an IPO is heating up. Lyft has selected JPMorgan Chase & Co. as the lead underwriter of its initial public offering along with Credit Suisse Group and Jefferies Group, the WSJ reported, citing “people familiar with the company’s plans.” Lyft declined to comment. Lyft is expected to file an IPO in the […]

Twitter today inserts activity-based tweets into your timeline, alerting you to things like the popular tweets liked by people you follow, or those Twitter accounts that a lot of people in your network have just started to follow. These alerts can be useful, but their timing is sporadic and they can be easily missed. Plus, […]

Men's hair loss brand Keeps has raised $15 million in a round co-led by Maveron and Northzone.

If you've been laying off the Pokémon Go for a while due to a lack of new monsters, prepare to be glued to your phone again. Niantic is now adding pokémon from the rugged Sinnoh region that first appeared in 2007's Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum games.

Arm-based chips are ubiquitous today, but the company isn’t resting on its laurels. After announcing its ambitions for powering more high-end devices like laptops a few months ago, the company today discussed its roadmap for chips that are dedicated to internet infrastructure and that will power everything from high-performance servers to edge computing platforms, storage […]

For the longest time, GitHub was all about storing source code and sharing it either with the rest of the world or your colleagues. Today, the company, which is in the process of being acquired by Microsoft, is taking a step in a different but related direction by launching GitHub Actions. Actions allow developers to […]

Medtronic, a maker of medical devices and implants, has pulled the plug on its internet-based software update system, which security researchers had found had a dangerous security vulnerability The company said in a notice this week that it’s switching off the software distribution network after researchers found that a hacker could update the pacemaker’s software […]

Facebook has announced it rolled out a system of checks on political ads run on its platform in the UK which requires advertisers to verify their identity and location to try to make it harder for foreign actors to meddle in domestic elections and referenda. This follows similar rollouts of political ad transparency tools in […]

Like many other leading social media companies, Pinterest is making it easier to purchase the products on its platform.

Andreessen Horowitz has led the $300 million Series B, with participation from Premji Invest and Uprising.

A mysterious product called “Ripley” appeared hidden beside Facebook’s new Portal smart displays in Facebook for Android’s code. Dug up by frequent TechCrunch tipster Jane Manchun Wong a week ago, Ripley’s name squared with Facebook’s VP of Portal Rafa Camargo telling us that “we’re already investing in expanding the product line with more products we want […]

The saga between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which began with a now infamous “funding secured” tweet about taking the electric automaker private, is officially resolved. A federal judge has approved Musk’s settlement with the SEC over securities fraud allegations. Bloomberg was the first to report the judge’s approval. […]

It’s been a year since the launch of Substack, a platform that allows newsletter writers to build a subscription business. Today, on its first birthday, the startup has a simple message: Yes, people really are willing to pay for newsletters. In fact, the company says there are more than 25,000 paying subscribers for Substack -powered […]

LG’s strange new hybrid Watch W7 marked a small but important victory for Wear OS. But this morning in London, Google lost a key ally in the smartwatch wars — for this model, at least. Huawei’s latest wearable, the Watch GT ditches the Google operating system for its own in-house brew, LiteOS. The move marks […]

Leave your smartwatch on the counter because Timex is back with its first automatic watch in decades. Called the Marlin, this 21-jewel timepiece that hearkens back to the days of “Takes a licking, keeps on ticking.” The Marlins cost $249 and come in multiple styles. This particular model, in a rich burgundy, looks like something […]

When Discord first launched its new built-in game store just a few weeks back, there was one big caveat: it was available to only a tiny, tiny slice of its 150M users. 50,000 of them, to be exact — all of them in Canada. Today it’s going global. Discord says that access to its store […]

Walmart appears to have big plans for its video streaming service, Vudu . On the heels of a partnership with MGM for original content, new reports claim the retailer is now in discussions with various video services, in the hopes of making them accessible through Vudu itself. That move would make Vudu more like Amazon’s […]

Make no mistake, Huawei’s going after the big dogs here. The company’s taken a Samsung-esque approach to the world of flagship smartphones with a beast of a handset that delivers everything and the kitchen sink. The Mate 20 Pro is a 6.4 inch powerhouse with features and specs to spare. It’s a combination of the […]

Paperspace wants to help developers build artificial intelligence and machine learning applications with a software/hardware development platform powered by GPUs and other powerful chips. Today, the Winter 2015 Y Combinator grads announced a $13 million Series A. Battery Ventures led the round with participation from SineWave Ventures, Intel Capital and Sorenson Ventures. Existing investor Initialized […]

MongoDB is a bit miffed that some cloud providers — especially in Asia — are taking its open source code and are offering a hosted commercial version of its database to their users without playing by the open source rules. To combat this, MongoDB today announced that it has issued a new software license, the […]

Dating app Hinge is today launching a new feature aimed at improving its recommendations, based on whether or not matches had successful real-world dates. The feature may also help to address one of the major problems with today’s dating apps: that no one knows how well they actually work. After all, it’s one thing to […]

D1 Capital Partners has led the $600 million round for Instacart.

In today’s world of Slack, email and a gazillion other web apps and services, it’s become increasingly hard to search for information. Did your boss Slack you or email you that information about your bonus? Or did they share it via a Google Doc? Who knows? Clearly not you, but Journal knows. Journal, a machine […]

The Voyage may be dead, but the Kindle line still has some life left in it. This time last year, Amazon upgraded the high-end Oasis model, and now the mid-range Paperwhite is getting a little love.The workhorse of the company’s devoted e-reader line just got a handful of upgrades that will give users a more […]

In this fun video the Boston Dynamics Spot dances, wiggles, and shimmies right into our hearts. This little four-legged robot – a smaller sibling to the massive Big Dog – is surprisingly agile and the team at Boston Robotics have taught the little robot to dance to Bruno Mars which means that robots could soon […]

Lyft has been testing versions of an all-access monthly subscription plan since March. Now, it’s ready to make it available to everyone in the U.S. Starting today, U.S.-based riders can sign up for the plan. It will be available to everyone in the U.S. by the end of the week. Lyft’s All-Access plan costs $299 per […]

Technology, like so much of life, is cycle. Gadget evolve, leaving holes in our lives that some fresh new startup is waiting in the wings to fill. There are few better examples of the phenomenon than the Mighty. Introduced last year, the product built a pretty solid reputation as “the iPod Shuffle for Spotify.” The […]

Temasek, the Singaporean government-controlled company that is one of the world’s biggest investors, is today announcing an acquisition to beef up its cybersecurity business. It is acquiring Sygnia, a startup out of Israel that keeps a low profile, but has built technology and services to help large organizations respond to cyber threats. The price of […]

Analyst Gartner, best known for crunching device marketshare data; charting technology hype cycles; and churning out predictive listicles of emergent capabilities at software’s cutting edge has now put businesses on watch that as well as dabbling in the usual crop of nascent technologies organizations need to be thinking about wider impacts next year — on both […]

NowRx, an on-demand pharmacy solution of sorts, just closed a $7 million Series A round via the SeedInvest crowdfunding platform. The company had previously raised a $3 million seed round. As the on-demand industry flourished and NowRx co-founder Cary Breese surrounded himself with people from the pharmacy industry, Breese said it became clear to him […]

Some of the most sensitive U.S. government departments and agencies still aren’t using a basic email security feature that would significantly cut down on incoming spam or phishing emails. Fifteen percent of all U.S. government domains still aren’t employing DMARC, or domain-based message authentication, reporting, and conformance policy on their domains, which email systems use […]

Amazon announced today that it has invested $10 million in Closed Loop Fund, which finances the creation of recycling infrastructure and services in U.S. cities. In a statement, the e-commerce behemoth claimed that its investment will keep one million tons of recyclable material out of landfills and “eliminate the equivalent of two million metric tons of […]

TechCrunch Disrupt is the world’s biggest and most impactful tech startup conference, and we can’t wait to bring the hype to Berlin. We’re very proud of the show we’ve put together and are thrilled to give you a look at what’s in store. Editor’s Note: Not all of our speakers are included on this agenda […]

JobUFO, the Berlin-based startup that has built a video focussed app to help facilitate better job applications, has raised €2 million in seed funding. Leading the round is IBB and Hevella Capital, with the investment to be used for growth. Claiming to re-invent the way companies handle the application process, JobUFO has developed an online/mobile […]

Commenting publicly for the first time about Google’s censored search engine for China, CEO Sundar Pichai said onstage at the WIRED 25 summit in San Francisco that the company is taking “a longer-term view” about the country. Codenamed Project Dragonfly, the controversial development has been public knowledge since a report in August by the Intercept, […]

Uber and Lyft are often times the ones to blame for the rise in traffic and congestion in cities. In San Francisco, the two ride-hailing services are undoubtedly partially to blame, but not entirely to blame, according to a new study from the San Francisco County Transportation Authority. The gist is that while ride-hailing companies […]