Crunch Hype

What if you could peek behind what’s in your photos, like you’re moving your head to see what’s inside a window? That’s the futuristic promise of Facebook 3D photos. After announcing the feature at F8 in May, Facebook is now rolling out 3D photos to add make-believe depth to your iPhone portrait mode shots. Shoot one, […]

Audit giant PwC is the latest mainstream firm to show new interest in digital currencies. This week it announced a partnership with decentralized lending platform Cred to advise on better standards for stablecoins. While details of the partnership are light, Cred is working on its own stablecoin tied to the U.S. dollar, and is hoping to avoid […]

There’s always been a gap between how much money Apple’s App Store makes when compared with Google Play. But in the third quarter of 2018, that gap widened considerably – possibly to the widest point yet. According to a new report from Sensor Tower, the App Store earned nearly 93% more than Google Play in […]

Israeli startup CommonSense Robotics is launching its first automated micro-fulfillment center in Tel Aviv. It’s a tiny 6,000 square feet warehouse that is packed from ground to ceiling with products. Robots do the heavy lifting when it comes to getting items ready to dispatch. TechCrunch shot a video of CommonSense Robotics’ test fulfillment center. Today’s […]

SpankChain, a cryptocurrency aimed at decentralized sex cams, has announced that a hacker stole about $38,000 from their payment channel thanks to a broken smart contract. They wrote: At 6pm PST Saturday, an unknown attacker drained 165.38 ETH (~$38,000) from our payment channel smart contract which also resulted in $4,000 worth of BOOTY on the […]

Coord, the mobility data startup that spun out of Alphabet-owned Sidewalk Labs, has raised a $5 million Series A round led by Alliance Ventures, with participation from Trucks, Urban.Us and DB Digital Ventures. The plan with the funding is to continue to enhance Coord’s APIs and geographic coverage, as well as “build a bridge between […]

Fortnite’s journey to Android has been an adventure unto itself. It first launched as a Samsung exclusive, alongside the Note 9, before circumventing the Play Store to arrive on Google’s Mobile operating system. Until now, however, actually getting the game required going to the site, signing up and waiting for an invite. Epic announced today […]

Uber Freight, the newly spun out Uber business unit, will push out an upgraded app in the coming weeks with better, more intuitive tools to help truck drivers connect with shipping companies. The redesigned and updated app comes just two months after Uber announced it would make Uber Freight a separate unit and more than double […]

Fresh off a $150 million round of funding, kids’ gaming platform Roblox is making its first acquisition. The company says it’s acquiring the small startup PacketZoom, bringing its team and technology in-house to help it improve mobile application performance as its platform expands further into worldwide markets. Founded in 2013, and based in San Mateo, California, […]

Earlier this week at its annual hardware event, Google announced a number of new features for its Assistant coming to the new Pixel 3 phones and Google’s own Home Hub smart display. As it turns out, though, Google didn’t pull back the curtain on everything new with the Assistant, so today, it’s announcing a number […]

If you miss the old AOL chat rooms, you’ll love Facebook’s plan to combine Groups and with Messenger without spamming you to death. Starting today, Facebook will gradually roll out the abilty for members of Facebook Groups to launch group chats about specific sub-topics that up to 250 members can join. A dog owners’ Group […]

Some nice momentum for privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo which has just announced it’s hit 30 million daily searches a year after reaching 20M — a year-on-year increase of 50%. Hitting the first 10M daily searches took the search engine a full seven years, and then it was another two to get to 20M. So as […]

Walmart and Eko announced a partnership this morning to create a joint venture for interactive content called W*E Interactive Ventures. The best example of the interactivity that Eko enables is probably “That Moment When,” a comedy web series that the startup created last year in partnership with Sony. In a series of short videos, you take […]

New Relic, a provider of analytics and monitoring around a company’s internal and external facing apps and services to help optimise their performance, is making an acquisition today as it continues to expand a newer area of its business, containers and microservices. The company has announced that it has purchased CoScale, a provider of monitoring […]

Back in 2016, Spotify partnered with Genius to bring lyrics and backstory to its pop music playlists. Today, however, the musical reference guide has drawn a bit of a line in the sand, partnering with Spotify’s chief competitor. Genius announced via blog post today that it’s firmly in the Apple Music camp. The new deal brings […]

This clever – if expensive – product is called the BoxLock and it is a keyless padlock that lets your package delivery person scan and drop off your packages into a locked box. The system essentially watches for a shipping event and then waits for the right barcode before opening. Once the delivery person scans […]

Last year, Mozilla made its first acquisition by snatching up Pocket, the Instapaper competitor that helps you save longer articles for later reading. Today, this popular reading app is getting a major update that gives its app a visual makeover, including a new dark mode, and most importantly, a better way to listen to the […]

Email continues to be a tempting target to entrepreneurs. After all, email is nearly ubiquitous, and yet almost no one loves the experience of using it. June.ai today joins a long list of startups that looked to change up the way we use email, but this latest company is taking a different approach. Co-founder and […]

Last week, Amazon addressed growing backlash against unfair warehouse wages by announcing plans to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour. The news was largely lauded as a positive step by critics including Senator Bernie Sanders, who had helped push the company in that direction with strongly worded legislation. The move was still met […]

As MoviePass continues to fumble, Sinemia just keeps on rolling. This morning, the movie ticket subscription service announced one of it its most compelling offerings to date. In addition to all of its proprietary ticket tiers, the startup is launching Sinemia Enterprise, a white-labeled service that essentially lets theaters build their own custom plans. The […]

FitMetrix, a fitness technology and performance tracking company owned by gym booking giant Mindbody, has exposed millions of user records because it left several of its servers without a password. The company builds fitness tracking software for gyms and group classes — like CrossFit and SoulCycle — that displays heart rate and other fitness metric […]

Walmart and PayPal this morning announced a partnership that will see the two collaborating on financial services and products, including new PayPal cash in and cash out services at Walmart stores, as well as the ability for PayPal Cash MasterCard customers to access their cash balance in-store at service desks, ATMs and cash registers. The […]

With its regulatory woes behind it — and the acqui-hire of fintech startup Pariti — Tandem‘s product roadmap appears to be picking up pace. The challenger bank founded by Ricky Knox has launched its second credit card today, this time targeting people in the U.K. who have yet to build up a credit history at […]

Zuora, the SaaS company helping organizations manage payments for subscription businesses, announced today that it had been selected as a Premier Partner in the Amazon Pay Global Partner Program. The “Premier Partner” distinction means businesses using Zuora’s billing platform can now easily integrate Amazon’s digital payment system as an option during checkout or recurring payment […]

If you think that Flash, the once-popular web plugin, couldn’t die fast enough, even those annoying fake Flash installers riddled with malware aren’t going anywhere any time soon. In fact, they’re getting even sneakier. New research out of Palo Alto Networks found a recent spike of fake Flash installers not only dropping cryptocurrency mining malware […]

Shimon is a marbima-playing robot with some real soul. This crazy little robot, created by Gil Weinberg at the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, can listen to the other players around it and play out little ditties in response to the music. In short, it’s the world’s best jazz and hip hop collaborator because, […]

GoFundMe, the social fundraising platform that has raised over $5 billion from over 50 million donors for causes, today is taking a big step into fundraising for charities and other non-profit organizations, and specifically helping charities dedicated to adolescent girls in the process. The startup is partnering with former First Lady Michelle Obama and the […]

Shopify, the provider of payment and logistics management software and services for retailers, has opened its first physical storefront in Los Angeles. The first brick and mortar location for the Toronto-based company, is nestled in a warren of downtown Los Angeles boutique shops in a complex known as the Row DTLA. For Shopify, Los Angeles […]

After holding a series of hearings in the wake of the Facebook -Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal this summer, and attending a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg himself in May, the European Union parliament’s civil liberties committee has called for an update to competition rules to reflect what it dubs “the digital reality”, urging EU institutions […]

Want to make your music more interesting? Add a subwoofer. That’s what Amazon did and, suddenly, the entire Echo smart speaker lineup is more interesting. If you were not impressed with the sound of an Echo, consider trying again when the Echo is paired with an Echo Sub. The subwoofer changes the game. The Echo […]

David Gorodyansky Contributor David Gorodyansky is the CEO and co-founder of AnchorFree, maker of privacy app Hotspot Shield. More posts by this contributor Warrantless surveillance law proves it’s time to take privacy into our own hands This is the future if net neutrality is repealed; the creeping, costly death of media freedom Congressman Ro Khanna’s […]

When Snowflake, the cloud data warehouse, landed a $263 million investment earlier this year, CEO Bob Muglia speculated that it would be the last money his company would need before an eventual IPO. But just 9 months after that statement, the company announced a second even larger round. This time it’s getting $450 million, as […]

Chargify, the payment management service owned by Scaleworks, has launched a new tool for billing management. The new product is designed to remove limitations and allow payers to assign or reassign payment responsibility for subscriptions or groups of subscriptions, according to the company. Called WhoPays, the new service is pitched to businesses as a way […]

On the heels of Apple this morning inking a $600 million deal to acquire IP, talent and licenses from Dialog Semiconductor in Europe, it has also confirmed another acquisition of a smaller startup in the region. Apple has purchased Spektral, a computer vision company based out of Denmark that has worked on segmentation technology, a […]

On 29-30 November, thousands of early-stage startups across Europe and beyond will attend Disrupt Berlin 2018 and spend two program-packed days exhibiting and exploring the very latest in tech innovations. In a crowd that size, it helps to have a tool to find and connect with the right people. That’s why we’re making our CrunchMatch platform […]

You thought Google+ was dead, didn’t you? And it is — if you’re a consumer. But the business version of Google’s social network will live on for the foreseeable future — and it’s getting a bunch of new features today. Google+ for G Suite isn’t all that different from the Google+ for consumers, but its focus […]

It’s been about two years since Google acquired API management service Apigee. Today, the company is announcing new extensions that make it easier to integrate the service with a number of Google Cloud services, as well as the general availability of the company’s API monitoring solution. Apigee API monitoring allows operations teams to get more […]

Google is playing catch-up in the cloud, and as such it wants to provide flexibility to differentiate itself from AWS and Microsoft. Today, the company announced a couple of new options to help separate it from the cloud storage pack. Storage may seem stodgy, but it’s a primary building block for many cloud applications. Before […]

Over the course of the last year, Google has launched a number of services that bring to other companies the same BeyondCorp model for managing access to a company’s apps and data without a VPN that it uses internally. Google’s flagship product for this is Cloud Identity, which is essentially Google’s BeyondCorp, but packaged for […]

It’s a busy week for news from Google Cloud, which is hosting its Next event in London. Today, the company used the event to launch a number of new networking features. The marquee launch today is Cloud NAT, a new service that makes it easier for developers to build cloud-based services that don’t have public IP […]

Apple has quietly been putting considerable effort into building faster and more efficient chips that can help differentiate its hardware from the rest of the consumer electronics pack, and today it’s taking its next (and possibly largest) step in that strategy. Apple is paying $300 million in cash to buy a portion of Dialog Semiconductor, […]

Enterprise cloud service management company ServiceNow announced today that it will acquire FriendlyData and integrate the startup’s natural language search technology into apps on its Now platform. Founded in 2016, FriendlyData’s natural language query (NLQ) technology enables enterprise customers to build search tools that allow users to ask technical questions even if they don’t know […]

Razer is quick to refute any suggestions that its second phone is little more than an iterative update. Sure, the thing looks remarkably identical to its predecessor from the front, but the innards are certainly souped up — and there’s a snazzy new back to match. As the company puts in the Razer Phone 2 […]

It’s 4:20 p.m., which means Tesla CEO Elon Musk might be tweeting. This time, the billionaire entrepreneur’s tweet debunked a Financial Times article from Wednesday that reported Twenty-First Century Fox CEO and Tesla board member James Murdoch was the lead candidate to take Musk’s chairman spot. Musk agreed in a September 29th settlement with the U.S. Securities […]

Gogoprint, a startup that is aiming to disrupt the traditional printing industry in Southeast Asia, has pulled in a $7.7 million investment as it prepares to expand its business in Asia Pacific. We first profiled Gogoprint in 2016 soon after its launch the previous year, and since then the Bangkok-based company has expanded beyond Thailand […]

Aurora, the buzzy self-driving car startup, has become the first company officially authorized by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation to test its vehicles on public roads. Aurora has been testing its autonomous vehicles on public streets in Pittsburgh since late 2017. And other companies such as Argo AI also test autonomous vehicles there. So receiving […]

SmileDirectClub, the at-home teeth-straightening startup, has just raised $380 million at a $3.2 billion valuation, the company announced today. Investors from Clayton, Dubilier & Rice led the round, which featured participation from Kleiner Perkins and Spark Capital. This funding comes on top of Align Technology’s $46.7 million investment in SmileDirectClub in 2016, and another $12.8 million investment […]

Tech stocks tanked today amid a broader stock market slide as nervous investors worried that the 10-year bull run in public stocks may be coming to an end. The S&P 500 dropped 3.3 percent while Nasdaq composite index (which is the market where many of the largest U.S. tech companies are traded) lost 4 percent […]

Apple has answered two questions in one day, or rather a CNBC report citing someone within the company has. Why are the shows it's planning so allegedly boring? And what does it plan to do to get a foot in the door in an increasingly competitive streaming-media market? They're going to repeat the success they had with U2's "Songs of Innocence" and just shunt it right onto everyone's device.

If you are dying to get your hands on some crazy Magic Leap hardware, you have some much better options as of today. At the company’s first developer conference, Magic Leap announced they are opening orders of the Magic Leap One Creator’s Edition headset to the 48 contiguous states of the USA. If you’re in […]