Crunch Hype

Between 2013 and last year, the number of boot camp schools tripled to more than 90 in the U.S. alone, according to Course Report, an outfit that tracks the industry. Some — including The Iron Yard and Dev Bootcamp — have since folded, unable to find enough eager recruits willing to pay top dollar to […]

Of all the things to add to the blockchain, wine makes a lot of sense. Given the need for provenance for every grape and barrel, it’s clear that the ancient industry could use a way to track ingredients from farm to glass. VinX, an Israeli company founded by Jacob Ner-David, is ready to give it […]

You may recall Rylo from this time last year, when the imaging startup launched a creative take on the 360 camera. The company’s been fairly quiet in the six months since it launched some new software tricks, but a new round of funding should help the company take some key steps toward spreading the gospel. […]

Square today launched a new service that will allow its small business sellers to offer financing to their customers. Square Installments, as the service is called, will be available at launch to sellers in 22 U.S. states for purchases between $250 and $10,000. Customers can apply to pay for their purchase over three, six, or […]

Uber no longer wants the barrier to transportation to be a deciding factor between voting and not voting. On Election Day, Uber is going to make it easy for people to find their local polling places and work with nonprofits to give certain groups of people free rides to the polls. On November 6, 2018, Uber will […]

Bird, the electric scooter-sharing startup worth $2 billion, is further differentiating itself from the rest of the pack with the launch of custom, rugged electric scooters. These will roll out in the “coming weeks,” post-beta testing in Los Angeles, Nashville, Atlanta, Baltimore, Austin and Salt Lake City. Dubbed Bird Zero, the scooters have 60 percent more […]

TechCrunch is pleased to announce that Nubank co-founder Cristina Junqueira and co-founder/CEO David Vélez will join us in a fireside chat at Startup Battlefield Latin America on November 8 at the Tomie Ohtake Institute in São Paulo, Brazil. Nubank’s product is a no-fee credit card managed through a mobile app. Investors like Sequoia, Kaszek, Tiger Global […]

When your feed and Stories tray go stale, or your follower count stops rising, you drift away from Instagram . That’s why the app is rolling out two big new features designed to connect you to new people and diversify your graph so there’s alwasy something surprising to look at and like. Today Instagram launches […]

The European Parliament has voted in favor of a new quota for content on streaming services. Services, such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, will have to make sure that at least 30 percent of their catalogs in Europe come from European countries. Many European countries already have quotas for movie theaters and TV networks. […]

Whenever I see an overpass or billboard that's been tagged, I worry about the tagger and the danger they exposed themselves to in order to get that cherry spot. Perhaps this spray paint-toting drone developed by ETH Zurich and Disney Research will take some of the danger out of the hobby. It could also be used for murals and stuff, I guess.

On the heels of a $300 million funding round valued at $1.2 billion, Postmates is making its Unlimited monthly subscription product a bit more economical. Postmates Unlimited, which costs $9.99 per month (or $7.99 per month paid annually), is lowering its minimum order size from $20 to $15. That means in order to get free […]

If you ever wanted to use your Google Assistant to book a ride with Uber or Lyft, your wishes have been heard. Starting today, you’ll be able to use your voice to ask Google’s virtual assistant to book you a car from Uber, Lyft, Ola, Grab, GO-JEK and similar services. The new feature works with Google […]

Thursday’s explosive story by Bloomberg reveals detailed allegations that the Chinese military embedded tiny chips into servers, which made their way into datacenters operated by dozens of major U.S. companies. We covered the story earlier, including denials by Apple, Amazon and Supermicro — the server maker that was reportedly targeted by the Chinese government. Apple […]

As the summer of MoviePass quickly turned into the bummer of MoviePass, the company has been trying all manner of Hail Maries to keep the dream alive. And while the movie ticket startup has been burning through cash like crazy, securing funding apparently hasn’t been an issue. This week, MoviePass’ parent company Helios & Matheson […]

Quantum computing represents tremendous promise to completely alter technology as we’ve known it, allowing operations that weren’t previously possible with traditional computing. The downside of these powerful machines is that they could be strong enough to break conventional cryptography schemes. Today, BlackBerry announced a new quantum-resistant code signing service to help battle that possibility. The […]

Walgreens has entered into a strategic partnership with beauty-in-a-box startup Birchbox, which will involve building Birchbox experiences inside Walgreens’ stores so customers can shop and try new brands. The deal also sees Walgreens acquiring a minority equity interest in Birchbox, the companies said. The deal follows a change to Birchbox’s ownership structure reported earlier this […]

There are currently two main open source foundations that focus on JavaScript: the JavaScript (JS) Foundation, which was founded in 2016, and the Node.js Foundation, which launched in 2015. The JS Foundation’s mission is to shepherd the ecosystem around the language while Node.js obviously focuses on the Node.js technology for using JavaScript server-side with the […]

Atlassian’s Jira has become a standard for managing large software projects in many companies. Many of those same companies also use GitHub as their source code repository and, unsurprisingly, there has long been an official way to integrate the two. That old way, however, was often slow, limited in its capabilities and unable to cope […]

Brandwatch — the UK-HQ’d social intelligence company which raised $65M from European VCs Nauta Capital, Highland Europe and Partech — is to merge with another leading player in the space, Crimson Hexagon. The merger, expected to close in Q4, will (say the companies) create a business with around $100M in recurring annual revenues. The merged […]

We’ve finalized the Vancouver micro meetup tonight. We’ll be holding it at Hootsuite HQ on 5, East 8th Ave at 7pm on October 4. Extra special thanks to the folks at Hootsuite for helping out. You must RSVP here so we know how many are attending. I’ve already picked ten companies to pitch so if […]

Nintendo’s been known to upgrade consoles with some regularity. It’s an easy way to keep audiences engaged over the long life of a system. Released in March 2017, the Switch certainly seems due for an update. Sure, the hybrid console has been a runaway success for Nintendo, but after a year and a half, sales […]

U.S. prosecutors have charged seven suspects accused of working for the Russian GRU, the country’s military intelligence unit. The Justice Department’s National Security Division alleged the seven hackers were part of “a conspiracy to use computer hacking to obtain non-public, health information about athletes and others in the files of anti-doping agencies in multiple countries, […]

With Circle Invest, Circle has been trying to make it as easy as possible to get started with cryptocurrency trading. And the company wants to go one step further with collections of multiple tokens. When it first launched, Circle Invest was pretty straightforward. You could download an app, sign up and buy Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, […]

Recruitment websites are some of the oldest and most established residents of the internet, but if you’ve ever used them to find jobs or fill vacancies, you know that there is a lot of room for improvement in how they work. Now, a startup that is out to do just that by applying artificial intelligence […]

Amazon this morning announced a new way for customers to use Alexa’s skills – together, in combined requests. That is, you can start a request in one skill, then have it fulfilled in another. For example, the AllRecipes skill can now connect the HP skill in order to print out recipes for customers, Amazon says. […]

Google has partnered with media company PRX to launch the Google Podcasts creator program. PRX, a public radio distribution marketplace, is behind shows like This American Life, Reveal and The Moth Radio Hour. The accelerator aims to remove access barriers to podcasting and to increase the diversity of the podcast industry. This program comes after […]

The LOT Network has been around for a few years now. Its mission is to fight patent trolls and it does so by having all of its members commit to a pledge that ensures that whenever they sell a patent to a company that’s in the business of patent trolling, all of the members will […]

“Maniac,” a new miniseries on Netflix, comes from an impressive creative team — it stars Emma Stone and Jonah Hill, while director Cary Joji Fukunaga also helmed the first season of “True Detective,” and creator Patrick Somerville used to write for “The Leftovers.” And yet the series left us a bit cold. On the latest […]

Farewell, Yahoo Messenger. Hello, Yahoo Together? Yep, Yahoo is returning to the messaging space today after closing its older app due to lack of use. Designed for group chats between family, friends, clubs and others, Yahoo Together tries to differentiate itself from others through its ability to organize group conversations into separate topics, similar to […]

China’s internet battle is rapidly reproducing itself in Southeast Asia. One new hotspot is the Philippines, where Tencent just agreed to invest in Voyager, a fintech business started by telecom firm PLDT. The deal would bring Tencent into direct competition with arch-rival Alibaba, which entered the Philippines 18 months ago when its fintech affiliate Ant […]

U.S. authorities will soon have the authority to shoot down private drones if they are considered a threat — a move decried by civil liberties and rights groups. The Senate passed the FAA Reauthorization Act on Wednesday, months after an earlier House vote in April. The bill renews funding for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) […]

Basis, a mental wellness app, has raised $3.75 million in funding from Bedrock, Wave Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Move over Twitter, President Trump now has the power to send every phone in the land a simultaneous message — thanks to the new “presidential alert”, tested by FEMA yesterday. What’s it for? The idea is to enable the president of the United States to warn the nation of major threats — such as a natural […]

JFrog wants to change the way we deal with software updates. Instead of large numbered updates you have to manually download, it sees a future of continuous delivery where software is delivered as binaries and updated in the background. Investors must like that vision very much because they showered the company with a $165 million […]

It looks like Amazon’s move to sell off its physical server business in China last year was because the unit had been compromised by a Chinese government spying program. That’s according to a report from Bloomberg which details how the Chinese government infiltrated a number of U.S. companies by sneaking tiny chips onto motherboards from Supermicro. […]

The traditional aviation industry typically moves rather slowly, but over the last few years, we’ve seen a number of upstarts that are challenging the status quo both in the general and commercial aviation business. One of those is Zunum Aero, which is looking to produce a small hybrid electric-powered commuter plane for six to 12 […]

Ready for information about what may be one of the largest corporate espionage programs from a nation-state? The Chinese government managed to gain access to the servers of more than 30 U.S. companies, including Apple, according to an explosive report from Bloomberg published today. Bloomberg reports that U.S-based server motherboard specialist Supermicro was compromised in China […]

Juul Labs today filed a complaint with the United States International Trade Commission (ITC) claiming that several organizations are infringing on Juul Labs’ patents. Juul has asked the ITC to halt the importation, distribution and sale of these products in the U.S. In all, eighteen entities are listed within the complaint as having infringed Juul […]

The UK has directly accused Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, of being behind a number of cyber attacks that took place between 2015 and 2017, calling them “indiscriminate and reckless” with a range of target types including political institutions, businesses, media and even sport. It says the chaotic campaign of attacks by the GRU […]

Startup Battlefield is returning to Africa this December. TechCrunch will be hitting Lagos, Nigeria, bringing with it our Battlefield competition and a day’s worth of panel discussions, focused on topics facing the city’s startup scene. We’ve already announced a pair of speakers for the event and and are excited to add a couple more to […]

Fake news and misinformation was a key tactic used by the Russians during the 2016 presidential election to try to sway voters against candidates and sow mistruths and mistrust. Now, with just weeks before the 2018 midterm elections, researchers say things are almost as bad. Research out Thursday by the Knight Foundation found that more […]

Embattled Chinese tech firm ZTE narrowly survived after the U.S. Department of Commerce hit it with a $1 billion fine and forced changes to its business earlier this year, and. Now it is back in the news for negative reasons after it was judged to have broken the probation around a fine that it copped in […]

In less than two months, thousands of the best and brightest minds from the European and international tech startup scene will attend Disrupt Berlin 2018. The conference, which takes place November 29-30, draws participants from more than 50 countries across Europe, Asia and beyond. It’s two full days of connection, collaboration and — most of […]

Jake Bright Contributor Jake Bright is a writer and author in New York City. He is co-author of The Next Africa. More posts by this contributor Polestar unveils first production EV with aim to overtake Tesla Liquid Telecom goes long on Africa’s startups as future clients Nigerian digital payments startup Paga is gearing up for international expansion […]

Amazon’s announcement this week that it will raise its minimum wage for workers in the United States and United Kingdom earned it a wave of positive publicity, but backlash is already growing as reports emerge that its new pay structure will do away with monthly bonuses and stock option awards. In blog posts about the […]

SoftBank is getting into self-driving car services after the Japanese tech giant announced a joint-venture with Toyota in its native Japan. SoftBank is invested in Uber and a range of other ride-hailing startups like Didi in China and Grab in Southeast Asia, but this initiative with Toyota is not related to those deals. Instead, it […]

Fitbit data may have helped catch one of its customer’s killers, and not for the first time. According to numerous media reports, a 90-year-old visited his stepdaughter at her home in San Jose, Ca. earlier this month, where he says he brought her pizza and visited briefly. But according to data provided to authorities by […]

We've known for months now that Jon Favreau was working on a live-action Star Wars series for Disney's upcoming streaming service. But that's about all we knew.Until now! Favreau just dropped a few huge details out of nowhere.

Blizzard — the company behind massive game titles like World of Warcraft, Overwatch, and Hearthstone — is getting new leadership. After 27 years, Blizzard President Mike Morhaime is stepping down from the company he co-founded back in 1991 (back when it was known as Silicon and Synapse.) J. Allen Brack, previously Senior Vice President and […]

Kia is finally sharing more details about its upcoming all-electric crossover — the 2019 Kia e-Niro — that made its debut in Korea earlier this year. The upshot: it’s got some range. The production version of the all-electric crossover, which Kia is showing off at the Paris Motor Show this week, has a range of […]