Crunch Hype

WikiLeaks has a new top dog. Its contentious figurehead and founder, Julian Assange, will step aside, letting former WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson take the reins due to what WikiLeaks calls “extraordinary circumstances” that have seen Assange “held incommunicado.” ANNOUNCEMENT: Assange appoints Hrafnsson Editor-in-Chief after six months of effective incommunicado detention, remains publisher [background: https://t.co/2jOgvSu5bG] pic.twitter.com/0Fwvf3SrkL […]

Google’s attempting to smooth out its relationship with photo rights holders by bringing some additional contextual data to its Image Search. In a blog post today, Product Manager Ashutosh Agarwal highlighted the company’s plan to associate Creator and Credit metadata with images served up via search. The company notes that finding out who created a […]

Facebook might be doing its best to stay out of political scandals in the latter half of 2018, but the company had a presence, front and center, at one of the most contentious Senate hearings in modern history. Facebook’s vice president of Global Public Policy, Joel Kaplan, was spotted sitting prominently near his wife, Laura […]

Tesla CEO Elon Musk described fraud charges filed Thursday by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission an “unjustified action” that has left him “deeply saddened and disappointed” in a statement sent to TechCrunch. The SEC alleges in a complaint filed against the CEO that Musk lied when he tweeted on August 7 that he had “funding […]

Update: There’s a live stream of the SEC press conference detailing the complaint: The Securities and Exchange Commission lodged a complaint today against Elon Musk following tweets sent last month by the CEO involving a planned private takeover of the electric car company at $420 a share. The filing from the Southern District of New York […]

We frequently turn to tech executives to answer for issues because they have the agency to make changes. But they are not alone.

 The X-Men movie franchise is still chugging along — and it’s returning to one of the comics’ best-known stories. For those of you who haven’t read it, the Dark Phoenix saga focuses on Jean Grey’s growing telekinetic powers, which eventually transform her personality and force her fellow X-Men to make a terrible choice. It’s […]

Tesla shares dropped more than 13 percent in after-hours trading Thursday after the Securities and Exchange Commission filed securities fraud charges against CEO Elon Musk . The SEC alleges in a complaint filed against the CEO that Musk lied when he tweeted on August 7 that he had “funding secured” for a takeover of the company […]

Archaeology may not be the most likely place to find the latest in technology — AI and robots are of dubious utility in the painstaking fieldwork involved — but lidar has proven transformative. The latest accomplishment using laser-based imaging maps thousands of square kilometers of an ancient Mayan city once millions strong, but the researchers make it clear that there's no technological substitute for experience and a good eye.

Earlier this year, the FTC settled with PayPal over the company’s handling of privacy disclosures in its peer-to-peer payments app Venmo, but Mozilla doesn’t think the changes Venmo made as a result went far enough. This week, Mozilla says it delivered a petition signed by 25,000 Americans asking Venmo to set transactions shared in its […]

A government watchdog has said that the Internal Revenue Service could do more to prevent tax fraud if it invested more money in ensuring that the identities of taxpayers are properly verified. From the IRS’s own data, fraudsters scammed the agency out of at least $1.6 billion in tax refunds during the 2016 tax season […]

This December a set of autonomous vehicles will start roaming the streets of Columbus, Ohio, in an effort to turn this bustling Midwestern community into the first smart city. The project, which is part of the Smart Columbus and DriveOhio initiatives, is the first step in launching a fully autonomous shuttle route in the city. […]

Think Ethereum and other crypto coins are overvalued? Now you can make money when their prices fall via Compound, which is launching its money market protocol for shorting cryptocurrencies today. The Coinbase and Andreessen Horowitz-funded startup today opens its simple web interface allowing users to borrow and short Ethereum, 0x’s ZRX, Brave’s BAT, and Augur’s […]

Slowly but surely, Google is expanding its portfolio of travel offerings that now range from hotel- and flight-booking services to trip planning tools. Today, it’s launching yet another set of new travel features that focus on travel planning and hotel bookings. Maybe the most interesting new tool, especially if you are planning to travel over […]

Troy Capital Group has closed its $200 million fund to provide loans to startup employees whose liquidity is locked up in company stock. The fund, backed by the multi-billion-dollar private equity giant Oaktree Capital, is the latest investment vehicle from Troy Capital Partners, a four-year-old venture firm founded by MySpace co-founder Josh Berman; Samit Varma, a […]

This summer, Microsoft pushed off the inevitable end of Skype Classic (7.0) support after a fair bit of user backlash. Nearly a month after the original September deadline, the company announced today that it’s going to pull the plug in November — for real this time. The company is killing Skype 7 support on the […]

WndrCo, the consumer tech investment and holding company founded by longtime Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, has invested $30 million in The Infatuation, a restaurant discovery platform.

This year’s rush of IPOs from Chinese tech companies has dominated headlines, but what’s more interesting is how quickly they got there. Traditionally, “going public” represented the gratifying culmination of sleepless nights and missed birthdays that went into building a company. The peak of a lengthy climb, where founders and VCs would finally see the […]

Coinbase is shaking things up quite a bit lately and its latest tools are geared toward cryptocurrency traders just getting their toes wet. On Thursday, the company announced that it would add a feature called Coinbase Bundle. The new offering lets users purchase a market-weighted sampling of Coinbase’s five available cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, […]

VirusTotal, the virus and malware scanning service own by Alphabet’s Chronicle, launched an enterprise-grade version of its service today. VirusTotal Enterprise offers significantly faster and more customizable malware search, as well as a new feature called Private Graph, which allows enterprises to create their own private visualizations of their infrastructure and malware that affects their machines. […]

A majority of U.S. teens have been subject to online abuse, according to a new study from Pew Research Center, out this morning. Specifically, that means they’ve experienced at least one of a half-dozen types of online cyberbullying, including name-calling, being subject to false rumors, receiving explicit images they didn’t ask for, having explicit images […]

The music industry has always been cut-throat, and on-going internet fragmentation only complicates matters. Musicians have to be their own promoters, tour managers, bookers and a million other things, just to get off the ground. If nothing else, Spotify’s new Co.Lab event series is a potentially useful attempt to help new and emerging artists make […]

The Internet is of course amazing if you want to send messages across borders. But different languages can still put a wrinkle in your conversational flow, even with all the handy translation apps also on tap to help turn zut alors into shucks! So Microsoft -owned SwiftKey is probably still onto something with a new […]

Over the last several months, Dropbox has been undertaking an overhaul of its internal search engine for the first time since 2015. Today, the company announced that the new version, dubbed Nautilus, is ready for the world. The latest search tool takes advantage of a new architecture powered by machine learning to help pinpoint the exact […]

Facebook has confirmed it does in fact use phone numbers that users provided it for security purposes to also target them with ads. Specifically a phone number handed over for two factor authentication (2FA) — a security technique that adds a second layer of authentication to help keep accounts secure. Facebook’s confession follows a story Gizmodo […]

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But it doesn’t guarantee success, and today, an Airbnb clone learned that the hard way. Wimdu, a startup originally hatched out of the Rocket Internet startup factory in Berlin and modelled on the travel acomodation US startup Airbnb, announced that it would be shutting down at […]

Entrepreneur First (EF), the company builder and “talent first” investor, held its tenth London Demo Day this afternoon. This time around the even had a decidedly more international bent as it combined pitches from the London and recently launched Berlin programs. Once again, the pitches took place in front of a nearly overcapacity crowd at […]

Cargo, the startup that helps ridesharing drivers earn money by bringing the convenience store into their vehicles, has raised $22 million in a Series A round led by Founders Fund . Additional investment came from Coatue Management, Aquiline Technology Growth as well as a number of high-profile entertainment, gaming, and technology executives who include Zynga founder […]

More problems for Samsung executives this week, as chairman Lee Sang-hoon is indicted on union sabotage charges. Lee’s not alone — twenty-seven other Samsung employees and partners are also being hit with similar charges. The charges are considered a kind of validation after years of concern over the electronics giant’s approach to organized labor. Lee has […]

Amazon is taking full advantage of its deal to live stream Thursday Night Football games, which it snagged the rights to earlier this year. The company will this year launch a TNF pre-game show, co-stream the games on its video game streaming site Twitch, and will leverage Prime Video’s “X-Ray” technology to give viewers access to real-time stats, […]

Founded in 2015, Amazon’s Alexa Fund is devoted to helping kickstart early-stage voice startups. This week, it’s announced support for a trio of new companies. There’s Bamboo Learning, which was an early partner for Amazon’s Alexa Presentation Language (APL). The startup develops music educational skills, teaching users about notes, instruments, chords and tempo, along with […]

In the two years since Indian social media app ShareChat raised $4 million in funding from Lightspeed Ventures the converging trends of increasing smartphone use, wireless internet connectivity, and cashless banking have combined to create a new social media juggernaut. Now Lightspeed has confirmed that the company has raised an additional $100 million in financing […]

A new messaging app is looking to give folks a way to communicate in situations with poor or no cellular connectivity. Berkanan, founded by Zsombor Szabó, is a group messaging app that uses Bluetooth to send and receive messages. This means that Berkanan works in a plane, at a festival, camping, or anywhere else where […]

What happens when you bring together an entrepreneur, a product designer and an investment banker who all really love collector vehicles? You get Rally Rd., an app for buying and selling equity shares in classic cars. Launched in 2016, the company’s SEC-compliant platform lets users purchase shares in Ferraris, Porsches, Lamborghinis and other classic models […]

Bumble is continuing to go on the offensive against Match Group. Earlier this week, the dating app maker said it was serving Match Group with papers (which Match Group said at the time it hadn’t yet received – but it has now). Bumble is taking Match Group to court for fraudulently obtaining trade secrets during […]

It’s been a busy week at Cloudflare, which promised a week of news for its birthday (and delivered). After announcing the Bandwidth Alliance yesterday, the company today announced the Cloudflare Registrar. This new domain registration service promises to only charge the wholesale price that the top-level domain registry (think Verisign) charges. Typically, registrars charge their […]

Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former chief security officer, who left the company this summer to take up a role in academia, has made a contribution to what’s sometimes couched as a debate about how to monetize (and thus sustain) commercial end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms in order that the privacy benefits they otherwise offer can be as widely […]

TiVo today is introducing a new set-top box, the TiVo BOLT OTA, which will join its existing lineup of TiVo BOLT-branded devices, including the voice-controlled BOLT VOX DVRs, launched last year. This new device, as its name suggests, is designed for cord cutters who use a digital antenna to watch live TV over-the-air. It will replace […]

Nozomi Networks has secured $30 million in Series C funding. The San Francisco, Calif.-based touts itself as an industrial security giant, securing more than 300,000 industrial devices over a range of industries, like manufacturing, energy, and mining, with hundreds of hydroelectric and gas distribution facilities on its roster. It’s the second round of funding this […]

Compass, the New York startup that has built a tech-first platform to take on the antiquated market of real estate, is building up its own house today. To double down on domestic growth, build out its tech, and to finally open up for business outside the US, the company has raised another $400 million of […]

It’s official. Two weeks ago, we reported that Opendoor — the four year-old, San Francisco-based company aiming to make it possible to buy and sell residential real estate with a few key strokes — was close to sealing up funding from SoftBank. Today, it’s announcing that the ink is dry on the deal. The terms: SoftBank’s massive Vision […]

Security researchers say that they have found evidence that for the first time Russia-backed hackers are now using a more sophisticated type of malware to target government entities. ESET presented its case Thursday that the hacker group, known as Fancy Bear (or APT28), is using rootkit malware to target its victims. That marks an escalation […]

The once sleepy world of insurance has become the hot ticket for venture investors. Insurance technology companies have raised multiple billions of dollars in the past four years as venture capitalists finance industry disruptors and enabling technologies for established players to fend off new technology-based challengers. In the month since tech-enabled car insurance startup Root […]

French startup Doctolib will take advantage of recent legal changes that will make telemedicine legal in France. Starting on January 1st, you’ll be able to book face-to-face appointments on Doctolib as well as remote appointments. Doctolib is a marketplace with 60,000 practitioners using the platform to manage their calendars and let people book appointments through […]

Die Zeit läuft aus, Leute — time is running out, people! You have less than 24 hours to apply to be a TechCrunch Top Pick at Disrupt Berlin 2018, which goes down on 29-30 November. It’s one of the smartest moves that early-stage startup founders can make, so go apply now before the application […]

Bitmain’s IPO is the big news in the crypto world this week. The company just filed its IPO prospectus and the numbers are impressive, particularly the year-on-year growth between the first six months of 2018 and a year prior, which saw a near-10x jump in revenue and 7x growth in profit. Nevertheless, that aggregated six-month number may be […]

Cryptocurrency speculation is over. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Vinay Gupta will join us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin to talk about cool use cases that could make blockchain projects useful, beyond financial services. Gupta worked on the initial release of Ethereum back in 2015. He contributed when it comes to project management. He […]

China’s Didi Chuxing is fighting fires at home around passenger safety, but overseas the ride-hailing giant has moved into another new market after its taxi-booking service began operations in Japan. The service has gone live in Osaka, the city of nearly nine million people, and parts of the surrounding area including Kansai International Airport. The Didi […]

Twenty years ago this month, a pair of Stanford PhD students founded a search engine company based in their friend Susan’s Menlo Park garage. Initially named “BackRub,” Larry Page and Sergey Brin eventually thought better of it and opted for a misspelling of the term googol, denoting the number one followed by 100 zeros. To […]

The Lobby will use the funds to build out its finance job marketplace, which founder and CEO Deepak Chhugani says is like a "personalized Glassdoor."