Crunch Hype

Most mobile VR headsets have left me with the impression of, “well… you have to start somewhere,” but after spending some time with Facebook’s newly-announced Oculus Quest, it’s clear that the standalone hardware is far less caged by its limitations and has a lot to offer as what is clearly the company’s most balanced consumer […]

U.K.-based cyber defense firm Darktrace has raised $50 million in its recent Series E round of funding, putting the company’s valuation at $1.65 billion. The company said Wednesday that the funding — led by Vitruvian Partners, with help from KKR and 1011 Ventures — will drive further international expansion. Darktrace is one of the largest […]

NASA has issued a report summarizing its official plans for exploring our solar system, and it makes for exciting reading — if you don’t mind that it comes with a dose of realism. Crewed missions to the moon’s surface; a semi-permanent base orbiting it; a Mars sample return mission; all these and more are there, […]

Who should you sell your startup to? Facebook and the founders of its former acquisitions are making a strong case against getting bought by Mark Zuckerberg and Co. After a half-decade of being seen as one of the most respectful and desired acquirers, a series of scandals has destroyed the image of Facebook’s M&A division. That […]

Juul has been on an incredible, and in some ways, nightmarish, ride this year. The three-year-old, San Francisco-based company has handily won 75 percent of the e-cigarette market in the U.S., thanks in large part to the sleek design of its nicotine vaporizer. It is reportedly on track to see at least $1 billion in […]

Amazon is expanding its brick-and-mortar footprint with a new kind of store, the company announced this afternoon. On Thursday, the retailer will open an “Amazon 4-Star” store in New York, where all the items it sells are rated 4 stars and above, are a top seller or are new and trending on Amazon. It’s effectively […]

As Facebook execs took to the stage during the opening keynote for the company’s VR-focused Oculus Connect 5 conference, one thing was clearly missing, the founding team that had built the virtual reality startup Facebook bought for $2 billion in 2014. None of the five original OculusVR co-founders took to the stage at the company’s […]

The FCC is pushing for speedy deployment of 5G networks nationwide with an order adopted today that streamlines what it perceives as a patchwork of obstacles, needless costs, and contradictory regulations at the state level. But local governments say the federal agency is taking things too far.

Few properties seem better suited to tap VR than Star Wars, if only because… you know, lightsabers. And Lucasfilm knows it. They’ve just announced Star Wars: Vader Immortal — a three-part, at-home experience that’ll launch on Oculus’ just announced standalone Quest headset. Alas, there’s not much to go on besides the name, a quick teaser […]

Fast, healthy food is one of those concepts that just seems too good to be true. But Farmer’s Fridge, a Chicago-based startup that recently closed a $30 million Series C round led by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, aims to make that a reality. Farmer’s Fridge retrofits vending machines to serve up healthy […]

On Wednesday, Texas Rep. Will Hurd and Illinois Rep. Robin Kelly introduced a bipartisan bill that would reorganize how IT is managed throughout the federal government. The bill, the Federal CIO Authorization Act of 2018, would make a handful of changes with the intention of making the government run more smoothly and securely. Among those […]

Payments startup Stripe has changed the landscape for how businesses can collect funds online by using a few lines of code, and today the company is announcing that it’s picked up more funding of its own. Stripe has raised $245 million, valuing the company at $20 billion. This is a big jump on its previous […]

Uber has agreed to pay $148 million to settle a data breach that affected some 57 million customers in 2016. The agreement was with the attorneys general of all 50 states and the District of Columbia to resolve their legal inquiries on this matter, Uber’s chief legal officer Tony West said in a statement released Wednesday. The […]

Chegg, a technology giant specializing in textbook rental, has confirmed a data breach affecting some 40 million customers. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said it will reset all user passwords after hackers gained access to the company’s customer database. That database includes users for Chegg’s website but also other […]

CollegeHumor is getting into the subscription business with a new service called Dropout. Dropout is part of CH Media, the IAC -owned subsidiary that also includes Dorkly, Drawfree and CollegeHumor proper. It’s not just a subscription video service. Yes, there will be ad-free video series, many of them starring familiar faces from previous CollegeHumor shows, […]

Oculus showed off the future of working in VR today. Rather than just splaying out 2D software on an infinite desktop, the new Oculus Hybrid Apps system lets you see both 2D screens and 3D models in VR at the same time. That means you could use a traditional image editing suite to change the […]

For a while, the best thing Google Daydream had going for it was YouTube, the platform has had a ton of 360 content on it but has been unavailable on Facebook’s Oculus Go headset. At the company’s Oculus Connect 5 keynote, the company announced that a YouTube VR app will soon be arriving on the […]

If you’re familiar with 20th century Soviet camera clones you’ll probably be familiar with Zenit. Created by Krasnogorsky Zavod, the Nikon/Leica clones were a fan favorite behind the Iron Curtain and, like the Lomo, was a beloved brand that just doesn’t get its due. The firm stopped making cameras in 2005 but in its long […]

Having to deal with using a PC is honestly the worst part about dealing with virtual reality. The same goes for having to wait for lengthy installs of big VR game downloads. Today at its Oculus Connect 5 keynote, the company announced that its mobile app for iOS and Android will now connect to the […]

Uber is putting $10 million behind sustainable transportation over the next three years. As part of the fund, Uber is donating $250,000 to SharedStreets, a nonprofit organization focused on creating a shared standard for public streets and data sharing. Lyft, also in the name of environmental impact, invested millions of dollars in carbon offsets earlier […]

Opening up the Oculus Connect 5 keynote with some announcements, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that its newest headset, called Oculus Quest, will be released in the spring of 2019 at a $399 price point. The standalone VR device will be the first wireless Oculus hardware to sport positional tracking, both for the headset itself […]

Oculus doesn’t want to deter developers by making their games and content obsolete when the next version of Rift comes out. So today at the Oculus Connect 5 conference, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that “Future versions of our product are going to be compatible with the old ones. All of the content that works […]

In this episode of Product Hunt Radio I’m joined by two incredible people, Laura Deming and Daniel Gross, that have accomplished more before the age of 30 than most people have realized in a lifetime. Laura grew up in New Zealand and came to San Francisco when she was only 12 years old to join […]

The European Union’s executive body has signed up tech platforms and ad industry players to a voluntary Code of Practice aimed at trying to do something about the spread of disinformation online. Something, just not anything too specifically quantifiable. According to the Commission, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Mozilla, some additional members of the EDIMA trade association, […]

Another day, another hearing of tech giants in Congress. Wednesday’s hearing at the Senate Commerce Committee with Apple, Amazon, Google and Twitter, alongside AT&T and Charter, marked the latest in a string of hearings in the past few months into all things tech: but mostly controversies embroiling the companies, from election meddling to transparency. This […]

Uber is taking a page out of the federal government’s disaster response handbook. The ride-hailing company is centralizing how it responds to disasters, whether it’s flooding in North Carolina, a mass shooting in Las Vegas or an earthquake in Mexico City. Now, instead of taking a local-first (and sometimes reactionary) approach, the company’s global security […]

After months of speculation, Bitmain — the world’s largest provider of crypto miners — has opened the inner details of its business after it submitted its IPO prospectus with the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong. And some of the growth numbers are insane. The document doesn’t specify how much five-year-old Bitmain is aiming to raise from […]

Also known as deep learning, neural networks are the algorithmic constructs that enable machines to get better at everything from facial recognition and car collision avoidance to medical diagnoses and natural-language processing.

Dish today is launching a new dual-tuner adapter for $29 that will allow AirTV Player owners to watch one live TV channel and record another, or record two channels at once. The option to bundle an AirTV Player with the adapter is also now available for $119 – a bit of a savings over buying […]

Daimler said Wednesday that Dieter Zetsche is stepping down as CEO and will be replaced by a long-serving executive who has most recently been leading the automaker’s research and development efforts, including its push into electric vehicles. The company has proposed that Zetsche, who was CEO of Daimler for 12 years, become chairman of the […]

In a letter to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, former Google research scientist Jack Poulson details why he stepped down from the company in late-August. The note, sent earlier this week, details growing concern over Project Dragonfly, the search giant’s attempt to enter the Chinese market in a meaningful way. The letter […]

As MoviePass flounders and runs out of cash, AMC’s competitive offering, AMC Stubs A-List, is scaling up quickly. The theater chain announced this morning the service is growing faster than anticipated, and has already signed up over 380,000 users in the three months since its late July launch. The growth is notable also because much […]

Today, a new crop of startups is launching out of the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator. This marks the 15th ERA class, the past 14 classes comprising 165 startups with a combined market capitalization of $2B+. Thirteen companies in total are participating in demo day today, spanning a wide variety of industries including e-commerce, real estate, and […]

Plex is continuing to streamline its software by shutting down features that weren’t broadly adopted or all that functional. The company says it will soon sunset a handful of options in its media player software, including Plugins, Cloud Sync, and its “Watch Later” bookmarking feature. The move to kill off these features comes shortly after […]

Cross-play has been one of the biggest selling post for Fortnite, allowing players to engage in the battle royale, regardless of platform. There has, however, been one major holdout — until now. While PS4 have been able to play one another, Sony has been dragging its heels at the seemingly inevitable update. Today, however, the […]

While this video shows a tiny robot from the City University of Hong Kong doing what amounts to a mitzvah, we can all imagine a future in which this little fellow could stab you in the kishkes. This wild little robot uses electromagnetic force to swim or flop back and forth to pull itself forward […]

GoPro’s stock price is on a bit of rebound this morning. The stock opened at $7.36, up from its previous close of $6.62, and is continuing to climb on news that Oppenheimer analyst Andrew Uerkwitz is now bullish on the action camera maker. He cites optimism around GoPro’s refreshed product line. Uerkwitz changed his rating […]

WhatsApp founder, Brian Acton, who left Facebook a year ago — before going on to publicly bite the hand that fed him, by voicing support for the #DeleteFacebook movement (and donating $50M to alternative encrypted messaging app, Signal) — has delved into the ethics clash behind his acrimonious departure in an interview with Forbes. And for leaving a cool […]

The consumer market is just the tip of the iceberg for drones, which have the potential to deploy across a range of different industry verticals such as construction or agriculture. That’s the premise beyond SenseHawk, a U.S-India startup that specializes in using data captured by drones to develop insight for projects within the solar industry. The […]

There’s a secret Facebook app called Blink. Built for employees only, it’s how the company tests out new video formats its hoping will become the next Boomerang or SuperZoom. They range from artsy Blur effects to a way even old Android phones can use Slo-Mo. One exciting format in development offers audio beat detection that […]

When Circle raised its $110 million funding round, the company used this opportunity to talk about its stablecoin — USD Coin, or USDC for short. And you can now buy, sell and send USD Coins on Circle Trade and Circle’s exchange Poloniex. But what is a stablecoin? As the name suggests, 1 USDC is worth […]

Sometimes $10 billion isn’t as much as you think. It’s true that when you look at the bottom line number of the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract, it’s easy to get lost in the sheer size of it, and the fact that it’s a one-vendor deal. The key thing to remember as […]

Reports are coming in that Amazon’s Alexa service is down in parts of UK, Spain, Germany and Austria. According to Down Detector and Twitter, the problem started surfacing around 8am local time and still continues. Interestingly, some users are reporting the issue is isolated to Echo Dot 2 models and while other Echo devices are […]

Virtual reality is largely an expensive hobby for Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg today, but the company hopes that within the decade, it can build out an entire VR empire for the social media giant to conquer. Later this morning, we’ll get a taste of the future of VR from Facebook at the Oculus […]

Say hello to the Bandwidth Alliance, a new group led by Cloudflare that promises to reduce the price of bandwidth for many cloud customers. The overall idea here is that customers who use both Cloudflare, which is turning eight years old this week, and a cloud provider that’s part of this alliance will get a […]

Verbinden wie nie zuvor! Very roughly translated that means “connect like never before.” If you’re planning to attend Disrupt Berlin 2018 on November 29-30, we’re happy to tell you that networking will be easier and more exacting than ever. How? We’re making our CrunchMatch platform available to all attendees. Not familiar with CrunchMatch? It’s our free business […]

Didi Chuxing, China’s largest ride-hailing firm, is rolling out new security systems one month after a female customer was raped and murdered by a driver, the second such fatality on its Hitch service this year. Today the company said it introduced a number of new safety features which include random biometric ID testing for drivers […]

Google has responded to blowback about a privacy hostile change it made this week, which removes user agency by automating Chrome browser sign-ins, by rowing back slightly — saying it will give users the ability to disable this linking of web-based sign-in with browser-based sign-in in a forthcoming update (Chrome 70), due mid next month. The […]

Instana, an application performance monitoring (APM) service with a focus on modern containerized services, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series C funding round. The round was led by Meritech Capital, with participation from existing investor Accel. This brings Instana’s total funding to $57 million. The company, which counts the likes of […]