Crunch Hype

Maven has raised a $27 million Series B co-led by Sequoia and Oak HC/FT, bringing its total raised to date to $42 million.

Disrupt Berlin 2018, Europe’s most exciting tech conference, takes place on November 29-30 and plays host to hundreds of early-stage startups and thousands of attendees. We’re talking boundary-pushing founders, investors, hackers and tech leaders. Not to mention legendary events like Startup Battlefield, the startup competition that’s launched more than 750 companies. Does your early-stage startup have […]

Binance, the one-year-old startup that appeared from nowhere to become the world’s top crypto exchange, is making major moves as it enters the next phase of its business. That includes a plan to offer fiat-to-crypto trading in international markets and the release of a decentralized exchange to complement its current trading site. The company routinely […]

Coinbase aspires to be the New York Stock Exchange of crypto, and it is taking a small — but not insignificant – step to offering a lot more cryptocurrencies after it revamped the process of listing new digital assets. The exchange currently only supports just five cryptocurrencies — Ethereum, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum Classic and […]

Even as Magic Leap has cleared the milestone of its first hardware release, the augmented reality startup still has big challenges ahead as it aims to entice developers to build the content for its wild new device. The $2,295 Magic Leap One headset is a very polished-looking developer kit, but it didn’t ship with a […]

Mars rover Opportunity has been operating on the surface of the Red Planet since 2004, but a dust storm this summer may prove to be the mission's toughest challenges. The enormous storm caked Opportunity in dust and blocked out the sun, its source of energy — and there's no guarantee the batteries aren't dead for good. But now that the skies have cleared, we at least have our first look at the workhorse rover from orbit.

Tinder has partnered with nonprofit Rock the Vote for a second time, in the hopes of driving young people to the polls through in-app messaging. The company claims a young adult user base where more than half are in the 18 to 24 demographic, and believes it’s well-positioned to mobilize younger voters during the 2018 […]

Food delivery startup DoorDash has received dozens of complaints from customers who say their accounts have been hacked. Dozens of people have tweeted at @DoorDash with complaints that their accounts had been improperly accessed and had fraudulent food deliveries charged to their account. In many cases, the hackers changed their email addresses so that the […]

The new iPhones have excellent cameras, to be sure. But it's always good to verify Apple's breathless on-stage claims with first-hand reports. We have our own review of the phones and their photography systems, but teardowns provide the invaluable service of letting you see the biggest changes with your own eyes — augmented, of course, by a high-powered microscope.

The Oculus Connect 5 conference kicks off tomorrow in San Jose where FB and company will let their latest virtual reality efforts loose and attempt to prove to the world that VR is coming at last and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Tomorrow is going to be a big day for hardware, […]

A dozen or so people accompanied by a 14-foot, 800-pound cage gathered in downtown San Francisco Tuesday morning to protest Salesforce’s contract with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), the agency within the Department of Homeland Security responsible for enforcing the Trump Administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy. Today is the first day of Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual user conference that […]

A stagnating mobile app industry eyes automobiles and a driverless future as the path to much needed diversification and exponential revenue growth.

The worlds of augmented reality and VR theoretically represent a boundless expanse for startups looking to create a new digital future. Realizing that future is the tough part, and doing so while Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple all look to plant their flags is even harder. While plenty of investors have taken a look at […]

Of the 100 most-watched live telecasts in the US in 2005, 14 were sporting events; in 2015, sporting events comprised 93 of the top 100 telecasts. That shift occurred because TV shows are shifting to online or on-demand viewing, and live broadcasts of the biggest sports are the main thing TV networks have left to […]

Photokina is underway in London and the theme of the show is "large." Unusually for an industry that is trending towards the compact, the cameras on stage at this show sport big sensors, big lenses, and big price tags. But though they may not be for the average shooter, these cameras are impressive pieces of hardware that hint at things to come for the industry as a whole.

They all started with the best of intentions. Formation 8 talked about bringing “smart enterprise” to the corporate world. Social Capital talked about how to “fix capitalism” and Binary Capital wanted to “affect global behaviour change.” Rothenberg Ventures set out to “work on the biggest problems that change the world.” Young founding partners debuting change-the-world […]

The new presidential limousine — and an identical one called a “spare” that travels in President Donald Trump’s motorcade for added security— was spotted this week on the streets of New York. This new “Beast,” like so many before it, is a Cadillac . But this time, the heavily armored vehicle produced by GM, is designed […]

A federal appeals court has handed a defeat to Uber drivers who were suing the company in three separate lawsuits over claims that they were misclassified as independent contractors instead of full-time employees. The litigants must go through arbitration to pursue their claims against the company rather than have the claims heard in open court. […]

If you happen to crack open that fancy little iPhone XS casing on your new phone, you’ll notice there’s a dwindling amount of Qualcomm chips in there and that they’re increasingly being replaced by Intel hardware. The swap is representative of the cooling state of affairs between the two as the companies’ legal teams battle […]

Defense Distributed announced during a press conference in Austin today that Cody Wilson has resigned as CEO. The announcement comes as the 3D-printed firearm activist faces charges of sexually assaulting a minor. Wilson was in Taipei last week when the charges were made public, only to be extradited to Texas and ultimately released on $150,000 […]

A watchdog report has warned that Homeland Security’s face scanning program, designed to track all departing travelers from the U.S., is facing “technical and operational challenges” that may not see the system fully working by the time of its estimated completion in 2021. The report by Homeland Security’s inspector general said that although Customs and […]

If you’ve been keeping up with watchmaker MB&F you’ll be familiar with their Horological Machine series, watches that are similar in construction but wildly different when it comes to design. This watch, the HM9, is called the Flow and hearkens back to roadsters, jets and 1950s space ships. The watch, limited to a run of […]

Google is rolling back its ban on cryptocurrency advertisements – following a similar move made by Facebook earlier this summer, CNBC reports. Google in March was among the first of the major platforms to announce it would no longer run ban cryptocurrency ads, due to an abundance of caution around an industry where there’s so […]

Alexa skill developers will now be able to sell “consumables” within their voice apps, aka Alexa skills, Amazon announced this morning. The company says that, starting today, developers in the U.S. will be able to take advantage of this new feature to sell products to Alexa device owners, which can be purchased, used, then purchased […]

Microsoft released Office 2019 for Windows and macOS this week, the latest version of its regular, non-subscription productivity suite. It’s the kind of Office that, 10 years ago, you would’ve bought in a shrink-wrapped package at Office Depot. But it’s really not the version of Office that Microsoft would like you to buy — or that […]

When Salesforce bought Mulesoft last spring for the tidy sum of $6.5 billion, it looked like money well spent for the CRM giant. After all, it was providing a bridge between the cloud and the on-prem data center and that was a huge missing link for a company with big ambitions like Salesforce. When you […]

Bleximo, a startup that aims to build “quantum accelerators” — basically quantum-based application-specific integrated circuits — today announced it has raised a $1.5 million seed round led by Eniac Ventures. Other investors in this round include Boost VC, Creative Ventures, KEC Ventures and Gyan Kapur. Instead of building a general-purpose quantum computer like IBM, Rigetti and […]

Back in March, we asked the question “Are corporations that use Wikipedia giving back?” The answer was kind of, sort of, with one key exception, noting, “Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Google all contributed around $50,000 by matching employee gifts. Amazon, on the other hand, is nowhere to be found on that list.” Today, however, the […]

This past Saturday, something pretty weird happened in Pokémon Go: immediately after the monthly "Community Day" event came to a close, a strange, new, never-before-seen Pokémon showed up. Weirder yet: no one could actually catch it.

Tinder in India is now rolling out a new feature that allows women to make the first move. The setting, called “My Move,” is similar to the core feature in rival dating app Bumble, which is currently enmeshed in multiple lawsuits with Tinder parent Match Group. Match sued Bumble for patent violations following failed acquisition […]

When I was a child I had a fake soda can with a screw off top for hiding change. It wasn’t a very effective theft deterrent. For one, no sane person keeps soda cans on a bookshelf. For another, I’m not sure they even made Diet Rite at that point. The HP Tango’s camouflage is […]

Another European data protection agency has reported a sharp rise in the numbers of complaints since the EU updated its privacy framework four months ago, when GDPR came into force, updating regional data protection rules and introducing much higher penalties for privacy violations. France’s CNIL agency said today that it’s received 3,767 complaints since May 25, when GDPR […]

Whether you’re trying to figure out how many students are attending your lectures or how many evil aliens have taken your Space Force brethren hostage, Wi-Fi can now be used to count them all. The system, created by researchers at UC Santa Barbara, uses a single Wi-Fi router outside of the room to measure attenuation […]

How many times have you called into a company, answered a bunch of preliminary questions about the purpose of your call, then found that those answers didn’t make their way to the CSR who ultimately took your call. This usually is because System A can’t talk to System B and it’s frustrating for the caller, […]

Twitter says it’s going to change the way it creates rules regarding the use of its service to also now include community feedback. Previously, the company followed its own policy development process, including taking input from its Trust and Safety Council and various experts. Now, it says it’s going to try something new: it’s going to ask […]

Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Warby Parker and a long list of other startups of the 21st century have appointed C-level employees to roles focused exclusively on data science. These digital-age companies have established “data cultures,” which provide employees broad access to high-quality data, advocate for data literacy and have data-driven decision-making processes, according to Carl Anderson, who […]

Snapchat is a college favorite more than high school phenomenon. Only 20 percent of Snapchat’s US users are under 18, down from 22 percent in 2016 as some of its early adopters have now aged up and headed to college. Appealing to older users was a big motive for its otherwise-disastrous redesign that do a […]

DevOps automation service Chef today announced a number of new integrations with Microsoft Azure. The news, which was announced at Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida, focuses on helping enterprises bring their legacy applications to Azure and ranges from the public preview of Chef Automate Managed Service for Azure to the integration of Chef’s InSpec […]

Earlier this year, Mozilla announced Firefox Monitor, a service that tells you if your online accounts were hacked in a recent data breach. All you have to give it is your email address and it’ll use the Have I Been Pwned database to show you if you need to worry and what data was compromised. Today, […]

LinkedIn may be best known as a place where people and organizations keep public pages of their professional profiles, using that as a starting point for networking, recruitment and more — a service that today that has racked up more than 575 million users, 20 million companies and 15 million active job listings. But now […]

Salesforce and Amazon’s cloud arm, AWS, have had a pretty close relationship for some time, signing a $400 million deal for infrastructure cloud services in 2016, but today at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s massive customer conference taking place this week in San Francisco, they took it to another level. The two companies announced they were offering a […]

Mark Zuckerberg was quick to realize that Facebook, the largest social network in the world, doesn’t have a monopoly on all users nor can it bank on holding its position as top dog forever. Thus he instituted a policy of buying up promising rivals and integrating them into the Facebook ‘group’ in a strategy designed […]

Open source software is now a $14 billion+ market and growing fast, in use in one way or another in 95 percent of all enterprises. But that expansion comes with a shadow: open source components can come with vulnerabilities, and so their widespread use in apps become a liability to a company’s cybersecurity. Now, a […]

Program a robotic toy to move and you could be hooked on coding for life. That’s the idea behind Facebook’s newest educational initiative called CodeFWD. It provides online coding tutorials for teachers and students powered by Code.org, and if classrooms finish those, they can apply to be sent a free Bolt robot from Sphero, makers […]

If you’ve even vaguely considered applying to be a TechCrunch Top Pick at Disrupt Berlin 2018, which takes place on 29-30 November, you need to act now. The application window closes on Friday 28 September, so get moving and apply to be a TC Top Pick today. Why would you want to be selected as a […]

OYO, the India-based startup that operates a network of budget hotels, has pulled in $1 billion in new funding to grow its business in China and expand into other international markets. The majority of the funding — $800 million, to be exact — was led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund with participation from Lightspeed, Sequoia and Greenoaks Capital. OYO […]

Picfair, the photo marketplace that competes with Getty and Shutterstock by giving photographers a fairer deal, is adding a major update to its offering today. The London-based startup is launching Picfair Stores, giving the 35,000 photographers on its marketplace the ability to create their own free independent online store. Customers who buy from a Picfair […]

On 29-30 November — in less than two short months — thousands of tech startup founders, investors, innovators and entrepreneurs will make their way to Germany to attend Disrupt Berlin 2018. It’s an amazing showcase of the latest and greatest startups and technologies from across Europe and around the world. We’re serious about international participation, […]

TechCrunch is returning to Europe with Disrupt Berlin to talk with the best and brightest people in tech from Europe and the rest of the world. In addition to fireside chats and panels, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield Europe to win the coveted Battlefield cup. You should grab your ticket to Disrupt […]

Chinese electric scooter startup Niu Technologies has filed for an initial public offering on Nasdaq to raise up to $150 million. In its form, Niu said it is “the largest lithium-ion battery-powered e-scooters company in China,” according to data from China Insights Consultancy, and also a market leader in Europe based on sales volume. Founded […]