Crunch Hype

French startup BlaBlaCar just released some interesting metrics. The company has reached profitability if you look at revenue between January 2018 and today. BlaBlaCar forecasts that 50 million people will book a ride on BlaBlaCar in 2018, which represents a 40 percent increase compared to 2017. BlaBlaCar is a marketplace for long-distance rides. People driving […]

Google CEO Sundar Pichai will meet in private with Republican lawmakers on Friday to discuss issues including its work in China and alleged political bias, reports the Wall Street Journal. The meeting was organized by House Majority leader Kevin McCarthy, who has accused Google of “controlling the internet” by boosting negative news stories about conservatives […]

Facebook promised Instagram autonomy, but reduced it over time leading to today’s bombshell revelation. Eight years after launching Instagram and six years after selling it to Facebook, Instagram co-founders CEO Kevin Systrom and CTO Mike Krieger are leaving the company, according to The New York Times. The founders apparently did not give a reason for […]

Turo — the peer-to-peer car-sharing marketplace sometimes referred to as the ‘Airbnb of cars’ — is expanding to the UK. And this time, everyday car owners can actually use it. The San Francisco-based company expanded to the UK once before in 2016. But at the time, the Turo platform was only offered to small rental […]

Attention, Scrabble enthusiasts! A whopping 300 new words have been added to Merriam-Webster’s Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, including a few that are sure to satisfy millennials and aggravate everyone else: Bitcoin, emoji and botnet. Merriam-Webster likes to keep up with the hip, younger crowd and often adds words that began as slang but infiltrated the average person’s vocabulary. […]

Last week, after Hatreon creator and 3D-printed gun activist Cody Wilson was charged with the sexual assault of a minor, he managed to evade arrest briefly in Taipei. On Friday, authorities successfully located Wilson and extradited him back to Texas, booking him into a Harris County jail. Now, Wilson is out on a $150,000 bond. Facing […]

You heard it here first! Early-bird ticket sales are extended till September 28 for TechCrunch Sessions: AR/VR on October 18 at UCLA. Don’t miss out on the biggest savings for this event — book your $99 tickets here. Students, get your tickets for just $45 when you book here. What’s going to happen at TC […]

It’s been five years since T-Mobile picked up MetroPCS, and now the prepaid service is finally getting a fresh coat of paint. The “PCS” bit is getting the old heave-ho, while the brand’s owners are letting you know who’s boss with the new Metro by T-Mobile brand name. The new name involves some new plans, […]

Everyone’s favorite endless, serene snowboarding game just made the leap from mobile to the Mac App Store. Available now for $9.99, Alto’s Adventure for Mac is a desktop port of the side-scrolling snowscape game that’s won hearts and accolades since it first hit iOS in 2015. Earlier this year, the team behind Alto’s Adventure introduced […]

Airbnb’s head of engineering will leave the company before the end of 2018 to pursue other projects and focus on his family. The news was first reported by The Information and later confirmed to TechCrunch by Airbnb. Curtis joined the home-sharing platform in 2013 after about two years as the director of engineering at Facebook. […]

Microsoft is hosting its Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida this week. And although Ignite isn’t the household name that Microsoft’s Build conference has become over the course of the last few years, it’s a massive event with over 30,000 attendees and plenty of news. Indeed, there was so much news this year that Microsoft provided […]

Dust off your old Bose 501 speakers. New devices are coming that will give traditional audio equipment a voice. Amazon recently announced a mess of new Echo devices and among the lot are several small, diminutive add-ons. These models did not have a smart speaker built into the devices but rather turned other speakers into […]

Zoho .com was pulled offline on Monday after the company’s domain registrar received phishing complaints, the company’s chief executive said. The web-based office suite company, which also provides customer relationship and invoicing services to small businesses, tweeted that the site was “blocked” earlier in the day by TierraNet, which administers its domain name. In an email […]

According to some early numbers from Apple analyst extraordinaire Ming-Chi Kuo, the iPhone Max XS is currently running laps around its smaller counterpart. In a note posted by MacRumors, Kuo suggested that the 6.5-inch handset sold three to four times as well as the XS during its inaugural weekend. “We have determined that the demand for […]

Sleep-tracking app Sleep Cycle is bringing a new feature to its Android app to help snoring users track the sleep effects of their rather loud ailment. Sleep Cycle is a great little app that helps you learn about your quality of sleep and helps wake you up at a time where you’re more likely to […]

Following an acquisition by FTD Companies earlier this year for a reportedly small amount of cash, on-demand flower service BloomThat is pausing its services as it works “to figure out how to best integrate BloomThat as part of the FTD portfolio of brands,” the founders wrote to its customers a few days ago. “Before we […]

When it comes to public areas where you are most free to surrender self-awareness and self-consciousness, lounging on a multi-hour airline flight is probably prime territory. Coincidentally, it’s also a venue where virtual reality companies see an opportunity to open people to a world of VR content. Today, Alaska Airlines announced that it will be […]

Google has changed a lot in 20 years. What started as an index of “just” a few million pages is now reaching into the hundreds of billions; what was once a relatively simple (if very clever!) search engine is now an impossibly complex brew of machine learning, computer vision, and data science that finds its […]

There are few stories as important right now as the internet being ripped asunder by the increasing animosity between the U.S. and China. Eric Schmidt, the former chairman of Alphabet, said last week at a private event in San Francisco that “I think the most likely scenario now is not a splintering, but rather a […]

A meeting on the status of anti-piracy efforts at search engines has produced a collaborative approach to better addressing the issue of pirated works appearing in search results. An international collective of search giants thinking of creating a blacklist of all known pirated works, which will be compared with search results every five minutes and any matches removed.

Walmart has been working with IBM on a food safety blockchain solution and today it announced it’s requiring that all suppliers of leafy green vegetable for Sam’s and Walmart upload their data to the blockchain by September 2019 . Most supply chains are bogged down in manual processes. This makes it difficult and time consuming […]

See, snap, sale. In a rare partnership for Amazon, the commerce giant will help Snapchat challenge Instagram and Pinterest for social shopping supremacy. Today Snapchat announced it’s slowly rolling out a new visual product search feature, confirming TechCrunch’s July scoop about this project codenamed “Eagle”. Users can use Snapchat’s camera to scan a physical object […]

True Ventures has led the $3 million round for Mode, a real-time database that gives companies instant access to sensor data. GigaOm founder and True Ventures partner Om Malik has joined the startup’s board of directors as part of the deal. Sensor data is collected from vehicles, cell phones, appliances, medical equipment and other machines. Businesses deploying these […]

Porsche will no longer make diesel-powered vehicles, opting instead to invest more money into electric and hybrid technology, the company said over the weekend. Porsche has never been as committed to diesel as other automakers under its parent company VW Group. Porsche has offered some diesel versions of its models, including the Porsche Cayenne. But […]

At a small press event in San Francisco today, Google dropped a mention of a big new feature on the way: Google Lens support is coming to Google Image Search. For the unfamiliar, Google Lens (previously available as a dedicated app, and as part of Google Photos) taps the company’s computer vision work to figure […]

News broke this morning that Bumble would be taking Tinder parent company, Match Group, to court. Its lawsuit alleges that Match Group fraudulently obtained trade secrets, publicly disparaged Bumble, and impacted Bumble’s other investment and acquisition offers at a time when Match Group itself was trying to acquire Bumble’s business. Now, Match Group has responded to […]

Stripe, the fast-growing payments startup that is now worth over $9 billion, is working on a new product to help it fill out some of the gaps in its product suite as it bids to become the go-to financial services partner to startups and other businesses. It has been testing a new cash advance service, […]

As a nearly constant traveler I’ve been looking for something like the Surface Go all my life. I’ve lugged around everything from massive ThinkPads to iPad Pros and I’ve always found myself stuck in one of two situations – the laptops that made the most sense were too heavy to be comfortably portable and the […]

Enjoy reading lots of words about new operating systems? Good news! There are plenty of those here. Enjoy actually downloading and running said new operating systems? Gooder news! macOS 10.14 Mojave is now available in final public form over at the Mac App Store. As with the last several versions of the desktop OS, Mojave’s […]

Against my better judgement and repeat warnings from those who knew better, I went ahead and installed Mojave on my work computer the first chance I got. Sure, there were certain standard beta bugs and capability issues that made me regret the decision on occasion, but the only way to sufficiently test a product like […]

Uber and similar services could be facing caps on the number of licenses for vehicles that can operate ride-hailing services in London and other UK cities under rule changes being recommended to the government. CCTV being universally installed inside licensed taxis and private hire vehicles for safety purposes is another suggestion. A working group in […]

Slack announced today that it has acquired Astro, the Bay Area startup behind email assistant, Astrobot. The deal, which marks Slack’s largest to date, will go a ways toward helping the popular enterprise chat platform achieve its vision of fully integrating workplace mainstays like email and calendars into its channels. As Slack notes, the company […]

A security researcher has claimed a new vulnerability in the latest version of macOS — just hours before the software is due to be released. Patrick Wardle, chief researcher officer at Digita Security, tweeted a video Monday of an apparent privacy feature bypass that’s designed to prevent apps from improperly accessing a user’s personal data. […]

Considering it’s been eight years since Red Dead Redemption came out, it’s no surprise that fans of the franchise are ravenous for the next installment of the game, which launches October 26. Last week, Rockstar Games offered some publications the opportunity to preview the game, giving gamers even more to salivate over. But Sony is […]

The Los Angeles-based women’s subscription box and media business FabFitFun is expanding its video catalog with the launch of new live programming set to coincide with the launch of its latest seasonal box. FabFitFun is creating a new slate of live programming that will air every day on its Facebook page from 11 a.m. to 1 […]

Facebook Ad Breaks, the social network’s pre-roll and mid-roll video ads, are launching in 21 new countries. Facebook announced that Ad Breaks were generally available last month in five countries: the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Now it’s adding territories in Europe, Latin and South America and Asia to the list. […]

Last year, we broke the news that Apple was buying the music recognition startup and app Shazam for about $400 million, and nearly one year later, the deal has finally closed. Today, Apple announced that it has completed the acquisition, and that it would soon be making the service ad free to use for everyone, […]

Amazon’s Echo Show will apparently also work like a little TV, not just a visual interface for Alexa and her many apps. When the newly announced 10-inch HD screen Echo Show begins shipping next month, it will offer support for Hulu – the first live streaming TV service to work on the screen-based Alexa device. […]

Adobe Analytics is a sophisticated product, so much so that users might focus on a set of known metrics at the cost of missing key insights. Adobe introduced an AI-fueled virtual assistant called Intelligent Alerts today to help users find deeper insights they might have otherwise missed. John Bates, director of product management for Adobe […]

Bumble is officially serving the papers in the suit against Tinder parent, Match Group. Bumble had said in March it was filing a suit of $400 million against Match Group for fraudulently obtaining trade secrets, following Match’s suit filed only weeks before, which had claimed patent infringement and misuse of intellectual property. Match’s original lawsuit […]

Groups of UberEats couriers are continuing to strike over pay and calling for a minimum £5 per delivery fee. Several strikes have been reported in London over the past few days, as well as other UK cities including Glasgow, Cardiff and Plymouth. Late last week Uber revealed a new pay structure which shrinks the per […]

Microsoft, SAP and Adobe today announced a new partnership: the Open Data Initiative. This alliance, which is a clear attack against Salesforce, aims to create a single data model for consumer data that is then portable between platforms. That, the companies argue, will provide more transparency and privacy controls for consumers, but the core idea […]

A new feature in the latest version of Google Chrome that logs users into the browser when they sign in to a Google site has come under fire. Until recently, it was the user’s choice to log-in to the browser. Now, any time that you sign in to a Google site in Chrome 69 — […]

This wild, 3D-printed self-solving Rubik’s cube is amazing. To make it work, a Japanese inventor used servo motors and Arduino boards to actuate the cube as it solves itself. Sadly, there isn’t much of a build description available but it looks to be very compact and surprisingly fast. There is a description of the project […]

International shipping has changed little in the last century – it’s slow and opaque, with many processes carried out manually and on paper. Most supply chain teams still rely on phone calls and emails to do their job. The whole things stuck in the 20th Century. It’s estimated that the average shipper spends over 40 […]

Apple and Salesforce are both highly successful, iconic brands, who like to put on a big show when they make product announcements. Today, the two companies announced they were forming a strategic partnership with an emphasis on mobile strategy ahead of Salesforce’s enormous customer conference, Dreamforce, which starts tomorrow in San Francisco. For Apple, which is […]

During last September’s Ignite conference, Microsoft heavily emphasized its quantum computing efforts and launched both its Q# programming language and development kits. This year, the focus is on other things, and the announcements about quantum are far and in between (and our understanding is that Microsoft, unlike some of its competitors, doesn’t have a working quantum […]

Microsoft Azure is getting a number of new storage options today that mostly focus on use cases where disk performance matters. The first of these is Azure Ultra SSD Managed Disks, which are now in public preview. Microsoft says that these drives will offer “sub-millisecond latency,” which unsurprisingly makes them ideal for workloads where latency […]

Ross Lipson, the chief executive officer and co-founder of the on-demand marijuana and cannabis delivery service, Dutchie, had thought he was done with the online delivery business. Instead, he’s launched a new delivery service that has just raised $3 million from Casa Verde Capital, the $45 million venture firm founded by hip hop impresario Snoop Dogg, and […]

In a world dominated by Alexa and the Google Assistant, Cortana suffers the fate of a perfectly good alternative that nobody uses and everybody forgets about. But Microsoft wouldn’t be Microsoft if it just gave up on its investment in this space, so it’s now launching the Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise to see if […]