Crunch Hype

Hidden amongst the 70 or so announcements Amazon made at today’s big Alexa event was one key hidden presence. Google’s offerings loomed large over much of the news flowing out from the big event. It’s easy to understand why, of course. Assistant and Home have steadily been making up ground on Amazon over the last […]

Everyone’s favorite trillion-dollar retailer hosted a private event today where they continued to exercise their highly-strategic approach to hardware where they just throw everything at the wall and wait to see what sticks. We got some new Amazon Echo devices, sure, but there was also an amp, a camera, a clock and a microwave…? There’s […]

If the Echo Show was the Amazon device most desperately in need of a makeover (please and thank you), the Dot was certainly a close second. After all, while the cheapest (and best selling) Echo device has already been through a couple of iterations, the hardware wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you’d proudly display […]

A week ago rumors were flying that Adobe would be buying Marketo, and lo and behold it announced today that it was acquiring the marketing automation company for $4.75 billion. It was a pretty nice return for Vista Equity partners, which purchased Marketo in May 2016 for $1.8 billion in cash. They held onto it […]

Augmented reality has the potential to change how we interact with the internet; as these technologies scale, you can certainly bet that Facebook is going to be looking to shape what’s possible. At our one-day TC Sessions: AR/VR event in LA next month, we’ll be joined by Ficus Kirkpatrick, Facebook’s head of Camera AR Platform, […]

The way we work is changing. People possess the innate ability to innovate and evolve in the jobs that they do, and new technologies -- from the wheel to steam power and artificial intelligence -- have drastically improved and impacted work throughout history.

It’s official: Hulu is reviving the cult mystery series “Veronica Mars”. The show originally ran from 2004 to 2007 on UPN and the CW, with the titular high school sleuth played by Kristen Bell. Last month, there were reports that Hulu was in talks to bring the show back. Now it looks like a deal […]

The Show was far and away the Echo product most in need of a makeover. The original device, introduced two years back, was far more concerned with function than form. That, of course, is in line with many of the company’s hardware offerings, which are often designed to simply show what things like Alexa are […]

Amazon wants Alexa to interact with as many people as possible, including the ability to show them things. And that means freeing the virtual assistant from the confines of Amazon’s screen-supporting smart speaker Echo Show or Fire TV — devices that give Alexa a face (and of course a voice). The company announced Thursday at […]

Eventbrite is having one hell of a debut on the New York Stock Exchange this morning. Shares of the ticketing startup, founded back in 2006, have shot up over 50% in trading on the NYSE. After pricing its shares at $23 in its initial offering, investors have bid up the stock to a whopping $37, […]

Amazon was quick to note at today’s event that not all that much has been done to update the microwave for the 21st century. While that’s probably a pretty fair criticism of the ubiquitous home appliance, the new AmazonBasics microwave is less about space-age technologies than it is helping to usher in the future of […]

Delta will later this year roll out facial recognition at its terminal at Atlanta International Airport for anyone traveling on an international flight. The airline said the biometric facial scanning is optional — a move that will shave off a few minutes off each flight — but will help border and pre-flight security authorities before […]

Everyone loves a tale of a bootstrapped startup founder’s journey to an eight-figure exit. The team at Toronto-based Cluep have a good one. The founders of the adtech startup raised less than $500,000 from angel investors before selling their company to Impact Group for $40 million ($53 milllion CAD) this week. Founded in 2012, Karan Walia, Sobi Walia […]

Amazon’s big hardware event isn’t all about hardware — although there is plenty of that, too. Amazon also talked about how it’s making its virtual assistant Alexa smarter and more intuitive about human behavior, particularly when there are lots of connected smart home devices to tap into. Amazon announced at the event Thursday a feature […]

Amazon this morning introduced a new device called the Fire TV Recast that works with Fire TV and other devices to allow you to record live TV through a connected digital antenna. The device allows you to place your digital antenna anywhere in the house where you can get good reception, without having to worry […]

As Amazon noted at today’s event, the company has already been working with a number of car companies to bring Alexa to vehicles. There are already a number of high-profile partners, including Toyota, Ford, Lexus, BMW and Audi. Today, it announced its plan to bring the assistant to the rest of the “hundreds of millions” […]

Today’s Amazon event is full of surprises, but you could have predicted this one from a mile away. The Echo show is a couple of years old now, and honestly, the hardware was never really that spectacular in the first place. Well, Amazon just introduced a new version of the screen-sporting smart speaker, which features […]

Among the slew of devices Amazon announced this morning is a new Ring Stick Up Cam – stick up, because it’s designed to go anywhere. (And is not, apparently, a reference to being robbed at gunpoint?) The camera comes in two versions – one that’s battery powered and could be more easily used outdoors, as […]

Here’s another unexpected surprise, as the hardware announcements have started coming fast and furious. Alexa Guard is a home security device that integrates with existing Echos. When the users is away, the product, flips the smart speakers in “Guard Mode,” so they listen out for sounds like breaking glass. The product features smoke and carbon […]

Amazon keeps rolling out new Alexa devices this morning, with the launch of a new Alexa device – in a clock. Yes, there’s now an Echo Wall Clock available that has Alexa voice capabilities built in. That means you can ask Alexa to do things like set alarms and timers – and the lines on […]

One of the weirder rumors ahead of today’s Amazon event has come to fruition. The company’s attempting to make a big push into home appliances, so it’s leading the way with its very microwave. The Amazon Basics Microwave apparently began life as an in-house reference product, as the company was developing an API for third-parties […]

Amazon today is giving its premium smart home-ready Echo Plus device a notable update. The device, which includes a smart home hub built into the Echo, is now getting a new fabric design, and a temperature sensor. However, what’s more interesting is the addition something Amazon calls “local voice control.” What this means is that […]

Amazon wants to make it easier to set up your smart home. Today, the company introduced a new Smart Plug device that brings Alexa’s voice control capabilities to anything you want to control – a coffee pot, a light, or anything else that can be powered on or off at a power outlet. What makes […]

Alchemist is the Valley’s premiere enterprise accelerator and every season they feature a group of promising startups. They are also trying something new this year: they’re putting a reserve button next to each company, allowing angels to express their interest in investing immediately. It’s a clever addition to the demo day model. You can watch […]

Amazon today announced it’s rolling out new features for its FreeTime service for parents and children, which recently started working with Alexa, allowing parents to control children’s experience with the personal assistant. Now, the FreeTime service for Alexa will also support routines – the combination of voice commands that can be kicked off with a single […]

Today’s big Amazon event was all about the hardware, but Amazon kicked things off with a few extra tricks. Among the cooler features rolling out for the smart assistant in the coming weeks is improved contextual understanding. One piece that’s coming in the next few weeks is the ability to understand when the user needs […]

Former Facebook executive turned venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya announced this morning that his firm, Social Capital, would no longer raise outside capital. The firm will transition into a technology holding company by the end of 2018 and will invest $50 million to $250 million off a “multi-billion dollar balance sheet of internal capital only.” “[We] will focus […]

Geofenced sharing, Quiz stickers, Stories Highlight stickers, and a separate interface for adding hashtags to posts are amongst a slew of new features Instagram has prototyped or is now testing. The last one could finally #cure #the #hashtag #madness that’s infected many of Instagram’s 1 billion users, causing them desperately fill up their captions with […]

The investment arms of BMW and the Chinese search technology giant, Baidu, along with a large original equipment manufacturer for the auto industry and a slew of technology investors have all come together to back Lunewave, a startup developing new sensor technologies for autonomous vehicles. The $5 million seed round which the company just closed […]

With the Apple Watch Series 4, Apple introduced a new, larger display. It now has rounded edges and thinner bezels. And the company took advantage of that display to introduce new fire, water, liquid metal and vapor faces. Apple didn’t use CGI to create those faces — they shot those faces in a studio. Many […]

Graph databases have always been useful to help find connections across a vast data set, and it turns out that capability is quite handy in artificial intelligence and machine learning too. Today, Neo4j, the makers of the open source and commercial graph database platform, announced the release of Neo4j 3.5, which has a number of […]

Bird just announced 10 million scooter rides since launching about one year ago. If this story sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because Bird competitor Lime earlier today announced it surpassed 11.5 million rides across its shared bikes and scooters. Bird, which launched last September in Santa Monica, Calif., currently operates in 100 cities and […]

Workplace training has long been considered one of the key early areas where virtual reality can make a dent in the enterprise. Walmart already made some noise when it announced it would be bringing VR hardware into its training centers, now the company is planning to send Oculus Go headsets to each of its 5,000 […]

More consolidation is afoot in the world of cloud-based voice services. Today, Vonage — once a VoIP pioneer that today offers cloud-based unified communications and other IP services in the business market — announced that it would acquire NewVoiceMedia, a UK startup that builds cloud-based contact center solutions, for $350 million in cash. Vonage says […]

Spotify today is taking another step that may make record labels uncomfortable. Fresh off reports that the streaming service is cutting its own licensing deals with independent artists, the company this morning announced it will now allow indie artists to directly upload their music to its service, too. The upload feature is today launching into beta […]

Three years after its introduction, GoPro is killing its Session camera line. The cute little cube was dropped today after GoPro revealed its latest lineup of Hero7 cameras. GoPro shakes up its entire camera line When the Hero4 Session was first revealed in 2015, it was the action camera company’s first major redesign and signaled […]

Any story about GoPro’s product line is also a story about the health of the public company and this year that story seems to be a more conservative one with the company’s new flagship device the Hero7 Black moving mostly lateral on hardware specs while throwing its focus to software tech like digital video stabilization. […]

GoPro delivered a big refresh of its cameras today with a lot of new product names but not quite as many hardware updates as we’ve seen in past updates. The new lineup from GoPro is definitely less confusing from a branding perspective. The Hero7 White, Silver and Black will cost $199, $299 and $399 respectively. […]

Surprise! Amazon’s holding a big hardware event at its Seattle headquarters, and we’re here on site, to bring you the news as it breaks. Unlike Apple, Google and the like, the company isn’t one for announcing these sorts of events in advance, though given that it’s done something similar in recent years, it seemed likely […]

Designing for digital interfaces has come a long way since the first days of the web, but there remains a place for tech that can help navigate us through what are sometimes still bloated or complicated services (notwithstanding those that are deliberately so). Today, one of the more successful startups working in this area has raised a […]

MariaDB, the company behind the eponymous MySQL drop-in replacement database, today announced that it has acquired Clusterix, which itself is a MySQL drop-in replacement database, but with a focus on scalability. MariaDB will integrate Clusterix’s technology into its own database, which will allow it to offer its users a more scalable database service in the long […]

Facebook has been singled out for censure by the European Commission’s head of consumer affairs who has warned she’s running out of patience and said the company needs to make additional changes to its terms of service before the end of the year to bring them into line with the bloc’s consumer rules. The Commission […]

TechCrunch Startup Battlefield is returning to Africa in December, this time in Lagos, Nigeria. We will have a day-long program full of our flagship Battlefield competition highlighting the best startups that Africa has to offer. Not only that, we’ll have panel discussions designed to explore the continent’s rapidly developing technological infrastructure on the continent. To […]

Does deeper data produce perfect matches? Facebook is finally ready to find out, starting today with a country-wide test in Colombia of its new Dating feature. It’s centered around an algorithm-powered homescreen of Suggested romantic matches based on everything Facebook knows about you that other apps don’t. There’s no swiping and it’s not trying to […]

Credit rating giant Equifax has been issued with the maximum possible penalty by the UK’s data protection agency for last year’s massive data breach. Albeit, the fine is only £500,000 because the loss of customer data occurred when the UK’s prior privacy regime was in force — rather than the tough new data protection law, […]

Disrupt Berlin 2018 takes place on 29-30 November, and we simply can’t wait to see you all there. We always get super stoked about Startup Alley, the Disrupt exhibition hall, where hundreds of innovative early-stage startups display the very latest tech products, platforms and services. Now, the only thing better than exhibiting in Startup Alley […]

Bike and scooter company Lime recently hit 11.5 million rides, a couple of months after it surpassed six million rides. This milestone comes just 14 months after Lime deployed its first bikes. Today, Lime is in more than 100 markets throughout the U.S. and Europe. Last December, Lime brought its bikes to a number of European […]

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 African experiments with drone technologies could leapfrog decades of infrastructure neglect Harley-Davidson is opening a Silicon Valley R&D center to power EV production Digital infrastructure company Liquid Telecom is betting big […]

Now that your cousin doesn’t ask you questions about bitcoin anymore, is it the end of all things blockchain? Maybe it just means that it’s time to think about innovating at the protocol level and come up with new use cases. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Outlier Ventures CEO and founder Jamie Burke […]