Crunch Hype

At an event in Tokyo, Google today announced the launch of Work Insights, a new tool that gives businesses more insights into how their employees use the company’s G Suite productivity tools and how teams collaborate using those tools. In addition, Google is also launching its investigation tool for helping business better secure their data […]

It’s no surprise that Google used its Cloud Next 2018 event in Tokyo today — one of a number of international Cloud Next events that follow its flagship San Francisco conference — to announce a couple of new initiatives that specifically focus on the Japanese market. These announcements include a couple of basic updates like […]

TaskRabbit is kicking off its Canadian expansion in the greater Toronto area before rolling out in Vancouver in October and Montreal sometime in 2019.

It didn’t hurt. I thought someone dropped a small cardboard box on my head. It felt sharp and light. I was sitting on the floor, along the back of the crowd, and then an Intel Shooting Star Mini drone dropped on my head. Audi put on a massive show to reveal its first EV, the […]

The story could be a harbinger of things to come when voice becomes more and more ubiquitous. After all, Amazon announced the launch of Alexa for Hospitality, its Alexa system for hotels, in June. News stories like this simply reinforce the idea that voice control is seeping into our daily lives. The French startup Snips […]

A new research report has raised concerns about how in-home smart devices such as AI virtual voice assistants, smart appliances, and security and monitoring technologies could be gathering and sharing children’s data. It calls for new privacy measures to safeguard kids and make sure age appropriate design code is included with home automation technologies. The […]

There's an empty space in my heart for a minimalist phone with only the most basic functions. Bad for my heart, but good for a handful of companies putting out devices aiming to fill it. Punkt's latest, the MP02, goes a little ways to making the device I desire, but it isn't quite there yet.

Facial recognition technology presents myriad opportunities as well as risks, but it seems like the government tends to only consider the former when deploying it for law enforcement and clerical purposes. Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) has written the FBI, FTC, and EEOC telling them they need to get with the program and face up to the very real biases and risks attending the controversial tech.

It’s no secret that Evernote, the productivity app that lets people take notes and organize other files from their working and non-work life, has been trying to regain its former footing as one of the most popular apps in the U.S., and that doing so has been an ongoing struggle. Just two weeks ago, we […]

Google is reportedly getting ready to launch some new hardware at its October 9 hardware event and we just learned a lot more about a new product that might be launching. It was rumored that Google was working on its own Smart Display, now we’ve got images of the Google Home Hub and details about […]

Sunil Dhaliwal has had a solid run in his 20 years so far as a VC. Just two years out of Georgetown, Dhaliwal landed at Battery Ventures, a highly regarded venture firm. Fifteen years later, in 2012, he struck out on his own, creating Amplify Partners. It wasn’t so easy at first. His first fund required […]

Popular travel app Kayak has put augmented reality to clever use with a new feature that lets you measure the size of your carry-on bag using just your smartphone. Its updated iOS app now takes advantage of Apple’s ARKit technology to introduce a new Bag Measurement tool that will help you calculate your bag’s size […]

Like virtually every other major tech company, Microsoft is currently on a mission to bring machine learning to all of its applications. It’s no surprise then that it’s also bringing ‘AI’ to its highly profitable Dynamics 365 CRM products. A year ago, the company introduced its first Dynamics 365 AI solutions and today it’s expanding […]

Microsoft HoloLens mixed reality glasses have always been interesting technology, but it’s never been clear how the company would move from novelty device to actual viable business use cases. Today, it made a move toward the latter, announcing a couple of applications designed to put the HoloLens to work in Dynamics 365, giving it a […]

Fortnite has taken the world by storm. In fact, the game is so popular that Epic has released versions for PC, Xbox, PS4, iOS, Android and the Nintendo Switch, making the game about as accessible as possible. The popularity of the game stems from the general popularity of the Battle Royale genre and popular streamers […]

The Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 eras weren’t kind to the world’s largest media conglomerates, throwing their business models into question, creating whole new categories of content consumption, and bringing online competition to subscription and ad pricing. Many of the media giants from the 1990s and early 2000s remain market leaders with multi-billion dollar valuations, […]

Coinbase continues to beef up its management team with another new hire in Michael Li, who’s joining the cryptocurrency trading platform as its VP of data. Li spent the last seven years at LinkedIn, most recently as its head of analytics and data science. “Data will be essential to empowering Coinbase’s mission, and core to company’s […]

Hulu’s live TV streaming service has hit a milestone number of more than 1 million subscribers. That’s up from the estimated 450,000 CNBC reported at the beginning of the year, and the 800,000 official number Hulu announced in May. But although the live TV audience may be growing, it’s still a small fraction of Hulu’s […]

Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, has been a controversial project since its debut. The need for the framework has been clear: the payloads of mobile pages can be just insane, what with layers and layers of images, Javascript, ad networks, and more slowing down page rendering time and costing users serious bandwidth on metered plans. […]

Apple has finished wiring billions of euros to pay back illegal tax benefits to the Irish government according to Reuters. Overall, Apple has paid $15.3 billion (€13.1 billion) for the original fine as well as $1.4 billion (€1.2 billion) in interests. In August 2016 the European Commission ruled that Apple benefited from illegal tax benefits […]

HQ Trivia is gearing up to debut a follow-up to its wildly popular live mobile game show. Called HQ Words, the company announced this morning they’ll release the Wheel of Fortune-style game in October. HQ Words. Coming this October. pic.twitter.com/e1TbDSHvV5 — HQ Trivia (@hqtrivia) September 18, 2018 HQ Trivia, which airs twice per day and awards […]

Billionaire VC Peter Thiel has largely flown under the radar since raising his hand to support Donald Trump’s presidential bid, then working with Trump’s administration to fill some of its many vacant positions. The association made him deeply unpopular in Silicon Valley, though he says people have not shown a “great deal of hostility to […]

After Friday, September 21, ticket prices for TC Sessions: AR/VR will jump $100 for the October 18 event hosted at UCLA. Buy your early-bird $99 tickets today before these savings fly the coop!

Tesla’s stock is down 5 percent this morning after news emerged the U.S. Department of Justice had launched a criminal investigation into CEO Elon Musk’s Aug. 7 tweets about taking the company private. The criminal probe is in addition to the previously reported Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into the electric car company. “Last month, following […]

YouTube will no longer maintain a separate app targeting gaming and live game streaming, the company announced today. The YouTube Gaming app, which first arrived in 2015, will be sunset sometime next spring as its host of features make their way over to YouTube’s main site. Over the years, the YouTube Gaming app has been […]

In a world where nothing can be trusted and fake news abounds, ICO and crypto teams are further muddying the waters by trying – and often failing – to pay for posts. While bribes for blogs is nothing new, sadly the current crop of ICO creators and crypto projects are particularly interested in scaling fast […]

Facebook is getting ready to purposefully influence the U.S. mid-term elections after spending two years trying to safeguard against foreign interference. Instagram plans to run ads in Stories and feed powered by TurboVote that will target all US users over 18 and point them towards information on how to get properly registered and abide by […]

Rent the Runway, the fashion startup that began as a rental service for special occasions and has since evolved over the last couple of years into a service for people also looking to spice up their everyday wear, just opened up its fifth physical, standalone location. The new location, in downtown San Francisco, enables Rent the […]

The Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Echo Plus is a limited edition, which will no doubt make fans want the thing that much more. It’s a standard Amazon device that Ubisoft dressed up in a Spartan helmet, to be given away in small quantities through the company’s site. The ridiculous thing is the game maker’s way of […]

Spire’s Health Tags, the dark and tiny devices you stick on your clothes to gather all sorts of health data from your steps, heartbeat and stress levels is now available at your local Apple Store. The company started out with a breath tracking device to detect when you are feeling tense and help calm you down. […]

Amazon’s focus on using its camera-enabled Echo devices to help you figure out what to wear everyday has highlighted how the tech world sees a big opportunity in building fashion-related tools and services beyond the now-ubiquitous but still quite basic business of e-commerce, where clothes are displayed on websites, and ordered for delivery to your home. […]

The State Department has confirmed a data breach affecting an unknown number of employees. A spokesperson told TechCrunch that the breach affected “less than 1 percent” of unclassified employee inboxes. “We have not detected activity of concern in the Department’s classified email system.” “We determined that certain employee personally identifiable information may have been exposed […]

Amazon wants developers to build their own Alexa Gadgets. As you may recall, Amazon last year launched its own gadgets – those weird, Bluetooth-connected Echo Buttons – but told us this year at CES that it had plans to open up gadget-building to the wider developer community. Now, it has. The company today is launching […]

Even bigger than the salary gap that sees women earn $.82 on the dollar is the equity gap. A new study from Carta and the ex-Twitter female investor group #Angels reveals that women make up 35 percent of startup equity-holding employees, yet own just 20 percent of the equity. That means they own just $0.47 […]

As iOS12 drops, we are again reminded that phone-based AR is on hundreds of millions of phones but we still haven’t seen any big successes built on the new technologies. Illumix is hoping that its approach to building games that understand where the user is while serving up content that responds to that space can […]

Today marks a big milestone for Lyft — one billion rides. That’s a milestone Uber hit in December 2015. Uber has since grown to 10 billion trips completed — including Eats deliveries — as of this past July. Uber, of course, had a bit of head start given it launched in 2009 while Lyft first […]

Design tools are becoming increasingly important to just about every brand out there. Today, a new entrant joins the race. Framer X, a revamped version of three-year-old Framer, was founded by Koen Bok and Jorn van Dijk after the duo sold design software Sofa to Facebook in 2011. Framer X is a rich, React-based design […]

Lyft has launched its electric scooters in Santa Monica, Calif. as part of the city’s pilot program, joining both Bird and Lime, CNET first reported. As part of the pilot program, Lyft can have up to 250 scooters on the streets at any one time. Riders must also be sure to stay within the service […]

Google’s parental control software for mobile devices, Family Link, will now help parents of teenagers, too. The company announced this morning the addition of new features aimed at parents of children over the age of 13. Perhaps the most controversial choice Google has made with this expansion is that teens can choose to turn off […]

While the property market in the US appears headed for a slowdown, a startup that’s honing in on rentals is doubling down on growth. Zumper, a San Francisco-based startup that has built an end-to-end platform to source, rent out and help service apartments across the US, has raised another $46 million in funding — money […]

Comcast and Ticketmaster are rolling out a feature to let Xfinity X1 customers search tour dates and begin the ticket buying process directly through their televisions — using voice search on their remotes. The feature’s launch coincides with the first tickets going on sale for Kelly Clarkson’s new tour. If users speak “Kelly Clarkson tour” […]

Singular, a startup working to unify data for marketers, is announcing that it has raised $30 million in Series B funding. The company was founded by former Onavo executives, including Gadi Eliashiv, Eran Friedman and Susan Kuo — who now serve, respectively, as Singular’s CEO, CTO and COO. Eliashiv explained that Singular was created in […]

Brie Larson’s cosmic superhero couldn’t have asked for a better setup than Avengers: Infinity War (Caution — minor spoilers ahead, naturally). Revealed via Nick Fury’s (Samuel L. Jackson) period-inappropriate pager in the end credits, the scene showed off very little in the way of detail, save for the fact that superhuman is apparently the last […]

UiPath is bringing automation to repetitive processes inside large organizations and it seems to have landed on a huge pain point. Today it announced a massive $225 million Series C on a $3 billion valuation. The round was led by CapitalG and Sequoia Capital. Accel, which invested in the companies A and B rounds also […]

The large, legacy car industry has pinned a lot of hopes and dreams on innovative startups to build the next generation of automotive technology, and today the latest chapter in that story was revealed. WayRay, a Zurich-based developer of holographic augmented reality technology and hardware — used in head-up displays that project images into a driver’s […]

Mozilla’s vision of a VR-first web browser is ready for consumers to download and judge. Firefox Reality is a browser built entirely for virtual reality. While you may have read about desktop Firefox or Chrome adding WebVR support, Firefox Reality is a web browser that you actually use entirely inside a VR headset. You can […]

Symantec is the latest private security company to offer its expertise to vulnerable political targets on the house. Today the company announced that it would extend its “Project Dolphin” service (dolphins eat phish, get it) to political campaigns, candidates and election officials, all “prime target[s] for malicious actors seeking to influence the outcome of the […]

Bad news first: the internet is broken for a while. The good news is that Cloudflare thinks it can make it slightly less broken. With “the click of one button,” the networking giant said Tuesday, its users can now switch on DNSSEC in their dashboard. In doing so, Cloudflare hopes it removes a major pain-point […]

Here in the States, UBTECH is probably best know for the crazy-walking Star Wars Stormtrooper it released late last year. But the company’s been producing robotics toys for long enough to get a vote of confidence in the form of a $820 million Series C late last year. The Chinese company’s latest project takes a […]

Indigo, the startup bringing algorithms and machine learning to the agricultural industry, has raised a $250 million Series E, bringing its total raised to $650 million. The funding values the company at $3.5 billion, according to a source familiar with the deal. That’s a steep increase from its previously reported value: $1.4 billion with a […]