Crunch Hype

So much for summer Fridays. Yesterday, BuzzFeed reported that a dozen tech companies, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Snapchat, would meet at Twitter headquarters on Friday to discuss election security. For two of them, that wasn’t the only meeting in the books. In what appears to be a separate event on Friday, Facebook and Microsoft […]

For the second time this week, U.K. phone giant EE has fixed a security lapse, which allowed a security researcher to gain access to an internal site. The researcher, who goes by the pseudonym Six, found the company’s internal training site indexed on Google. (We’re not linking to the page as it remains an active […]

For startups, especially e-commerce companies, branding is everything. A slogan, an ad, even the design of the logo can make the difference between success and failure. But understanding how to develop a brand and strategically evolve that brand over time isn’t the easiest task. Luckily, three experts are coming to Disrupt to talk through the […]

Last call, folks! Last call to take advantage of the potentially life-changing connections and opportunities that await early-stage founders in Startup Alley. Today is the final day you can secure an exhibit table in Startup Alley at Disrupt San Francisco 2018 — which takes place September 5-7. Buy your Disrupt SF Startup Alley Exhibitor Package today before […]

When Alibaba reported its earnings yesterday, the cloud data got a bit buried in other stories, but it’s worth pointing out that its cloud business grew 93 percent in the most recent quarter to $710 million. That’s down a smidgen from the gaudy triple digit growth of last report, but their market share has doubled […]

The World Bank has launched the first bond on a blockchain with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. The A$110 million ($87 million) bond-i (blockchain operated new debt instrument) — so named, I’m assuming, because of Australia’s famed Bondi Beach (bankers have the funnies!) — is the first bond to be created, allocated, transferred and managed […]

It’s not just parents who are worrying about their children’s device usage. According to a new study released by Pew Research Center this week, U.S. teens are now taking steps to limit themselves from overuse of their phone and its addictive apps, like social media. A majority, 54% of teens, said they spend too much […]

Cyber security has never gone away as a hot topic in the technology sphere and in 2018 it remains an enormous issue. As the next 3 billion or so of the planet’s people come online, it’s never been more important to secure their safety, their privacy and the security of their personal data. As the […]

Need something to put on that new Wireless Charging Duo? Good news — the Galaxy Note 9 and Galaxy Watch are available now. Here’s the my full 3,000 word review of the Note 9. The TLDR version is, essentially: Good screen Very good camera Decently long battery Interesting new S-Pen tricks Way, way too pricey […]

Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet, has opened a subsidiary in China. The unit, called Huimo Business Consulting Co., opened in Shanghai on May 22, according to a filing with China’s National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System. China Money Network was the first to report on […]

After a delay, RED’s Hydrogen One was scheduled to arrive this month. And then it got delayed again until October/November. If and when the phone actually does arrive, however, odds are pretty good you’re not going actually buy the thing. After all, $1,295 is nearly half an Aibo. For most of us, these first official full […]

PayPal is revamping its mobile app. Again. In an effort to keep pace with newcomers like the bank-owned Zelle, PayPal says its new app will focus on making it easier to use its core features – that is, sending and requesting money. That means many of the app’s homescreen buttons – like Offers, Donate, Order […]

T-Mobile has confirmed hackers breached its systems. The cell giant, currently merging with Sprint, said in a statement that hackers customer stole names, billing zip codes, phone numbers, email addresses, account numbers, and account type — such as if an account was prepaid or postpaid — in what the company described as an “unauthorized capture of […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week we had a full house which was super great. TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos and Sarah Buhr held down the fort in San Francisco along with our guest, Susan Mac Cormac, a partner at Morrison Foerster where she […]

A month after announcing its $55 million Series C, Japanese fintech startup Paidy has snagged a strategic investment from payment giant Visa. Paidy didn’t disclose how much Visa put into its business, which has raised over $80 million to date, but it did say that it will work with the credit card giant to develop “new […]

Alibaba’s Lazada is introducing new credit options for SMEs as it aims to boost the number of retailers in Southeast Asia, the region with 650 million consumers. The firm announced a partnership with Finaxar that will see the fintech offers its services to Lazada sellers in Singapore. There are plans to expand the arrangement to […]

The Russian weapons manufacturer Kalahsnikov, best known for making the AK-47 machine gun, has unveiled a fleet of electric and hybrid cars, buggies and motorcycles this week — including an electric vehicle that the company says will rival Tesla. While it’s a noble goal to take competitive aim at the world’s most famous electric vehicle […]

Let’s talk a bit about security. Most internet users around the world are pretty crap at it, but there are basic tools that companies have, and users can enable, to make their accounts, and lives, a little bit more hacker-proof. One of these — two-factor authentication — just got a big boost from Epic Games, […]

Here is a strange little online community to puzzle at. Amazon has developed an unnerving, Stepford-like presence on Twitter in the form of several accounts of definitely real on-the-floor workers who regurgitate talking points and assure the world that all is right in the company's infamously punishing warehouse jobs.

Amidst Facebook’s biggest branding crisis, it’s just hired a veteran CMO formerly of Pepsi and Visa to boost the social network’s external image and cross-promote features inside its apps. Antonio Lucio today announced he’ll be leaving his role as HP’s CMO after three years to take that post at Facebook starting September 4th. He’s replacing […]

AWS Lightsail, which launched in 2016, is Amazon’s answer to the rise of Digital Ocean, OVH and other affordable virtual private server (VPS) players. Lightsail started as a pretty basic service, but over the course of the last two years, AWS added features like block storage, Windows support and additional regions. Today, the company announced it […]

Lyft is going to offer half-priced and free rides to polling places around the country on Election Day (November 6). The ride-hailing giant said that it’s going to give out 50 percent off promotional codes to partners that encourage voter turnout. The company has linked up with Vote.org, Nonprofit VOTE, TurboVote and others to help […]

The screwdriver-happy dismantlers at iFixit have torn the Magic Leap One augmented reality headset all to pieces, and the takeaway seems to be that the device is very much a work in progress — but a highly advanced one. Its interesting optical assembly, described as "surprisingly ugly," is laid bare for all to see.

As a race, human beings have a lot of shortcomings. We’re not very fast, not all that strong and while we have been able to create technology that helps us overcome our environments, we’re not very good at adapting to them. Animals, on the other hand, have been successfully adapting and evolving to meet the […]

Eventbrite filed an IPO today for $200 million, confirming reports earlier this summer that the event-planning company plans to go public later this year. According to the document, the company plans to raise $200 million from selling Class A shares, but has yet to list the price per share. As for what Eventbrite intends to […]

A massive trove of voter records containing personal information on millions of Texas residents has been found online. The data — a single file containing an estimated 14.8 million records — was left on an unsecured server without a password. Texas has 19.3 million registered voters. It’s the latest exposure of voter data in a […]

There’s nothing inherently social about VR. In fact, putting on a headset and entering your own world can be a fairly isolating experience. But Survios’ latest offering is looking to turn that truism on its head. Electronauts is designed to deliver a social experience, in which players can create music for their surroundings. The new […]

Historically, we haven’t been great about digital security. In 2016 (not long enough ago to feel OK about it), the top passwords were “123456” and “password.” Awareness has certainly grown, but some folks could still use a nudge in the right direction. Luckily, Fortnite Battle Royale maker Epic Games has a solution. The company has […]

Build versus buy? Potential partner or potential disruptor? The option set for corporations to collaborate with startups used to be simpler.

Amazon acquired social reading service Goodreads five years ago, squelching the life out of the competitive landscape, as minimal as it was. So it’s promising to see a new app appear with the goal of getting more people to move off of Goodreads for social book recommendations. That app is Inky, built by two bookworm friends […]

Apple has placed a series order for Foundation, an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s classic series of science fiction stories and novels. Deadline reported earlier this year that the show was in development, but this was just the latest of several attempts to adapt Foundation, including a version developed by Westworld’s Jonathan Nolan for HBO. Now, […]

The largest trend in photography over the last five years or so, not counting smartphones, has been the emergence and maturity of mirrorless camera systems. These operate in a very different manner from traditional SLRs, and as such market leaders with decades embedded in the latter — namely Canon and Nikon — have resisted making the shift. That changes for Nikon today with its announcement of the Z6 and Z7, which show the company is making the change wholeheartedly.

I wrote the law that allows sites to be unfettered free speech marketplaces. I wrote that same law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, to provide vital protections to sites that didn’t want to host the most unsavory forms of expression. The goal was to protect the unique ability of the internet to be the proverbial marketplace of ideas while ensuring that mainstream sites could reflect the ethics of society as a whole.

As fields of research, machine learning and artificial intelligence both date back to the 50s. More than half a century later, the disciplines have graduated from the theoretical to practical, real world applications. We’ll have some of the top minds in both categories to discuss the latest advances and future of AI and ML on […]

Twitter says it’s ending support for all Twitter iOS users who are running older versions of the iOS operating system. According to a message in the app’s update text in its latest App Store release this week, only those users running iOS 10 or higher will continue to have a supported mobile client. The company’s […]

Moving to a new city can be tough for a number of reasons, but what’s arguably hardest about moving is a competitive and expensive housing market, and lack of a pre-existing social support network. That’s the problem startup Bungalow is trying to solve. Bungalow, which just raised a $14 million Series A round led by […]

Mixmax, a service that aims to make email and other outbound communications more usable and effective, today announced the official launch of its new IFTTT-like rules for automating many of the most repetitive aspects of your daily email workflow. On the one hand, this new feature is a bit like your standard email filter on […]

Autonomous vehicles need more than a brain to operate safely in a world filled with obstacles. They need maps. Or more specifically, self-driving vehicles need maps that constantly refresh and can deliver important information — like that sudden lane closure due to construction or a double-parked vehicle — so they can take the safest and […]

Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa are no longer solely the domain of super cheap smart speakers. Google, in particular, has been courting third-party hardware makers pretty aggressively in an attempt to put the consumer AI on as wide a range of products as possible. Bang & Olufsen’s BeoSound 1 and 2 certainly hit the high […]

The success of Airbnb has created a major disruption in how people choose where to stay when they visit other places. Gone are the days of assuming a hotel is the best or only option; a selection of private accommodations might prove to be more interesting, cheaper and more flexible. Now, an Airbnb-like startup out […]

Apple today announced a pair of initiatives that will allow its customers to support America’s National Parks. Starting tomorrow, August 24, and continuing through the 31st, Apple says it will donate $1 to the National Park Foundation for every purchase made using Apple Pay online at apple.com, or through the Apple Store app in the […]

The Mavic Pro was a revelation. Introduced in 2016, the folding drone wasn’t perfect, but it helped usher in a new era of devices for DJI and the industry at large. The original Mavic helped make consumer drones more portable and accessible, and spurred a line that now includes the Mavic Air and Mavic Spark. […]

Pets are expensive. I’ll be the first to admit that. The adoption fees, the shots, the food, the medical care. But at the end of the day, it’s worth it for the judgement-free, uninhibited love of a furry companion. If you’re looking to save a buck a two, a robotic dog is probably not the […]

French startup Blade, the company behind Shadow, is updating its physical box that lets you connect to your cloud computer instance. Shadow Ghost is a tiny device that provides all the ports and wireless technologies that you need to plug to a TV or a monitor and start playing. Shadow has been building a cloud […]

Armory, a startup that has built a CI/CD platform on top the open source Spinnaker project, announced a $10 million Series A today led by Crosslink Capital. Other investors included Bain Capital Ventures, Javelin Venture Partners, YCombinator and Robin Vasan. Software development certainly has changed over the last several years, going from long cycles between […]

Grab, the ride-hailing company that consumed Uber’s business in Southeast Asia, today made a big push to grow the number of electric vehicles in its fleet after it partnered with energy supplier Singapore Power. The deal will see Grab add 200 new ‘fast-charging’ EVs to its fleet in Singapore with SP providing “preferential” pricing at the […]

An apparent hacking attempt on the Democratic National Committee’s voter database was a false alarm, the organization has said. CNN and the Associated Press reported on Wednesday, citing an unnamed party official, that the political organization was warned of an attempt on its systems. DNC officials contacted the FBI after Lookout, a security firm, detected and reported […]

Who needs VCs? The largest companies in the crypto world are continuing to build the ecosystem through aggressive investments of their own, as I forecasted at the start of this year. Binance, the world’s largest exchange, is the latest example. The company is marching beyond a gargantuan $1 billion fund it unveiled earlier this year after it announced […]

It used to be a one-vendor, stack-driven world in the enterprise. Today, the cloud has changed that and best of breed and interoperability are the watchwords of the day. Two enterprise cloud stalwarts have announced a new integration that brings Box content directly into ServiceNow. For ServiceNow customers, it means that they can access Box […]