Crunch Hype

If the Instagram ads feel like they’re closing in and you can’t bring yourself to toggle your Zoom camera on these days, you’re far from alone. Well into 2021, many of the social apps and virtual chat tools that kept the world connected during the pandemic feel more exhausting than the real-life interactions they’re meant […]

At its I/O developer conference, Google today announced a slew of updates to its Firebase developer platform, which, as the company also announced, now powers over 3 million apps. There’s a number of major updates here, most of which center around improving existing tools like Firebase Remote Config and Firebase’s monitoring capabilities, but there are […]

At Google I/O today Google Cloud announced Vertex AI, a new managed machine learning platform that is meant to make it easier for developers to deploy and maintain their AI models. It’s a bit of an odd announcement at I/O, which tends to focus on mobile and web developers and doesn’t traditionally feature a lot […]

Things have been a bit quiet on the foldables front of late, but plenty of parties are still bullish about the form factor’s future. Ahead of today’s big I/O kickoff, Samsung (undoubtedly the most bullish of the bunch) posted a bunch of metrics this morning, noting, The global outlook is just as impressive. This year […]

Flutter, Google’s cross-platform UI toolkit for building mobile and desktop apps, is getting a small but important update at the company’s I/O conference today. Google also announced that Flutter now powers 200,000 apps in the Play Store alone, including popular apps from companies like WeChat, ByteDance, BMW, Grab and DiDi. Indeed, Google notes that 1 […]

At its I/O developer conference, Google today announced the first beta of the next version of its Android Studio IDE, Arctic Fox. For the most part, the idea here is to bring more of the tooling around building Android apps directly into the IDE. While there is a lot that’s new in Arctic Fox, maybe […]

Google is working on a video calling booth that uses 3D imagery on a 3D display to create a lifelike image of the people on both sides. While it’s still experimental, “Project Starline” builds on years of research and acquisitions, and could be the core of a more personal-feeling video meeting in the near future. […]

Read on for highlights from our chat with Olson, Grooms Lee and Adler, or watch a recording of the full session, including our live pitch-off.

Google today announced it’s partnering with Shopify, giving the e-commerce platform’s over 1.7 million merchants the ability to reach consumers through Google Search and its other services. The integration will allow merchants to sign up in just a few clicks to have their products appear across Google’s 1 billion “shopping journeys” that take place every […]

Google is working with BMW and other automakers to develop a digital key that will let car owners lock, unlock and start a vehicle from their Android smartphone, the company announced Tuesday during its 2021 Google I/O developer event. The digital key is one many new features coming to Android 12, the latest version of […]

For years, Wear OS has been, at best, something of a dark horse among Google operating systems. It’s certainly not for lack of partnership or investment, but for whatever reason, the company has never really stuck the landing with its wearable operating system. It’s a category in which Apple has been utterly dominant for some […]

With a long-standing history of working together on the mobile side, it’s always been a bit of surprise that Samsung hasn’t had much patience for Google’s wearables play. The hardware giant had flirted with Android Wear in the past, but for the last several years, it’s been invested in building out its own version of […]

The one-dozenth versions of Android has been something of an odd duck. The latest version of Google’s mobile operating was announced back in February, and a beta version is already available to developers. But up to now, we’ve known glancingly little about how the final version of Android 12 will actually look. Fittingly, the new […]

Google’s Android operating system is now running on 3 billion active devices, Google announced at its (virtual) I/O developer conference today. In a briefing before today’s event, the company also noted that there were 250 million active tablets running Android last year, which is likely a larger number than some expected, but which explains Google’s […]

Electric aviation startup Beta Technologies closed a $368 million Series A funding round on Tuesday, with investments from Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund. The new capital is the second round of funding announced by the company this year, after the company raised $143 million in private capital in March. The funding round was led by Fidelity […]

Commission-free trading app Stake, which is available in UK, Brazil and New Zealand, has raised $30 million from Tiger Global and partners of London-based DST Global to expand into Europe. Matt Leibowitz, Founder and CEO, Stake said: “We’re really excited to get to this point but it’s just the start. We set out to change […]

Google announced a new feature for its Chrome browser today that alerts you when one of your passwords has been compromised and then helps you automatically change your password with the help of… wait for it… Google’s Duplex technology. This new feature will start to roll out slowly to Chrome users on Android in the […]

At its I/O developer conference, Google today announced the next generation of its custom Tensor Processing Units (TPU) AI chips. This is the fourth generation of these chips, which Google says are twice as fast as the last version. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted, these chips are then combined in pods with 4,096 v4 […]

Google kicked off its Google I/O Developer event this afternoon with a set of new collaborative workspace tools, which it’s calling, as a group, “Smart Canvas.” The company demonstrated using how Smart Canvas works for brainstorming and project planning, showing how users could drop in ideas about an upcoming launch, share their thoughts, work on […]

While there are few silver linings to the COVID-19 pandemic, one is the widespread adoption of virtual care, which will lead to hybrid models that combine the best elements of in-person and virtual care.

Humans may not have totally mastered getting objects to space, but we’ve done a pretty good job so far. The hundreds of satellites that orbit the Earth are proof enough that ‘send stuff to space’ is firmly in humanity’s capacity. But what about refueling, repairing, or even adding capabilities to spacecraft or satellites once they’re […]

When disaster strikes, costs pile up quickly. Flood waters can wipe out the foundation of a home or building, just as much as wildfires can burn down the walls or the entire structure. For residents and business owners, rebuilding and rebuilding quickly is crucial: they ultimately need some place to live and offer services, and […]

After skipping a year, Google is holding a keynote for its developer conference Google I/O. While it’s going to be an all-virtual event, there should be plenty of announcements, new products and new features for Google’s ecosystem. The conference starts at 10 AM Pacific Time (1 PM on the East Cost, 6 PM in London, […]

Meet Finary, a new French startup that wants to change how you manage your savings, investments, mortgage, real estate assets and cryptocurrencies. The company lets you aggregate all your accounts across various banks and financial institutions so that you can track your wealth comprehensively over time. After attending Y Combinator, the startup has just closed […]

Four years after joining as Facebook’s first VP of VR, ex-Xiaomi exec Hugo Barra has left the company, he said in a social media post Tuesday. Barra led Facebook’s VR efforts during a particularly tumultuous time for Oculus, coming aboard to helm the division as the once independent arm was folded deeper into its parent […]

Logistics and delivery providers are territorially split between Earth and space, with companies like Amazon and FedEx working to master ground, air and drone transportation, and new entrants like SpaceX honing its expertise in space launch. Autonomous transportation startup Aevum wants to do both. And it was just issued a patent that will help it […]

Spotify is taking the first step towards making transcripts available for the podcasts on its service. The company announced this morning it’s soon launching a limited beta that will introduce automatic transcripts for its own Spotify Exclusive and Original shows, with the larger goal of enabling transcripts across all podcasts published to its platform in […]

Like “innovation,” machine learning and artificial intelligence are commonplace terms that provide very little context for what they actually signify. AI/ML spans dozens of different fields of research, covering all kinds of different problems and alternative and often incompatible ways to solve them. One robust area of research here that has antecedents going back to […]

Marqeta has long been a fintech darling, but it's less well-known than other companies in its sector due to its infrastructure nature.

Alek Koenig spent four years at Affirm, where he was head of Credit. There he saw firsthand just how powerful the alternative lending model could be. Koenig realized that it wasn’t just consumers who could benefit from the model, but businesses too. So in November 2019, he founded Settle as a way to give e-commerce […]

The influence of a founder on their company's culture cannot be overstated. Everything from their views on the product and business to how they think about people affects how their company's employees will behave.

Discovery has ordered a new reality show, to air in 2022, which will be an eight-episode competition series where competitors will vie for a chance to take a trip to the International Space Station on a commercial Axiom Space mission. The winner will be a crew member for AX-2, the second mission from Axiom to […]

It’s 2021. Contact importers are old history, and everyone’s a creator, building for their own audience. How can early-stage startups find meaningful traction at the velocity they need when the distribution channels are more competitive and complex than ever? Which ads are worth spending money on? Growth and marketing expert Susan Su is joining us […]

Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet’s urban innovation organization, has announced the launch of Pebble, a vehicle sensor that’s designed to help manage parking in cities by providing real time parking and curb availability data. Here’s how it works: small spherical sensors are stuck to the ground on parking spaces to note the absence or presence of a […]

Lamborghini will pay homage to combustion engines with the introduction of two new V12 luxury sports cars this year before it makes a push into electrification as the company tries to balance its storied gas-powered past with a hybrid, and eventually electric, future. The company laid out Tuesday its electrification roadmap, a plan that will […]

When a company chooses to go with supervised learning, it needs to have a strategy that allows them to label data as fast as it acquires it.

Vise today announced a $65 million Series C financing round led by Ribbit Capital, with participation from existing investors including Sequoia. The startup launched on the Disrupt Startup Battlefield stage in 2019 and has since raised upwards of $125 million. Vise uses an AI-powered platform to give independent financial advisors the same level of data as […]

A company that has built a new approach to the business of extended warranties — providing a cost-effective and efficient way for retailers or brands to offer them; and an easy way for consumers to buy and file claims against them — is today announcing a huge round of funding as it looks to take […]

Without good data, it’s impossible to build an accurate predictive machine learning model. Explorium, a company that has been building a solution over the last several years to help data pros find the best data for a given model, announced a $75 million Series C today — just 10 months after announcing a $31 million […]

Email marketing is decades old, but it’s a category that has surprising life in it. Multiple generations of email marketing companies have come through and sustained success, from Constant Contact to Mailchimp. These brands often become household names — after all, you probably have hundreds of emails with their logos attached to the email footer. […]

As cloud-native apps continue to become increasingly central to how organizations operate, a startup founded by the creators of a popular open-source tool to manage authorization for cloud-native application environments is announcing some funding to expand its efforts at commercializing the opportunity. Styra, the startup behind Open Policy Agent, has picked up $40 million in […]

Email marketing has been with us for decades, but today it has been refined to a science and an art form. If you’re an early-stage founder, it is one of the best ways to build and grow your direct relationship with your customer. You know how fickle the platforms can be. You can’t afford to […]

In the absence of a real baseball league, it is perhaps not surprising that a simulated one should grow popular during the troubled year 2020. But even so, the absurdist horror and minimalist aesthetic of Blaseball seem an unlikely success. The text-based fantasy fantasy league has attracted hundreds of thousands of players and now $3.4 […]

Nearly every social media experience today is built on the same premise: Humans identify with individuality. Users create a profile, upload an avatar picture, write a short biography and can then scream into the ether to other users on behalf of their digitally sculpted selves. Naj Austin, the founder behind Ethel’s Club, built Somewhere Good […]

The events of the past year and a half could well mark the beginning of a sea change for the world of restaurant robotics. The essential industrial was slammed amid the pandemic, leaving many companies searching for a decent automated option that could both keep things running and potentially avoid transmission vectors. Seattle-based Picnic is […]

Last September we concluded our 27-inch iMac review thusly, The big open question mark here is what the future looks like for the iMac — and how long we’ll have to wait to see it. That is, of course, the perennial question for hardware upgrades, but it’s exacerbated by the knowledge of imminent ARM-based systems […]

As publishers face up to whatever might be their next existential crisis — there are so many options from which to choose, including Substack stealing all their writers; or Clubhouse pulling in people through audio-based conversations where news and analysis intermingle seamlessly with networking — a startup that’s helping them build more tools to keep […]

One thing is clear in the cloud native world. Developers use a lot of services to create applications, and while service meshes define how these services work together, just getting a grip on the services a team uses is usually tracked manually in spreadsheets. That’s where Cortex, a new startup, comes in. It can help […]

When antitrust accusations close in on Google the tech giant loves to fire back a riposte that competition is just “one click away“. It’s a disingenuous retort from an online advertising behemoth whose power and profits stem from its expertise in capturing markets by manipulating and monopolizing Internet users’ attention. Indeed, the entire brand is […]

Automation is extending into every aspect of how organizations get work done, and today comes news of a startup that is building tools for one industry in particular: life sciences. Artificial, which has built a software platform for laboratories to assist with, or in some cases fully automate, research and development work, has raised $21.5 […]