A new report offers a few more details as to what Disney has in store for its upcoming Netflix rival. The company last August had announced plans to debut its own streaming service in 2019 with content like Star Wars and Marvel movies, Disney studio and Pixar films. This week De … | Continue reading
We all know about the unicorns of the startup world — fast-growing companies that appear to be on the road (or have already arrived at) valuations of $1 billion or more — and we hear a lot about the unfortunate ones that either run out of money or fail for another reason. But wh … | Continue reading
Lyft has teamed up with Black Girls Code, a non-profit organization dedicated to getting more black girls involved in computer programming and technology, to make the non-profit organization one of its Round Up & Donate partners. Since launching the Round Up & Donate program eig … | Continue reading
Is there room in the market for yet another streaming service? Viacom thinks so. The company, on its earnings call on Thursday, said it’s planning to launch its own ad-supported streaming service by September 2018, the end of its fiscal year. The service will include “tens of th … | Continue reading
Whether you’re trapped on a futuristic island prison full of blood-thirsty gang members or simply stuck in a two-hour meeting, the LifeClock One might be the watch for you. Inspired by the movie Escape From New York starring Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken, the watch is an homage … | Continue reading
Uber has agreed to settle the lawsuit brought against it by Waymo for theft of some of the company’s trade secrets. As part of the settlement Uber has agreed to work with Waymo to ensure that the company’s LIDAR and software represents just the work of Waymo engineers. The agree … | Continue reading
Right now if you want financial guidance and planning help you basically have two options – shell out thousands (or more) a year for an old-school Wall Street-affiliated advisor, or test your luck with one of the free financial planning chatbot startups that have been popping up … | Continue reading
Aurora, the self-driving startup founded by Google self-driving car project alum Chris Urmson, along with Tesla Autopilot developer Sterling Anderson, CMU robotics expert and Uber vet Drew Bagnell, and a team of industry experts, will be making the autonomous smarts for Byton’s … | Continue reading
Facebook will award up to $1 million to five community leaders and $50,000 to 100 more to fund their ideas for how to strengthen people’s online and offline connections. Facebook will also hire double the number of engineers currently working on safety-related causes in its Lond … | Continue reading
A so-called ‘Starman,’ which is a life-size mannequin wearing a production version of the SpaceX crew spacesuit; a miniature car created by Hot Wheels to commemorate the Roadster and its primary passenger; and something called an Arch (pronounced “Ark”), which is not so easy to … | Continue reading
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Today we’re doing another Equity Shot, a short topic-centered episode where we assemble the troops to dive into one particular thing. Or, in this case … | Continue reading
Hacker group fail0verflow shared a photo of a Nintendo Switch running Debian, a distribution of Linux (via Nintendo Life). The group claims that Nintendo can’t fix the vulnerability with future firmware patches. #switch pic.twitter.com/4iTjTk9D59 — fail0verflow (@fail0verflow) F … | Continue reading
WeTravel wants to be the payment platform for small travel companies and group trips. Founded by three immigrant entrepreneurs who met at University of California, Berkeley, the company has just closed a $2 million seed round to expand its business among the small and medium-siz … | Continue reading
Amazon is gearing up to compete directly with UPS and FedEx, according to a new Wall Street Journal report. The so-called “Shipping with Amazon” program will be an end-to-end shipping solution, with pickups from businesses and shipments made to consumers, per the report. The tim … | Continue reading
More problems and controversy for Logan Paul, the YouTube star who caused a strong public backlash when he posted a video of a suicide victim in Japan. Google’s video platform today announced that it would be pulling advertising temporarily from his video channel in response to … | Continue reading
After teasing the feature back in September, Apple is adding support for live news in the TV app on the iPhone, iPad and Apple TV — 9to5mac first spotted the new section. For now, it’s quite limited as it only supports a handful of channels for American users. If you’re running … | Continue reading
Another antitrust fine for Google. India’s competition commission has issued a 1.36BN rupees (~$21.1M) penalty on the search giant for abusing its dominant position in the local search market for online general web search and web search advertising services. Read More | Continue reading
B Capital Group, the VC fund founded by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, has closed out its first fund at $360 million. Read More | Continue reading
There’s controversy in the crypto community after one of the founders of a prominent wallet service for storing and sending cryptocurrencies abruptly announced a rival venture. Taylor Monahan, who start MyEtherWallet.com (MEW) with Kosala “Kvhnuke” Hemachandra in 2015, announced … | Continue reading
This week isn’t turning out to be great one for Uber in Japan. Two of its investors — Didi and SoftBank — are teaming up to launch a rival service, while one of its existing competitors has just landed a big cash infusion and highly influential backer after Toyota backed JapanTa … | Continue reading
China’s top wearable firm Huami has raised $110 million after it listed on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday. Fresh from launching iits Apple Watch-like Amazfit Blip this week, Huami sold 10 million shares at $11 a pop, the mid-point of its price range. The company joined … | Continue reading
A number of iOS app developers have been mystified by a new wave of app rejections related to their use of Apple’s emojis. They’ve suspected that a new App Store crackdown is underway. However, the company hasn’t changed its policy on Apple emoji usage in apps, nor its enforceme … | Continue reading
China’s Didi Chuxing is preparing yet another market expansion after it inked an agreement with SoftBank, Uber’s largest shareholder, to introduce taxi-hailing services in Japan this year. Didi dominates the Chinese market — thanks in no small amount to its acquisition of second … | Continue reading
Attorneys for Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous vehicle spinout, are nearing the end of their plaintiffs presentation against Uber in a trial that is likely to have broad ramifications for the common Valley practice of acqui-hiring talent. The case hinges on whether the jury believes … | Continue reading
How can Facebook promote meaningful interaction between users? By letting them downvote inappropriate comments to hide them. Facebook is now testing a downvote button on a limited set of public Page post comment reels, the company confirms to TechCrunch. But what Facebook does w … | Continue reading
HBO is bringing the popular left-wing podcast Pod Save America to TV this fall with a series of hour-long specials. The podcast is hosted Jon Favreau, Dan Pfeiffer, Tommy Vietor and Jon Lovett, all alums of the Obama administration. They started out by hosting the podcast Keepin … | Continue reading
Nvidia’s successes are continuing to pile on as the company’s gaming and data center businesses drove revenues up 34 percent year-over-year. Nvidia shares were up around 10 percent after-hours following the company’s release of its fourth-quarter earnings report. The company rep … | Continue reading
A day after Alphabet announced plans to roll Nest into its hardware team, cofounder Matt Rogers has announced that he’s exiting the company. The story was first noted by CNET and quickly confirmed by Rogers on Twitter. Could just be social media talk, but Rogers’ brief statement … | Continue reading
The largest tech acquisition offer in history wasn’t enough. Qualcomm’s board of directors issued a statement on Thursday saying that they are turning down Broadcom’s $121 billion bid to buy the competing chipmaker. According to the release, Qualcomm “unanimously rejected” an “u … | Continue reading
Media executives sometimes say that their companies are like a startup — but in the case of This Old House, that’s actually kind of true, since Time Inc. sold the 40-year-old brand (best known for the home improvement TV show of the same name) to Eric Thorkilsen and TZP Growth P … | Continue reading
A few months after hearing closing arguments in the Lawson v. GrubHub case, Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley has ruled Raef Lawson, the plaintiff, was indeed an independent contractor while driving and delivering food for GrubHub. “We’re extremely satisfied with today’s ruling in L … | Continue reading
Deliv, the crowdsourced same-day delivery service which today partners with retailers like Macy’s, Best Buy, Petsmart and Walmart on various initiatives, today announced a new service to offer same-day delivery of prescription medications. At launch, Deliv Rx, as the service is … | Continue reading
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing about the future of blockchain lately. With cryptocurrency prices reaching all-time highs and total market capitalization topping $800 billion recently, everyone wants to know if we’re witnessing the second coming of the internet or the crazie … | Continue reading
The recent arrival of the Apple HomePod and Google Home Max have demonstrated, if nothing else, what a smart speaker can be when it’s music first. On the other hand, audio’s never been as much of a driver on Amazon’s Echo line, though the company did take a small step in that di … | Continue reading
Avid audiobook nerds tired of dealing with Audible’s nonsense or long library queues now have a new way to get get a steady stream of the good stuff. Scribd just announced that it will be reinstating an unlimited plan offering relatively unfettered access to ebooks, audiobooks, … | Continue reading
The blockchain is the buzziest thing on the internet these days and now MIT professor and godfather of the Human Genome Project George Church wants to put your genes on it. His new startup Nebula Genomics plans to sequence your genome for under $1,000 (the current going rate of … | Continue reading
Earlier this week, iOS source code showed up on GitHub, raising concerns that hackers could find a way to comb the material for vulnerabilities. Apple has yet to confirm or deny the legitimacy of the posted material, but all signs point to it being the real deal — a fact seeming … | Continue reading
Scheduling tech conferences is hard, especially in May, when seemingly every company wants to hold a major event, including Google and Microsoft. Typically, Google I/O and Microsoft Build, the flagship developer conferences for both companies, happen within a week or two of each … | Continue reading
The world needs more emojis. Ever since emojis became a cultural phenomenon, tech companies have been working together to add new smileys, animals and objects. And the Unicode consortium just published this year’s list of new emojis. While many glaring omissions have been fixed … | Continue reading
Designing VR and AR products is a challenge that’s not particularly well-suited for this reality. Unity and Epic Games have made great strides in adapting their workflows to allow users to edit virtual reality content in a very precise way, but at the same time, they’re both sti … | Continue reading
After having declared last year that the app would receive no future updates, Facebook is delivering a big update to its VR painting tool Quill. The update expands on Quill’s initial promise, expanding it from being a platform for designing static scenes to one that can handle d … | Continue reading
Sylabs, the commercial company behind the open source Singularity container engine, announced its first commercial product today, Singularity Pro. Sylabs was launched in 2015 to create a container platform specifically designed for scientific and high performance computing use c … | Continue reading
Google’s Chrome browser will soon flag every site that doesn’t use HTTPS encryption. Starting in July, with the launch of Chrome 68, Chrome will mark all HTTP sites as ‘not secure’ and prominently highlight this in its URL bar. Over the course of the last few years, Google has s … | Continue reading
It’s a half-serious joke among people who bet early on cryptocurrencies and have watched their values soar. At some point, it’s time to buy a Lamborghini, as did Peter Saddington, an Atlanta-based coder and self-described serial entrepreneur who says he cashed out 45 bitcoins la … | Continue reading
WhatsApp has begun testing a new payments feature in India that will allow people to send money to other WhatsApp users, excluding merchant accounts. The feature is currently in beta, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans, but hasn’t been publicly announced beca … | Continue reading
Pay discrimination and discrepancies based on gender and race are nothing new. Unfortunately, it seems that little has changed over the years. In the tech industry, white people on average make $136,000 a year, which is about $6,000 more than black people with the same level of … | Continue reading
Hey startup world, get ready for the biggest, most ambitious TechCrunch Disrupt event ever. Disrupt, the world’s top technology and startup event, will take place in San Francisco on September 5-7, 2018, and it’s about to level-up in a big way. This is the one tech event you do … | Continue reading
Here at TechCrunch, we cover company earnings on a pretty regular basis. And we promise it’s for a good reason: The success and failure of these publicly-traded companies tends to give us at least one more data point when it comes to calibrating which technologies are exciting t … | Continue reading