MarketingMuses

To paraphrase a saying popularized by countless dorm room stoners: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you use the hype around decentralized crypto economies sell bacon.” The latest example of this age-old adage comes to us from Oscar Meyer and involves their exciting new cryp-faux-currency, Bacoin. The […]

A growing number of U.S. adults no longer view the internet as a largely “good thing” for society, according to a new report from Pew Research Center out today. To be clear, a sizable majority –  70 percent – continue to believe the internet’s development has been mostly good. But that number has dropped by […]

Amazon is famous for its hard-charging work culture, and Charlie Kindel, an Amazon executive who helped shape the rise of Alexa, is ready to hit the pause button after a five-year stint with the company and three years with the team at work on the company’s smart home division. Writing on his personal blog earlier […]

On May 25, the latest installment of the Star Wars theatrical franchise will drop in theaters. Shooting Star Wars: A Solo Story hasn’t been all roses, with Ron Howard stepping in to take over for directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller and reshooting many scenes. But the show must go on! Yesterday, Lucasfilm released a […]

Technotopia is a podcast about the future. It assumes the world won’t fall into a dystopia and therefore is optimistic about our chances for human success. I’m looking for cool people to talk to and I’d like for you to join me. I love guests who are are excited about the future and technology but […]

Facebook’s lawyers are attempting to block a High Court decision in Ireland, where its international business is headquartered, to refer a long-running legal challenge to the bloc’s top court. The social media giant’s lawyers asked the court to stay the referral to the CJEU today, Reuters reports. Facebook is trying to appeal the referral by challenging […]

Payments company Stripe is today taking another step to expand its operations into a wider set of business services, targeting the startups that form its core base of customers. Today, the company is announcing that Atlas, the all-in-one service Stripe started two years ago to help founders incorporate in Delaware, can now be used to […]

Google today announced that Nvidia’s high-powered Tesla V100 GPUs are now available for workloads on both Compute Engine and Kubernetes Engine. For now, this is only a public beta, but for those who need Google’s full support for their GPU workloads, the company also today announced that the slightly less powerful Nvidia P100 GPUs are […]

Halide, the premium iOS camera app from ex-Apple designer Sebastiaan de With and Twitter engineer Ben Sandofsky is today launching one of its biggest upgrades since its arrival last year. The updated app includes a Self-Timer, redesigned photo reviewer, accessibility improvements, and more. But perhaps its best feature is the ability to take better control over your […]

Jake Bright Contributor More posts by this contributor Business solutions firm Africa’s Talking closes $8.6M round led by IFC Uber and Taxify are going head-to-head to digitize Africa’s two-wheeled taxis When it comes to monetizing digital social interactions, Kenya’s Safaricom has its own order. American tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter offered social networks […]

Don’t let procrastination drain your time and productivity — or your wallet. You have exactly three days left to save up to $1,800 on Super Early Bird pricing for Disrupt San Francisco 2018 — the premiere tech conference related to all things startup. Disrupt SF takes place September 5-7 at Moscone Center West, and it’s […]

Here’s an odd juxtaposition for you. According to a new report on voice assistants released today by PwC, younger users are adopting voice technology at a faster rate than their older counterparts, but are somehow using their voice assistants less often. The report found that users 18 through 24 had fewer “heavy” users of voice […]

Since it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed the personal data of millions of Facebook users, one question has lingered in the minds of the public: What other data did Dr. Aleksandr Kogan gain access to? Twitter confirmed to The Telegraph on Saturday that GSR, Kogan’s own commercial enterprise, had purchased one-time API access […]

Fitbit this morning announced plans to utilize Google’s new Cloud Healthcare API, in order to continue its push into the world of serious healthcare devices. It’s a bit of a no-brainer as far as partnerships go. Google announced Cloud for Healthcare, taking a major step into the world of health, which comprised around $3.3 trillion […]

Boom, boom, boom! We’re announcing another big name for our upcoming blockchain event in Zug, Switzerland, on July 6 after Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan joined the line-up. The event — TC: Sessions Blockchain — will be TechCrunch’s first show dedicated to blockchain, it takes place in the world’s “Crypto Valley” and we’ll be joined by a host […]

Baidu has turned to the financial industry to bolster its consumer finance business. The Chinese search giant confirmed that it has sold a majority share in its Financial Services Group (FSG) business to a consortium of private equity firms in a deal worth $1.9 billion. The business is in the consumer finance space and its services include credit and wealth […]

Blue Origin conducted the 8th launch of its New Shepard sub-orbital rocket and crew capsule today out in Texas, and things couldn’t have gone better for the growing space tourism company. The rocket ascended into a cloudless sky, reaching a max velocity of about 2,200 MPH, and delivered its capsule to the edge of space, […]

Larry Harvey normalized the abnormal, expanding the boundaries of what creators could attempt. That’s why there’s a special bond between Silicon Valley and Black Rock City, the desert settlement where Burning Man transpires. Both ditch “what are we supposed to do?” for “what can we do?”. Both encourage risky expression that appears insane to outsiders. […]

Brooks Rainwater Contributor More posts by this contributor Do cities still want a sharing economy? As tech startups surge in cities, inclusive economic growth must be a priority Christopher Hooton Contributor From home- and ride-sharing apps to TV and movie streaming subscriptions to social media platforms – Internet companies have transformed our lives. Today the internet sector […]

Sprint and T-Mobile, after years of going back and forth as to whether they are going to tie up two of the largest telecom providers in the U.S., have announced that the two companies have entered a merger agreement this morning. The merger will be an all-stock transaction, and will now be subject to regulatory […]

Disney’s latest alarmingly star-packed Avengers entry is going to set another box-office record for its opening weekend, eclipsing Star Wars: The Force Awakens, according to Variety. The film is set to bring in around $250 million in its debut domestically, which would put it just ahead of the debut for the first star Wars film in […]

I went to see Arlan Hamilton of Backstage Capital speak this week. Her remarkable story is pretty well known by now — she “built a venture capital fund from the ground up, while homeless,” to quote Backstage’s site. She said several interesting things, but let’s start with this one: as of 2019, she will no […]

I want to live in the Gemini’s universe. It’s one where the promise of on-demand hardware has been fulfilled. Where crowfunding, rapid prototyping, scalable manufacturing all of those good things have improved our lives by giving us the devices we both want and need. It’s the utopian dream of 2011, fully realized. In the Gemini […]

While streaming and bingeing seem increasingly synonymous, Hulu’s biggest hit The Handmaid’s Tale actually feels like an anti-binge. Some of that is just Hulu’s release strategy, where it doesn’t release an entire season at once, but instead comes out of the gate with a handful of new episodes (two this week for the launch of […]

Shahin Farshchi Contributor More posts by this contributor The dos and don’ts of crafting frontier-tech companies Five billion-dollar businesses for the driverless future I entered the world of venture investing a dozen years ago.  Little did I know that I was embarking on a journey to master the art of balancing contradictions: building up experience […]

Rip Pruisken waffled in college (we got that pun safely out of the way for now). He was a student in the Ivy League at Brown University, and had focused on academics for much of his life. His parents were physicists, and “I thought I would study some sort of cookie-cutter path of studying something […]

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Michael Markman, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, April 27, 2018. Apple, Spotify meets Alexa, Is Social Dead, the coming subscription bubble. @stevegillmor, @mickeleh, @DenisPombriant, @fradice, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor Liner Notes Live chat stream The Gillmor Gang on Facebook

Earlier this week Eric Lundgren was sentenced to 15 months in prison for selling what Microsoft claimed was “counterfeit software,” but which was in fact only recovery CDs loaded with data anyone can download for free. The company has now put up a blog post setting “the facts” straight, though it’s something of a limited […]

Apple has long been rumored to be working on a pair of augmented reality glasses, but a report today suggests that they’re looking to compete with Google, Microsoft and Facebook in the virtual reality space as well. CNET reports that Apple has its eye set on the 2020 release of a wireless headset that combines […]

The charming robot at the heart of Disney’s Big Hero 6, Baymax, isn’t exactly realistic, but its puffy bod is an (admittedly aspirational) example of the growing field of soft robotics. And now Disney itself has produced a soft robot arm that seems like it could be a prototype from the movie. Created by Disney […]

It looks like a potential merger deal between T-Mobile and Sprint, two of the major telecom companies in the U.S., is getting closer and now has set valuation terms, according to a report by Bloomberg. The deal could be announced as soon as Sunday, according to a report by CNBC. The proposed tie-up of the […]

It’s hard launching a phone company — something Essential was pretty candid about from the start. Andy Rubin’s latest endeavor got off to something of a slow start, according to outside accounts, but today the well-funded hardware startup is getting ready to add a whole bunch of new markets to its online store. On Twitter […]

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is gearing up to present its proposal for electric scooter permitting. This comes after the SF Board of Supervisors approved an ordinance for the SFMTA to create a permitting process to better regulate the plethora of electric scooters from Bird, Lime and Spin. The SFMTA’s proposal lays out a […]

EcoFlow, a Chinese hardware firm developed by former JDI engineers that sells portable power stations, has pulled in a Series A round of over $4 million ahead of the imminent launch of new products and an international sales expansion. The Shenzhen-based company has taken an interesting route. Founded in 2016, the startup burst on to the […]

Ahead of Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting in June, stockholder Jing Zhao has submitted a proposal to replace the board’s chairman, Elon Musk, with an independent director. Musk, the chief executive officer at Tesla, has been chairman of the board since 2004. “Although the current leadership structure, in which the positions of Chairman and CEO are […]

Fortnite Battle Royale has transcended your average video game to become somewhat of a cultural phenomenon. In fact, the third-person shooter saw a peak 3.4 million concurrent players in March, with the servers buckling under the pressure. Fortnite Battle Royale also holds the record for individual streamer numbers on Twitch with Ninja’s stream featuring Drake. […]

Facebook’s Messenger Kids, the social network’s new chat app for the under-13 crowd, has been designed to give parents more control over their kids’ contact list. Today, the app is gaining a new feature, “sleep mode,” aimed at giving parents the ability to turn the app off at designated times. The idea is that parents […]

It’s almost becoming boring reporting that the Amazon cloud had a monster quarter. It’s not news at this point, because of course they did. Yesterday, it once again blew away analyst expectations with 49 percent revenue growth for the quarter. Oh ya, and that revenue? Well that was $5.44B for the quarter, a ways above […]

Enterprise tech IPOs continue to roar in 2018. Today, not one but two enterprise tech companies, DocuSign and Smartsheet, saw their share prices popped as they made their debuts the public markets today. Smartsheet was first out of the gates. Trading on NASDAQ under the ticker SMAR, the company clocked an opening price of $18.40. […]

Real estate-focused MetaProp NYC has been adding new programs on top of its core accelerator. The latest: The MetaProp Bridge at Columbia University. It’s an international accelerator designed specifically for real estate and property tech-related startups from Europe, the Middle East and Africa that are looking to expand into North America. Participants get access to […]

If you’ve ever painted a room you know that getting every nook and cranny is pretty difficult and Tim Allen help you if you have hardwood or carpet. The tarp alone costs more than the paint. Now, thanks to MIST, your robot can manage the entire job, slapping paint up like a robotic Jackson Pollock. […]

Despite Facebook being under fire for everything pertaining to Cambridge Analytica, the company still hopes to be able to do some good. Today, Facebook is dropping its platform fees pertaining to fundraisers for personal causes. That means Facebook is getting rid of the 4.3 percent platform fee in the u.S. and the 6.2 percent fee […]

The maker of Shadowverse and Granblue Fantasy is teaming up with Nintendo for a new mobile RPG. Called Dragalia Lost, the Japanese-style action RPG will be a free-to-play game though likely loaded with Loot Box-style mechanics that will result in a financial windfall for Nintendo and developer Cygames. The trailer doesn’t reveal many details about […]

The UK government has suffered yet another defeat in the courts over a surveillance regime that critics have dubbed a ‘Snooper’s charter’. Today the UK High Court agreed with digital and civil rights group Liberty’s crowdfunded legal challenge to a portion of the UK’s 2016 Investigatory Powers Act that gives the state the power to […]

Over coming years Ford intends to stop selling most of its cars in North America. This plan would leave just the Mustang and upcoming Focus Active as the only traditional car it sells while crossovers, SUVs and trucks make up the rest of its lineup. The news was abruptly revealed in Ford’s latest quarterly financial […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Today Katie Roof and I were joined by James Hardiman, a partner at Data Collective (DCVC). If you want to tell him how he did, he’s on Twitter here. It was good to have Hardiman on board as […]

With the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, Microsoft is launching a number of new features for its desktop operating system today. Most of those apply to all users, but in addition to all the regular feature updates, the company also today announced a couple of new features and tools specifically designed for its business users […]

Following the steady pace of its semi-annual update cadence, Microsoft today launched the latest version of Windows 10. For the most part, there are no major revelations here since Microsoft’s Windows Insider program now regularly provides early access to all the new features to those who are brave enough to try out pre-release software. But […]

Unlike other browser vendors, Microsoft remains committed to a relatively slow update cycle that sees the company launch major new versions of Edge in sync with the bi-annual Windows 10 updates. It doesn’t look like that’s changing anytime soon, even as the Edge mobile browser is seeing far more regular updates now. Since today is […]

The ongoing trend of consolidation in the world of ridesharing continues apace, with the latest development coming out of Europe. BlaBlaCar, the French carpooling platform, is acquiring Less, a young carpooling platform based in Paris and focusing only on urban rides, paying drivers on a per-kilometer rate to incentivize them. The financial terms are not […]

$4.5 billion-valued ride-sharing startup Go-Jek may be busy in Southeast Asia, where it is aiming to step into the gap following Uber’s exit, but that isn’t stopping it from looking at opportunities elsewhere in the world. Over in Bangladesh, motorbike-taxi hailing service Pathao has announced that it raised a “pre-Series A” investment led by Go-Jek. […]

While Bumble BFF and Hey! Vina help adult women find new friends, there isn’t a social network dedicated to young women. But Brooke Chaffin and Catherine Connors are looking to change that with the introduction of Maverick, a social network that connects young girls with female mentors to express their creativity in a safe space. […]

DocuSign priced its IPO Thursday evening at $29 per share, netting the company $629 million. It was a better price than the e-signature company had been expecting. The initially proposed price range was $24 to $26 and then that was raised to $26 to $28. The price gives the company a valuation of $4.4 billion […]

[embedded content] As we navigate further and further into this strange Ready Player One-like future that plenty of tech companies are investing heavily, Disney wants to ensure that people can feel content in the most life-like way possible. Disney Research has shown off some research into the world of haptic feedback via a vest with “pneumatically-actuated […]

With Microsoft’s BUILD 2018 conference right around the corner, the company just made good on a promise from last year’s conference; Apple iTunes is finally coming to the Windows Store. The music software was originally forecast to arrive by the end of 2017, but it took a bit longer to finally find its Windows home. […]

Bluetooth and smart speakers are a dime a dozen these days, and many of them aren’t bad — so what it often comes down to is style. Native Union has my number with its latest device, which accentuates the classic bookcase speaker look with a tech-heavy back end and brass volume knob. It’s a collaboration […]

On today’s wildly successful earnings call, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky dropped a bit of a bombshell for Amazon Prime subscribers. The retailer’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink annual subscription plan is about to get pricier. On May 11, Prime annual memberships will jump $20, from $99 a year to $119. The news follows a similar announcement back in January, […]

It’s an end of an era in Cupertino today. Apple just announced the end of production on its AirPort line of base stations, a list that includes the AirPort Express, AirPort Extreme and AirPort Time Capsule. In a statement provided to TechCrunch, the company noted that it will continue to sell its remaining stock, but […]

Thanks in part to its colossal cloud business, Microsoft earnings are drenching shareholders in dollars. For the quarter ending March 31, 2018, the tech ringer from Redmond saw its revenue increase to $26.8 billion (up 16 percent) from $23.2 billion, with operating income up 23 percent to $8.3 billion, up from $6.7 billion. Income was […]

Amazon just announced that it’s scored the rights to stream Thursday Night Football games for another two years. The contract renewal will bring 11 NFL games simulcast on Fox to its Prime video offerings for both the 2018 and 2019 seasons, including weeks four through 15 of the season, save for Thanksgiving.  The NFL and Amazon […]

Square just announced that it’s reached an agreement to acquire Weebly for $365 million in cash and stock. While Square is best known for its payment software and hardware, it’s also been expanding into other areas; for example, with the acquisition of food delivery service Caviar and corporate catering startup Zesty. Weebly, meanwhile, offers easy-to-use […]

Amazon reported first-quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday, sending shares up 7 percent in after-hours trading after its significantly better-than-expected report. The company reported earnings per share of $3.27, well above the $1.26 that analysts had been expecting. This worked out to $1.6 billion in net income, up from $724 million last year. Revenue […]

MoviePass is known for a pricing model that sounds too good to be true — in exchange for paying $9.95 per month, subscribers get up to one movie ticket per day. At least, they used to: If you try to sign up now, that isn’t quite what you’re offered. Instead, there’s a bundle that combines […]

Stock market investors greeted payroll software company Ceridian with enthusiasm on its debut Thursday. After pricing above its expected range at $22 per share, the stock shot up 42 percent, closing above $31 by day’s end. Ceridian helps clients ranging from BlackRock to Trader Joe’s keep tabs on personnel, including payroll, benefits and onboarding. Its […]

Daniel Tawfik Contributor Often when I attend a conference or a networking event I am surprised by how many people operate at the periphery of the tech industry. Social media gurus, SEO “ninjas,” bloggers, etc. It’s a coterie of tech “club promoters.” The hype men of the industry. “Hack your way to success.” “Meet the […]

Zurich-based DeepCode claims that their system — essentially a tool for analyzing and improving code — is like Grammarly for programmers. The system, which uses a corpus of 250,000 rules, reads your public and private GitHub repositories and tells you how to fix problems, remain compatible and generally improve your programs. Founded by Veselin Raychev, […]

Teradyne, a prosaic-sounding but flush company that provides automated testing equipment for industrial applications, has acquired the Danish robotics company MiR for an eye-popping $148 million, with $124 million on the table after meeting performance goals. MiR, which despite the lowercase “i” stands for Mobile Industrial Robots, does what you might guess. Founded in 2013, […]

Tesla’s VP of Autopilot and low-voltage hardware, Jim Keller, is leaving the company, Electrek first reported. In a statement to TechCrunch, Tesla said it appreciates “his contributions to Tesla and wish the best,” a spokesperson said. “Tesla is deeply committed to developing the most advanced silicon in the world and we plan to dramatically increase […]