You know when you set up a website and you add a Google Analytics tracker to see how many visitors you have? What you’re actually doing is giving Google and other parties access to your stats and users. Sure there are privacy protections in place and things aren’t all that bad but what if your website or app is particularly sensitive? Then you use something like Piwik or, now,… Read More
Breaking into the App Store can be difficult enough, but for small-time mobile game developers it’s even more of a challenge as they go up against billion-dollar, global publishers who dominate the top charts, like Supercell, Activision Blizzard, Niantic, EA, Tencent and others who can afford to invest millions in marketing budgets and advertising. Apple is now hoping to level the… Read More
Nintendo Switch is in short supply – which is good news for Nintendo, but not so great news for customers looking to get their hands on one of the new consoles. They’ve been hard to find since launch, and Nintendo announced it’s ramping production which should help, but now GameStop says it’ll have new units on Wednesday, March 22 so eager gamers can set their alarms.… Read More
If you launch a new console with a massively successful game like Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it’s not that hard to sell your console. This is exactly what is happening with the Nintendo Switch as Nintendo is ramping up production for the next 12 months. Nintendo already said that the company was planning to sell 2 million consoles for the month of March. According to SuperData, the… Read More
Tesla has raised $1.2 billion in new cash from sale of common shares, and convertible notes that come due in 2022. The total amount includes $350 million in share sales, plus $850 million raised via the senior notes, which is a bit north of what it announced on Wednesday it was planning to raise.
The capital raise comes after Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on an earnings call that while it… Read More
Most chat bots are dumb. No one wants to message a soulless stack of if-then statements just to order a pizza when a half-decent app or website interface can do the same job in half the time. Chat assistants are a different matter. Rather than actively bugging you for information in a back-and-forth no one enjoys having, chat assistants lurk in the background of the conversations… Read More
One down, many more to go! The first episode of TechCrunch’s latest podcast, Equity, our venture capital-focused podcast is out.
This week, TechCrunch’s Matthew Lynley, CrunchBase editor-in-chief Alex Wilhelm and I sat down with investor and SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin to talk about Tesla’s $1 billion raise, the return of IPOs and recent acquisitions in the technology… Read More
A group of researchers are demonstrating a tilt-based typing technique they’ve designed that could be an alternative option for users of larger smartphones or for inputting text when in VR. Read More
Homage, a Singapore-based startup that connects caregivers with elderly people seeking assistance, has closed a $1.2 million seed round. The money comes from 500 Startups’ Southeast Asia fund, Golden Gate Ventures, and SeedPlus, a fund affiliated with Jungle Ventures. Launched in May 2016, Homage was founded by Gillian Tee, a Singaporean who has spent time working in the U.S. where,… Read More
Netflix announced today that it would ditch its standard five-star rating scheme in favor of a much more simple thumbs up or down option. The streaming service said it had been testing thumbs up and down ratings “with hundreds of thousands of members” in 2016 – and it led to 200% more ratings being given. This makes sense – giving a five-star rating takes some… Read More
Enterprise software company MuleSoft will go public tomorrow and just priced their IPO at $17 – slightly above the proposed $14-16 range.
The company will start trading on the New York Stock Exchange tomorrow, under the symbol “MULE”. Founded in 2006, MuleSoft is an integration platform that helps help businesses use APIs to connect different types of software and… Read More
GoPro plans to cut 270 Jobs, Tesla looking to raise $1 billion for the Model 3, growth of the iMessage store is slowing down and the pricing of the Lucid Air electric car is revealed. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
New internal Uber documents leaked to Recode detail the company’s progress toward realizing its dream of a fleet of vehicles entirely devoid of pesky human drivers. As those files reveal, Uber’s month-over-month metrics aren’t exactly a steady line of progress, more a jerky sort of stumbling toward its goal of self-driving reliability. And as Uber’s court battle… Read More
Google’s legal battle with Uber over the development of self-driving cars is already off to an ugly start. Lawyers for the two tech firms spent the last two days bickering over which attorneys should be allowed to view the trade secrets Google claims were stolen by their former employees who went to work at Uber, and a lawyer for Uber said today in court that the company has been unable… Read More
An Israeli tech startup called Utilis has taken top honors at Imagine H2O this year, for technology that can detect underground leaks in underground, potable water supply systems through analysis of satellite imagery. Americans waste 1 trillion gallons of water every year thanks to leaky faucets, faulty sprinkler systems and other small systems. Utilis’ tech can find leaks to systems… Read More
True&Co., an e-commerce company founded with the mission of disrupting the lingerie industry by creating a new business model for selling bras and other undergarments, has been sold. Phillips Van Heusen (PVH), owner of Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger and Izod, among other iconic brands, has acquired the startup and plans to use it to move deeper into online sales and big data… Read More
The plot thickens, but doesn’t it always? New documents have emerged detailing former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn’s financial ties to Russian companies, including the U.S. subsidiary of Russian cybersecurity group Kaspersky Lab. One invoice form dating back to 2015 shows payments to Flynn made by three Russian entities: $33,750 from state-sponsored news source RT… Read More
For the last couple of years, private equity firms have been buying up public software companies that had fallen out of favor with investors. In fact, many of the top software deals in the U.S. last year were take-private transactions. Just three of them included the visual analytics company Qlik Technologies, which sold to Thomas Bravo; the marketing software company Marketo, acquired… Read More
Appodeal is announcing that it has acquired Corona Labs, creators of the Corona SDK for building cross-platform games and apps. The companies say the framework has been used to build more than 10,000 games including The Lost City by Fire Maple Games and HoPiKo by Laser Dog. Appodeal, meanwhile, is a mobile ad mediation company — in other words, it helps app developers manage… Read More
News junkies, rejoice. ABC News is rolling out an updated Apple TV application, live today, which makes the news division the first to offer a simultaneous multi-stream viewing experience in its tvOS application. At launch, there are a dozen different live streams users can choose from, presented in a row as the bottom of the screen. These can be placed in either a dual-screen mode or even… Read More
