The U.S. Space Force obviously won’t be able to train most of their service people in actual space, so they relatively new arm of America’s defense forces has tasked Slingshot Aerospace to create a VR space sim, in partnership with The Third Floor, a Hollywood VFX firm that worked on blockbusters including Gravity, The Martian […]
IBM, a company that originally made its name out of its leadership in building a myriad of enterprise hardware (quite literally: its name is an abbreviation for International Business Machines), is taking one more step away from that legacy and deeper into the world of cloud services. The company today announced that it plans to […]
MessageBird, the Amsterdam-headquartered cloud communications company, has raised $200 million in Series C funding in a round led by Silicon Valley’s Spark Capital. The new investment gives 2011-founded MessageBird a whopping $3 billion valuation, and includes participation from Bonnier, Glynn Capital, LGT Lightstone, Longbow, Mousse Partners and New View Capital. Existing investors Accel, Atomico, and […]
Grid AI, a startup founded by the inventor of the popular open-source PyTorch Lightning project, William Falcon, that aims to help machine learning engineers more efficiently, today announced that it has raised an $18.6 million Series A funding round, which closed earlier this summer. The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Bain […]
The next U.S. Presidential debate between President Trump and Democratic candidate and former VP Joe Biden will be done remotely, the U.S. Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) announced today. This follows an intense news cycle that came immediately after the first Presidential debate, which saw Trump and a large number of his White House inner […]
Dr Lal PathLabs, one of the largest lab testing companies in India, left a huge cache of patient data on a public server for months, TechCrunch has learned. The lab testing giant, headquartered in New Delhi, serves some 70,000 patients a day, and quickly became a major player in testing patients for COVID-19 after winning […]
Google’s appeal against an order by France’s competition watchdog to negotiate with publishers for reuse of snippets of their content has failed. As we reported in April, the French authority was acting on a new ‘neighbouring right’ for news which was transposed into national law following a pan-EU copyright reform agreed last year. The Paris […]
Mobile usage continues to remain high amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, which has prompted social distancing measures and lockdown policies, and has pushed consumers to connect online for work, school and socializing. This, in turn, has helped drive record spending in apps during the quarter, as well as a huge surge in time spent in apps. […]
The German energy company E.ON, which counts over 50 million commercial, residential, and industrial customers, has created a new EUR250 million ($265 million) investment fund called Future Energy Ventures to invest in “asset-light” tech startups. As utilities move to decarbonize their sources of energy generation they’re coming to the realization that they will need exposure […]
Yesterday, a 450-page “investigation on competition in digital markets” was published by the House based on 16 months of evidence gathering, including interviews with employees and past employees and others with first-hand knowledge of the inner workings of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. The picture it paints is of companies that have abused their power […]
French fintech startup Lydia is going to work with financial API startup Tink for its open banking features in its app. Lydia started as a peer-to-peer payment app and now has 4 million users in Europe. Lydia’s vision has evolved to become a financial super app that lets you control your bank accounts and access […]
Running a small to medium-sized business means a small staff needs to juggle a plethora of tasks, like bookkeeping, tax records and regulatory filings. Singaporean startup Lanturn streamlines their workload with a combination of corporate services and an internal platform that helps automate administrative work. Lanturn announced today that it has raised a $3 million […]
When you look at maps of micromobility across the world, it appears there’s not a ton of activity throughout Africa. Well, that’s because there’s not, Gura Ride founder and CEO Tony Adesina said at TC Sessions: Mobility. In Africa, there are “very few” micromobility operators, Adesina said. “Almost non-existent.” That’s why launching bike and scooter […]
The major tech platforms push back against the House antitrust report, Google Assistant gets a “guest” mode and we interview a freshly minted Nobel laureate. This is your Daily Crunch for October 7, 2020. The big story: Big tech responds to antitrust report The House Judiciary Committee released its tech antitrust report late yesterday, concluding […]
We don’t often cover telecom technology startups, but it’s periodically worth checking in to see what’s happening in that space. We can get a good indication from the latest cohort to emerge from an accelerator associated with South Korea’s largest wireless carrier, SK Telecom. This group of startups will join the Telecom Infra Project accelerator […]
In a blog post Wednesday, Facebook said it will no longer allow content that encourages poll watching that uses “militarized” language or intends to “intimidate, exert control, or display power over election officials or voters.” Facebook credited the update to its platform rules to civil rights experts who it worked with to create the policy. […]
Amazon has sent a legal notice to Future Group, India’s second largest retail chain, for breaching the terms of its contract by selling a significant portion of the business to Ambani’s Reliance Retail. Future Group announced in late August that it was selling its retail and wholesale business, as well as its logistics and warehousing […]
The goal of Sight Tech Global, a virtual, global event on December 2-3, 2020, is to gather the world’s top experts who are applying advanced technologies, notably AI, to the future of accessibility and assistive tech for people who are blind or visually impaired. Today we’re excited to roll out most of the agenda. There […]
Welcome back to Extra Crunch’s Media Roundup, where I round up the stories that entrepreneurs in the content and advertising business should be thinking about — trends, larger platform shifts, as well as noteworthy funding rounds. This time, we’ve got some bad news for movie theaters, the specter of antitrust regulation and a new career […]
YouTube has long allowed its users to test new features and products before they go live to a wider audience. But in a recent change, YouTube’s latest series of experiments are being limited to those who subscribe to the Premium tier of YouTube’s service. Currently, paid subscribers are the only ones able to test several […]
