Just six days after Uber won its appeal against London transportation regulators to continue operating in London for another 18 months, one of its bigger rivals has found itself in the hot seat. Ola, the India-based ride-hailing startup, is not getting its Transport for London ride-hailing license renewed, after failing to meet some of TfL’s […]
Chinmay Malaviya and Charlie Depman found themselves at the center of the shared micromobility industry just as it took off, working for companies like Bird, Lime and Scoot. They experienced a rollercoaster ride of venture funding and skyrocketing demand, product pitfalls and regulatory hurdles. It was in the midst of this activity that the pair […]
For the past four years, Swedish startup Einride has captured interest, investment and even a few customer contracts for its unusual-looking pods — electric and autonomous vehicles that are designed to carry freight. But progress in developing, testing and validating autonomous vehicles — particularly ones that don’t even have space for a driver and rely […]
“Away,” a new drama on Netflix, tells the story of the first manned expedition to Mars — Emma Green (played by Hilary Swank) leads an international team of astronauts on the three-year mission, while her husband Matt (Josh Charles) is part of the support team back on Earth. As we explain on the latest episode […]
The other week TechCrunch’s Extra Crunch Live series sat down with Accel VCs Sonali De Rycker and Andrew Braccia to chat about the state of the global startup investing ecosystem. Given their firm’s broad geographic footprint, we wanted to know what was going on in different startup markets, and inside a number of business-model varietals […]
Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter for your weekend enjoyment. Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.
Evan Weinstein, the founder of the Philadelphia-based startup, Cocoa Press, which makes a 3D printer for chocolate, doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth. But the young founder was fascinated by 3D printing technologies and was looking for a way to move the technology forward. “I stumbled on chocolate,” Weinstein said. And the result, was […]
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the TechCrunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending three hours and 40 minutes per day […]
SPACs, or special purpose acquisition companies, are all the rage right now, and people are emerging from all corners to raise them. Among the latest entrants — and someone who might be of interest to Silicon Valley watchers — is Emil Michael, a former Uber executive and top lieutenant to former CEO Travis Kalanick. Earlier […]
An aspect of video calls that many of us take for granted is the way they can switch between feeds to highlight whoever’s speaking. Great — if speaking is how you communicate. Silent speech like sign language doesn’t trigger those algorithms, unfortunately, but this research from Google might change that. It’s a real-time sign language […]
A day after the Senate Commerce Committee moved forward with plans to subpoena the CEOs of Twitter, Facebook and Google, it looks like some of the most powerful leaders in tech will testify willingly. Twitter announced late Friday that Jack Dorsey would appear virtually before the committee on October 28, just days before the U.S. […]
President Donald Trump’s positive COVID-19 result has made Twitter a busy place in the past 24 hours, including some tweets that have publicly wished — some subtly and others more directly — that he die from the disease caused by coronavirus. Twitter put out a reminder to folks that it doesn’t allow tweets that wish […]
Kindred Capital, the London-based VC that backs early-stage founders in Europe and Israel, recently closed its second seed fund at £81 million. Out if its first fund raised in 2018, the firm has backed 29 companies. They include Five, which is building software for autonomous vehicles; Paddle, SaaS for software e-commerce; Pollen, a peer-to-peer marketplace […]
Twitter addresses questions of bias in its image-cropping algorithms, we take a look at Mario Kart Live and the stock market takes a hit after President Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis. This is your Daily Crunch for October 2, 2020. The big story: Twitter confronts image-cropping concerns Last month, (white) PhD student Colin Madland highlighted potential algorithmic […]
The venture world is swimming in capital these days, and the flood doesn’t appear to be abating. That’s changing the game for venture capitalists and their firms, which transformed from solo practitioners focused on one stage and a single geographical area to covering all startups in all geos in all industries in just a handful […]
Twitter is developing a new product called “Birdwatch,” which the company confirms is an attempt at addressing misinformation across its platform by providing more context for tweets, in the form of notes. Tweets can be added to “Birdwatch” — meaning flagged for moderation — from the tweet’s drop-down menu, where other blocking and reporting tools […]
Daydream, Google’s mobile-focused virtual reality platform, is losing official support from Google, Android Police reports. The company confirmed that it will no longer be updating the Daydream software, with the publication noting that “Daydream may not even work on Android 11” as a result of this. This isn’t surprising to anyone who has been tracking […]
Grindr, one of the world’s largest dating and social networking apps for gay, bi, trans, and queer people, has fixed a security vulnerability that allowed anyone to hijack and take control of any user’s account using only their email address. Wassime Bouimadaghene, a French security researcher, found the vulnerability and reported the issue to Grindr. […]
One year ago, Uber’s business model could be categorized as an “all of the above approach,” a strategy to generate revenue from all forms of transportation, including ride-hailing, micromobility, logistics and package and food delivery. The COVID-19 pandemic upended that business strategy, prompting Uber to offload its shared micromobility unit Jump, double down on delivery […]
