Instagram apparently handled searches for popular hashtags related to the two presidential candidates differently, pointing Joe Biden search queries toward often negative related hashtags while making no such suggestions in corresponding searches pertaining to President Trump. A new report by the Tech Transparency Project details the strange platform behavior. In the report, the tech watchdog […]
On-demand delivery startup DoorDash has launched a digital storefront to sell household items, as well as the types of things you’d find at a convenience store. So, chips, ice cream, spices and packaged foods from local restaurants. Called DashMart, the convenience store is available in eight cities throughout the U.S. and plans to launch in […]
Krisp’s smart noise suppression tech, which silences ambient sounds and isolates your voice for calls, arrived just in time. The company got out in front of the global shift to virtual presence, turning early niche traction into real customers and attracting a shiny new $5 million Series A funding round to expand and diversify its […]
When Rent the Runway co-founders Jennifer Fleiss and Jennifer Hyman got their first term sheet, it had an exploding clause in it: If they didn’t sign the offer in 24 hours, they would lose the deal. The co-founders, then students at Harvard Business School, were ready to commit, but their lawyer advised them to pause […]
Software valuations are bonkers, which means it’s a great time to go public. Asana, Monday.com, Wrike and every other gosh darn software company that is putting it off, pay attention. Heck, even service-y Palantir could excel in this market. Let me explain. Over the past few weeks, TechCrunch has tracked the filing, first pricing, rejiggered […]
Security researchers say they have developed a new technique to detect modern cell-site simulators. Cell site simulators, known as “stingrays,” impersonate cell towers and can capture information about any phone in its range — including in some cases calls, messages and data. Police secretly deploy stingrays hundreds of times a year across the United States, […]
Now more than ever, companies should examine all sources of capital and ensure they are sufficiently funded to emerge from this period stronger than they entered it.
Twitter says a security bug may have exposed the private direct messages of its Android app users, but said that there was no evidence that the vulnerability was ever exploited. The bug could have allowed a malicious Android app running on the same device to siphon off a user’s direct messages stored in the Twitter […]
Samsung’s first virtual Unpacked ranked somewhere between Microsoft and Apple’s recent events in terms of overall presentation and general awkwardness. The show kicked off seven minutes late, and a number of on-screen presenters certainly tended toward the more…awkward side of things, but overall, it was a decent first virtual event as the company embraces what […]
Microsoft today announced the launch of a new open-source service mesh based on the Envoy proxy. The Open Service Mesh is meant to be a reference implementation of the Service Mesh Interface (SMI) spec, a standard interface for service meshes on Kubernetes that has the backing of most of the players in this ecosystem. The […]
It takes a village — or in this case a kickass global startup community — to help you survive and thrive in challenging times. Tap into your village at Disrupt 2020, but do it quickly to gain entry at the lowest possible price. You have just three days left before the price goes up. Buy […]
If you want to build technology to be harnessed for equity, diversity and social advancement of the many — rather than freedom and inclusion for the few — we think Canada is a good place to do it.
It was only relatively recently, in October 2018, that TechCrunch held Startup Battlefield MENA to unpack startups in the Middle East and North Africa. When TechCrunch went looking for a city in the region to host the event in, it quickly became clear that Beirut was the one for us. Vibrant, full of creative entrepreneurs, […]
Gumroad founder Sahil Lavingia has teamed up with AngelList to launch his debut $5 million rolling fund to invest in early-stage entrepreneurs. He is cutting $100,000 to $250,000 checks for startups and has a particular interest in B2B, SaaS, future of work, video and developer tools. Limited partners include Arlan Hamilton, Josh Kopelman and AngelList […]
Byju’s has acquired edtech startup WhiteHat Jr. for $300 million as the Indian online learning giant looks to expand its dominant reach in the country. The all-cash deal makes 18-month-old Mumbai-headquartered WhiteHat Jr., which offers online coding classes to school-going students in India and the U.S., the fastest exit story at this size in the […]
As uncertainty swirls around TikTok’s future in the U.S., the company this morning announced new Community Guidelines focused on helping to keep misleading and deceptive content off its platform. The new rules aim to better clarify what’s allowed and not allowed on TikTok, broaden the app’s fact-checking partnerships ahead of the U.S. election and ban […]
Google today announced a major update to its mobile G Suite productivity apps. Among these updates are the addition of a dark theme for Docs, Sheets and Slides, as well as the addition of Google’s Smart Compose technology to Docs on mobile and the ability to edit Microsoft Office documents without having to covert them. […]
How and when should startup founders think about the “exit”? It’s the perennial question in tech entrepreneurialism, but the hows and whens are questions to which there are a multitude of answers. For one thing, new founders often forget that the terms of the exit may not eventually be entirely in their control. There’s the […]
It seemed so simple. A small schema issue in a database was wrecking a feature in the app, increasing latency and degrading the user experience. The resident data engineer pops in a fix to amend the schema, and everything seems fine — for now. Unbeknownst to them, that small fix completely clobbered all the dashboards […]
PandaDoc, the startup that provides a fully digital sales document workflow from proposal to electronic signature to collecting payment, announced a $30 million Series B extension today, making it the the second such extension the company has taken since taking its original $15 million Series B in 2017. The total for the three B investments […]
