When 2020 began, the year seemed set to include another year of record-setting venture capital investment and, perhaps, some long-awaited IPOs. All that quickly faded when COVID-19 spread globally, shutting economies, undercutting swaths of the business world and rearranging the working life in countries around the globe. Here at TechCrunch we’re navigating the changing landscape, […]
Walmart this morning announced a new partnership with e-commerce shopping platform, Shopify, now used by over 1 million businesses. The deal will open Walmart’s Marketplace to Shopify’s small business sellers, with the goal of bringing 1,200 Shopify sellers to the marketplace this year. The partnership will greatly expand the reach of the participating brands by […]
In a typical month, an IT department might deal with a small percentage of employees working remotely, but tracking a few thousand employees is one thing — moving an entire company offsite requires next-level planning. To learn more about how large organizations are adapting to the rapid shift to working from home, we spoke to Liberty […]
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our short-form week-starter in which we go over the weekend, look to the week ahead, talk about some neat funding rounds and dig into what is stuck on our minds. So, by section then: […]
Akron, Ohio, the hometown of LeBron James; the seat of the U.S. tire industry; the 127 largest city in the U.S.; and the home of America’s first toy company, is now the latest site of a global experiment in whether cities can use behavioral economics to help foster good citizenship. Thanks to the work of […]
Spraying plants with fertilizers and pesticides is typically a highly lossy affair — as little as 1% of the substances currently used in industrial and food production farming is actually taken up by the plant, while the rest leaches off into the soil. A new technology demonstrated for the first time by Carnegie Mellon University’s […]
A week before kicking off WWDC, Apple introduced a pair of upgrades to its pro-level hardware lines. Both the 16-inch MacBook Pro and the Mac Pro desktop are getting select internal upgrades, starting today. On the notebook front, the 16-inch model gets an additional graphics configuration. The addition of the AMD Radeon Pro 5600M GPU […]
This past weekend was a busy one for rocket launches, including for new launch companies hoping to join the ranks of SpaceX and Rocket Lab as private, operational space launch providers. Edinburgh-based Skyrora achieved a significant milestone for its program, successfully launching its Skylark Nano rocket from an island off the coast of Scotland on […]
After months of talks and trials, WhatsApp has finally pulled the trigger on payments in its app. Today the Facebook-owned messaging service announced that users in Brazil would be the first to be able to send and receive money by way of its messaging app, using Facebook Pay, the payments service WhatsApp owner Facebook launched […]
Sherman Ye founded VESoft in 2018 when he saw a growing demand for graph databases in China. Its predecessors, like Neo4j and TigerGraph, had already been growing aggressively in the West for a few years, while China was just getting to know the technology that leverages graph structures to store data sets and depict their […]
A wave of digital banks, or neo-banks, has flourished in recent years in Western nations as people begin to flee megabanks. While most of these startups are yet to prove they can turn a profit, entrepreneurs are beginning to replicate similar ideas in South Asian markets, where most people don’t have accounts with traditional banks […]
Veteran journalist Maria Ressa, the founder of Filipino independent news site Rappler, was found guilty on Monday of cyber libel charges by a Manila court. She faces up to six years in prison. Critics of the charges, which include prominent human rights and press freedom advocates, say charges filed against Ressa and Reynaldo Santos Jr, […]
Sinch said on Monday it has agreed to buy Indian firm ACL Mobile for £56 million (roughly $70 million) in what is the fourth acquisition deal the Swedish mobile voice and messaging firm has entered into at the height of a global pandemic. The Swedish firm said acquiring ACL Mobile will enable it to leverage […]
Chinese internet giant ByteDance has announced plans to discontinue two of its apps in India, its biggest overseas market, and urged users to move to TikTok. Vigo Video and Vigo Lite, two apps that allow users to create and share short-form sketches and lip-syncing to Bollywood songs, posted a message early Monday (local time) to […]
Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. This week, we have updates from Alibaba’s rapidly growing cloud computing unit, Apple’s controversial decision to remove two podcast apps from its Chinese App Store, […]
Bit Bio, the new startup which pitches itself as the “enter button for the keyboard to the software of life” only needed three weeks to raise its latest $41.5 million round of funding. Originally known as Elpis Biotechnology and named for the Greek goddess of hope, the Cambridge, England-based company was founded by Mark Kotter […]
Instead of Terminator or WALL-E or HAL 900 or R2-D2, all we got is Facebook serving us ads we don’t want to click on, Netflix recommending us another movie that we probably shouldn’t stay up to watch, and iRobot’s Roomba.
The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every Saturday in your inbox. Hi friends and first-time readers. Welcome back to The Station, a newsletter dedicated to all the present and future ways people and packages move from Point A to […]
With everything that’s going on in the world right now, it’s nice to know that we can rely on Netflix’s “Queer Eye” to continue tugging at our heartstrings. The latest season was filmed during what looks like a sweltering Philadelphia summer, before the COVID-19 pandemic. The basic “Queer Eye” formula hasn’t changed, with the Fab […]
Tesla Model 3 vehicles produced at its Fremont, Calif. factory will reportedly come standard with a wireless charging pad and USB-C ports, upgrades that were first spotted by Drive Tesla Canada. Electrek also reported on the changes. The upgrades now put U.S.-made Model 3s on par with the same vehicles made at Tesla’s factory in […]
