Bang & Olufsen has an excellent reputation in home audio, and its original Beoplay E8 fully wireless headphones were a category leader when there was barely a category to lead. The company recently launched the third version of the E8, a new generation of hardware that comes with a number of improvements for better audio […]
The European Commission is proposing to direct billions of euros of financial relief into high tech and green investments to help the bloc recover from the coronavirus crisis. Technologies such as 5G, AI, cloud, cybersecurity, supercomputing and renewable energy look set to benefit from a €750BN pan-EU support package set out today — aligning with […]
WarnerMedia unveils its new streaming service, Donald Trump is mad at Twitter and GE Lighting has a new owner. Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 27, 2020. 1. HBO Max launches today, here’s what you need to know At $14.99 per month, the service — initially available to subscribers in the United States — is […]
Instagram today is launching new tools that enable video creators to make money, including badges that viewers can purchase during Instagram Live videos and the introduction of IGTV ads. Both launches are considered a test, as the company is limiting the features’ availability during its experimentation phase, it says. Badges will give viewers a way […]
The philanthropic arm of the Zuckerberg fortune is infusing $3.8 million worth of grants into nearly two dozen open-source software projects in biomedical research. It’s the second such disbursement of funds, and a third will be open for applications next month. The grants range in size from $50,000 to $250,000, and any biomed-centric project with […]
When it launched in April, Quibi carried the express mission statement of offering short-form videos designed to watch on-the-fly. The service’s narrow focus rubbed a lot of potential subscribers the wrong way, with many requesting a more traditional method for watching the service’s series. Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg blames coronavirus for the streaming app’s challenges […]
You don’t need a green thumb and a big backyard to grow baskets of fresh produce. In fact, according to Chicago-based Rise Gardens, you probably just need a bookshelf’s worth of space in your living room and an app. Rise Gardens, an indoor hydroponic gardening system, has raised $2.6 million in seed funding for home-grown […]
Facebook’s internal R&D group, NPE Team, is rolling out yet another new app today called Collab after having just launched a new group audio calling app, CatchUp, on Tuesday. With Collab, the focus has now returned to video, and specifically, the concept of watching, mixing, and matching original videos together, beginning with music. In Collab, […]
Massachusetts-based smart home company Savant Systems this morning announced a deal to require GE Lighting. The division has existed as part of General Electric since 1911, with its origins reaching back even further to Thomas Edison’s work in the space. Today’s GE Lighting portfolio still largely revolves around bulbs, with some push into more modern […]
Extra Crunch Live is on fire, and the hits keep rolling! Next week, we’ll sit down with Initialized’s Alexis Ohanian and Garry Tan. You can catch the chat live on Tuesday, June 2 at 2 p.m. EDT/11 a.m. PDT. Alexis Ohanian is the founder and former CEO of Reddit, and his investment portfolio includes Flexport, […]
Toro’s founders started at Uber helping monitor the data quality in the company’s vast data catalogs, and they wanted to put that experience to work for a more general audience. Today, the company announced a $4 million seed round. The round was co-led by Costanoa Ventures and Point72 Ventures with help from a number of […]
Once again, Trump has doubled down. Following the addition of a fact-checking warning label added to his tweet about mail-in ballots, Trump took to the platform yet again to denounce it. In what may be his strongest words to date against a service that has largely given him free rein to this point, the President […]
HBO Max, the HBO -plus-other-stuff streaming service from WarnerMedia, is finally here. At $14.99 per month, the service — initially available to subscribers in the United States — is more expensive than competing offerings like Netflix and Disney+. But from another angle, it’s still a pretty sweet deal, since you’re getting HBO, plus a whole […]
Companies spend inordinate amounts of time and money building data warehouses and moving data from enterprise applications. But once they get the data in, how do they get specific information like product data back out and distribute it to business operations, who can use it to better understand customers? That’s where Census comes in. It […]
Kentik, the company once known as CloudHelix, today announced that it has raised a $23.5 million growth funding round led by Vistara Capital Partners, with existing investors August Capital, Third Point Ventures, DCVC, and Tahoma Ventures also participating. With this round, Kentik has now raised a total of $61.7 million. The company’s platform allows enterprises […]
Newly released documents show U.S. immigration authorities have used a secretive cell phone snooping technology hundreds of times across the U.S. in the past three years. The documents, obtained through a public records lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and seen by TechCrunch, show that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deployed cell site […]
Google is rolling out a series of updates aimed at helping local businesses adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic while continuing to serve their customers across Google Maps and Search. Since the outbreak, Google has made it possible for businesses to communicate to customers things like their revised operating hours or temporary closures, among other things. […]
Student loans are both a trillion-dollar debt category and also one of the most popular mini-verticals out there in fintech startup investing right now. There are dozens if not hundreds of companies in the space, and they all mostly do one of two things: either they help students think through their student loan options before […]
UK-based AI chatbot Babylon Health — which last year raised $550M at a $2BN+ valuation — has led a $30M Series B in US-based Higi, which owns and operates 10,000+ FDA-cleared health kiosks. Higi, which was founded back in 2012 per Crunchbase, has built out a nationwide network of “health stations” located at retail locations […]