Despite the economic disruptions associated with the coronavirus pandemic, cloud vendors are holding up well as many client companies and their employees work from home. With stores closed, it’s natural that e-commerce would also perform strongly — after all, it’s also cloud-based, and folks working from home are shifting their shopping from brick-and-mortar to digital. […]
After eight years of Unreal Engine 4, Epic Games is finally ready to talk about Unreal Engine 5, which they’re announcing will launch in preview early next year with a wider launch by the year’s end. Unreal Engine 5 is all about harnessing the performance of next-generation consoles like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series […]
Having a holistic picture of your health might not mean just wearing a device like an Apple Watch that can monitor your biometrics — researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) have developed a new system that can figure out when and where in-home appliances like hair dryers, stoves, microwaves and washing […]
The Extra Crunch Live series rolls along next week with something special: My old boss is taking part. Let me explain. Alexia Bonatsos was once co-editor of TechCrunch and was part of my interview circuit when I first joined the publication. She taught me more than I can write down; Alexia is one of my […]
Facebook strikes a deal to compensate content moderators with PTSD, Tesla might reopen its factory next week and Twitter says some employees can work from home indefinitely. Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 13, 2020. 1. Facebook to pay $52M to content moderators suffering from PTSD Facebook employs thousands of content moderators to sift through […]
While the world feels paused, in some respects, new startups are still cropping up like usual. Today, 13 companies are graduating from the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, based in NY, with $100,000 each in funding from the accelerator. This is ERA’s 18th class, with the accelerator having launched more than 200 companies since its inception, which […]
Amazon’s Fire TV platform now has its own rival to Roku’s popular free movies and TV hub, The Roku Channel. Today, Amazon introduced a new “free” section on Fire TV that makes it easier for customers to find free movies, TV shows, news and other content, across its apps — including IMDb TV and Twitch […]
Over the last few weeks all eyes in the crypto world have been glued to the halvening, a nigh-religious moment in the blockchain realm. Every once in a while, the amount of new bitcoin mined — distributed to miners, the folks with fleets of computers powering bitcoin’s database, or blockchain — is cut in half. […]
As Harley-Davidson rounds year one on its electric debut, we’re still riding in the fog on how to evaluate the company’s EV pivot. The American symbol of gas, chrome and steel released its first production electric motorcycle, the LiveWire, last fall. The $29,799 machine leads a future line-up of EVs planned by Harley-Davidson — spanning […]
Around two-thirds of the way through “Beautiful the World,” a voice declaratively whispers, “The music of the Earth has arrived.” Created by the fittingly named Uncanny Valley, the three-and-a-half minute track bombards the listener with fragments of relentless optimism, coupled with nearly comprehensible inspirational phrases like, “Dreams Still Live in the Wings of Happiness.” If […]
VMware announced today that it intends to buy early-stage Kubernetes security startup Octarine and fold it into Carbon Black, a security company it bought last year for $2.1 billion. The company did not reveal the price of today’s acquisition. According to a blog post announcing the deal, from Patrick Morley, general manager and senior vice […]
Facebook’s Avatars feature, which lets you customize a virtual lookalike of yourself for use as stickers in comments and Messenger chats, is today launching in the U.S. Essentially Facebook’s version of Snap’s Bitmoji, Avatars were first introduced last year and have been since made available in Australia, New Zealand, Europe and Canada. Based on early feedback, […]
In a rare joint public statement, the FBI and Homeland Security’s cybersecurity advisory unit CISA have accused top Chinese hackers of trying to steal U.S. research related to the coronavirus strain, known as COVID-19. The statement, published today, said that Chinese hackers “have been observed attempting to identify and illicitly obtain valuable intellectual property and […]
A new small study out of Harvard and Boston University is targeting the use of soft robotic exosuits among stroke survivors. The aim is to demonstrate how such technologies could impact the rehabilitation of patients suffering hemiparesis, a kind of paralysis that impacts muscles and limbs on one side of the body. The results so […]
FeaturePeek’s founders graduated from Y Combinator in Summer 2019, which for an early stage startup must seem like a million years ago right now. Despite the current conditions though, the company announced a $1.8 million seed investment today. The round was led by Matrix Partners with some unnamed Angel investors also participating. The startup has […]
UK food delivery giant Deliveroo has been called on to do more to protect riders’ incomes and safety during the coronavirus crisis. The ‘meals-on-wheels’ service couriers provide makes them key workers in a pandemic characterized by social distancing and ‘shelter in place’ lockdowns, is the key argument. More than forty MPs from across the political […]
LeoLabs has been building out its global network of space-scanning radars for the last couple years, leading up to today’s launch of its Collision Avoidance system, essentially satellite-monitoring-as-a-service. It should prove an indispensable asset to startups that don’t happen to have their own state of the art radar setup. Space is full of junk, and […]
Justine and Olivia Moore, the twin investors behind the CRV-backed Liftoff List have long believed in the power of student entrepreneurship. The twin sisters were among the early architects of Stanford University’s student investment program, Cardinal Ventures, and even back then they’d noticed that it was hard for student entrepreneurs to get press and coverage […]
Israeli cybersecurity company CyberArk has acquired identity startup Idaptive for $70 million in an all-cash deal. CyberArk is one of the shining stars in the Israeli cybersecurity scene before its initial public offering in 2013 saw it go public on the Nasdaq. To date, its share price has almost quadrupled. At the core of CyberArk’s […]
