Uber and Airbnb are cutting significant portions of their workforce, Microsoft announces new Surface devices and we talk to Apple Craig Federighi about the new iPad cursor. Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 6, 2020. 1. Uber is laying off 3,700 as rides plummet due to COVID-19 In an SEC filing, Uber disclosed plans to […]
Tinder will add a video dating feature in the second quarter of this year, parent company Match announced on Tuesday as part of its Q1 2020 earnings report. The company also detailed the coronavirus impact, which slowed Tinder user growth in the quarter, as social distancing requirements and government lockdowns went into effect. Match didn’t […]
Meet Kairn, a new startup coming out of stealth today with a sneak peek of what the company has been working on. As Wunderlist shuts down, Kairn wants to prove that there’s still room for an innovative task-management service. “We’re building a task manager that is smart and focused on capturing tasks,” co-founder and CEO […]
Africa-focused tech talent accelerator Andela has let go 135 employees, CEO Jeremy Johnson confirmed to TechCrunch. Senior staff at the company — with offices in New York and four African countries — will also take salary cuts of 10% to 30%. The compensation and staff reductions are a result of the economic impact of the […]
Pinterest is introducing new features that make it easier for those planning recipes, virtual events and other quarantine activities. These include the ability to add a date or notes to a board as well as automated ways to better organize your pins on a given board, with the aid of machine learning technology. The company […]
Modern Games is a new studio working to create games that combine physical and digital play. The company was founded by husband-and-wife team Justin and Amanda Kifer — serial entrepreneurs who previously launched companies including Citizen Local (acquired by MyLife in 2011) and Fidgetly, a fidget spinner company that also created a motion controller for […]
Volvo Cars will start producing vehicles in 2022 that are equipped with lidar and a perception stack — technology developed by Silicon Valley startup Luminar that the automaker will use to deploy an automated driving system for highways. For now, the lidar will be part of a hardware package that consumers can add as an […]
IRL, the recently pivoted calendar app that aggregates live virtual events, has today launched a web version of the platform. The company, which has $11 million in funding from Goodwater Capital, Founders Fund and Floodgate, started as a social planning app that helped folks find each other in the real world, based on interest and […]
In an SEC filing dating back to last week, Uber disclosed plans to layoff 3,700 employees. The figure amounts to around 14% percent of the ride hailing giant’s total workforce. In the document, the company states that the job loss is part of a planned reduction in operating expenses “in response to the economic challenges […]
Even though Apple did not invent the mouse pointer, history has cemented its place in dragging it out of obscurity and into mainstream use. Its everyday utility, pioneered at Xerox Parc and later combined with a bit of iconic* work from Susan Kare at Apple, has made the pointer our avatar in digital space for […]
The days of the big product event are on hold for the foreseeable future. Until then, a big blog post will have to do. A day after announcing that Microsoft would be shifting focus away from dual-screen devices, Chief Product Officer Panos Panay took to the company’s Devices blog to show off a slew of […]
Covariant this week announced that it has raised a $40 million Series B, led by Index Ventures. The funding brings the three-year-old Berkeley startup’s total funding up to $67 million. Co-founded by top UC Berkeley professor Pieter Abbeel, the company is dedicated to building autonomy for industrial robotics. It’s a category that’s growing hotter than […]
In the early 2000s, VMware introduced the world to virtual servers that allowed IT to make more efficient use of idle server capacity. Today, Run:AI is introducing that same concept to GPUs running containerized machine learning projects on Kubernetes. This should enable data science teams to have access to more resources than they would normally […]
Uber Eats is introducing a new feature that lets customers send food to friends, family or coworkers and share details to make it easier track the deliveries. Uber Eats customers have been able to order and send food to friend. But in the past, it required the sender to track the delivery and provide updates […]
Alphabet-owned Loon, the company focused on providing connectivity via high-altitude, stratosphere skimming balloons that can act as on-demand, deployable cell towers, has signed a new agreement with AT&T. This partnership will help Loon ensure it’s in a much better position to address any potential need for disaster response cellular network coverage, thanks to AT&T and […]
Gatik, the autonomous vehicle startup focused on the ‘middle mile’ of logistics, has added box trucks to its fleet as Walmart and other customers look for ways to boost efficiency and shore up the supply chain amid surging demand from consumers ordering goods online. Gatik came out of stealth nearly a year ago with a […]
SpaceX’s Starship prototype is on a streak of successes, at a key moment for the spacecraft’s development. The Starship SN4 (so-named because it’s the fourth full-size prototype) tester managed to pass a test of its Raptor engine firing while installed on the test stand. SN4 previously passed a crucial low temperature pressure test designed to […]
Burst Oral Care, a startup that sells an electric toothbrush boasting charcoal bristles and 33,000 sonic vibrations per minute, has raised a Series C of undisclosed size. Although we don’t know the amount of the round, the Series C was led by Goldman Sachs Growth Equity, and Burst says it more than doubled the valuation […]
Sequoia’s Roelof Botha, who runs the firm’s US business, has a portfolio that’s rather impressive. It includes 23andMe, MongoDB, Eventbrite, Evernote, Bird, Square, Tumblr, Unity, YouTube, and Xoom to name just a few. And his perspective on the startup ecosystem as a whole is unique in that Sequoia invests in companies at the very early […]
