About a year ago, Microsoft launched Visual Studio Online, its online code editor based on the popular Visual Studio Code project. It’s basically a full code editor and hosted environment that lives in your browser. Today, the company announced that it is changing the name of this service to Visual Studio Codespaces. It’s also dropping […]
Zoom is not having a good month. As it scales to meet pandemic demand, it has been beset by security issues, which it has had to explain and fix. Today, The Verge reported that the company just changed a blog post, which had previously listed 300 million daily active users (DAUs) to active participants. The […]
NASA has selected the companies that will provide them with the human landing system for their Artemis Moon missions, including a lander vehicle that will carry astronauts from space to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. Blue Origin, SpaceX and Dynetics were picked from a larger field of competitors to develop and […]
Twitch is doubling down on esports in this new era of social distancing as a number of traditional sporting events have been cancelled. The company this week introduced a new esports directory on its site that will make it easier for viewers to find live matches, information on players, games with active competition leagues, a […]
Apple and Google ask for developer feedback on their contact tracing efforts, Facebook sees a “significant reduction” in ads and Microsoft makes life easier for IT managers. Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 30, 2020. 1. Apple and Google release first seed of COVID-19 exposure notification API for contact tracing app developers This is a […]
Joe Biden’s campaign this morning announced that it has chosen a team to vet potential running mates for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. The four-person committee has three high-profile Democratic politicians: Senator Chris Dodd, Congresswoman Lisa Blunt and Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, who has been in the spotlight recently as his city […]
In an impressive display of international collaboration, NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have come together to launch a virtual hackathon running between May 30 and May 31, with the aim of using open data to develop innovative solutions to problems arising from the global COVID-19 pandemic. All […]
Visa just connected to Africa’s most powerful mobile payments network. The global financial services company and Kenyan telecom Safaricom — operator of the M-Pesa mobile money product — announced a partnership today on payments and tech. The arrangement opens to M-Pesa’s own extensive financial services network in East Africa Visa’s global merchant and card network […]
Google is facing anger from the German startup ecosystem for refusing to restructure ad payments linked to travel and transport bookings that were subsequently wiped out by the coronavirus crisis. TechCrunch has seen a letter addressed to Google that’s co-signed by eight travel industry startups in which the tech giant is asked for flexibility in […]
Traditionally dominated by big players like Adobe and Autodesk, the world of design has been flush with a newer wave of startups that are creating collaboration spaces and new cloud-based tools designed to address the needs of creatives. Today, two of those players are combining. Dribbble, an online community for designers that lets them post […]
Facebook is today rolling out a tool that will allow users in the U.S. and Canada to export their Facebook photos and videos to Google Photos. This data portability tool was first introduced in Ireland in December, and has since been made available to other international markets. To use the feature, Facebook users will need […]
The Fund, an early-stage investment firm with a memorably straightforward name, is looking beyond New York City as it starts investing its second fund. Founders Jenny Fielding (who’s also managing director at Techstars New York) and Scott Hartley (also co-founder and partner at Two Culture Capital) told me that in the past two years, they’ve […]
NASA is getting ready to send its next Mars rover to the Red Planet later this year, and that mission will also carry Ingenuity, a brand new helicopter robot that will attempt to make history by becoming the first vehicle to perform a powered atmospheric flight on another planet. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) created […]
The tech industry experienced turmoil before during the dot-com bust and again during the 2008 economic downturn. But this time it’s a bit different, according to Kapor Capital founding partners Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor. “What’s different this time is that it is society-wide,” Kapor Klein said during an Extra Crunch Live appearance this […]
Material Bank, a logistics platform for the architectural and design industry, has announced the close of a $28 million Series B financing today, led by Bain Capital Ventures. Bain’s Merritt Hummer led the round on behalf of the firm and will join the board of directors at Material Bank, along with Jeff Sine, cofounder and […]
Medical startup Nines, which has developed an AI-based triage tool that has received clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is making that tool available for free to all until June 30 to help address the growing burden on radiology diagnostics departments as COVID-19 continues to reshape the healthcare landscape in the U.S. […]
Okta released a special COVID-19 edition of its app usage report today, and you don’t need a Ph. D. in statistics to guess what they found. Indeed, Zoom surged 110% on the Okta network, leading the way in usage growth just as you would expect, but another whole class of tools besides collaboration also saw […]
Even before the COVID-19 shutdown, venture funding rounds and total deal volume of VC funding for esports were down noticeably from the year prior. The space received a lot of attention in 2017 and 2018 as leagues formed, teams raised money and surging popularity fostered a whole ecosystem of new companies. Last year featured some […]
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we’re taking our final look back at Q1 venture capital through the lens of AI-focused startups. New data out this week paints a mixed picture of the AI startup landscape. Venture dollar volume in […]
