The coronavirus pandemic has presented plenty of challenges for ad-reliant social networks, but Snap made clear it was not yet feeling significant negative effects with its Q1 earnings release today. Snap surged 17% after-hours on news of its Q1 results after dropping nearly 4% during trading today. The company reported revenue of $462 million in […]
Houzz, an online platform for home renovation and design, has laid off 155 employees, roughly 10% of its staff, per an internal memo obtained by TechCrunch. Executive salaries also took a cut. The company, last valued at $4 billion, confirmed the content of the memo in a statement to TechCrunch. “Due to the impact of […]
Epic Games is finally settling its feud — kind of — with Google and putting Fortnite onto the Google Play Store, but the studio sounds pretty pissed about it. When Fortnite launched on mobile in 2018, Epic Games very notably sidestepped the Google Play Store and pushed users to download the title directly from their […]
Astronauts may make a second home of space, but even they have a first time going up. NASA is hoping to better prepare its crews for the challenges of space by sending them on suborbital flights from the likes of Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin — suggesting a potentially huge new market for the nascent […]
GM’s experiment with car sharing is over. The automaker Tuesday said its Maven car-sharing service, which launched in 2016, will shut down for good. Maven had paused service due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The company sent an email to customers Tuesday that after examining the business, the car-sharing industry and COVID-19, it decided to shutter […]
BoostVC has been an accelerator known for the unconventional bets it has chased — and is still chasing — trends like blockchain and AR/VR that other investors have long sworn off. Its accelerator program has been as classical as it comes, offering perks like office space and living quarters for a relatively tight group of […]
Seattle-based Pulumi has quickly made a name for itself as a modern platform that lets developers specify their infrastructure through writing code in their preferred programming language — and not YAML. With the launch of Pulumi 2.0, those languages now include JavaScript, TypeScript, Go and .NET, in addition to its original support for Python. It’s […]
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the tech industry has yet again found itself in a vulnerable state. As we saw in the dot-com era, when the economy takes a hit, so do companies, and they need to make critical decisions — whether it’s laying off or furloughing employees, pausing operations in select markets, taking on additional […]
Trading and IPOs on the New York Stock Exchange will continue through any economic tremors the COVID-19 crisis may cause. That’s according to the NYSE’s vice chairman, John Tuttle, who spoke to TechCrunch on business continuity and how the coronavirus pandemic could impact future operations of the world’s largest stock market. Like much of the […]
Facebook has already come under fire for hosting groups organizing anti-quarantine protests in response to government lockdowns amid the coronavirus outbreak, and those promoting fake coronavirus cures and misinformation. Now it’s trying to figure out what to do with the growing number of COVID-19 community groups on its platform worldwide. In hopes of better educating […]
There are few more messages more timely than the opening line, “Dance your cares away, worry’s for another day” (or is it “worries?”). Today the familiar Fraggle Rock bass line returns, along with the titular felt underground dwellers, as the first of a new series of mini-episodes hits Apple TV+. Apple’s streaming service will post […]
AWS and Facebook today announced two new open-source projects around PyTorch, the popular open-source machine learning framework. The first of these is TorchServe, a model-serving framework for PyTorch that will make it easier for developers to put their models into production. The other is TorchElastic, a library that makes it easier for developers to build […]
In a surprising move, SAP ended its co-CEO experiment yesterday when the company announced Jennifer Morgan will be exiting stage left on April 30th, leaving Christian Klein as the lone CEO. The pair took over at the end of last year when Bill McDermott left the company to become CEO at ServiceNow, and it looked […]
Google is making a change to its product search offering, meaning that unpaid listings picked by algorithm will dominate results displayed on the Google Shopping tab instead of mostly paid product listings. In a blog post announcing the move, Bill Ready, president of Google’s commerce division, cited the coronavirus pandemic as a catalyst for Google […]
A new acquisition should help Fandango expand its streaming efforts, Apple brings its digital services to new countries and new research suggests a higher-than-expected infection rate for COVID-19. 1. Walmart is selling its on-demand video service Vudu to Fandango Details as to how Fandango will specifically leverage Vudu weren’t immediately disclosed, but the company currently […]
There is massive momentum in fintech right now: regulations are finally opening up, APIs are more widely available than ever before and there is a sense that existing products — both financial and technical — are just not doing the job that consumers and financial professionals demand. With excitement like that, fintech has unsurprisingly seen […]
AT&T’s WarnerMedia announced last fall its plan was to launch the new streaming service HBO Max in May 2020 for $14.99 per month. Today, we have a solid launch date: May 27th. AT&T has also now revealed its initial programming slate for the new direct-to-consumer service, which includes over 10,000 hours of premium content from […]
When you lay off employees on an H-1B or TN visa, they will have 60 days or the visa end date plus 10 days — whichever is shorter — to find a comparable job or another visa to remain in the U.S.
Uber Eats customers have given $3 million in direct contributions to restaurants using a new feature on the app designed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The milestone caps off a related campaign by Uber Eats to match up to $3 million in contributions made by customers. Uber Eats is sending its $3 million in […]
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. This morning we’re hunting up “green shoots” for software companies. Green shoots is financial slang for positive signals that could point to an economic recovery — or good news amidst a greater pullback. You can […]
