The FrankOne coffee maker, fresh off a successful crowdfunding campaign, is now available for purchase, and I got a chance to test out one of the first run of these funky little gadgets. While it won’t replace my normal pourover or a larger coffee machine, it’s a clever, quick, and portable way to make a
Month: October 2019
YouTube is partnering with Merchbar on a new integration that will allow artists to sell their official merchandise to their worldwide fans from a shelf just below the video. The addition is the latest deal focused on helping video creators make more money from their videos, beyond the revenue brought in through advertisements and subscriptions.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. LinkedIn gets physical, debuts Events hub for people to plan in-person networking events LinkedIn is bringing its professional networking features into
&Open is a startup with an unusual name, and one that fills an unusual niche in the business world. It has built a gift giving platform, so that businesses can reward loyalty with a small token of appreciation. The gift depends on the business and the circumstances, but it could be something like a book
Dozens of impeccably dressed women outfitted in jumpsuits and Rothy’s gathered at the Greylock offices last week for a “structured networking” session hosted by All Raise, an 18-month-old nonprofit organization that seeks to amplify the voices of and support women in tech. The organization, active in the Bay Area and New York City, is announcing
Booqed, a Hong Kong-based platform for booking short-term work spaces, announced today that it has raised $1.675 million in seed funding. Participants included Colliers International, the commercial real-estate management company, Techstars and Lazard Korea. The company participated in Proptech Accelerator, the Toronto-based accelerator program for property and real estate startups run by Colliers and Techstars,
Google today announced its largest package of renewable energy deals yet. Worth a total of 1,600-megawatts, the package includes 18 deals in the U.S., Chile and Europe. This brings Google’s current set of wind and solar agreements to about 5,500 megawatts (MW) and the company’s number of total renewables projects it’s involved in to 52.
Europe has ordered chipmaker Broadcom to stop applying exclusivity clauses in agreements with six of its major customers — imposing so called ‘interim measures’ based on preliminary findings from an ongoing antitrust investigation. The move follows a formal statement of objections issued by the Competition Commission in June. At the time the regulator said it would
The Pixel 4 and Pixel XL smartphones, that Google just unveiled at a press conference in New York, won’t launch in India, one of the company’s key overseas markets, the Android-maker said on Tuesday. The bottleneck lies in the headline feature Project Soli, a radar-based motion-sensing chip baked into the new Pixel smartphones that relies
Live Caption, Google’s automatic captioning system first introduced at its I/O developer conference this May, is now officially available, alongside the launch of the new Pixel 4. But unlike some of the other technologies highlighted at the company’s Pixel hardware event yesterday, Live Caption won’t be limited to Google’s new smartphone alone. After the initial
As TikTok continues its rapid U.S. growth, the company is being challenged to better explain its content moderation choices. Why, for example, is the short-form video app censoring the Hong Kong protests but not U.S. political content? Why is it banning political ads, but supports hashtags like #trump2020 and #maga, each with millions, or even
Databricks, the big data analytics service founded by the original developers of Apache Spark, today announced that it is bringing its Delta Lake open-source project for building data lakes to the Linux Foundation and under an open governance model. The company announced the launch of Delta Lake earlier this year and even though it’s still
Days out of Y Combinator, venture capitalists valued ZeroDown, a financial and real estate technology startup, at $150 million. The company had the perfect match of experienced founders and eye-popping ambitions to carve a new path to home ownership. “I think we will be known as a company that makes it easier to buy a
Thimble, which offers flexible, short-term insurance to small businesses and freelancers, is announcing that it has raised $22 million in a Series A funding round led by IAC. Until today, the startup was known as Verifly, a name tied to the company’s initial aim of providing insurance to drone pilots. However, founder and CEO Jay
How do you attract the attention of a prince? Aside from being Meghan Markle, of course. One answer came recently in the form of Prince Harry’s backing of a new initiative designed to make offsetting the carbon from your airline flights a properly mainstream idea. For Harry, the initiative had a double whammy. It might
Google’s new Pixel 4 camera offers a ton of new tricks to improve its photographic chops, and to emphasize the point, it had Professor Mark Levoy, who leads camera technology development at Google Research, up on stage to talk about the Pixel 4’s many improvements, including its new telephoto lens, updated Super Res Zoom technology
This is the Pixel 4, the handset that literally everyone saw coming. Even by Google’s standards, the handset leaked like crazy. Some was almost certainly by design as the company looked to hype up its new flagship amid slowing smartphone sales. That said, showing up for preorder on two different sites in the past few
Twitter said it will restrict how users can interact with tweets from world leaders who break its rules. The social media giant said it will not allow users to like, reply, share or retweet the offending tweets, but instead will let users quote-tweet to allow ordinary users to express their opinions. The company said the
As cannabis dispensaries flourish across the country alongside the push to legalize medicinal and recreational marijuana use, demand for tools to manage the specificities of the weed retail business continues to increase. Looking to address that need, Flowhub, a cannabis retail management software vendor, has raised $23 million from a consortium of investors including e.ventures,
French startup Strapi has raised a $4 million seed round led by Accel and Stride.vc. The company has been working on an open-source Node.js headless content management system. That’s a lot of technical words in a row, but it’s not that hard to understand what Strapi is. Content management systems, or CMS, are web applications
Entrepreneur First (EF), the Greylock-backed “talent investor” that recruits and backs individuals pre-team and pre-idea to enable them to found startups, is pulling out of Hong Kong, TechCrunch has learned. According to sources, the London HQ’d company builder has told provisional candidates for its 2020 Hong Kong cohort that they should instead apply to one
French company Kabuto is launching a Kickstarter campaign today for the second generation of its smart carry-on suitcase. The company was previously known as Xtend. If you think about smart suitcases, chances are you picture a suitcase with a battery pack in it and that’s it. In other words, they are not that smart. Kabuto
After the onstage presentation at Made by Google 2019, we got our hands on a Pixel 4. In this video, you can watch us do a quick run-through of the major new features — like Motion Sense, which provides gesture controls that don’t require you to touch your phone, and improved Night Sight, which allows
AWS and Oracle love to take shots at each other, but as much as Amazon has knocked Oracle over the years, it was forced to admit that it was in fact a customer. Today in a company blog post, the company announced it was shedding Oracle for AWS databases, and had effectively turned off its
If you’re an avid TechCrunch reader, someone who loves to absorb endless startup profiles and pore through fundraising stories, you might think raising venture capital is easy. In reality, it’s very, very difficult and not the best source of capital for most businesses. For startups hoping to scale far and wide as fast as possible,
Elastic acquired Endgame Security in June for $234 million, and as a result of that deal, today the company announced Elastic Endpoint security to help customers secure laptops and servers. It also announced the acquisition has officially closed. Elastic CEO and co-founder Shay Banon says that the company has already been helping threat hunters inside
As companies like Google, Amazon and Apple hone their strategies to build the brain that helps you use the smart home of the future, where a new wave of internet-enabled appliances, climate and security systems and other connected objects can be connected and controlled through their hubs, a new smart home startup called Level Home
Germany is resisting US pressure to shut out Chinese tech giant Huawei from its 5G networks — saying it will not ban any supplier for the next-gen mobile networks on an up front basis, per Reuters. “Essentially our approach is as follows: We are not taking a pre-emptive decision to ban any actor, or any company,”
GoFundMe has made its name primarily as a platform for individuals to create fundraisers for personal causes — a service that has seen hundreds of campaigns go viral through social media to raise collectively well over $5 billion in funding to date. Now, the startup is taking the next step in its ambition to build
Bird, the $2.5 billion electric scooter business, is losing its chief legal and policy officer. David Estrada, who was hired last year from Kitty Hawk, is joining another mobility company, SoftBank-backed Nuro. A spokesperson for Bird tells TechCrunch Estrada is leaving the Santa Monica-based company to be closer to his family. Nuro, for its part,