Four senators, including Ted Cruz (R-TX), have asserted that, as a consequence of sanctions placed on Iran, Twitter must cease providing its services to Ayatollah Khamenei and other leaders in the country. “The Ayatollah enjoys zero protection from the United States Bill of Rights,” he wrote in a letter to the company. Although the move
Month: February 2020
Russ Heddleston Contributor Russ is the cofounder and CEO of DocSend. He was previously a product manager at Facebook, where he arrived via the acquisition of his startup Pursuit.com, and has held roles at Dropbox, Greystripe, and Trulia. Follow him here: @rheddleston and @docsend More posts by this contributor First mover advantage: Does it matter
Controlling your smart home gadgets from your phone or by voice isn’t exactly a chore, but after setting up a bunch of smart lights, a Wi-Fi lock, thermostat and a few more smart devices, I came to miss the ability to control at least some of them with a physical switch. Add to that the
Motorola’s long been a kind of quiet workhorse on the mobile scene. Aside from the occasional razzle-dazzle of a Moto Z or Razr, the Lenovo subsidiary mostly trades in budget handsets. The G line is probably the best example of the bunch. The devices aren’t flashy and the specs are often a year or two
A startup called Our.News is working to make its users smarter consumers of the news. In other words, it’s confronting some big, seemingly intractable problems. For one thing, there’s a tremendous amount of disinformation online — as Our.News founder and CEO Richard Zack put it, “Unfortunately, you have thousands of people all over the world
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was something fun. First, we were back as a group in the San Francisco studio, which is always fun. Even better, we had NEA’s Rick Yang on hand to chat with Danny and Alex about
Clear is an early stage startup with a big ambition. It wants to build a blockchain for high-volume transaction systems like payments between telcos. Today it announced a $13 million Series A investment. The round was led by Eight Roads with participation from Telefónica Innovation Ventures, Telekom Innovation Pool of Deutsche Telekom, HKT and Singtel
Meet AssoConnect, a French startup that is building a software-as-a-service application to give you all the tools you need to manage your nonprofit organization (association in French). The company just raised a $7.7 million (€7 million) funding round with XAnge and ISAI leading the round. Various business angels, such as Nicolas Macquin, Rodolphe Carle, Michaël
France’s competition watchdog DGCCRF announced earlier today that Apple will pay a $27.4 million (€25 million) fine due to an iOS update that capped performance of aging devices. The company will also have to display a statement on its website for a month. A couple of years ago, Apple released an iOS update (10.2.1 and
The Galaxy Fold felt like an omen for a burgeoning category. The fascinating and promising product was plagued by broken review units that forced Samsung to go back to the drawing board with a reinforced model. But even that version ultimately ran into issues, as I can personally attest. No doubt other companies readying their
It’s no secret that it’s hard to make the economics work at drive-share companies. That may explain the success to date of HopSkipDrive, a six-year-old, L.A.-based company that pairs drivers with both families but also, crucially, school districts. Specifically, the now 100-plus person company has deals in place with school districts in 13 markets across
Snafu Records is bringing a new approach to finding musical talent — founder and CEO Ankit Desai described the Los Angeles-headquartered startup as “the first full-service, AI-enabled record label.” It’s a world that Desai knows well, having spent the past five years working on digital and streaming strategy at Capitol Records and Universal Music Group.
Instagram will now show you who you interact with least frequently in case you want to unfollow them. In an effort to help you keep your feed clean and relevant, today Instagram is launching ‘following categories’ that divides the list of who you follow into batches including “most seen in feed” and “least interacted with”.
Datree, the early stage startup building a DevOps policy engine on GitHub, announced an $8 million Series A today. It also announced it has joined the Y Combinator Winter 20 cohort. Blumberg and TLV Partners led the round with participation from Y Combinator . The company has now raised $11 million with the $3 million
A/O PropTech is a new European VC officially launching today, after raising €250 million of so-called “permanent capital” to invest in technology companies disrupting real estate. It’s this “permanent” approach — seeing the firm structured more like a corporate with various shareholders, rather than a traditional venture capital fund that typically has a life cycle
Instagram may finally let IGTV video makers earn money 18 months after launching the longer-form content hub. Instagram confirms to TechCrunch that it has internally prototyped an Instagram Partner Program that would let creators earn money by showing advertisements along with their videos. By giving creators a sustainable and hands-off way to generate earnings from
When Fair laid off 40% of its staff in October, CEO Scott Painter promised it wasn’t shuttering leasing services to on-demand fleets. But just a week later, Painter was removed and replaced in the interim with Adam Hieber, a CFA from Fair investor SoftBank. Today, according to two sources, Fair announced at an all-hands meeting
SpaceX looks likely to take its burgeoning Starlink business and spin it out, seeking to bring that satellite internet project to public markets via an IPO. That’s according to SpaceX COO and President Gwynne Shotwell, who made the remarks during a JPMorgan Chase investor conference, as reported by Bloomberg. SpaceX has been launching batches of
The growing market of fantasy sports in India may soon have a new and odd entrant: ShareChat . The local social networking app, which in August last year raised $100 million in a financing round led by Twitter, has developed a fantasy sports app and has been quietly testing it for six months, two sources
Netskope has always focused its particular flavor of security on the cloud, and as more workloads have moved there, it has certainly worked in its favor. Today the company announced a $340 million investment on a valuation of nearly $3 billion. Sequoia Capital Global Equities led the round, but in a round this large, there
Launched at CES 2020, NURVV, a biomechanics startup, has closed a $9m Series A round, led by Hiro Capital, the sports/Esports VC fund, along with co-investment from Ian Livingstone CBE (Games Workshop co-founder) and Cherry Freeman (co-founder of LoveCrafts). It turns out that if you can figure out how to protect a smartphone from smashing,
Netflix announced this week that it has started to stream titles in AV1 on Android in what could significantly help the two-year-old media codec gain wider adoption. The world’s biggest streaming giant said on Wednesday that by switching from Google’s VP9 — which it previously used on Android — to AV1, its compression efficiency has
Time to mark September 14-16 on your calendar for the startup extravaganza that is TechCrunch’s Disrupt San Francisco 2020. Registration for our flagship, 10,000-person event is officially open, and pass prices will never be lower. Super early-bird passes are now available and if you reserve your seat today, you can save up to $1,800. There
Forescout, the network security company that has been publicly traded since 2017, announced today it was going private again. Private equity firms Advent International and Crosspoint Capital are acquiring the company in an all-cash purchase of $1.9 billion. The two private equity firms will pay $33 per share, which represented a premium of 30% over
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. Jeff Weiner will step down as CEO of LinkedIn June 1, product head Ryan Roslansky steps up The changes are LinkedIn’s
Facebook’s use of the Onavo spyware VPN app it acquired in 2013 — and used to inform its 2014 purchase of the then rival WhatsApp messaging platform — is on the radar of Europe’s antitrust regulator, per a report in the Wall Street Journal. The newspaper reports that the Commission has requested a large volume
Next Tuesday, Samsung kicks off smartphone season with its Unpacked event in San Francisco. One of two tentpole events for the company, the big show brings with it the latest edition of the company’s primary flagship line, the Galaxy S. Samsung played a fun little trick, holding the event on February 11th at 11AM PT,
Drone startup Wingcopter, working with partners Merck and the Frankfurt University of Applied Science, has completed a first flight of a new drone delivery trial designed to show the benefits of using drones instead of trucks or other road faring vehicles for moving small cargo between two physically separate office facilities. This first flight covered
This morning The Zebra, an Austin-based insurance marketplace startup, announced it has closed a $38.5 million Series C. Accel led the funding event, which was participated in by prior investors Silverton Partners, Ballast Point Ventures, and the company’s CEO Keith Melnick. Floodgate and Weatherford Capital also invested in the round. According to Melnick, the company
The once-polarizing world of open-source software has recently become one of the hotter destinations for VCs. As the popularity of open source increases among organizations and developers, startups in the space have reached new heights and monstrous valuations. Over the past several years, we’ve seen surging open-source companies like Databricks reach unicorn status, as well