For the first time in eight months, people in Kashmir can use WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and other social services without any fear or use of specialized software — though things are not back to normal yet. India said on Wednesday that it has temporarily lifted the ban on social media services and on the much
Month: March 2020
Like many technology companies, Zendesk made the tough decision to cancel its Zendesk Relate customer conference this week in Miami amid Covid-19 health concerns. That doesn’t mean the announcements didn’t happen though, even if the conference didn’t, and today the company announced a major update to its Sunshine development platform. You may recall that the
Lunchr has rebranded to Swile in order to expand its product offering beyond meal vouchers. The company wants to focus on everything that happens at work but that isn’t technically work — money pots for a birthday, paying back your co-workers, creating team-building events and more. At heart, Swile provides a payment card for your
Tilting Point announced this morning that it has acquired Star Trek Timelines, a free-to-play character collection game, from the game’s developer Disruptor Beam. It’s also hired Disruptor Beam team members to create a new studio, Wicked Realm Games. This follows Disruptor Beam‘s shuttering of its other titles, Game of Thrones Ascent and The Walking Dead: March
It’s a bit gauche to talk about positive economic impacts of what may become a global pandemic, but the novel coronavirus hasn’t been bad news for every company. Video conference provider Zoom appears to be one beneficiary; after going public in 2019, its share price rose from around $68 at the start of the year
French startup Colonies has raised a $34 million funding round (€30 million). In addition to that, LBO France is committing to spend $168 million (€150 million) in real estate projects over the next couple of years. Those new buildings will eventually be managed by Colonies. Idinvest Partners, Global Founders Capital and La Financière Saint James
TikTok, the hugely popular social media app, found a lot of early traction by giving users a way to create funny lip-synced versions of clips from well-known songs and then share them with friends (its predecessor in the West was even called Musically). Now at long last, TikTok’s owner, China’s ByteDance, is doubling down on
Ampere, the chip startup run by former Intel President Renee James, announced a new chip today that she says is designed specifically to optimize for cloud workloads. Ampere VP of product Jeff Wittich says the new chip is called the Ampere Altra, and it’s been designed with some features that should make it attractive to
Mavenoid, a startup founded in Stockholm that helps companies scale tech-focused product support via an AI-powered chatbot, has raised $8 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Mosaic Ventures, alongside Creandum and Point Nine Capital. The company says the new capital will be used to invest further in product development and to
As the company experiences its second day of outages, Robinhood, the popular trading app with a purported 10-million-strong user base and a $7.6 billion valuation, said it will offer compensation for yesterday’s outage on a case-by-case basis, according to a company spokesperson. The company issued a statement early Tuesday documenting that the outage began at around
Alternative and holistic healthcare seekers in the Los Angeles area have a new service they can turn to in WellSet, the listing platform that launched on Tuesday. Through the service, customers coming off of the company’s existing waitlist can access its marketplace for finding acupuncturists, massage therapists, functional medicine practitioners, craniosacral therapists, nutrionists, life coaches
Uber sold its food delivery business in India to the local rival Zomato for $206 million, the American ride-hailing company disclosed in a regulatory filing in one of its key overseas markets. In January, Uber announced that it had sold the India business of Uber Eats to Zomato for a 9.99% stake in the loss-making
Who fact-checks the fact-checkers? Did Trump call coronavirus the Democrat’s “new hoax”? Those the big questions emerging from a controversial “false” label applied to Politico and NBC News stories by right-wing publisher The Daily Caller. Its Check Your Fact division is a Facebook fact-checking partner, giving it the power to flag links on the social
Justin Kan’s hybrid legal software and law firm startup Atrium is shutting down today after failing to figure out how to deliver better efficiency than a traditional law firm, the CEO tells TechCrunch exclusively. The startup has now laid off all its employees, which totaled just over 100. It will return some of its $75.5
We are still years away from a time when fully-autonomous cars will be able to drive us from A to B, and the complexity of getting to that point is likely going to need hundreds of billions of dollars of investment before it becomes a reality. That hard truth is leading to some shifts in
It wasn’t the leap year, a coding blip, or a hack that caused Robinhood’s massive outages yesterday and today that left customers unable to trade stocks. Instead, the co-CEOs write that “the cause of the outage was stress on our infrastructure — which struggled with unprecedented load. That in turn led to a “thundering herd”
Founders, it’s time to launch your company on the most famous stage in tech media. Startup Battlefield applications are now open. TechCrunch is scouring the globe to find the most innovative and game-changing startups to compete for the famous Disrupt Cup and a $100,000 equity-free prize at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2020. Startups will gain
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. We’re still in IPO-land this morning, working our way through the Accolade S-1 filing. Yesterday we dug through the Procore filing, a vertical software-as-a-service (SaaS) company. That was a former startup that we could get
Facebook -owned WhatsApp is finally giving users’ eyes a break by rolling out a dark mode setting to the messaging app — years after some other tech giants figured out how to offer a ‘dimmer pixels’ switch. The messaging giant says the feature is rolling out globally in the “coming days” to the latest version
Most developers think of Stack Overflow as a question and answer site for their programming questions. But over the last few years, the company has also built a successful business in its Stack Overflow for Teams product, which essentially offers companies a private version of its Q&A product. Indeed, the Teams product now brings in
Popular music app publisher MWM has raised a $55.9 million (€50 million) funding round. Blisce/ is leading the round with Idinvest Partners, Bpifrance (Large Venture fund), Aglaé Ventures and Xavier Niel also participating. Some of MWM’s apps include edjing Mix, Beat Maker Pro, Drum Machine, Beat Snap 2, TaoMix 2, Guitar and Drums. The company
I was honestly a surprised to find out from Sensel that the company is only just recently raising its Series A. The Sunnyvale-based hardware startup has been around since 2013, bringing its first product, the modular music and computing Morph peripheral, to market a few years back. Over the past few years, however, the company’s
French startup Le Wagon has raised its first round of funding after many years of bootstrapping. The company closed a $19 million funding round (€17 million) a few months ago. Cathay Capital is leading the round with AfricInvest also participating. “We’ve always bootstrapped since 2013 and we’ve always been profitable since day one,” Le Wagon
iPrice Group, which helps comparison shoppers in Southeast Asia by pulling together prices from different e-commerce platforms, has closed a $10 million Series B. Led by ACA Investments, the round also included participation from Daiwa PI Partners and returning investors Line Ventures, Mirae Asset-Naver Asia Growth Fund. The company’s last funding announcement, from Line’s venture
Another major figure could soon join the list of a growing number of people who are done with social media: The leader of the world’s largest democracy. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted Monday evening that he was thinking about giving up on his Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube accounts. Modi, whose 53 million followers
RTP Global, the VC firm founded by Russian entrepreneur and investor Leonid Boguslavsky, is announcing a new $650 million fund to continue backing early-stage tech startups, primarily at Series A but also some late seed deals and Series B. Of note, the VC’s last fund was launched in December 2017 and totalled $200 million, so
Nokia announces a big leadership change, an AT&T streaming service expands and we look at how our jobs may have to evolve during to the coronavirus pandemic. Here’s your Daily Crunch for March 2, 2020. 1. Rajeev Suri to step down as Nokia CEO; Pekka Lundmark to take over The company, like its rivals Sweden-based
Robinhood, the startup with a stock trading app valued upwards of at least $7.6 billion, suffered one of its worst outages on one of the busiest trading days of the year. As the Dow Jones Industrial Average enjoyed the single biggest point-gain in the history of the index, Robinhood’s application fell prey to an error
So much for that correction! After a desolate week, the United States saw its major indices rally on Monday, pushing the value of domestic and domestically listed securities higher. The gains came despite a rising number of infections in the country of the novel coronavirus, now known as COVID-19. Last week, rising concern about an
Throughout this series on the rise of multiverse virtual worlds, I have outlined the collision of gaming and social media into a new multiverse era of social media within virtual worlds due to technological and cultural changes. The result will be a healthier ecosystem of social media than what currently exists and the economic development