Facebook is co-opting some of the top video chat innovations like Zoom’s gallery view for large groups and Houseparty’s spontaneous hangouts for a new feature called Rooms. It could usher in a new era of unplanned togetherness via video. Launching today on mobile and desktop, you can start a video chat Room that friends can
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In a small suburb of Melbourne, two entrepreneurs are developing a technology that could mean big changes for the packaging industry. Stuart Gordon and Mark Appleford are the co-founders of Varden, a company that has developed a process to take the waste material from sugarcane and convert it into a paper-like packaging product with the
As companies increasingly look to find ways to cut costs, Granulate, an early-stage Israeli startup, has come up with a clever way to optimize infrastructure usage. Today it was rewarded with a tidy $12 million Series A investment. Insight Partners led the round with participation from TLV Partners and Hetz Ventures. Lonne Jaffe, managing director
Apple and Google have provided a number of updates about the technical details of their joint contact tracing system, which they’re now exclusively referring to as an “exposure notification” technology, since the companies say this is a better way to describe what they’re offering. The system is just one part of a contact tracing system,
India has emerged as one of the fastest growing smartphone markets in the last decade, reporting growth each quarter even as handset shipments slowed or declined elsewhere globally. But the world’s second largest smartphone is beginning to feel the coronavirus heat, too. The Indian smartphone market grew by a modest 4% year-over-year in the quarter
Facebook will soon allow users to go on “virtual dates,” the company announced today. The social network is planning to introduce a new video calling feature that will allow users of its Facebook Dating service to connect and video call over Messenger, as an alternative to going on a real-world date. This sort of feature
Digits, a fintech startup hailing from the same team that built and sold Crashlytics to Twitter, is officially launching today after two years of development. It’s also announcing a $22 million Series B round of funding led by GV, as it makes its public debut. While the company had been fairly quiet about product details
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week we had a choice of all sorts of news, but as we cut the show together as a group Danny pushed all the funding rounds up. So, when Alex and Natasha jumped into the show
Instant messaging service Telegram has amassed 400 million monthly active users, it said today, up from 300 million active users the seven-year-old service disclosed to the SEC last October. The service — founded by Pavel Durov, who also created Russian social networking site VK — said it adds about 1.5 million users each day and
Michael Ovitz didn’t invent the idea of a talent agency, but one might argue that he perfected it. He founded the CAA in 1975, and grew it into the world’s leading talent agency, serving as chairman for 20 years. Now, Ovitz is investing in a brand new type of talent agency called Human Capital. Human
On the heels of Amazon getting approval from the competition authority to proceed with an investment leading a $575 million round for food delivery startup Deliveroo in the UK, two of Deliveroo’s biggest rivals got their own £6.2 billion merger approved, and they have subsequently picked up an extra $756 million to come out fighting. Today,
Prompted by Jeff Bezos’s plans to test all Amazon employees for the virus that causes COVID-19, we wondered whether employers can mandate employee testing, regardless of symptoms. The issue pits public safety against personal privacy, but limited testing availability has rendered the question somewhat moot. But as the World Health Organization and U.S. Centers for
Q1 was alright. Q2 and Q3 are going to suffer. Alex Wilhelm 8 hours Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we’re taking a look at a bit of data on the European venture capital scene in Q1. As with our
WhatsApp is deepening its collaboration with the World Health Organization as people across the globe grapple with the coronavirus pandemic. The Facebook -owned service said today it is attempting to appeal to users in a language that they speak “billions” of times a day on its platform: Stickers. The service, with more than 2 billion
Miro is a company in the right place at the right time. The makers of a digital whiteboard are seeing usage surge right now as businesses move from the workplace and physical whiteboards. Today, the company announced a hefty $50 million Series B. Iconiq Capital led the round with help from Accel and a slew
The new “normal” offers new opportunities. That’s the thinking behind a new pre-seed funding program from Heartcore Capital . The European consumer-focused VC usually invests in startups at seed and Series A, but recognising that many potential founders are in lockdown and with time of their hands, is moving to the top of the funnel
Apple plans to fix an iPhone email security bug, Magic Leap cuts 1,000 staffers and Google is requiring all advertisers to identify themselves. Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 23, 2020. 1. A new iPhone email security bug may let hackers steal private data According to security firm ZecOps, the bug is in the iPhone’s
U.S. companies rely on Mexican manufacturers for goods ranging from automotive and aerospace parts, avocados and other produce, to electronics and furniture. But the trucking system that transports these things across the border relies on an inefficient mix of paper, phone calls, faxes and too many stakeholders who drive up costs. These snarls congesting border
Today Opera Event, an influencer software service, announced that it closed a $5 million Series A. The Oakland-based startup raised the capital from new lead investor Antera, with prior investors Atlas Ventures, Everblue, and Konvoy Ventures coming along. According to Crunchbase data, Opera Event had raised at least $1.2 million before this new round. Opera
Even as Mark Zuckerberg touted the “hundreds of thousands of pieces of misinformation related to COVID-19” that the site had pulled in recent months, Facebook continued to offer targeted ads classified as “pseudoscience.” It was an odd choice from a social network so publicly declaring its own campaigns to remove junk science amid a global
At a time when more transactions than ever are happening online, payments behemoth Stripe is announcing three new features to continue expanding its reach. The company today announced that it will now offer card issuing services directly to businesses to let them in turn make credit cards for customers tailored to specific purposes. Alongside that, it’s going
A German research institute that’s involved in developing a COVID-19 contacts tracing app with the backing of the national government has released some new details about the work which suggests the app is being designed as more of a ‘one-stop shop’ to manage coronavirus impacts at an individual level, rather than having a sole function
Apple’s long-rumored Mac ARM chip transition could happen as early as next year, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The report says that Apple is currently working on three Mac processors based on the design of the A14 system-on-a-chip that will power the next-generation iPhone. The first of the Mac versions will greatly exceed
Neighborhood social network Nextdoor and Walmart are teaming up today to launch a new “Neighbors Helping Neighbors” program that will make it easier for vulnerable community members to get assistance from neighbors who are already planning a trip to Walmart. The new in-app feature will allow Nextdoor users to post to groups associated with their
Paige, the Sloan-Kettering spinout that has been building an artificial intelligence platform to improve cancer pathology and subsequently use those insights to develop better drug therapies, has raised an additional $5 million in funding to continue its work commercialising its platform and expanding its research reach, while also getting FDA clearance to launch in hospitals
Digital marketing company TapClicks announced this morning that it’s broadening its platform with the acquisition of AdStage. AdStage first launched back in 2013 as a cross-network advertising startup, eventually expanding by automating ad campaigns and consolidating marketing data. TapClicks founder and CEO Babak Hedayti told me that his goal is to build a “single, unified platform” for
Facebook today is introducing another feature aimed at making it easier to see who’s behind the posts published across Facebook and Instagram. The company says it will now display the location of the Facebook Page or Instagram account with a large audience on every post it shares, so end users have a better understanding of
Google Meet, like all video chat products, is seeing rapid growth in user numbers right now, so it’s no surprise that Google is trying to capitalize on this and quickly iterating on its product. Today, it is officially launching a set of new features that include a more Zoom-like tiled layout, a low-light mode for
SFC (formerly known as Startup Funding Club – a UK a seed stage investor – has received £10 million from British Business Investments (the commercial subsidiary of the British Business Bank), to deploy a total of £40 million across more than 100 early-stage startups in the UK. SFC intends to deploy the commitment in over
A team of researchers from Apple and Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute have presented a system for embedded AIs to learn by listening to noises in their environment without the need for up-front training data or without placing a huge burden on the user to supervise the learning process. The overarching goal is for