Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads in 2019 and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App Annie’s recently
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From long payment cycles to antiquated processes on how to bill workers, the hefty inefficiencies of the construction industry are long overdue for innovation. Enter startups such as the large venture-backed Katerra and recently public companies such as Procore. Still, independent contractors or workers from small family businesses often can’t afford hefty fees from SaaS
Ecosia, a not-for-profit search engine which uses ad generated revenue to fund planting trees, is set to get a visibility boost in Chrome. A change Google is making to its chromium engine will see it added as a default search engine choice in up to 47 markets for the version 81 release of Google’s web
Y Combinator’s Demo Day is a key soirée on the startup calendar. This year, however, instead of a packed room replete with short pitches and lackluster catering, Demo Day has gone virtual. Even more, it was moved up by a week, pushing the public debut of a host of companies to this coming Monday. TechCrunch
Unitary, a startup that’s developing AI to automate content moderation for “harmful content” so that humans don’t have to, has picked up £1.35 million in funding. The company is still in development mode but launched a trial of its technology in September. Led by Rocket Internet’s GFC, the seed round also includes backing from Jane
When concerns about the novel coronavirus — and subsequent changes in activity — are not bringing productivity to a halt (and perhaps especially in times of needing to be as efficient as possible), one of the bigger IT trends has been a push to streamline how people work by creating better integrations between the different
It’s amazing that in this day and age, the best way to search for new clothes is to click a few check boxes and then scroll through endless pictures. Why can’t you search for “green patterned scoop neck dress” and see one? Glisten is a new startup enabling just that by using computer vision to
American-listed shares are off sharply this morning, falling after a steep selloff yesterday was not staunched by a presidential address. The declines echo what happened to Asian-listed stocks earlier today. All major American indices are now in bear-market territory, having shed the requisite 20% from recent highs. Today’s carnage is simply bleak. As we write
Instagram is embracing its potential as a news source, employing its ubiquity to distribute Coronavirus prevention techniques through a new call-out at the top of its homescreen feed. In some countries, Instagram will show a link to information from the World Health Organization and local health ministries along with a message like this: “Help Prevent
With the globalized world going into partial or complete lock down over the Covid-19 pandemic, startups in the travel sector are facing a huge stress test and immediate disruption to business as usual as public health concern spirals and entire populations are encouraged or even forced not to travel. The traditional travel hub of Europe
ZTE’s struggles with the U.S. government generally haven’t been as high-profile as fellow Chinese mobile giant Huawei, but the company has still had its share of issues in recent years. The latest wrinkle, first reported by NBC and later confirmed by The Wall Street Journal, finds it under investigation over bribery charges. The issues stem
Lisa Enckell Contributor Lisa Enckell is a partner at Antler, an early-stage venture capital firm and startup generator. In Asia, where I work as a partner at an early-stage VC, startups are regularly rolling out a minimum viable product (MVP) and then transacting on messaging apps. Companies like shoe brand Portblue, AI e-commerce company Sorabel
Today after the bell, Slack, a popular workplace communication product, reported its FQ4 2020 earnings, the three-month period ending January 31 2020. The company’s results came in ahead of expectations. However, its shares have rapidly lost altitude in the wake of its news. In the fourth quarter, Slack’s revenue rose to $181.9 million, a gain
On Thursday, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Rick Scott (R-FL) introduced legislation to further restrict the use of the popular viral video app TikTok on government devices. The bill seeks to expand existing federal guidance prohibiting use of TikTok to encompass any U.S. government-issued device. The legislation is the most recent effort by U.S. lawmakers
The JEDI contract award process might never be done. Following legal challenges from Amazon after the Pentagon’s massive, $10 billion cloud contract was awarded to Microsoft in October, the Pentagon indicated in court documents last night that it wishes to reconsider the award. It’s just the latest plot twist in an epic government procurement saga.
Speedinvest, a seed-stage VC headquartered in Vienna with offices in London, Berlin, Munich and San Francisco, recently disclosed a new €190 million fund that brings the firm’s total assets under management to more than €400 million. Its remit remains largely the same: Speedinvest broadly targets fintech, deep tech, marketplaces, industrial tech, digital health and consumer
Users of Storz & Bickel’s vaporizers can once again connect their vapes to iPhones. The company’s solution comes several months after Apple enacted a ban on apps for tobacco and cannabis vaporizers. This time around, Storz & Bickel turned to a web app to provide iPhone users with expanded controls over their vapes. I found
Caryn Marooney Contributor Caryn Marooney is general partner at Coatue Management and sits on the boards of Zendesk and Elastic. An advisor to Airtable, in prior roles she oversaw communications for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus and co-founded The OutCast Agency, which served clients like Salesforce.com and Amazon. Pride. Greed. Lust. Envy. Gluttony. Wrath. Sloth.
Well, that was terrible. During the day’s wild trading session, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) dropped by just under 10% in what was the largest single-day percentage decline since the stock market crash in 1987 (when markets were sufficiently scarred to institute failsafe measures for the future, to prevent similar, shocking declines). Investors shrugged
Brizzly, the name associated with a long-gone Twitter client, and later, a goofy project highlighting our addiction to social media, is coming back. And this time, it’s focused on serving the needs of Twitter power users in search of features Twitter itself has failed to build — like an Edit button and an auto-deletion option
European on-demand food delivery startups are starting to add ‘contactless’ deliveries in response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Earlier this month U.S. startups including Postmates and Instacart added an option for customers to choose not to have their meal handed to them by the courier — and instead have it dropped off at their door without
The Trump administration is preparing an executive order to ban federal departments and agencies from buying or using foreign-made drones, citing a risk to national security, TechCrunch has learned. The draft order, which was drafted in the past few weeks and seen by TechCrunch, would effectively ban both foreign-made drones or drones made with foreign
Verizon said Thursday it will boost investment in network infrastructure, increasing its capital guidance by $500 million, to prepare for the rise in telecommuting and online learning amid the coronavirus outbreak. Verizon has not seen any measurable increases in data usage, even as some business, schools and other organizations are asking its employees to work
Fintech startup Revolut has introduced a new trading feature for premium users. Starting today, Premium and Metal users can access gold exposure from the app. Revolut works with a gold services partner (London Bullion Market Association) so that money that you spend on gold exposure is backed by real gold held by this partner. In
While you’ve probably spent a lot of today thinking about the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s worth remembering that other health issues aren’t going away — and that heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States. Heartbeat Health is a startup working to improve the way that cardiovascular care is delivered, and it
With tech companies wise to many of the tactics that Russia’s now-infamous troll farms used to seed disinformation during the 2016 election, those campaigns are getting creative. According to a pair of reports out from Facebook and Twitter, a disinformation campaign run by individuals with links to Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) is back and
Yext says that in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s making its Yext Answers site search product free for 90 days. You might not see an obvious connection between site search and a worldwide pandemic. You might even think this sounds like a marketing gimmick. But Yext CEO Howard Lerman said that for the past
The European Commission is switching all staff in “non-critical functions” to remote working from next Monday in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. In an email sent to staff today the Commission writes that president Ursula von der Leyen has activated a business continuity plan that requires all but those in “critical functions” to telework from
According to a new report from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple could unveil new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models with scissor-switch keyboards. MacRumors first noticed the report; TechCrunch obtained the research note as well. Apple updated the big MacBook Pro in November. The company slightly increased the size of the display from 15” to 16”
No surprise, really, that 5G smartphone sales are on the way up. Frankly, there’s really no other way to go, according to the latest numbers from NPD’s Mobile Phone Tracking. The firm noted that 5G handsets accounted for less than 1% of total sales in the U.S. The hurdles are also what you’d expect: namely,