Kimberly Shenk has been focused for a while now on “clean” products that are made without harmful chemicals. In 2017, Shenk and friend Jaleh Bisharat launched NakedPoppy, a site that curates and sells cosmetics that have been vetted by chemists (including some of its own products). Interestingly, as the young startup was announcing $4 million
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It’s been a bonkers week in the world with markets gyrating, companies fretting, investors tweeting and founders re-cutting their 2020 forecasts. But for one collection of startups, the past few days weren’t about work crises or the latest Slack share price. Instead, for Y Combinator’s Winter batch, it was Demo Day week. TechCrunch has covered
You don’t have to go far to find someone online downplaying the severity of a global pandemic that’s shut down entire economies and ground everyday life to a halt. Knowing that, Twitter will take extra steps to remove tweets that put people at risk of contracting the novel coronavirus as it rapidly sweeps through communities
Research firm Canalys reports that the Chinese cloud infrastructure market grew 66.9% to $3.3 billion in the last quarter of 2019, right before the COVID-19 virus hit the country. China is the second largest cloud infrastructure market in the world with 10.8% share. The quarter puts the Chinese market on a $13.2 billion run rate.
Israel has passed an emergency law to use mobile phone data for tracking people infected with COVID-19 including to identify and quarantine others they have come into contact with and may have infected. The BBC reports that the emergency law was passed during an overnight sitting of the cabinet, bypassing parliamentary approval. Israel also said
With world events overtaking the tech world’s preferences to meet for coffees and convene at events, Y Combinator skipped its famous two-day live Demo event and went for a radical experiment: no demos at all, but instead a long list of the nearly 200 startups in its Winter 2020 batch, with links to their sites
It was another brutal day on Wall Street as investors continue to come to grips with the new economic realities imposed by the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S. Both the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) and the S&P 500 are scraping near their lowest point in the last three years, brushing their lowest numbers since
In an effort to disseminate trustworthy health information on COVID-19, Facebook will roll out its own coronavirus information center, a central hub on the vast social network where the company will collect information from sources like the CDC and WHO. “We’re going to be putting at the top of everyone’s Facebook feed,” Zuckerberg said in
AWS CEO Andy Jassy showed signs of frustration at his AWS re:Invent keynote address in December. Customers weren’t moving to the cloud nearly fast enough for his taste, and he prodded them to move along. Some of their hesitation, as Jassy pointed out, was due to institutional inertia, but some of it also was due
Apple today announced the Mac Mini will ship with more standard storage space. Starting at $799, the base model Mac Mini now ships with a 256GB SSD, up from 128GB previously. The CPU, GPU and system memory remains the same from the previous model. This refresh is a slight but welcomed bump to Apple’s least
In October, TikTok tapped corporate law firm K&L Gates to advise the company on its moderation policies and other topics afflicting social media platforms. As a part of those efforts, TikTok said it would form a new committee of experts to advise the business on topics like child safety, hate speech, misinformation, bullying and other
Many companies have been designed to optimize productivity when everybody is in the office. As offices close due to the coronavirus outbreak, many people are experimenting with remote work at scale for the first time. Employees have to learn what it means to work remotely — but managers also have to learn how to keep
You’d be excused for feeling that mid-2019 was in a different decade as far as venture-backed IPOs go. Last year saw a number of successful flotations of venture-backed technology and technology-enabled companies, and most performed well after they began trading. But despite some early success, a number of the most famous 2019 IPOs have seen
When Slack first launched in 2013, the product was quickly embraced by developers, and the early product reflected that. To get at advanced tools, you used a slash (/) command, but the company recognizes that as it moves deeper into the enterprise, it needed to simplify the interface. Today, the company introduced a newly designed
You have to actually get work done, not just video call all day, but apps like Zoom want to take over your screen. Remote workers who need to stay in touch while staying productive are forced to juggle tabs. Meanwhile, call participants often look and sound far away, dwarfed by their background and drowned in
UK on-demand food delivery startup Deliveroo has been accused of setting up an inaccessible hardship fund for couriers in the midst of the coronavirus crisis that leaves gig economy workers on its platform unable to access claimed financial support if they become ill or are self isolating. Gig economy delivery workers are one of the
A couple of days after Microsoft unveiled a ton of info about the Xbox Series X, Sony is about to do the exact same thing in a live video. Sony is hosting a live broadcast about the PlayStation 5 today at 9 AM PT, 12 PM ET, 4 PM GMT. [embedded content] Lead system architect
Google is expanding the feature set for its Advanced Protection Program, a security offering that helps safeguard Google Accounts of those at risk for targeted attacks — like politicians, journalists, activists, business leaders, and others. The program already provides an increased level of protection for these accounts by limiting access to data, blocking fraudulent account
Sophie Alcorn Contributor Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,”
‘If you are planning to raise money this year, just know your best case is probably Q4’ Alex Wilhelm 8 hours Earlier today, TechCrunch caught up with Chris Sugden, a managing partner at Edison Partners, to talk about the current fundraising market, what’s next for SaaS startups and if there’s any good news to be
The world is vulnerable to a new type of trolling as people turn to Zoom video calls to feel connected amidst quarantines. Jerks are using Zoom’s screensharing feature to blast other viewers with the most awful videos from across the internet, from violence to shocking pornography. That’s just what happened today on the WFH Happy
Salesforce, the global giant in CRM, said on Wednesday that former banker Arundhati Bhattacharya will be joining the company on April 20 as chairperson and CEO of its India division. The San Francisco-headquartered firm said Bhattacharya, who served as the chairperson of the state-run State Bank of India for nearly four decades and oversees financial
The wheels of the regulatory machine continue to turn, and today Apple, along with two of its wholesale partners, was dealt a major blow in France over antitrust violations, by receiving the biggest-ever fine levelled against a business over anti-competitive practices and “sterilizing the market” for Apple products, specifically as they are sold across a
It’s no secret I’m a fan of the reMarkable, a tablet with a paper-like display that’s focused on text and sketching rather than rich media and games. The sequel to the original, announced today, looks to make a good thing even better. Designed for the creation and consumption of monochromatic content like long documents, ebooks,
Google this week warned Android developers that Play Store app review times will be much longer than normal due to the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis. Developers should expect app reviews to take up to a week or even longer, the company informed its community by way of an alert on the Google Play Console.
Hello TechCrunch friends and family, tomorrow morning at 9 am Pacific Time we’re gathering on Zoom for an in-depth chat about our favorite startups from the latest Y Combinator Demo Day. This year’s installment of the twice-yearly startup event happened yesterday, a week early and online only. Like many other things, Demo Day was adapted
The novel coronavirus pandemic has rapidly moved companies into a remote-first world. Nearly all of the world’s largest events have been canceled, put on pause or pivoted to online-only. In the tech world, event cancellations thus far have included SXSW, GDC, Mobile World Congress, Google I/O, Facebook F8, E3 and others. As more and more
Facebook is suffering from a massive bug in its News Feed spam filter, causing URLs to legitimate websites including Medium, Buzzfeed, and USA Today to be blocked from being shared as posts or comments. The issue is blocking shares of some but not all coronavirus-related content, while some unrelated links are allowed through and others
Addapptation, a startup that wants to build a practical design layer on top of Salesforce and other enterprise tools, announced a $1.3 million seed investment today. 2048 Ventures led the round with participation from East Coast Angles, The Millworks II Fund and additional angel investors from New Hampshire, where the firm is located Co-founder Sumner
Renewed phones, laptops and tablets can be as much as 40% cheaper than their brand new cousins, working equally as well and, because they have been saved from the scrapheap, are therefore a great deal more environmentally friendly. Players in this space includeBack Market (raised €48M), Swappa (US) and Amazon Renew. Refurbed, a marketplace for