To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PT, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Friday, March 25, 2022! This is one of the last Daily Crunch intros that I will write for you. I will miss our daily chats
Historically, only institutions have been able to be part of REITs (real estate investment trust), which are made up of companies that own or finance income-producing real estate across a range of property sectors. A startup called Flock Homes wants to give landlords a similar ability to own shares of a portfolio that is made
Jeff Kukowski Contributor Jeff Kukowski is CEO at CloudBolt, which helps companies automate easily, optimize continuously and govern at scale in hybrid and multicloud, multitool environments. With data centers alone consuming around 1% of global electricity demand, IT departments have substantial influence on their organization’s sustainability goals. Significantly reducing the amount of energy used to
The European Union’s co-legislators reached political agreement on a major reform of digital competition rules late yesterday, which will introduce up-front obligations and restrictions (literally a list of “dos and don’ts”) on the most powerful internet giants — enforced by the threat of substantial fines and other types of penalties if they fail to meet
Braille is widely used by people with vision impairments, but despite widespread improvements to accessibility on the web and smart devices, innovation for braille-reader hardware has essentially been stalled. Dot has taken a huge step forward with a smart braille device that not only allows for easy display of text, but tactile representations of imagery,
Android development these days runs on a monthly cadence, so it’s no surprise that about a month after Google announced the first developer preview of Android 13 (code-named “Tiramisu,” as Google occasionally calls it in its developer documentation) it has now launched the second developer preview. These previews typically still have a lot of rough
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. It was a live recording this week, which was good fun. Our co-host Natasha was off, so Mary Ann and Alex teamed up with Grace to hammer our way through the news of the week live, with
Instacart is not done making news. Earlier this week, the well-known grocery delivery unicorn announced a software suite as part of a self-described third act. Today, Bloomberg reported that Instacart reduced its valuation from around $39 billion to $24 billion, representing a roughly 38.5% reduction in the company’s worth. Commentary indicates that the company’s new
Twitter has started testing a new clipping tool for Spaces, the company announced this week. Select hosts on iOS are now able to clip 30 seconds of audio from recorded Spaces to share them with others on Twitter. All iOS users can now see and listen to the clips on their timelines, while Android and
Engineers, coders and product designers, lend us your ears! TC Sessions: Mobility 2022 goes big, live and in-person on May 18-19 in San Mateo, California. This two-day deep dive — dedicated to mobility tech, early-stage startups and the investors who fund them — is a prime networking opportunity you don’t want to miss. Looking for
ServiceNow introduced a new overall application design today, and while they were at it, launched Automation Engine, a tool developed to help companies speed up the creation of automations, including native RPA (robotic process automation) integration. They are both part of the new San Diego release available today. Dave Wright, chief innovation officer at ServiceNow,
French startup Bigblue has raised a $15 million Series A funding round. The company operates an order fulfillment platform for direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands. In other words, a D2C brand can outsource all things related to logistics to Bigblue so that they can focus on product and marketing. Runa Capital is leading the round, with LPV
Among the challenges of growing up with a visual impairment is learning and participating in the social and conversational body language used by sighted people. PeopleLens is a research project at Microsoft that helps the user stay aware of the locations and identities of the people around them, promoting richer and more spontaneous interactions. A
After a bullied teen died by suicide, a grieving mother last year sued the platform where the abuse had taken place — Snapchat — for not doing enough to protect its younger users. Another lawsuit, related to another suicide, followed last month. In response to the former, Snap banned the anonymous messaging apps that had
Lahore-based coworking space startup, Colabs, is set to roll-out a SaaS product to enable businesses meet back-office needs including company registration, talent sourcing and management, payroll processing and legal and tax compliance. It also plans to hire more staff, which will include increasing the product team for its SaaS workspace business service that is emerging
Glance has acquired India’s Gambit as the Google-backed firm looks to supercharge its mobile games offerings and introduce NFTs to its Gen-Z users, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed. Piyush Shah, co-founder of InMobi Group and COO of Glance, confirmed the acquisition but declined to share the financial terms of the deal. In an interview with
A pair of former TikTok content reviewers is suing the company, alleging that it failed to adequately support them as they engaged in the deeply disturbing work of removing objectionable videos from the social network. NPR first reported the lawsuit, which was filed Thursday in federal court. Plaintiffs Ashley Velez and Reece Young both did
Agtech startup SupPlant‘s flagship product is, essentially, a Babel fish for plants: leveraging a set of hardware sensors, the plants can tell you whether they’ve been drinking enough water, or whether they could do with an additional sip or two. In a world where under-watering has far more damaging results than over-watering, a non-tech-enabled farmer
Digits, the startup that is building a new take on accounting software through an approach that it describes as building a “Living Model” of a company’s financial activity, has brought in some money of its own to double down on growing its business. The company has raised $65 million, a Series C that CEO and
Late Thursday the European Union secured agreement on the detail of a major competition reform that will see the most powerful, intermediating tech platforms subject to a set of up-front rules on how they can and cannot operate — with the threat of fines of up to 10% of global annual turnover should they breach
At Apple’s March event, the company announced the Studio Display, a new, 27-inch external monitor that starts at $1,599 — a huge step down in price from the company’s only other monitor, the Pro Display XDR, which starts at $5,000. The announcement of the Studio Display is big news for many who have been waiting
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the latest year-end reports. Global spending across iOS,
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PT, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Thursday, March 24, 2022! I am happy to report that Haje is taking on the day’s startups section, as he will be sharing the Daily
Ola said on Thursday evening it has reached an agreement to acquire Avail Finance, a financial services startup that serves the blue-collar workforce, as the ride-hailing giant looks to expand its financial services offerings. The two startups did not disclose the terms of the deal. Avail Finance had raised about $38.5 million (including about $4.5
In Russia’s latest swipe at foreign social media giants since it started a land war in Europe by invading Ukraine late last month, the country’s internet censor has fired a warning shot at Google over what it describes as anti-Russian “information attacks” which it claims are being spread via YouTube — accusing the U.S. tech
Utility companies have a problem: Their “smart grids” were created to solve billing problems from a decade ago, not the needs and expectations from 2022 consumers with electric cars, solar panels and an obsession with real-time data. Copper Labs just raised $5.5 million to help them solve that problem, with an elegant little hardware device
Repairing a home that’s been destroyed in a hurricane, tornado, flood or fire can take quite a while, displacing homeowners during that time. Captain founder and CEO Demetrius Gray noted that following storms, like the Katrina and Sandy hurricanes, the average primary recovery period was 14 months. Smaller storms can still take up to five
A U.K.-based incubator focused on nonprofit startups that are addressing climate-related challenges through open-source data initiatives has announced the six startups which will be put through its 2022 program. Selected projects and platforms for the data-for-climate-focused accelerator program include a startup trying to prevent rainforest deforestation in Africa; one that’s hoping to help websites and
If you want to monitor the temperature, humidity and exposure over 100 square miles of forest, you’re going to spend a lot of time tying tech trees. But what if you could scatter your sensors the same way dandelions and elms scatter their seeds? UW researchers have put together devices light enough to be carried
Kenya-based agritech Apollo Agriculture, which helps farmers access high-quality farm inputs, financing and markets, plans to double the number of farmers it is serving by the end 2022 and to introduce other products that deliver more value per acre of land. This is after raising $40 million in Series B funding in the equity round