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
Few companies caught as much of a COVID tailwind as U.S. grocery-delivery giant Instacart. Reporting indicates Instacart’s 2020 revenues roughly tripled to around $1.5 billion. That epic pace of growth helped the company raise a series of large, high-priced financing rounds. In June 2020, Instacart raised $225 million at a $13.7 billion valuation. A month
Global plastic use is expected to double by 2040, with most plastic sent to landfills and only 13 percent recycled. According to CIEL (Center for International Environmental Law), plastic production and incineration could produce 2.8 gigatons of carbon dioxide every year by 2050. To help end the global plastic pollution, Australian enviro-tech startup Samsara Eco has developed
Twitter is rolling out the option for users to search for specific messages in their DMs, the company announced in a tweet. Up until now, you could only search your DMs for the names of people or group chats. With this new update, you can use the search bar to find specific messages using keywords.
Hold your horses, er, unicorns, folks. Time is running out on a serious savings opportunity. We refer, of course, to early-bird pricing on passes to TC Sessions: Mobility 2022, which takes place in-person on May 18-19 in San Mateo, California, with an online component on May 20. Why wouldn’t you act now to save $300
As developers build new features into software, they have to be sure that the new functionality doesn’t break what’s already there. So they often will roll it out slowly and see what happens using a technique of placing feature flags in the code. This is a proven way of controlling the rollout, but it requires
In the latest move by Russia to censor Western Internet services since it started a war by invading Ukraine, Google has confirmed that Russians are having problems accessing its news aggregator service, Google News, in the country. This follows an earlier report by the Interfax news agency which said the service had been blocked by
Twenty years ago, getting a human genome sequenced was a billion-dollar, international project. Today, you can get your dog’s genome sequenced by the end of the month for a few bucks. It speaks to the speed with which genetics has permeated our lives, but despite massive improvements to the technology, the process can still be
Dating app giant Match Group, already home to Tinder, Match, OkCupid, Hinge and others, is today launching the latest addition to its dating services lineup with Stir, an app designed exclusively for single parents. With the new release, the company aims to address the 20 million single parents in the U.S. who are under-served by
French startup Weglot has closed a $50 million Series A funding round (€45 million) from Partech. The company has built a translation solution for websites. It helps you add more languages to your site without a lot of tweaking and without having to switch to a different CMS or e-commerce platform. And this is key
For founders who want to work with people like them, New Era Capital Partners will fit that bill. Gideon Argov, Ran Simha and Ziv Conen were all building businesses before coming together at New Era. Simha is an engineer by trade, but went into finance at Lehman Brothers and a hedge fund before taking a
Instagram today is making a chronological feed available to all users, as earlier promised, alongside another new feed-filtering option that will allow you to scroll through posts from your favorite accounts. The features had been launched into limited testing starting in January but will now reach Instagram’s global user base by the end of the
Not-for-profit search engine Ecosia has started funnelling a portion of the profits it generates from serving ads against users’ searches into startups in the renewable energy space. This is in addition to the €350 million WorldFund which Ecosia recently incubated and launched last year to back climate-focused startups. To be clear, Ecosia is also continuing
Astronomer has grown quite a lot since we briefly profiled the company back in 2017. At that time, the scrappy data analytics company had scooped up $3.5 million in funding to develop its tool for what happens after you’ve collected a bunch of data, namely assembling and organizing it so the data can be analyzed.
Just as sea breezes propel sailboats across the sea on Earth, solar radiation might one day be able to propel spacecraft between the stars. Or at least that’s the hope of French startup Gama. The aerospace company was founded in 2020 by Louis de Gouyon Matignon, Thibaud Elziere and Andrew Nutter, whose goal is to
The first DJI Mavic turned the world of consumer drones on its head when it was released back in late-2016. The compact, foldable design launched a million copy cats around the world — including a number under the drone giant’s own umbrella. Compact certainly isn’t the first word that comes to mind in the enterprise
South Korea’s LG Energy Solution, which supplies electric vehicle batteries to Tesla, Lucid Motors, General Motors and Proterra, said on Thursday it is investing $1.4 billion (1.7 trillion KRW) to build a cylindrical battery plant in Queen Creek, Arizona. The move is a clear indication that LG Energy is increasing its presence in the United
I would put window washing fairly high (so to speak) on the list of jobs it makes sense to automate. Certainly the gig qualifies as both dirty and dangerous — and surprisingly, doesn’t come with all that much in the way of hazard pay. That’s something you would think might come standard with a job
The Yuga Labs investor deck from February is a fascinating document, bringing together gaming, a new currency, and an ever-growing pool of digital assets that can be bought and sold by fans of Yuga’s well-known NFT project Bored Ape Yacht Club. I ran through the deck last night and again this morning to get a
Twitter has been spotted working on making TweetDeck a premium feature through its Twitter Blue subscription service. According to reverse app engineer Jane Manchun Wong, who searches the code of mobile apps to spot features and upcoming changes in development, the social media giant is currently working on the addition to Twitter’s premium offering, adding
Vertical farming has long done a very good job with a very thin sliver of the agricultural marketplace. Specifically, years of advancements in hydroponics and greenhouse farming have made it possible to grow a fine head of lettuce and other leafy greens under the glow of LED lighting. Now, suddenly, everyone wants in on the
Google Cloud today launched its Suspend/Resume feature for virtual machines into general availability. Before it launched this feature as an alpha a couple of years ago, the only option developers had were to stop and start instances. With Suspend/Resume, the experience is more akin to closing and opening the lid on your laptop, Google argues.