Apple today is announcing a series of coming updates for AirTag and the Find My network aimed at addressing the problem of AirTag accessories being used to stalk individuals or people’s property without their knowledge or consent. Following the AirTags’ spring 2021 introduction, numerous media reports and updates from local police departments have warned of
Right on schedule, Google today announced the first developer release of Android 13. These very early releases, which are only meant for developers and aren’t available through over-the-air updates, typically don’t include too many user-facing changes. That’s true this time as well, but even in this early release, the company is already showing off a
Twine, a company that provides networking tools for virtual events and remote teams, will soon bring its services to Zoom thanks to its just-closed acquisition of the Y Combinator-backed startup, Glimpse, which had developed a “speech matching” platform designed for virtual events. Glimpse’s idea was to offer a way to facilitate the connections that typically
For most people, mention of the word “taxes” conjures up unpleasant things like tedious processes, mountains of paperwork and shelling out a lot of money to the government. But one startup is on a mission to make taxes less…well, dreadful and an actual benefit. Mountain View, California-based Neo.Tax wants to apply machine learning to company
Messenger is rolling out its “Split Payments” feature to all iOS and Android users in the United States, Meta announced on Wednesday. The company began testing the feature late last year as a way for users to share the cost of bills and expenses through the app. Meta sees the new feature as a “free
Data quality — the practice of testing and ensuring that the data and data sets you are using are what you expect them to be — has become a key component in the world of data science. Data may be the “new oil”; but if it’s too crude, you may not be able to use
Meet Insify, an insurtech startup that raised a $17 million (€15 million) Series A round led by Accel. The company wants to modernize the insurance market. Instead of focusing on the consumer market like many insurtech startups, Insify has picked a different path. It’s a pure B2B play as Insify focuses on Europe’s small and
Tinder is bringing back the idea of the “blind date” through a new in-app feature, launching today. Except, in this case, Tinder isn’t sending out two members out on a blind date together — it’s introducing them to one another through a social chatting feature that will allow them to interact and chat before they
Meal deliveries in Vietnamese cities typically take less than half an hour, but grocery deliveries are lagging behind, sometimes taking up to two to three hours, says Rino founder Trung Thanh Nguyen. By creating a vertically-integrated logistics infrastructure centered around “dark stores,” or stores set up for order fulfillment only, Nguyen says Rino can cut
Financial apps are proliferating across Southeast Asia, making things like bookkeeping or securing an online loan easier. But this means fintechs need access to large amounts of data that they can use to verify customer identity, creditworthiness or aggregate information from online accounts. Brick wants to simplify the process with a suite of APIs that
Microsoft is working to warm lawmakers up to its plans to bring a collection of the world’s most popular video games under its wing. The company announced its intention to buy Activision Blizzard last month in a deal that would be worth $68.7 billion — the largest gaming acquisition of all time, if the deal
When Docker announced it was selling Docker Enterprise in 2019, it was a big surprise to industry watchers. Perhaps an even bigger surprise was that the buyer was Mirantis, a company best known for commercializing the OpenStack project. After the sale, Docker pivoted to a developer-focused company and reported last week it had $50 million
French startup Alan currently insures more than 200,000 people with its own health insurance contracts. The company is expanding its business in two different ways — it wants to offer more services to turn its insurance app into a health superapp, and it is announcing today that it wants to sell its infrastructure and tech
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 Dear Sophie: When is the H-1B
Michael Redd Contributor Michael Redd spent 12 seasons playing in the NBA and on the U.S. Olympic team. He is now co-founder and chairman of 22 Ventures. The Theranos scandal demonstrates how quickly investors will fall over themselves to seize a golden egg deal. When investors pay so much attention to only the (supposed) big
The widespread success of platforms ranging from Second Life to Roblox shows that people are open to virtual worlds where they can socialize, play games, exchange information, and share some laughs. More recently, the rise of virtual HQs, Meta’s investment in interactive social software, and a handful of acquisitions by Microsoft signal that the metaverse
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Wednesday, February 9, 2022! I just got a look at the initial run-of-show for Early Stage in April, and it looks wicked good. Also, I’m
European cloud computing companies have raised the alarm over what they say is a “critical loophole” in the EU’s flagship plan to tackle anti-competitive behaviors by gatekeeping digital giants. In an open letter sent to competition commissioner and EVP Margrethe Vestager this week, 41 European cloud enterprises called for an urgent clarification to be made
Today, if a hematologist wanted to dive into the exact organization and structure of your blood cells, they’d probably need a microscope in a lab. Scopio, an Israel-based startup that just closed a $50 million Series C round, argues that soon, a lot of that work could be done with nothing more than a laptop.
Consumers spent more than $8.5 billion in 2020 on camping reservations across the U.S., but the camping industry itself has yet to be fully digitized. Today, reserving a space at some campgrounds, both public and private, may require a phone call. And the reservation itself is still often recorded using old-school systems, like pen and paper.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created all sorts of real estate issues for companies as it forced so many employees to work from home, leaving empty space all over the globe. And while there is no shortage of technology out there for landlords, there are fewer options for commercial real estate tenants and brokers. Enter Occupier.
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha and Alex crawled through the Metaverse, leaning on Facebook’s latest earnings and
Reading back through a transcript from Facebook’s investor-disappointing fourth-quarter earnings call has solidified my perspective that we need a third-party, benevolent central entity for the metaverse. A sort of central digital clearinghouse that can transport me from place to place, inclusive of the platform-locked areas that will inevitably come to constitute a portion of our
Kenya-based EV startup BasiGo has closed $4.3 million in seed funding, three months after setting up operations in East Africa’s biggest economy, to provide clean-energy mass transit vehicles in a country that is heavily-reliant on fossil-fuel buses. The startup said it will use the new funding to set up an assembly plant in Nairobi and
Census, a startup building a data layer between business operations and a company’s data warehouse, confirmed an Axios story from earlier this week that it has raised a $60 million Series B on a valuation of $630 million. CEO Boris Jabes said that from the start he wanted to build something that would allow mostly
Last year we covered Longevica, which had raised $13 million after researching supplements to increase human longevity. Later that year we covered its launch of an open research tool for scientists to tracks the effects of more than 1,000 pharmacological compounds for testing drugs. This is just one example of the boom that is going
The Note is dead. After more than a decade, Samsung has officially closed the book on the transformative phablet. The brand will still exist, but only in a kind of liminal marketing capacity. “We’re thinking more and more of the Note as the experience,” a rep told me on a recent briefing call. As the
AMD CEO Lisa Su joins Emily Chang to discuss their latest earnings results, the future of the semiconductor industry, and when we can expect the chip shortage to fizzle out. Also, she responds to Pat Gelsinger’s video claiming that “AMD is in the rear-view mirror” for them.
The MENA region has about 400 million people with $500 billion in annual savings. But as a relatively young population, most of them have minimal equity market and investment exposure. Replicating the success of Robinhood in the U.S., some platforms are looking to create investors out of the region. One such is Egypt-based Thndr. The
French startup Silvr has raised a $20.6 million (€18 million) Series A funding round and has opened a $128 million (€112 million) debt line for its activities. Silvr wants to offer new credit opportunities for e-commerce and software-as-a-service companies. Essentially, it wants to bring the Pipe and Clearco experience to Europe. XAnge, Otium, Bpifrance, Eurazeo