Cleanly, the YC-backed company that looked to bring tech to the laundry industry, has today announced a merger with NextCleaners. The New York-based companies signed an all-stock deal after more than a year of negotiations, with Cleanly founder and CEO Tom Harari serving as Chairman of the Board and Next CEO Kam Saifi will stay
Google VP Vint Cerf has voiced support for a single set of standards for Internet platforms to apply around political advertising. Speaking to the UK parliament’s Democracy and Digital Technologies Committee today, the long time Googler — who has been chief Internet evangelist at the tech giant since 2005 — was asked about the targeting
Electric, the platform that delivers IT services to small and medium businesses, has today announced that it has raised an additional $14.5 million on its Series B from 01 Advisors, the fund led by Twitter alums Dick Costolo and Adam Bain. Though the funding is a part of the company’s Series B financing, founder Ryan
MessageBird, the Amsterdam-headquartered cloud communications platform backed by Accel in the U.S. and Europe’s Atomico, is unveiling another new product today, this time taking aim at the $350 billion customer service market. Dubbed Inbox.ai and positioned as “Slack for external communications,” the new product — which is to be offered largely for free — enables
Facebook’s latest colonization of Instagram has begun. Facebook is testing the option to cross-post Stories to Instagram, instead of just vice-versa. Hopefully, that means the two apps will finally sync up the ‘already viewed’ status of cross-posted Stories so we don’t have to watch re-runs any more, as I harped about in January. If fully
As Stanford, Princeton, Columbia and others shutter classrooms to limit the coronavirus outbreak, college educators around the country are clambering to move their classes online. At the same time, tech companies that enable remote learning are finding a surge in usage and signups. Zoom Video Communications, a videoconferencing company, has been crushing it in the
At least it’s over. The markets endured their worst day of trading of this young year as the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 2,000 points to close at 23,850.79 — a 7.79% decline. The Nasdaq Composite Index fell 624.94, to close at 7,950.68, and losses to the S&P 500 triggered a temporary halt on trading
The tradition of sitting through a barrage of ads in exchange for being entertained began with radio, flourished with the arrival of television and followed the mass migration online. As the massive $35 billion in advertising revenue captured by YouTube and Instagram in the last quarter indicated, online advertising around social media, influencers and streamers
In the age of coronavirus, we all have to resist the urge to touch our faces. It’s how the virus can travel from doorknobs or other objects to your mucus membranes and get you sick. Luckily, a startup called Slightly Robot had already developed a wristband to stop another type of harmful touching — trichotillomania,
‘We started as a side project… and side projects can’t afford offices’ Greg Kumparak @grg / 7 hours When Zapier was founded in 2011, it was a side project for three friends from Missouri who wanted to make it easier to connect any one web app to another. Nine years, millions of users and around
Today was an awful day for the stock market, with global and domestic equities falling sharply as the world digested a collapse in oil prices, and yet another weekend of the spread of COVID-19. All major U.S. indices were down, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq falling the least of the three, slipping a comparatively modest 7.29%,
On Monday, Facebook announced the addition of two new names to its board of directors, Nancy Killefer and Tracey T. Travis. Killefer brings potentially valuable government insight to Facebook, as she served in the U.S. Department of the Treasury during the Obama administration. With last year’s departure of former Clinton administration chief of staff Erskine
TFLiving, looking to bring amenities to residential and commercial spaces, has today announced the close of a $4.8 million seed financing led by Camber Creek. Courtside Ventures, and other strategic investors, also participated in the round. TFLiving uses technology to connect service providers, like massage therapists, yoga instructors and dog walkers, with property managers and
According to a report from 9to5mac, Apple could be working on full cursor support for the next major version of iOS and iPadOS. The report is based on code of an early version of iOS 14 and iPadOS 14. If Apple ships that new feature, it means that you’ll be able to use a Bluetooth
A small consolation in the growing COVID-19 crisis is that some of our moderate germophobia has begun to feel like a minor super power. As I got settled for a cross-country flight last week, I took out my hand wipes and did a whole number on the screen, tray table and arm rests, and this
Goodlord, the London ‘proptech’ startup that offers cloud-based software to help estate agents, landlords and tenants manage the rental process, appears to have achieved somewhat of a turn-around after it fell into difficulty two years ago. Since then the company installed a new CEO and CTO, and raised further funding. Today Goodlord is announcing its
Australia’s privacy watchdog is suing Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica data breach — which, back in 2018, became a global scandal that wiped billions off the tech giant’s share price yet only led to Facebook picking up a $5BN FTC fine. Should Australia prevail in its suit against the tech giant the monetary penalty could
Box has joined a number of tech companies supporting employees to work remotely from home in response the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, known as COVID-19. It’s applying the policy to all staff, regardless of location. Late yesterday Box co-founder Aaron Levie tweeted a statement detailing the cloud computing company’s response to COVID-19 — to, as
The European Parliament has instructed vulnerable staff with a pre-existing health condition to work from home on account of increased personal risk related to the outbreak of the COVID-19 novel coronavirus, according to sources and an email reviewed by TechCrunch. The European Commission confirmed its first cases of coronavirus last week, after a staffer at
Aziz Gilani Contributor Aziz Gilani is a Managing Director at Mercury, where he focuses on investments in enterprise SaaS, Cloud and data science startups. More posts by this contributor The True Impact Of The Snapchat Writedown For Entrepreneurs If you were a software company employee or venture capitalist in Silicon Valley before 1993, chances are
Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. This week, a post from Sequoia Capital sounding the alarm of the coronavirus’s impact on businesses is reaching far corners of tech communities around the world,
Extra Crunch is now past its first birthday. Over the past year, we’ve learned a lot, made some changes and generally found our groove. Toward the end of 2019, former TechCrunch writer Alex Wilhelm returned to the publication to help grow Extra Crunch, though he still writes for the main site as well. His daily
ZenGo is expanding beyond the basic features of a cryptocurrency wallet — letting you hold, send and receive crypto assets. You can now set aside some of your crypto assets to earn interests. In other words, ZenGo now also acts like a savings account. The company has partnered with two DeFi projects for the new feature.
Postmates announced today it would be adding a “non-contact delivery option,” for those concerned about COVID-19 exposure from workers bringing them food. Instacart set up something similar earlier this week, announcing sales were 10x higher this week over last due to coronavirus concerns and rolling out the “leave it at my door” option for customers
Apple this week alerted developers to a new set of App Store Review Guidelines which detail which apps will be accepted or rejected, and what apps are allowed to do. The changes to the guidelines impact reviews, push notifications, Sign in with Apple, data collection and storage, mobile device management, and more, the company says.
As of this writing, COVID-19 has killed more than 3,400 people around the globe and the coronavirus has infected tens of thousands more. But its impact has gone much further, causing major disruptions in public markets and leading corporations to pull out of conferences and delay travel. Big tech companies are asking workers to stay
To take on the electric future, General Motors turns to its past Ed Niedermeyer 9 hours Ed Niedermeyer Contributor Ed Niedermeyer is an author, columnist and co-host of The Autonocast. His book, Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, was released in August 2019. More posts by this contributor GM reveals ‘Ultium,’ the heart of
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
If you’re an early-stage startup founder with a big vision and even bigger dreams, join us and more than 10,000 other like-minded startuppers at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2020 on September 14-16. Silicon Valley’s premier early-stage startup extravaganza focuses on founders, investors and startup experts determined to disrupt and reshape technology. Attending is awesome, but
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was packed with news, most of it pretty bad. But Zoom did well, so there’s that. Happily we had our dynamic pairing, Alex “Have I Died” Wilhelm and Danny “Good Hair” Crichton on hand to parse