Google has buried a major change in legal jurisdiction for its U.K. users as part of a wider update to its terms and conditions that’s been announced today and which it says is intended to make its conditions of use clearer for all users. It says the update to its T&Cs is the first major
“The Mandalorian” was a pretty good show. On that most people seem to agree. But while a successful live-action Star Wars TV series is important in its own right, the way this particular show was made represents a far greater change, perhaps the most important since the green screen. The cutting edge tech (literally) behind
Quibi, the mobile-only streaming service from Jeffrey Katzenberg, is now open for pre-orders. The company declined to fully show off its app only a month ago during demos of its “TurnStyle” technology at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, but it appears the app is ready nonetheless. Quibi is now listed on both Apple’s
Six months ago or thereabouts, a group of engineers and developers with backgrounds from the National Security Agency, Google and Amazon Web Services had an idea. Data is valuable for helping developers and engineers to build new features and better innovate. But that data is often highly sensitive and out of reach, kept under lock
It sounds like Liquid Death has won over investors with its promise to “murder your thirst” — the startup is announcing that it’s raised $9 million in Series A funding. Liquid Death sells water in a tallboy aluminum can, and it’s expanding the lineup with a sparkling water can that it plans to start shipping
Hold that tweet — and add another one. Twitter is adding a new feature for mobile users to make it easier to link dispersed ‘shower thoughts’ together — and another thing styleee. Per 9to5Mac, the feature — which Twitter tweeted about yesterday — is slowly rolling out to its iOS app. (At the time of writing
ChartHop, a startup that aims to modernize and automate the organizational chart, announced a $5 million seed investment today led by Andreessen Horowitz. A big crowd of other investors also participated including Abstract Ventures, the a16z Cultural Leadership Fund, CoFound, Cowboy Ventures, Flybridge Capital, Shrug Capital, Work Life Ventures and a number of unnamed individual
HungryPanda, a food delivery service for Chinese communities in cities around the world, announced today it has raised $20 million in funding. The round was led by investors 83North and Felix Capital and will be used on hiring, product development and global expansion, particularly in the United States. The startup, which did not disclose its
The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has intervened to raise concerns about Google’s plan to scoop up the health and activity data of millions of Fitbit users — at a time when the company is under intense scrutiny over how extensively it tracks people online and for antitrust concerns. Google confirmed its plan to acquire
LinkedIn has cornered the market when it comes to putting your own professional profile online and using it to network for jobs, industry connections and professional development. But when it comes to looking at a chart of the people, and specifically the leadership teams, who make up organizations more holistically, the Microsoft-owned network comes up
Teikametrics, a startup that helps retailers optimize their online ad spending, has raised $15 million in additional funding. The company launched with the goal of helping Amazon sellers advertise more effectively. More recently, it launched a similar partnership with Walmart. CEO Alasdair McLean-Foreman said that on both platforms, the startup’s Flywheel platform can improve the ad-buying
Google Cloud today announced that its new Seoul region, its first in Korea, is now open for business. The region, which it first talked about last April, will feature three availability zones and support for virtually all of Google Cloud’s standard service, ranging from Compute Engine to BigQuery, Bigtable and Cloud Spanner. With this, Google
The lead European Union privacy regulator for most of big tech has put out its annual report which shows another major bump in complaints filed under the bloc’s updated data protection framework, underlining the ongoing appetite EU citizens have for applying their rights. But what the report doesn’t show is any firm enforcement of EU
Spotify’s ongoing investments in the podcast-streaming side of its business helped boost podcast listening on its service by 200% last year. But today, only 16% of Spotify’s monthly listeners are engaging with podcasts — a number the company today hopes to nudge higher by redesigning the podcast side of its streaming app. The new layout
Over the past 12 months, Maven, the benefits provider focused on women’s health and family planning, has expanded its customer base to include more than 100 companies, and grown its telehealth services to include 1,700 providers across 20 specialties — for services like shipping breast milk, finding a doula and egg freezing, fertility treatments, surrogacy
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is the first Equity Shot in what feels like a long time, so, let me explain. Most of the time Equity comes out on Friday. It’s a mix of news and chat and venture happenings. It’s fun!
TikTok announced today the introduction of a new set of parental controls, called “Family Safety Mode,” designed to let parents set limits on their teenage children’s use of the TikTok mobile app. The suite of features includes screen time management controls, limits on direct messages, and a restricted mode that limits the appearance of inappropriate
“Yes.” That was Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s simple answer when I asked if he thought he’d achieved what he set out to do in his first year. A year ago, he took the helm of Google’s cloud operations — which includes G Suite — and set about giving the organization a sharpened focus by
In the murky world of crypto and blockchain, taking disputes to a traditional court would either land both the plaintiff and the defendant in jail or confuse the court to the point of total befuddlement. You can just imagine the scenario: “What is a DAO?” “It’s a decentralized autonomous organization, your honor.” “Please speak in
With the days of desert-themed releases officially behind it, Google today announced the first developer preview of Android 11, which is now available as system images for Google’s own Pixel devices, starting with the Pixel 2. As of now, there is no way to install the updates over the air. That’s usually something the company
BluBracket, a new security startup from the folks who brought you Vera, came out of stealth today and announced a $6.5 million seed investment. Unusual Ventures led the round with participation by Point72 Ventures, SignalFire and Firebolt Ventures. The company was launched by Ajay Aurora and Prakash Linga, who until last year were CEO and
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Fintech is what you hear about constantly, but probably aren’t as read up on as you’d like to be. Neither am I. Luckily we have a new report concerning fintech investing to unpack and explore.
Microsoft announced a major update to its Dynamics 365 product line today, which correlates to the growing amount of data in the enterprise, and how to collect and understand that data to produce better customer experiences. This is, in fact, the goal of all vendors in this space including Salesforce and Adobe, who are also
European Union lawmakers have set out a first bundle of proposals for a new digital strategy for the bloc, one that’s intended to drive digitalization across all industries and sectors — and enable what Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has described as ‘A Europe fit for the Digital Age‘. It could also be summed
Apple says the coronavirus outbreak will hurt its manufacturing and sales, Jeff Bezos makes a big commitment to fighting climate change and SpaceX launches more Starlink satellites. Here’s your Daily Crunch for February 18, 2020. 1. Apple will miss revenue forecast as coronavirus impacts its manufacturing and sales In a letter to investors, Apple said
Robotic process automation — the ability to automate certain repetitive software-based tasks to free up people to focus on work that computers cannot do — has become a major growth area in the world of IT. Today, a startup called Aisera that is coming out of stealth has taken this idea and supercharged it by
In the wake of the $5.3 billion sale of banking API provider Plaid to Visa — a deal generally lauded as intelligent for the larger company — fintech became an even hotter part of the venture capital and startup landscape. While companies in the broad fintech and finservices spaces were already attractive bets for private
Facebook may make it easier to escape its ranking algorithm and explore the News Feed in different formats. Facebook has internally prototyped a tabbed version of the News Feed for mobile that includes that the standard Most Relevant feed, the existing Most Recent feed of reverse chronological posts that was previously buried as a sidebar
We all know the cloud infrastructure market is extremely lucrative; analyst firm Canalys reports that the sector reached $30.2 billion in revenue for Q4 2019. Cloud numbers are hard to parse because companies often lump cloud revenue into a single bucket regardless of whether it’s generated by infrastructure or software. What’s interesting about Canalys’s numbers
Is “Twitter Stories” on the way? Or will we just get tools to send prettier tweets? Well now Twitter has the talent for both as it’s just acquired Chroma Labs. Co-founded by Instagram Boomerang inventor John Barnett, Chroma Labs’ Chroma Stories app let you fill in stylish layout templates and frames for posting collages and