The JEDI drama never stops. The $10 billion, decade long cloud contract has produced a series of twists and turns since the project was announced in 2018. These include everything from court challenges to the president getting involved to accusations of bias and conflict of interest. It has had all this and more. Today, in
Why do serial entrepreneurs keep jumping back in? What things might you learn the third, fourth, or fifth time around? To find out, Extra Crunch Managing Editor Eric Eldon spoke to Drift CEO and founder David Cancel at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco. Cancel has spent more than 20 years founding SaaS companies, with exits including
Over the past year or two, Squarespace has been expanding beyond website-building with new products like email marketing and its first acquisition (of an online scheduling tool) . Today, it’s announcing a move into social media content creation with the acquisition of Unfold, which offers templates for creating stories on Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat — you
EV Connect, the Los Angeles-based company that sells software to manage electric vehicle charging, has raised $12 million in a Series B round led by investors Mitsui & Co. and Ecosystem Integrity Fund. The company has raised $25 million to date. EV Connect’s cloud-based platform has an open standard architecture that is designed to be
LabGenius, a London-based startup applying AI and “robotic automation” to protein drug discovery, has raised $10 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Lux Capital and Obvious Ventures, with participation from Felicis Ventures, Inovia Capital, Air Street Capital and existing investors. Also investing is Recursion Pharmaceuticals’ founder and CEO Chris Gibson, as
The Snap-back continues. Snapchat blew past earnings expectations for a big beat in Q3, as it added 7 million daily active users this quarter to hit 210 million, up 13% year-over-year. Snap also beat on revenue, notching $446 million, which is up a whopping 50% year-over-year, at a loss of $0.04 EPS. That flew past
When Bill McDermott announced he was stepping down as CEO at SAP a couple of weeks ago, it certainly felt like a curious move — but he landed on his feet pretty quickly. ServiceNow announced he would be taking over as CEO there. The transition will take place at year-end. If you’re wondering what happened to
Medium is announcing significant changes to its Partner Program, where subscribers pay for access to exclusive content, and the revenue gets split with writers. The biggest change is that writers will now be compensated based “primarily” on reading time, rather than claps. In a post, Medium’s Emma Smith describes reading time as “a closer measure
Startup founders have a million things to worry about every day. Finding product-market fit, great talent and and a sustainable plan for constant growth are top of mind, but perhaps most importantly, they need to keep the lights on, whether it’s by raising venture capital or managing cash flows while bootstrapping. The flip side to
Pizza Hut this morning announced plans to pilot Zume’s signature round pizza boxes. Testing for now will be extremely limited — in fact, it’s only happening at a single location in Phoenix, Ariz. The boxes are one of a number of different technologies being pushed by the SF Bay startup. In fact, my recent conversation
The Ethereum community is hard at work on Ethereum 2.0, the next major upgrade of its blockchain. It is an incredibly challenging task, and the Ethereum Foundation has been completely transparent about its roadmap and progress. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.
Bootstrapped tech company Doist, the company behind popular task management Todoist, is releasing a major update called Todoist Foundations — the update should be rolled out over the next 24 hours. As the name suggests, it lays foundations for many new features down the road. But there are already some interesting improvements. Task lists in
Heaven forbid a political candidate’s Facebook account gets hacked. They might spread disinformation…like they’re already allowed to do in Facebook ads… Today Facebook made a slew of announcements designed to stop 2020 election interference. “The bottom line here is that elections have changed significantly since 2016,” and so has Facebook in response, CEO Mark Zuckerberg
When Okta launched its $50 million Okta Ventures investment fund in April, one of its investments was in an early stage privacy startup called DataGrail. Today, the companies announced a partnership that they hope will help boost DataGrail, while providing Okta customers with a privacy tool option. DataGrail CEO and co-founder Daniel Barber says that
Lilium, the Munich-based startup developing an on-demand “air taxi” service, has released its latest flight video — this time demonstrating a successful transition from vertical flight (liftoff) to horizontal flight. The company is also announcing the completion of its first manufacturing facility and plans for a much larger second factory in preparation for a 2025
Media monitoring — where news sources and other public information outlets are scanned regularly for mentions of specific organizations — is a well established service used by companies for market intelligence and to measure sentiment around their businesses. Today, London-based Signal AI, which has built a substantial operation in the area, has raised $25 million funding
Supermercato24, the Italian same-day grocery delivery service, has acquired Szopi.pl, an on-demand grocery delivery service in Poland. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although I understand it is a mixture of cash and stock. Szopi had raised €1.7M from various investors, including Impera Alfa. The acquisition sees the two companies join forces to speed up
As it looks to modernize its operations, the Los Angeles Fire Department is turning to a number of new technologies, including expanding its fleet of drones for a slew of new deployments. One of the largest fire departments in the U.S., next to New York and Chicago, the LAFD has a budget of roughly $691
Last week, Apple caved to the Chinese government and pulled an app called HKmap.live that was being used by Hong Kong protestors to crowdsource the location of police forces. While Apple CEO Tim Cook defended Apple’s stance, the move is a reminder that Apple is the only judge and jury regarding what’s acceptable in the
India said on Monday that it is moving ahead with its plan to revise existing rules to regulate intermediaries — social media apps and others that rely on users to create their content — as they are causing “unimaginable disruption” to democracy. In a legal document filed with the country’s apex Supreme Court, the Ministry
Bob Stutz has had a storied career with enterprise software companies including stints at Siebel Systems, SAP, Microsoft and Salesforce. He announced on Facebook last week that he’s leaving his job as head of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and heading back to SAP as president of customer experience. Bob Stutz Facebook announcement Constellation Research founder
WeWork, once valued at $47 billion, will be worth as little as $7.5 billion on paper as SoftBank takes control of the struggling co-working business, CNBC reports. SoftBank, a long-time WeWork investor, plans to invest between $4 billion and $5 billion in exchange for new and existing shares, according to CNBC . The deal, expected
The Australian scene industry has, in the last few years, started to generate a swathe of startups that have broken through internationally. Prior to this current era, Australia was scene has very much a local market in tech terms, with only occasional breakouts, like Atlassian . In fact, it’s now gaining a reputation as a
One ongoing theme in the world of smart homes has been the emergence of gadgets and other tools that can turn “ordinary” objects and systems into “connected” ones — removing the need to replace things wholesale that still essentially work, while still applying technology to improve the ways that they can be used. In the
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Pixel 4 review: Google ups its camera game Brian Heater was impressed by the improvements in Google’s latest smartphone, including camera
Chad Hurley is hunting for what comes after fantasy sports. He envisions a new way for fans to play by watching live and cheering for the athletes they love. Beyond a few scraps of info the YouTube co-founder would share and his new startup’s job listings revealed, we don’t know what Hurley’s game will feel
Microsoft wants to make it as easy as possible to migrate to Microsoft 365, and today the company announced it had purchased a Canadian startup called Mover to help. The companies did not reveal the acquisition price. Microsoft 365 is the company’s bundle that includes Office 365, Microsoft Teams, security tools and workflow. The idea
The popular TC Hackathon is back in action at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. We’re limiting the competition to 500 participants and seats are going fast. Don’t miss your chance to put your creative skills to the test and compete against some of the world’s top code poets. Oh, you’ll love this part — it
Europe’s chief data protection watchdog has raised concerns over contractual arrangements between Microsoft and the European Union institutions which are making use of its software products and services. The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) opened an enquiry into the contractual arrangements between EU institutions and the tech giant this April, following changes to rules governing
Google’s first-party hardware has always been a drop in the bucket of global smartphone sales. Pixel devices have managed to crack the top five in the U.S. and Western Europe, but otherwise represent less than 1% of the overall market. It’s true, of course, that the company got a late start, largely watching on the