March 29, 2019
In San Francisco, a fight over a homeless shelter shines a harsh light on a conflicted population
As of 2017, there were roughly 7,000 people living without homes in San Francisco, a number that comprises minors — a lot of them. The San Francisco Unified School District…
Valve is ready to sell its own full VR hardware getup. The gaming giant behind some classic titles and the ubiquitous Steam store has revealed a teaser image on its…
Toast, the restaurant management platform, has raised $250M at a $2.7B valuation
Restaurant sales hit $825 billion last year in the U.S., but with margins averaging at only three to five percent per business, they’re always looking for an edge on efficiency…
Apple sells wireless charging AirPods, cancels charger days later
“Works with AirPower mat”. Apparently not. It looks to me like Apple doesn’t treat customers with the same “high standard” of care it apparently reserves for its hardware quality. Nine…
Pink confetti fell from the ceiling Friday as Lyft co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer celebrated their company’s IPO. The stock offering was a bona fide success, with shares selling…
Should your company do an April Fools’ Day prank this year?
No. No. Absolutely not.
ServiceNow teams with Workplace by Facebook on service chatbot
One of the great things about enterprise chat applications, beyond giving employees a common channel to communicate, is the ability to integrate with other enterprise applications. Today, Workplace, Facebook’s enterprise…
Apple cancels AirPower product, citing inability to meet its high standards for hardware
Apple has canceled the AirPower product completely, citing difficulty meeting its own standards. “After much effort, we’ve concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards and we have cancelled the…
Tyler Barriss, a prolific and seemingly unremorseful repeat swatter and bomb hoaxer whose fakery got a man killed in 2017, has been sentenced to 20 years in prison. This hopefully…
Viacom-owned kids streaming service Noggin acquires educational app Sparkler
Viacom’s Nickelodeon is doubling down on the educational aspects of its preschooler-focused streaming service, Noggin, with the acquisition of the early childhood learning platform Sparkler. Announced on Friday, the deal…
1stdibs, the high-end online marketplace, just nabbed $76 million in Series D funding
1stdibs began pushing the antiques business into the 21st century long ago. Apparently, investors think it can push further and faster with $76 million in new funding. That’s how much…
Featured Article
How a Google side project evolved into a $4B company
How did Niantic happen? How did the company behind Pokémon GO and (soon) Harry Potter: Wizards Unite come to be? When anyone talks about Niantic, they generally mention that it’s “a Google spinout” and move on. As if that’s something that just happens every day. That dozens of people within a massive company come together,…
Featured Article
The Niantic EC-1
Few software companies have transformed the way we think about moving through physical space like Niantic. The creators of Pokémon GO and soon Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, Niantic has become an incredible unicorn success story, with a reported valuation of nearly $4 billion. One part AR, one part gaming, one part location, and many parts…
Daily Crunch: Lyft debuts on Nasdaq
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…
Lyft pops 21% on its first day of trading on Nasdaq after raising $2.2B in its IPO at a $24B valuation
Ride-hailing startup Lyft may bear the distinction of having highest net loss of any maiden public company ever going public, but despite that, it made its debut in a high gear…
Sidewalk Labs launches an app to crowdsource public space surveys
Alphabet’s urban planning subsidiary announced today the launch of CommonSpace. The new app was created to give park operators and community members a place to enter and organize observations about…
Focaldata thinks it has some answers for campaigners in the age of Trump and Brexit
Political parties, campaigns and brands can’t get an accurate and cost-effective understanding of opinion in small geographic areas, like the constituencies of lawmakers. This is a big problem in political…
Apple to close Texture on May 28, following launch of Apple News+
A year ago, Apple acquired the digital newsstand app Texture to form the basis of its new subscription-based service, Apple News+, which launched on Monday. As some have expected, the…
Alibaba has acquired Teambition, a China-based Trello and Asana rival, in its enterprise push
Alibaba has made an acquisition as it continues to square up to the opportunity in enterprise services in China and beyond, akin to what its U.S. counterpart Amazon has done…
Huawei’s chairman has harsh words for the US government
The past couple of years have marked some steep ups and downs for Huawei. Just this morning, the company posted a 25 percent raise in profit, to $8.84 billion, in…
Nativo has acquired SimpleReach, a move that Nativo CEO Justin Choi said will pair his company’s distribution system for native ads with SimpleReach’s measurement tools. “If you can’t measure the…
Form D filings, logistics, and Niantic
From Extra Crunch I wrote a comprehensive look at the new norms around Form D filings, which are filed with the SEC after a venture round closes. Those who’ve read…
Marketing tech vendors need to find right balance between digital and human interactions
As I walked the long halls of Adobe Summit this week in Las Vegas and listened to the company’s marketing and data integration story, I thought about the obvious disconnect…
Featured Article
Snap CEO’s sister Caroline Spiegel starts a no-visuals porn site
If you took the photos and videos out of pornography, could it appeal to a new audience? Caroline Spiegel’s first startup Quinn aims to bring some imagination to adult entertainment. Her older brother, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, spent years trying to convince people his app wasn’t just for sexy texting. Now Caroline is building a website…
Sony’s streaming service Crackle sells majority stake to Chicken Soup for the Soul
Crackle sells to Chicken Soup for the Soul. That’s not an early April Fools’ joke, but rather the news that Sony’s aging streaming service Crackle has now found a new…
User Interviews, a platform for product feedback, raises $5 million
It’s not uncommon to hear CEOs and business leaders talk about focusing on the consumer. But the only way to build for the consumer is to hear what they want,…
Sinemia says canceled accounts are defense against subscriber misuse
Every time we publish a story about MoviePass competitor Sinemia, a funny thing happens: our Twitter mentions explode. Seriously, follow the reactions to this post and see for yourself. A…
Daimler Trucks buys a majority stake in self-driving tech company Torc Robotics
Daimler Trucks just announced that it’s acquiring a majority stake in Torc Robotics, a deal that will see the two companies collaborating on the development of Level 4 self-driving trucks.…
I’ve never had a meeting quite like the one I had with Built Robotics. Within about 10 minutes of meeting Built’s co-founder Noah Ready-Campbell, we’re steering an 80,000-pound construction excavator…
Huawei books $8.8B profit for 2018 as consumer devices become top moneymaker
Despite an ongoing tussle with the U.S. government, signs look positive for Huawei. The Chinese firm just released its end of year report for 2018 and profit is up 25…
