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. Lyft pulls e-bikes in light of apparent battery fires
Lyft recently won the right to launch its pedal-assist bikes in San Francisco, but now it’s pulling those bikes from the city and other parts of the Bay Area after two of those bikes experienced apparent battery fires.
A spokesperson told us, “Out of an abundance of caution, we are temporarily making the ebike fleet unavailable to riders while we investigate and update our battery technology.”
2. For the next month, the Impossible Whopper will be available at Burger Kings across the country
The world’s second largest fast food chain is rolling out the Impossible Whopper nationwide at all of its 7,200 U.S. locations, testing demand for the meaty tasting meatless patty.
3. With the acquisition closed, IBM goes all in on Red Hat
These announcements further IBM’s ambitions to bring its products to any public and private cloud — which was the reason IBM acquired Red Hat in the first place.
4. Asana launches Workload to help prevent burnout
Workload provides a central view of how much more work any given team can currently handle. Team members can customize their own workload based on criteria like points or hours, and even set capacity limits.
5. Amazon-backed food delivery startup Deliveroo acquires Edinburgh software studio Cultivate
Cultivate is a software development and user experience design house that has worked with a number of big names, including Deliveroo itself.
6. Smartphone sales expected to drop 2.5% globally this year
New numbers from Gartner forecast a drop of 2.5%, down to 1.5 billion, with the biggest hits to the industry in Japan, Western Europe and North America.
7. The Exit: The acquisition charting Salesforce’s future
With Salesforce’s $15.7 billion acquisition of Tableau closing, we talked to investor Scott Sandell of NEA. (Extra Crunch membership required.)
