2019
Week-in-Review: YouTube’s awful comments and Google’s $1B tech-free investment
Hello, weekend readers. This is Week-in-Review where I give a heavy amount of analysis and/or rambling thoughts on one story while scouring the rest of the hundreds of stories that…
While people puzzle over WeWork, niche co-working spaces continue gaining traction
This week, a young, New York-based startup called Alma raised $8 million in funding to expand its “co-practicing community of therapists, coaches, and wellness professionals,” which it first launched from…
Harry Potter: Wizards Unite goes live in Canada, Germany, and 23 other countries
Harry Potter: Wizards Unite (think Pokémon GO, but with wands and giant spiders instead of pokéballs and Pikachus) officially launched earlier this week, but with a catch: it was only…
Original Content podcast: Netflix’s ‘When They See Us’ is difficult-but-essential viewing
“When They See Us,” a new miniseries on Netflix, can be so infuriating that it’s hard to watch — especially its first hour, which depicts the arrest of the teenaged…
Bill Gates on making “one of the greatest mistakes of all time”
At a recent event hosted for founders by the venture firm Village Global, one of its most prominent investors, Bill Gates, sat down with Eventbrite cofounder and CEO Julia Hartz…
NASA’s Curiosity rover finds levels of gas on Mars that could suggest possibility of life
NASA’s Curiosity Rover has detected high levels of methane output during its mission on the Martian surface, the New York Times reports. The discovery, found during a measurement taking on…
Ray Dalio, Niantic, Adobe, Dropbox, remote work, Northzone, and Slack
Ray Dalio on the Extra Crunch stage at Disrupt SF 2019 This year at Disrupt SF, we will be hosting a special Extra Crunch stage focused on the issues that…
In this week’s newsletter: Slack’s direct listing, Juul’s conundrum and Facebook’s new cryptocurrency.
Netflix is testing a pop-out floating video player on desktop
Netflix is testing out a new feature that could mean you never have to stop watching, not even while you work – it’s a pop-out video player, similar to the…
Google Pay expands its integration with PayPal to online merchants
Google and PayPal have been strategic partners for some time. The companies in 2017 announced that PayPal would become a payment method in Android Pay, the service that later rebranded…
With the release of the Facebook consortium’s project Libra whitepaper, the internet, tech world, financial services industry and policy circles are all burning with conversation on the project’s potential.
Airbus-owned Voom will compete with Uber Copter in the US in 2019
The U.S. air taxi market is heating up: Aeronautics industry giant Airbus will be among the companies operating on-demand air travel service in 2019 in American skies, FastCompany reports. Airbus’…
Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative gives $68M to fund Human Cell Atlas projects
An ongoing global project to map the human body cell by cell has receive a $68 million shot in the arm from the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. It will support dozens of…
When it comes to the gods of finance, few people reach the stratosphere of Ray Dalio. The founder of Bridgewater, the investment firm that has grown to manage $150 billion…
Featured Article
Crowdfunded spacecraft LightSail 2 prepares to go sailing on sunlight
Among the many spacecraft and satellites ascending to space on Monday’s Falcon Heavy launch, the Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 may be the most interesting. If all goes well, a week from launch it will be moving through space — slowly, but surely — on nothing more than the force exerted on it by sunlight.
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…
Slack and Zoom are flying high; they’re also being chased already by upstarts
Two of the highest-flying now-public enterprise companies of the year — Slack and Zoom — are different in many ways, besides the fact that one is focused on workplace messaging…
Apply to Startup Battlefield for a shot at TC fame and fortune
What would a $100,000 cash infusion do for your early-stage startup? Don’t just imagine it. Apply to compete in Startup Battlefield at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. Our premier…
‘Harry Potter: Wizards Unite’ reaches 400K downloads, $300K in consumer spend in UK and US
Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, the highly anticipated new mobile game from Pokémon GO makers Niantic and Warner Brothers’ games division, is off to a good start, but it’s not breaking…
‘This is Your Life in Silicon Valley’: Nomiku Founder CEO Lisa Fetterman on why Silicon Valley doesn’t care about female founders
Welcome to this week’s transcribed edition of This is Your Life in Silicon Valley. We’re running an experiment for Extra Crunch members that puts This is Your Life in Silicon…
This is it, the final day the super-early-bird is hanging out at TechCrunch dispensing serious savings on passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2019. Once the clock ticks onto 11:59 p.m.…
LTE flaws let hackers ‘easily’ spoof presidential alerts
Security vulnerabilities in LTE can allow hackers to “easily” spoof presidential alerts sent to mobile phones in the event of a national emergency. Using off-the-shelf equipment and open-source software, a…
TechCrunch is back in New York next week!
TechCrunch is headed back to NYC to find the next wave of early-stage startups tackling big ideas! Last time we held an event in New York it was 2017, so…
Nowports raises $5.3 million to become Latin America’s digital shipping answer to Flexport
Nowports, a developer of software and services to track freight shipments from ports to destinations across Latin America, has aims to become the regional answer to Flexport’s billion-dollar digital shipping…
YouTube confirms a test where the comments are hidden by default
YouTube’s comments section has a bad reputation. It’s even been called “the worst on the internet,” and a reflection of YouTube’s overall toxic culture, where creators are rewarded for outrageous…
Three years after moving off AWS, Dropbox infrastructure continues to evolve
Conventional wisdom would suggest that you close your data centers and move to the cloud, not the other way around, but in 2016 Dropbox undertook the opposite journey. It (mostly)…
The robotaxi’s blowin’ its horn and zooming autonomously down the home stretch. At 11:59 p.m. (PT) on June 21 — that’s tonight, people — we hit the brakes on early-bird…
Space startup Wyvern wants to make data about Earth’s health much more accessible
The private space industry is seeing a revolution driven by cube satellites, which are affordable, lightweight satellites that are much easier than traditional satellites to design, build and launch. It’s…
Facebook and eBay told to tackle trade in fake reviews
Facebook and eBay have been warned by the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to do more to tackle the sale of fake reviews on their platforms. Fake reviews are…
As the gaming market continues to boom, billions of dollars are being invested in new games and new streaming platforms vying to own a piece of the action. Most of…
