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This Week in Apps: Apple’s event brings a ‘Dynamic Island,’ new widgets and iOS 16
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. Global app spending reached…
Beginning with the first company I co-founded 25 years ago and continuing through the second company I co-founded 15 years ago, I raised over $100M from top-tier VCs.
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Here’s everything you missed at TC Sessions: Robotics 2022
In case you missed it, robots took over TechCrunch on Thursday, July 21. We played host to the robotic industry’s leading startups, researchers and academics at TC Sessions: Robotics. The event was a blockbuster success, and we hope you enjoyed the show. All the features, panels, interviews and podcasts are embedded below. TechCrunch Editor Brian…
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Runa Sandvik’s new startup Granitt secures at-risk people from hackers and nation states
Few know the threats that journalists face better than Sandvik, a native Norwegian. She defended The New York Times newsroom from hackers and nation-state adversaries, trained reporters to cloak their online activity in anonymity at the Tor Project, and helped organizations like the Freedom of the Press Foundation to build tools that allow journalists, like…
Apple revamps the Lock Screen in iOS 16 with widgets, real-time info and other personalization features
Apple is giving the iPhone’s Lock screen a big makeover in iOS 16. At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, the company introduced its plans for a more personalized Lock Screen that…
Entertainment site Fandom adds long-requested creator features, ‘Interactive Wiki Maps’ and ‘Fandom Trivia’
Fandom, a wiki hosting service and fan platform with more than 300 million monthly active users and 250,000 wiki communities, has just announced its newest features and tools: Interactive Wiki…
My Chemical Romance yesterday released their first single since 2014. Kendrick Lamar just dropped a new album. But did you know that this morning, Owl City remixed Smash Mouth’s seminal…
FabuLingua wins the TechCrunch City Spotlight: Austin pitch-off!
It’s my pleasure to announce FabuLingua won today’s City Spotlight: Austin pitch-off! The company competed against knowRX Health and Vertikal X on today’s TechCrunch Live episode and won free exhibition…
StackBlitz, a developer-focused startup that uses WebAssembly and WebContainers to give you a full development environment in your browser, today announced that it has raised a $7.9 million seed funding…
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Apple execs on developing Mac Studio and Studio Display for the other pros
The seeds of the Mac Studio were planted 5 years ago next month when, in a rare candid admission of misstep, Apple said it was pushing the reset button on the Mac Pro. Having painted itself into a “thermal corner,” Apple realized that it had to burn down the architecture it created and start anew. …
TechCrunch+ roundup: Tested TAM tips, no-code tech survey, writing crypto white papers
For most products, TAM is presented in nine figures or more, but when you’re planning to disrupt a billion-dollar market, these numbers can create a lot of cognitive dissonance.
TikTok launches a music distribution platform, SoundOn
TikTok has already achieved massive influence in today’s music industry, sending songs that find popularity on the app to the top of the Billboard charts. Now the company is launching…
TechCrunch+ roundup: After the exit, starting up in stealth, Wag’s SPAC plans
Startups do not have a great survival rate. Nine out of ten will fail, and those that persist will likely need at least three to four years to become profitable.
Web3’s early promise for artists tainted by rampant stolen works and likenesses
Jillian C. York didn’t want to be a non-fungible token. A Berlin-based author and activist, York is also the director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.…
TechCrunch+ roundup: VC advice for CEOs, 2022 e-commerce trends, OpenSea’s valuation
This is a fantastic time to launch a startup, but if you’re trying to grow one — well, winter is coming.
TechCrunch+ roundup: Less VC for SV, 2022 marketing predictions, GTM research strategies
The fact that the Bay Area’s share of startup funding is shrinking shouldn’t be cause for alarm — it’s good news for the entire country.
TechCrunch+ roundup: Credit Karma post-exit, recruiting developers, re:Invent recap
The very day in Feb. 2020 that Credit Karma planned to announce that it had been acquired by Intuit for over $7 billion, the stock market tanked, spooked by news…
GitHub gets a new CEO
GitHub CEO Nat Friedman is stepping down from his role on November 15 to become the Chairman Emeritus of the Microsoft-owned service. Thomas Dohmke, who only recently became GitHub’s chief…
Writing helper Copy.ai closes on its second funding round this year
Copy.ai’s software can, for example, write a blog post outline based on a few sentences and create link descriptions for Facebook ads and even generate a company motto.
Inkitt books $59M investment, wants to turn its data-driven, self-publishing platform into a multimedia powerhouse
Book sales during the pandemic went up, and it seems the amount we are reading did, too. Now Inkitt, the startup that operates a free, popular platform of the same…
Creator tools startup Spore raises $1M to build closer bonds between influencers and their fans
Few spaces have grown hotter in the past year than the creator economy has, but for all of the new tools available to those starting a podcast, newsletter or storefront,…
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How Robert Reffkin went from being a C-average student to the founder of Compass
In April, real estate tech company Compass forged ahead with its initial public offering and is now valued at several billions of dollars. At that time, TechCrunch Senior Editor Alex Wilhelm caught up with founder and CEO Robert Reffkin to chat about his company’s debut in the market’s suddenly choppy waters for tech and tech-enabled…
Extra Crunch roundup: Digital health VC survey, edtech M&A, deep tech marketing, more
Speaking as an unvaccinated urban dweller: I’d rather speak to a nurse or doctor via my laptop than try to remain physically distanced on a bus or hailed ride traveling…
Boston Globe will consider people’s requests to have articles about them anonymized
The Boston Globe is starting a new program by which people who feel an article at the newspaper is harmful to their reputation can ask that it be updated or…
Twitter acquires screen-sharing social app Squad
Today, Twitter announced that it is acquiring Squad and that the team from the screen-sharing social app will be joining Twitter’s ranks. Squad’s co-founders, CEO Esther Crawford and CTO Ethan…
Did you follow all of the unicorn news from the last couple of weeks? No? Here’s a list of headlines to catch you up….
Airbnb nears IPO as Asana and Palantir land their direct listings
World events have so far not stopped the enthusiasm for tech investing, and really, where else are those dollars going to go?
Kaleido’s Unscreen is dead simple drag-and-drop background removal for video
Removing the background of a video you’ve shot can be a real pain if you don’t have the kind of tools and setup used by professionals — and even then…
Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7 a.m. PT). Subscribe here. And I don’t mean building an app…
From Unity to Disrupt, tech has an especially optimistic week
Snowflake, Jfrog, Sumo Logic and Unity each raised price ranges days before IPO, to meet what had seemed like growing enthusiasm from public markets. Each one still popped.