TechCrunch Industry News

Tapbots, the company behind Tweetbot, has released a major update for the iPhone and iPad. Tweetbot 6 is now available in the App store. While there aren’t a lot of visual changes, there are a couple of important things happening under the hood. First, Tweetbot 6 is using Twitter’s API v2. An API is an […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Twitter is getting into the newsletter business. The social media company is announcing that it has acquired Revue, a Dutch startup that allows users to publish and monetize email newsletters. While Revue hasn’t driven the same wave of “is this the future of media?” think pieces as Substack, it counts major publishers like Vox Media […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

TechCrunch is embarking on a major project to survey the venture capital investors of Europe, and their cities. Our survey of VCs in Stockholm, and Sweden generally, will capture how the country is faring, and what changes are being wrought amongst investors by the coronavirus pandemic. The deadline is the end of this week. We’d […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google today announced a subtle but welcome refresh of its mobile search experience. The idea here is to provide easier to read search results and a more modern look with a simpler, edge-to-edge design. From what we’ve seen so far, this is not a radically different look, but the rounded and slightly shaded boxes around […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In what feels like an attempt at kicking some bad news under the rug on a Friday, Microsoft announced this morning that the price of Xbox Live Gold is going up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

YouTube is embracing the hashtag. The company has been quietly working on a new feature that allows users to better discover content using hashtags — either by clicking on a hashtag on YouTube or by typing in a hashtag link directly. Before, these actions would return a mix of content related to the hashtag, but […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Galaxy S21 is a tank. It’s a big, heavy (8.04 ounces versus its predecessor’s 7.7), blunt instrument of a phone. It’s quintessential Samsung, really — the handset you purchase when too much isn’t quite enough. In fact, it even goes so far as adopting S-Pen functionality — perhaps the largest distinguishing factor between the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meet the Raspberry Pi Pico, a tiny little microcontroller that lets you build hardware projects with some code running on the microcontroller. Even more interesting, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is using its own RP2040 chip, which means that the foundation is now making its own silicon. If you’re not familiar with microcontrollers, those devices let […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Every picture posted to Facebook and Instagram gets a caption generated by an image analysis AI, and that AI just got a lot smarter. The improved system should be a treat for visually impaired users, and may help you find your photos faster in the future. Alt text is a field in an image’s metadata […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Barcelona-based Landbot, a ‘no-code’ chatbot builder, has bagged a $8M Series A led by the Spanish-Israeli VC firm Swanlaab, alongside support from Spain’s innovation-focused public agency, CDTI. Previous investors Nauta Capital, Encomenda and Bankinter also participated in the round. We last chatted to Landbot back in 2018 when it raised a $2.2M seed and had […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Netflix is always in search of a better way to instantly connect users to something to watch, instead of having them waste time unsuccessfully scrolling through all the available programming options. Now, the company says a recent test focused on solving this problem, Shuffle Play, has proven popular enough to roll out to all users […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

India has asked WhatsApp to withdraw the planned change to its privacy policy, posing a new headache to Facebook-owned service that identifies the South Asian nation as its biggest market by users. In an email to WhatsApp head Will Cathcart, the nation’s IT ministry said WhatsApp’s planned update to its data-sharing policy raised “grave concerns […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

TechCrunch is embarking on a major project to survey the venture capital investors of Europe, and their cities. Our survey of VCs in Bucharest and Romania will capture how the country is faring, and what changes are being wrought amongst investors by the coronavirus pandemic. We’d like to know how Romania’s startup scene is […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Samsung Electronics vice chairman Jay Y. Lee is back in prison following a retrial of his 2017 conviction in a bribery case that helped lead to the downfall of former South Korean president Park Guen-hye. The Seoul High Court sentenced Lee to 30 months on Monday. Lee was originally convicted of bribery in 2017 and […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I suspect it will be a while before I get excited over wireless earbuds. It’s not for a lack of trying on the part of manufacturers. In fact, quite the contrary. The category actually matured quite quickly, compared to various other verticals in the consumer electronics space. The truth is, most major hardware makers have […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amazon is selling access to the underlying technology stack of Alexa to let companies — starting with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles — build their own intelligent assistants with unique voices, skills and wake words. The new Alexa Custom Assistant product, which was announced Friday, can coexist and cooperate with the Alexa assistant. Theoretically, this means an […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Even before the leaks, we all saw the Galaxy Buds Pro coming. It was a given that the company was planning to deliver its own take on Apple’s AirPods Pro, with improved sound quality and active noise canceling. The real secret weapon here, however, may be the price. This morning’s S21 announcement found Samsung dropping […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For the last couple of years, Samsung’s CES press conferences have featured a parade of futuristic home robots. They’re are smart, dexterous and impressive (and reasonably adorable). But home robots are hard. Like, really, really hard. There’s a reason the robotic vacuum continues to be one real viable home robot nearly 20 years after the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Payments company Checkout.com is raising once again. The company has closed a $450 million Series C round with Tiger Global Management leading the round — Greenoaks Capital and all existing investors are also participating. If you’re not familiar with the company, Checkout.com wants to build a one-stop shop for all things related to payments, such […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Smartphone sales are bad — and have been for a couple of years now. Certainly this ongoing pandemic hasn’t helped. All the talk about how 5G and new form factors were going to cause a kind of bounce-back all fell by the wayside, as people put a pause on unnecessary luxuries. Samsung is the only […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Alternative social media apps including MeWe, CloutHub and other privacy-focused rivals to big tech, are topping the app stores following Trump’s ban from mainstream social platforms like Facebook and Twitter and the more recent removal of conservative social app Parler from both the App Store and Google Play. In the days since the Parler ban, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As CES starts in earnest today, I anticipate we’ll be seeing a lot of hardware focused on remote work. PC sales saw a nice spike last year, even as smartphone sales continued to slip. There was a lot of adapting that needed to be done, moving from offices to virtual work places, and now we’re […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

LG spent a good chunk of its CES press conference talking about its lineup of TVs for 2021. You can expect bigger, slimmer and brighter TVs. I’m not going to list the specifications of new models. But there are a few new features that are worth mentioning. LG doesn’t use Android TV for the operating […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It might be easier at this point to ask which tech platforms President Donald Trump can still use. Payment-processing company Stripe is the latest tech company to kick Donald Trump off of its platform, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. That means the president’s campaign website and online fundraising arms will no […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Happy almost CES! Sure the year’s biggest consumer electronics show hasn’t officially kicked off, but, well, what do such arbitrary signposts really mean in a year like 2021, right? Samsung just dropped what’s almost certainly one of its biggest pieces of news for the show, with the arrival of the Galaxy Chromebook 2. The two-in-one […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tesla has started taking orders for a cheaper standard range version of the Model Y in an apparent reversal by CEO Elon Musk who earlier this year seemed to put plans to release the vehicle on hold. Electrek was the first to report that Tesla had updated its website to include the Model Y standard […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Leave it to Lenovo to give the world a swiveling all-in-one. It’s kind of the company’s M.O. – not always the most necessary or practical, but never not interesting. When it comes to fairly staid product categories like this, I’m all for trying something a little weird. And hey, in a world of convertible and […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After pro-Trump extremists violently stormed the U.S. Capitol, a number of tech executives and industry leaders are calling on Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to more aggressively curb the president’s messages amplifying and endorsing violence. After Trump released a video calling the extremists “very special” and telling them to go home, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Snapchat was among the first apps to leverage the iPhone 12 Pro’s LiDAR Scanner for AR, but now TikTok has followed suit. The social video app confirmed today it has launched its first-ever LiDAR-powered effect to help its users ring in the new year. The effect features an AR ball, similar to the one that […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Any teacher in the San Francisco Unified School District who needs a second monitor can request one free of charge from Two Screens for Teachers, the nonprofit that recently extended a similar privilege to Seattle educators. If you’re a teacher in SF, you can sign up here. Having a second monitor may sound like a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There’s a decent chance you missed the news back in May — there was, after all, a lot going on at the time. General Electric sold off its more than 100-year-old GE Lighting division to smart home company Savant. Today, the division’s new owner is announcing a key rebranding effort, six months after the initial […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Steel production accounts for roughly 8 percent of the emissions that contribute to global climate change. It is one of the industries that sits at the foundation of the modern economy and is one of the most resistant to decarbonization. As nations around the world race to reduce their environmental footprint and embrace more sustainable […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

ShareChat, which added Twitter as an investor in 2019, is in talks to add two more American giants to its captable. The Indian social network is in advanced stages of talks to raise money from Google and Snap, three sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The new financing round — a Series E — […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NASA recently announced the astronauts who will be taking part in the Artemis missions, and among them is Anne McClain, who has spent 203 days in orbit and conducted two spacewalks on the ISS. With the space industry looking nothing like it did 10 years ago and new spacecraft and technologies on the rise, McClain […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On the last day of 2020, New York City’s Metro Transit Authority announced that it has finished its roll out of contactless payment systems. With the addition of a final stop in Brooklyn, every MTA subway station and bus in the five boroughs now sports the OMNY “Tap and Go” system. We got an early […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s been a strange year for sleep. For me, levels have fluctuated between too little and too much, but have – more often than not – tended toward the former. 2020 gave most of us no shortage of excuses for sleep deprivation, from personal stresses to larger societal concerns. And, thankfully, the past few years […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You don’t need Qoobo in your life. Nobody needs Qoobo, exactly. In fact, first reactions tend to range from befuddlement to bemusement. The robotic cat pillow doesn’t make a ton of sense on the face of it – in part because Qoobo has no face. The handful of time I’ve interacted with the original Qoobo […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How do you make a virtual event accessible for people who are blind or visually impaired? When I started work on Sight Tech Global back in June this year, I was confident that we would find the answer to that question pretty quickly. With so many virtual event platforms and online ticketing options available to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

RentPath, owner of property listing sites including Rent.com and Apartment Guide, said today it has cancelled its agreement to be acquired by CoStar Group after the Federal Trade Commission sued to block the sale. CoStar, a commercial real estate data and analytics provider that also operates listing sites like Apartments.com and ApartmentFinder.com, agreed in February […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Madrona Venture Group has been a mainstay of the Seattle and northwest United States startup ecosystem for years now, and it looks like it is going to continue that legacy going forward. In a filing with the SEC, the firm announced its eighth venture capital fund, raising $320 million. That’s up slightly from the firm’s […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tesla will begin its operations in India “early” 2021, a top Indian minister said on Monday, a day after the tech carmaker said it was confident it would enter the world’s second most populated market next year. The American car company will begin operations with sales in early 2021 and then “maybe” look at assembling […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For obvious reasons, many of us are spending the final week of 2020 looking forward. Samsung is hoping some folks are looking far enough ahead to reserve a spot in line for its still-unannounced Galaxy S21 handset (not an official name, mind, but probably a safe guess). If you’re on the Samsung Mobile mailing list, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today we sat on the deck with our daughter Ella and her boyfriend Nick. Knowing of my fascination with all things Beatles, Nick gave me a Japanese 45 of Get Back flipped with Don’t Let Me Down. His gift coincided with a 5 minute cut of material from a newly authorized production of a new […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“Are you okay?” I don’t have a good answer to the question. Knowing full well that I’m talking back to an algorithm — even one asking the same question of everyone with a different band mad-libbed in — doesn’t soften the blow. Am I? Are we? Is anyone, really? In this case, it’s referring to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tesla stock’s miraculously bizarre 2020 might have a gone different way had Apple’s Tim Cook agreed to a meeting in recent years, or so says Elon Musk. Reacting to Reuters’ recent news that Apple has not abandoned its electric car program and is still pursuing plans to build a physical vehicle, Musk tweeted that in […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A new mobile app called Honk aims to make messaging with friends a more interactive, real-time experience. Instead of sending texts off into the void and hoping for a response, friends on Honk communicate via messages that are shown live as you type, with no saved chat history and no send button. The end result […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Spotify users have Wrapped and Instagram users have their Top 9. And now TikTok users will have their own year-in-review feature, too. The company today announced the launch of its first personalized annual recap feature with the launch of “Year on TikTok,” a video highlight reel that showcases individual users’ own top TikTok moments. This […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s been a busy year of expansion for the large cloud providers, with AWS, Azure and Google aggressively expanding their data center presence around the world. To cap off the year, Google Cloud today announced a new set of cloud regions, which will go live in the coming months and years. These new regions, which […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Twitter is shutting down Periscope, the video app it acquired several years ago when Facebook Live threatened to lap the field. When we stream the Gillmor Gang sessions, we send them to Facebook, Twitter, and an unlisted embed on YouTube. At one point, we planned to stream the sessions live on TechCrunch, but for now […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mobile travel app Hopper has been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic as consumers canceled their trips and airlines dropped their flights. But the complications around getting airline credits and refunds have since turned into a customer service crisis for the airfare prediction and ticket booking startup, which had been valued at $750 million back […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices