TechCrunch Industry News

The U.S. market has no real frontrunner poised to claim TikTok’s throne if the app is banned in the country. According to Trump’s executive order, TikTok’s owner ByteDance has to divest of TikTok’s U.S. operations or the app will be banned from the U.S. market on November 12. A number of companies have considered the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Between the IPO buzz and a raft of new federal contracts for COVID-19 work, it’s been a year of big moves for Palantir. Now, the company is making a more literal one: decamping from its Palo Alto headquarters to Denver, Colorado. The decision to relocate its Palo Alto headquarters, first reported by the Denver Business […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Earlier today, Facebook said it has removed hundreds of QAnon groups from its site, and that it’s restricting many more groups, along with hundreds of pages, and more than 10,000 Instagram accounts. As the New York Times observed in its report about the maneuvers, four-year-old QAnon, once a fringe phenomenon, has gone mainstream in recent […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jelani Memory, an entrepreneur and father, had been wanting to write a kids book for years. While in the midst of raising a Series B round for his startup Circle Media, he started to feel burned out and wanted to start doing something more creatively fulfilling, Memory told me. That’s what led Memory to create […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everyone, how are you? Are you doing well? Great. Or, condolences, depending. Anyway, last week the Equity crew was discussing bankers, and how they love to talk up stuff. The topic matters as there is a big impending transaction out there in the world, namely the shotgun sale of TikTok. And all sorts of […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Galaxy Note Ultra is a $1,399 smartphone. Even by Samsung’s standards, this is a high-end luxury device. It’s the phone for people who board the plane early and derive a sense of pride in watching the rest of us slowly shuffle onto the plane, wondering just how close to the back we’ll get. Sure, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tesla shares surpassed $1,800 for the first time today, the latest in an eye-popping run up of the stock that has propelled the company’s valuation to more than $341 billion. Let’s put these numbers in perspective. Tesla, an automaker that delivered 367,500 vehicles in 2019 and is aiming to exceed the 500,000-mark in 2020, is […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Businesses will now be able to monetize online events on Facebook, thanks to a new feature that the social network is launching in the United States and 19 other countries today. In a call with reporters, Head of Facebook App Fidji Sumo said that Facebook’s Events feature was designed for in-person events, but with the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tesla CEO Elon Musk acknowledged Friday that the company was ‘embarrassingly late’ rolling out a security layer known as two-factor authentication for its mobile app. “Sorry, this is embarrassingly late. Two factor authentication via sms or authenticator app is going through final validation right now,” Musk wrote Friday in response to a question from a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I enjoy driving the Polestar 2 more than the Tesla Model 3. The Polestar 2 is more comfortable, seemingly better built, and has a better infotainment system. In all the traditional automotive metrics, it’s a better car, and yet I find it hard to recommend over the Tesla Model 3. The Polestar 2 often excels […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Russell Kirsch, whose research going back to the ’50s underlies the entire field of digital imaging, died earlier this week at the age of 91. It’s hard to overstate the impact of his work, which led to the first digitally scanned photo and the creation of what we now think of as pixels. Born to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today after the bell, Lyft reported its second-quarter financial performance. The American ride-hailing company’s results helped illustrate just how much the economy has changed in the wake of COVID-19 and its resulting disruptions to life, travel and work. Uber’s own results, which were shared last week, provided hints of what was coming for Lyft. The […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cash App, the peer-to-peer payments service from Square, is giving select users a way to get short-term loans. The company said it’s only testing the feature with around 1,000 users for now. But it could become more broadly available — and there are probably plenty of people who could use the money, given the state […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hyundai has launched a dedicated EV brand called Ioniq with plans to bring three all-electric vehicles to market over the next four years. The Ioniq brand is part of the Korean automaker’s broader strategy to sell 1 million battery electric vehicles — and take a 10% share of the EV market — by 2025. If […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A state court has dismissed a high-profile case showing unsportsmanlike conduct by Google, which was caught red-handed using lyrics obviously scraped from Genius. Unfortunately for the latter, the complaints amount to a copyright violation — which wasn’t what the plaintiffs alleged, sinking the case. The lawsuit, filed in December, accused Google of violating Genius’s terms […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google has updated its Lookout app, an AI toolkit for people with impaired vision, with two helpful new capabilities: scanning long documents and reading out food labels. Paper forms and similarly-shaped products at the store present a challenge for blind folks and this ought to make things easier. Food labels, if you think about it, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lucid Motors said Tuesday that its upcoming all-electric luxury sedan can travel 517 miles on a single charge — a range that, if validated by the U.S. EPA, blows past every other EV on the road today including Tesla. The estimated EPA range was released ahead of the September 9 reveal of the Lucid Air. […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google Maps is now also available on the Apple Watch so you can get your walking, biking and driving directions right on your wrist. Don’t expect to get a full-blown Maps app on your wrist, though. The new app is mostly focused on giving you directions to know places (think home, work, etc.). To start […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Moft is a clever company that makes clever products. For a while there, I was sporting their laptop stand. It was a head-turner when I used to unfold it during meetings — back when we used to do those in-person. The truth is, I ended up having to tear it off the bottom. It lasted […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

WordPress.com, a division of Automattic, is launching a new product called P2. And this time, it’s all about improving internal communications for private groups. As a remote company, Automattic has been using P2 internally for years to communicate asynchronously. It’s a place to share long-form posts, a repository to keep onboarding documents and other important […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sony knows how to make a great pair of headphones. The WH-1000XM3 are one of the best received pairs of over-ear models in recent years. Two years later, the company is ready to unveil their successors, which sport a number of smart connected features. In fact, the WH-1000XM4 bring all sorts of nice upgrades to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Samsung’s made quality earbuds for a number of years now. They’re never particularly exciting or innovative, but they’re always a solid choice in an overcrowded market. Today’s big Unpacked event adds yet another model to the growing list of options. Already sporting the Galaxy Bean nickname based on early leaks, and for reasons that should […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

YouTube has banned a large number of Chinese accounts it said were engaging in “coordinated influence operations” on political issues, the company announced today. 2,596 accounts from China alone were taken down from April to June, compared with 277 in the first three months of 2020. “These channels mostly uploaded spammy, non-political content, but a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Identifying the new context we’re asking the system to understand is the first step towards moving visual AI forward. Then we need more content. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Apple sold a lot of Macs last quarter — a record, in fact, for Q3, jumping a full 21%, year over year. Given the state of the world, with most office workers moving to a remote setup, there’s little surprise the company’s desktop and laptops moved at such an impressive clip. For that reason alone, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Surprise. The latest version of Google’s budget Pixel device will be one of the first two to get its next-gen technology. It’s an odd strategy, to be sure, but sometimes roadmaps work out like that, I guess. You can read basically everything you need to know about the Pixel 4a in my review here. It’s […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Pixel line has always felt like more of an underdog product than one should reasonably expect from a corporation as massive as Google. After years of partnerships and Nexus devices, when Google finally did enter the smartphone market in earnest, it found itself attempting to chip away at an already mature category — an […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

TikTok’s U.S. General Manager Vanessa Pappas has posted a video message to the platform that appears to be a response to reports from Friday that President Trump is working on an effective “ban” of the app in the U.S., a plan he shared with reporters from the White House pool on board Air Force One. […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lyft continues to expand beyond its core ride-hailing business into bikes, scooters, transit and now rental cars. The company said Thursday that it’s taking Lyft Rentals, a pilot program that launched in December, and expanding it through a partnership with Sixt. Lyft Rentals initially gave folks in Los Angeles and San Francisco the ability to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Social video platform Triller has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against its biggest rival TikTok and parent company ByteDance. The suit, which was filed in the U.S District Court for the Western Division of Texas, claims TikTok is infringing on Triller’s U.S Patent No. 9,691,429. The patent covers a “systems and methods for creating music […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey the venture capital investors of Europe. 
Over the next few weeks, we will be ‘zeroing-in’ on Europe’s major cities, from A-Z, Amsterdam to Zurich, and many points in-between. It’s part of a broader series of surveys we’re doing to help founders find the right investors. Our survey […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google One, Google’s subscription program for buying additional storage and live support, is getting an update today that will bring free phone backups for Android and iOS devices to anybody who installs the app — even if they don’t have a paid membership. The catch: While the feature is free, the backups count against your […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While much of today’s Congressional grilling into the anticompetitive practices of the big tech giants focused on their core businesses, Amazon’s hardware also came in for close inspection during the hours-long interrogation. It was a small but significant exchange, because it touched on the breadth of the company’s services and how dominance in one area […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Toppr, one of the largest online learning startups in India, has secured $46 million in a new financing round as it looks to scale its platform including a new product. Dubai-headquartered investment firm Foundation Holdings led the Mumbai-based seven-year-old startup’s Series D round. Kaizen Private Equity, an existing investor, also participated in the new round, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Online alcohol delivery startup Drizly has told customers that it was hit by a data breach. In an email to customers obtained by TechCrunch, the company said that a hacker “obtained” some customer data. The hacker took customer email addresses, date-of-birth, hashed passwords, and in some cases delivery address, the email read. Drizly did not […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google today announced its plans to build a new subsea cable with landing points in New York in the U.S. and Bude, UK and Bilbao, Spain in Europe. The new cable, named after the pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper, will join Google’s various other private subsea cables like Curie between the U.S. and South America, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Following earlier reporting, Google has confirmed that it will continue to allow employees to work from home through the end of June of next year. The company told TechCrunch that Sundar Pichai announced the plan in an email sent to staff earlier today. “To give employees the ability to plan ahead, we are extending our […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Earlier this year, the oft-mocked but actually pretty important new branch of the military, the Space Force, revealed an image that was suspiciously reminiscent of Star Trek. Now the Space Force has revealed a new, sharper graphic that is the force’s actual logo — and a motto to go with it: “Semper Supra,” or “always […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Online shopping service Instacart says reused passwords are to blame for a recent spate of account breaches, which saw personal data belonging to hundreds of thousands of Instacart customers stolen and put up for sale on the dark web. The company published a statement late on Thursday saying its investigation showed that Instacart “was not […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You might not know Gorilla Glass by name, but odds are pretty good you own at least one device sporting Corning’s chemically strengthened glass composite. It’s been a ubiquitous feature of consumer products ranging from smartphones to wearables for more than a decade now, courtesy of excellent drop and scratch resistance. All in all, it […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Toronto Blue Jays may not have a have a home yet this season, but one things for sure: plenty of teams are going to be playing in the uncanny valley this year. The spectacle of a major league baseball team playing in front of an empty has some precedent from places like Korea, Taiwan […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gaming phones are a weird one. They make sense on paper to some degree. As we well know, everyone’s a gamer these days, and much or most of that gaming happens on mobile devices. So why aren’t devoting gaming phones a more popular phenomenon? It’s not for lack of trying. Lenovo’s the latest company to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I’ve learned a lot during this pandemic. About myself, about the world. But perhaps most important of all, I’ve learned the value of a good chair. In normal years I’m rarely home, between work and travel, and as such it’s not something I gave much thought to. So naturally, I spent the first month and […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meet Diaspora Ventures, a new VC fund based in the U.S. founded by two partners who grew up in France but have been in the U.S. for more than a decade —Â Ilan Abehassera (pictured right) and Carlos Diaz (pictured left). As the name suggests, Diaspora Ventures wants to invest in the French diaspora, and especially […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While other premium smartphone makers were exploring mid-tier devices amid slowing sales, OnePlus’s prices were slowly creeping up. It’s true that the company never cracked the $1,000 price point (beyond a few limited-edition models), but for those following the company’s story, it felt like it was straying a bit from its biggest appeal: flagship-quality devices […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Netflix is testing a new pricing tier in India as the on-demand video streaming service looks to court more subscribers in Asia’s third-largest economy. The American giant has unveiled a “Mobile+” plan for some new subscribers in India that delivers streaming in high-definition (HD) quality and supports mobile, tablet, and computer screens (but not TV). […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As the sports world slowly begins to emerge from the pandemic shut down with MLB scheduled to start this week, Fox Sports is launching its redesigned sports app today for Android and iOS. The new app and accompanying website, offers a more modern interface, access to live sports (with cable subscription) and bonus camera angles […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We continue to be stuck inside, and video games continue to sell well. It’s pretty much as simple as that, honestly. I mean, there’s more nuance than that, obviously, but that’s really the top line takeaway from NPD’s June gaming numbers. More specifically, last month saw $1.2 billion total spent on gaming, up 26% from […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s not hard to see why Russell Quinn calls 2017 the worst year of his life. That was the year he moved back to the United Kingdom to take care of his mother, and the year in which both his mother and grandmother died within a month of each other. Quinn recalled returning to Los […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Let’s just say it’s been busy times over here (Twitter being completely unusable has helped productivity though!) On Tuesday, we launched the first draft of The TechCrunch List, a verified, curated list of investors who have demonstrated a commitment to first checks and leading rounds from seed through growth, organized by market vertical. We constructed […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices