TechCrunch Industry News

Fast-growing fintech behemoth Brex is raising big money as its customer base itself — high-growth and spendy startups — is struggling. The company, which sells a credit card tailored for startups, today announced that it has raised $150 million in a Series C extension from a group of existing investors, including DST Global and Lone […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Over the years I’ve seen hundreds, probably thousands, of data breach notifications warning that a company’s data was lost, stolen or left online for anyone to grab. Most of them look largely the same. It’s my job to decode what they actually mean for the victims whose information is put at risk. Data breach notifications […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Twitter today acknowledged that it’s begun testing a new setting that let users limit who can reply to tweets. The setting was first noted earlier this year. Similar to Facebook’s post view settings, the current implementation features a small glove icon in the corner. Tapping on it brings up a “Who Can Reply?” window. From […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Polestar’s first U.S. retail stores will open in Los Angeles, New York City and two locations in San Francisco later this year — the latest milestone for the automaker as it gets closer to bringing its all-electric vehicle to market. Polestar, which is jointly owned by Volvo Car Group and Zhejiang Geely Holding of China, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When he was still running Microsoft, Steve Ballmer caused quite the stir in the tech world by screaming “Developers! Developers! Developers!” Since the executive retired to spend more time with his basketball team, however, the tech giant’s current CEO is decidedly more…subtle in his approach. In the kickoff keynote to the first all-virtual build conference, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Samsung’s in-house incubator C-Lab has produced some of the more fascinating hardware devices in recent memory. Previous graduates have run the gamut from smart belts to augmented reality. The Samsung staff’s pet projects are not always the most practical, but they’re never not interesting. Per usual, the latest batch of graduates from the 9.5-year-old incubator […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It would be one of the greatest startup investments of all time. Masayoshi Son, riding high in the klieg lights of the 1990s dot-com bubble, invested $20 million dollars into a fledgling Hong Kong-based startup called Alibaba. That $20 million investment into the Chinese ecommerce business would go on to be worth about $120 billion […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Chris and Alex Naoumidis came to hypnotherapy through dresses. As The New York Times reported last year, the two brothers initially started their careers as startup entrepreneurs with a peer-to-peer dress-sharing app for women. The Australian natives, overcome with doubt, about their ability to succeed in startupland and when apps didn’t work, their father suggested […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Back in March, Headspace announced that it would offer free content to all COVID-19 frontline responders. Now the meditation app is expanding the offer to include all unemployed people in the U.S. You can go here to sign up, by entering information on your most recent job, including the employer’s name and the date you […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cruise, the self-driving car subsidiary of GM that also has backing from SoftBank Vision Fund, automaker Honda and T. Rowe Price & Associates, is laying off nearly 8% of its more than 1,800-member workforce today as it tries to reduce costs during the COVID-19 pandemic. The layoffs will affect employees in Cruise’s product, marketing and […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

France’s lower chamber of the parliament has voted in favor of a controversial law against hate speech on social networks and online platforms. As I described last year, online platforms will have to remove illicit content that has been flagged within 24 hours. Otherwise, companies will have to pay hefty fines every time they infringe […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So, an eight-year product veteran from Facebook and an internationally renowned barista walk into a coffee bar… It’s not a joke. It’s the origin story for Taika, a new startup that’s aiming to bring natural stimulants to the masses through its juiced up coffee-beverages. The two co-founders, Michael Sharon, an eight-year veteran of Facebook’s mobile […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I’ve been following the Nura story since the Australian startup brought an unfinished prototype of its first headphones to our offices four years back. When I finally had the opportunity to review the Nuraphones the following year, I put the noise-adapting headphones at the top of my list of 2017’s best gadgets. There was a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg is admitting that the short-form video service’s launch hasn’t gone the way he’d hoped — and he knows what to blame for its issues. “I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus,” Katzenberg said in an interview with The New York Times. “Everything. But we own it.” Back in April, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Uber is in talks to buy GrubHub in an all-stock deal, The Wall Street Journal reports. This comes a few months after reports emerged that GrubHub was looking to sell Uber, DoorDash and others. According to the report, Uber approached GrubHub earlier this year with an offer, but the two companies are still in talks. […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Spotify is today introducing a new feature, Group Session, that will allow two or more of its Premium users in the same space to share control over they music being played. Essentially a “party mode” of sorts, Group Session participants can control what’s playing in real-time as well as contribute to a collaborative playlist for […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yubico, a maker of security keys, has launched a new service that lets enterprise customers ship its YubiKey security keys directly to their employees, partners and customers — even to their homes. The service, dubbed YubiEnterprise Delivery, is a cloud-based dashboard that is available from anywhere. IT staff can log in, check their inventory levels […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The original Go was a mostly well-received addition to the Surface line when it arrived in late 2018. It was a nice, pint-sized alternatively, positioned fairly well to serve as a secondary device for some. It did the convertible double duty and traveled well, but otherwise was lacking in guts and versatility. Launching at the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Since announcing the commercial availability of Spot, Boston Dynamics has presented a factotum of different gigs for the robot, from construction to telepresence. Last month, the company announced that it was partnering with local hospitals interested in using the platform to perform remote visits for COVID-19 victims. Turns out the global pandemic has spurred all […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fresh off of a large round of layoffs, Lyft reported its Q1 results this afternoon. The ride-hailing company disclosed that it generated revenue of $955.7 million in the first three months of 2020, up 23% from its year-ago Q1 revenue result of $776 million. The company’s net loss of $398.1 million was also an improvement […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With the new MacBook, Apple closes one of the more unfortunate product chapters in its history. The upgraded 13-inch mercifully marks the end of the failed five-year experiment that was the butterfly switch. I won’t go into too much detail here. If you’ve purchased a MacBook in the past several years, you almost certainly know […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There’s something to be said for consistency through good times and bad, and one company that has had a staggeringly consistent track record is international data center vendor, Equinix. It just recorded its 69th straight positive quarters, according to the company. That’s an astonishing record, and covers over 17 years of positive returns. That means […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In an SEC filing dating back to last week, Uber disclosed that plans to layoff 3,700 employees. The figure amounts to around 14% percent of the ride hailing giant’s total workforce. In the document, the company states that the job loss is part of a planned reduction in operating expenses, “in response to the economic […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The days of the big product event are on hold for the foreseeable future. Until then, a big blog post will have to do. A day after announcing that Microsoft would be shifting focus away from dual-screen devices, Chief Product Officer Panos Panay took to the company’s Devices blog to show off a slew of […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tumblr is making a change to how it deals with hate speech on its blogging platform. The company announced today it will also remove the reblogs (repostings) from any blogs that were suspended for violating its policies around hate speech. Already, the company says it’s identified nearly 1,000 blogs that were banned for blatant violations […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you’ve got kids with you through this stay-at-home stretch, there’s a good chance you’re running low on new ways to keep them entertained. All the coloring pages have been colored in; the freeze dances frozen; the stickers stuck. Good news! Your iPhone is now a cat (congratulations!) You need to help your new cat […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jon Evans Contributor Jon Evans is the CTO of the engineering consultancy HappyFunCorp; the award-winning author of six novels, one graphic novel, and a book of travel writing; and TechCrunch's weekend columnist since 2010. More posts by this contributor How to make sense of the coronavirus chaos What do we do with the positives? It’s […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When Roger Lee, the co-founder of Human Interest, heard that San Francisco imposed shelter-in-place orders, he started blogging about layoff news and posting crowdsourced lists of employees who were laid off. His goal was to increase awareness about layoffs and give recruiters a place to search for candidates. However, one week and 40 startup layoffs […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Automatic, makers of a connected car dongle, emailed customers today to announce that the company will shut down all operations May 28. The company says it’s the casualty of the COVID-19 shutdown. “Like many other companies in the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic has adversely impacted our business,” it writes, “and we have made the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The coronavirus outbreak has driven more consumers to turn to their smart speakers for news, information, music and entertainment, according to new data released today by NPR and Edison Research. Around three-quarters of U.S. adults 18 and up said their routines have been impacted due to COVID-19 and their media habits have changed as a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

About a year ago, Microsoft launched Visual Studio Online, its online code editor based on the popular Visual Studio Code project. It’s basically a full code editor and hosted environment that lives in your browser. Today, the company announced that it is changing the name of this service to Visual Studio Codespaces. It’s also dropping […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sarah Kunst graduated from college in 2008 and went straight into the luxury marketing world with a job at Chanel. Then, the stock market collapsed and Kunst was laid off. It was that layoff, Kunst says, that brought her to the world of startups and eventually to founding her own firm, Cleo Capital, to invest […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Security researchers are sounding the alarm over a newly discovered Android malware that targets banking apps and cryptocurrency wallets. The malware, which researchers at security firm Cybereason recently discovered and called EventBot, masquerades as a legitimate Android app — like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Word for Android — which abuses Android’s in-built accessibility features to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tax policy is surely a complex beast, and depending on your political leanings, you probably have some strong feelings about how it should be implemented. Salesforce AI researchers are trying to build a model to bring artificial intelligence to bear on what will undoubtedly always be a highly political process. Richard Socher, who heads up […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

VC firm Partech has raised a new fund focused on seed investments. Named Partech Entrepreneur III, it is the third seed fund from the VC firm. Partech announced the final closing of its previous seed fund in December 2016. The firm is looking for companies at the very early stage, from pre-seed to pre-Series A. […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

DJI had to kibosh its usual big unveil this time out, for obvious reasons, but the company won’t let a little thing like a global pandemic get in the way of an announcement. A little over two years after unveiling its lightweight Mavic Air, the drone giant is announcing the sequel. When I reviewed the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The original Pixel Buds weren’t very good. No way around it. Here’s a thing I wrote about them in a review titled “A disappointing debut for Google’s Pixel Buds“: As recently as a couple of years ago, they would have been a contender for the most compelling Bluetooth headphones on the market. But given the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

To: Hans (Mr. Vestberg? Boss?) RE: An Epic opportunity We wanted to jot down this memo to pitch a deal that could remake Verizon’s fortunes in the media business. Every major carrier and internet provider has staked out a huge piece of real estate in the entertainment world with the exception of Verizon (the parent […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A massive database storing millions of credit card transactions has been secured after spending close to three weeks exposed publicly to the internet. The database belongs to Paay, a card payments processor based in New York. Like other payment processors, the company verifies payments on behalf of selling merchants, like online stores and other businesses, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When the Air Force asked hackers to break into a F-15 fighter jet at last year’s Def Con security conference, the results were both eye-opening and eye-watering. It was the first time hackers were allowed to work on the system to look for bugs. In just two hours, a team of seven hackers found a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Founders have always faced big challenges, but they pale in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. Moving your business forward will require new thinking, new tools and new opportunities along with tried-and-true essentials. We’ve got you covered on all fronts. Case in point — catching investor attention in this climate will require a pitch par […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Apple will patch a newly discovered iPhone vulnerability that security researchers say hackers have already used to steal data from their victims’ devices. News of the vulnerability dropped Wednesday by security firm ZecOps. Zuk Avraham, the company’s chief executive, said the firm found the bug last year during a routine investigation. At least six organizations […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Helena Price Hambrecht and Woody Hambrecht always had plans for Haus, their direct-to-consumer low-alcoholic drink, to land white-label partnerships with local restaurants. But when coronavirus spread across the country and hurt thousands of local restaurants, the Haus founders saw an opportunity to fast forward on that product plan and at the same time give back. […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nintendo is selling a lot of Switches. The convertible console has been a lifesaver for people sheltering in place around the world. COVID-19-induced travel restrictions and the long-awaited arrival of Animal Crossing: New Horizons have proven to be a perfect storm for the three-year-old platform. New numbers out from NPD this morning shed some light […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Over the past two years, I’ve typed nearly every word I’ve written while traveling on the iPad Pro’s Smart Keyboard Folio. For more on why you can see my iPad Pro review here. For the purposes of this look at the new Magic Keyboard, though, you should probably just know two things: It was reliable, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When I was 10 years old, my dad took me to Fenway Park for the first time. I remember quite clearly walking up the runway and seeing the brilliant green lawn and being totally and completely amazed. Now that’s a great customer experience. I was hooked simply by the beauty of the ballpark, even before […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Spanish bank Santander has launched a new product called PagoFX. As the name suggests, PagoFX focuses on foreign exchange and lets you send money in other currencies. In other words, it’s a TransferWise competitor. It is completely separated from Satander’s retail bank products. You don’t need a Santander bank account. While Santander puts its logo […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

That NASA intends to collect a sample from Mars and return it to Earth is well known — they’ve said so many times. But how would they go about scooping up soil from the surface of a distant planet and getting it back here? With a plan that sounds straight out of sci-fi. Described by […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Apple has dropped a new iPhone SE on the market today. It’s a 4.7” iPhone with a physical home button, Touch ID, a single rear-facing camera and the A13 Bionic chip on board. With a $399 starting price point, the new SE is aimed squarely at new iPhone users or first time smartphone buyers but […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

US major stock indexes fell in Wednesday trading as new data from the Commerce Department and Federal Reserve indicated a collapse in manufacturing output and retail sales. However, the declines did not completely erase yesterday’s gains in another sign that US investors and corporations may be better positioned to withstand the economic shocks caused by […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices