TechCrunch Industry News

Pokémon GO was built to be played outside, with friends, as you wandered around and explored interesting landmarks around you — or, you know, the exact opposite of what we’re supposed to be doing right now. Niantic has been working on transitioning the game into something that can still be played from your couch (Pokémon […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As the COVID-19 death toll in the United States continues to climb, American stocks are, in a grim divergence, recovering lost ground. It isn’t clear precisely why locally-listed equities have risen in recent weeks, let alone today, but let’s go over the day’s results so that we’re all on the same page. In regular trading […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bruce Springsteen once wrote, “We’re living in the future and none of this has happened yet.” It seems that the world is changing before our eyes as COVID-19 has sent us all home and forced us and our institutions to change the way we operate overnight. As Box CEO Aaron Levie pointed out on Twitter […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Four months after breaking ground, the Lucid Motors factory in Arizona sits — its new roof and sign emblazoned on its side— waiting for construction to resume. The electric vehicle company released Tuesday new photos of the factory located off Interstate 10 between Phoenix and Tucson. Construction was “well ahead of schedule” when Gov. Doug […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Apple and Google’s engineering teams have banded together to create a decentralized contact tracing tool that will help individuals determine whether they have been exposed to someone with COVID-19. Contact tracing is a useful tool that helps public health authorities track the spread of the disease and inform the potentially exposed so that they can […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sam Altman, former president of Y Combinator and CEO of OpenAI, tweeted out his goal to secure 1 billion masks in 180 days. The public just needs to crowdfund those masks, first. Altman, along with his brother Max Altman, an employee at Rippling, Radu Spineanu, the co-founder of Two Tap, Tinnei Pang, a designer at […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In a sign of just how broken the process is for startups looking to receive stimulus dollars, Silicon Valley Bank, the bank that claims “more innovative startups bank with us than any other bank,” only just began processing claims today. “Since the CARES Act and the PPP were announced, we have been hard at work […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google’s game-streaming service Stadia is now free for anyone with a Google account, the company announced today. Assuming you’ve got a compatible device and controller — and good internet in one of the 14 supported countries — you can sign up right now and get the “Pro” edition with a handful of built-in games for […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Let’s channel our guilt into something good. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

All major indices rose Wednesday, led by the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which increased 3.44% to close above 23,000 for the first time since March 13. Investors seemed heartened by comments made by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, who said Wednesday that the U.S. death count from COVID-19 is lower […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Want to let your kids poke around Netflix without them wandering their way beyond the kids section? Got a roommate who keeps inexplicably forgetting to use their profile and is totally screwing up your “Continue Watching” list? Good news! Netflix is now letting users set a PIN to keep individual profiles locked down. The new […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

American equities closed down today, with the major domestic indices all losing ground after a wild trading cycle. After starting the day up sharply higher after strong Monday gains, those gains were erased as the day closed. It was a day of confusing movement; the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite, to pick an example, had a range […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After a sharp Monday rally seemingly built on optimism that the impact of the global pandemic may have reached its zenith in Europe — and indeed that the United States might see a lower infection and mortality peak than some anticipated — shares once again rose this morning. Here’s how the day looks a few […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Stocks rallied Monday, with all major indices snapping back into positive territories as investors seized on any positive developments in the fight to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus. The stock market is, of course, not the economy. And this is likely a dead cat bounce — a temporary recovery after […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The massive surge of COVID-19-related layoffs has put tech in a unique position. While the startup world is facing layoffs itself, it is also trying to help get people back to work. Back at the end of 2019, the SoftBank-backed belt-tightening period led to a flurry of crowdsourced spreadsheets with employee names from companies like […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Times are exceptionally hard, especially for local restaurants, which were always in a precarious business even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. But when times are hard, people pull together, right? Or at least they don’t take advantage of the suffering and desperate to exploit and profit from them. Right? We’d all like to think so, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With movie theaters largely closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Disney is pushing back its slate of upcoming films. And at least one movie won’t be making it into theaters at all, with “Artemis Fowl” heading straight to streaming instead. The company announced today that that the film will debut exclusively on Disney+, and that […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AWS today announced that its DeepComposer keyboard is now available for purchase. And no, DeepComposer isn’t a mechanical keyboard for hackers but a small MIDI keyboard for working with the AWS DeepComposer service that uses AI to create songs based on your input. First announced at AWS re:Invent 2019, the keyboard created a bit of […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Time spent in mobile apps has been surging, as people stuck at home due to the coronavirus outbreak have been turning to apps to do their shopping, manage their finances, find new exercises, work from home, and stay entertained. According to new data from App Annie, released today, Q1 2020 was the largest-ever quarter in […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you’ve ever tried to buy the Harry Potter audiobooks, you probably noticed something kind of tricky: there’s two very different versions. The version most widely available in the US is narrated by Jim Dale. The UK version is read by Stephen Fry. Which is better? I won’t get into that — that’s something the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A recent redbound in domestic equity prices faded further into the distance today, as American stocks fell for a second consecutive day following modest Tuesday declines. After rising from new 52 week lows, all domestic indices after the American president warned of difficult weeks ahead as the country reels from the economic and social impacts […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The first quarter of 2020 ended with a whimper — with the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500 and NASDAQ posting their worst quarter in decades — as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to cause uncertainty and volatility across all major stock market indices. At the beginning of the quarter, we were still basking in a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Let’s be real: Now isn’t the ideal time to launch a health tracker. For a majority of us, expectations have dramatically plummeted for step counts, workout minutes and other gamified metrics. But hardware launches will, for the most part, go on. Fitbit eschewed its normal press event this time out — for increasingly good reason […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The last few weeks have just been dreadful for asset managers. Not only have the markets tanked the past few weeks (if slightly recovered from their lows since the signing of the U.S. stimulus bill), but the daily volatility of different assets is making it very hard to keep portfolios balanced. As an example, the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Microsoft today announced a ton of new features for its productivity apps, but it also used today’s release to highlight a few new features that are coming to its Chromium-based Edge browser in the near future. Most of these are pretty straightforward and expected, like its Collections bookmarking feature coming to mobile later this year, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Only a few days after saying that he would like to see the country “opened up and raring to go by Easter” and maybe relax rules for at least some parts of the U.S. sooner than later, President Trump today announced that he is extending the government’s social distancing guidelines through April 30. “Nothing would […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The long-running Folding@Home program to crowdsource the enormously complex task of solving molecular interactions has hit a major milestone as thousands of new users sign up to put their computers to work. The network now comprises an "exaflop" of computing power: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Huawei has unveiled new flagship phones today, the P40, P40 Pro and P40 Pro+. These are beautiful phones with great specs. But it would only take you a few minutes to realize that there’s something odd with them. There is no Gmail, no Google Maps and no Google Play Store. Last year, the U.S. government […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The impacts of telecommuting, shelter-in-place laws, and home quarantines resulting from the COVID-19 outbreak are starting to impact broadband speeds across a number of U.S. cities, a new report has found. According to broadband analysis site BroadbandNow, 88 out of the top 200 most populous U.S. cities analyzed have now experienced some form of network […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Web browser Brave is expanding its cryptocurrency features with an integration with cryptocurrency exchange Binance. Brave users will be able to buy, trade and receive crypto assets directly on the new tab page. In addition to a particular focus on privacy, Brave has been playing around with cryptocurrencies for a while. The company launched its […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last week, popular music platform Bandcamp announced that it would be waiving its revenue shares from all sales for 24 hours, starting Friday morning. The move was an effort to help boost income for the innumerable artists who have been struggling to make ends meet as live performances have been canceled for the foreseeable future […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Apple has released software updates for the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple Watch, the Apple TV and the Mac. The biggest changes are on the iPad. Starting today, you can pair a mouse or trackpad with your iPad and use it to move a cursor on the display. Apple unveiled trackpad support for iPadOS when […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The technology industry’s central role in an American economy shaped by attempts to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 is being reflected in how investors are approaching markets in these turbulent times. As the broader economy stumbles, technology companies and the major exchange they call home seem to be somewhat more of a safe-haven given the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The flood of status symbol content into Instagram Stories has run dry. No one is going out and doing anything cool right now, and if they are, they should be shamed for it. Beyond sharing video chat happy hour screenshots and quarantine dinner concoctions, our piece-by-piece biographies have ground to a halt. Oddly, what remains […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The path forward now seems pretty clear. First we get through the grim month-and-more ahead, supporting health care workers in any way we can. (Tip: findthemasks.com lists where to donate PPE, personal protective equipment, in the US. If you have any, do so. We are very literally all in this together, and they need it […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With U.S. consumers asked to refrain from social gatherings and shelter-in-place at home due to COVID-19, media consumption is prepared to boom. Based on Nielsen data from prior major crises in recent U.S. history that forced consumers to stay home, total TV usage increased by nearly 60%. We’re not there yet, but consumption is starting […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Work in the time of coronavirus is driving huge growth in videoconferencing, as scores of office workers go remote and log on to meetings from home. Zoom — which offers a range of slick features like auto-transcription and virtual backgrounds — has been a key beneficiary of this viral boom. Back in February research analysts […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In a volatile trading session that saw the White House signal intentions to release the largest stimulus package since the great recession of 2008, American stocks made up for yesterday’s losses with major indices rising sharply. The return to gains was welcome after stocks posted huge losses to begin the week, tripping the market’s circuit […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

At what is now a daily coronavirus press briefing at the White House, President Trump today said that Google CEO Sundar Pichai called him to apologize. What Pichai apologized for wasn’t immediately clear, but Trump then went on to praise Google’s communications team for supposedly substantiating Trump’s comments about Google’s coronavirus screening site. “I want […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yesterday, San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced a lockdown for six Bay Area Counties: San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Marin, Contra Costa and Alameda. The public health order marks a big step to help reduce movement, potential transmission of COVID-19, of the nearly 7 million people within the Bay Area. It is important to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tesla said Monday it has started delivering the Model Y crossover to customers in the U.S., hitting a milestone one year after unveiling the prototype and six months ahead of schedule. Reports of deliveries started last week. The tweet from Tesla, which included a video of the Model Y being assembled and then hitting the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

An engineer from Charter, one of the largest phone and internet providers in the U.S., sent an email blast to a senior vice president and hundreds of engineers on Friday. In the email, Nick Wheeler, a video operations engineer based in Denver, criticized his employer for not allowing its staff to work from home despite ongoing […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After several weeks worth of leaks, the latest version of Apple/Beat’s Powerbeats arrive this week. One key thing many of the rumors got wrong is the name. There will be no Powerbeats 4 — not for now, at least. Instead, the company’s somewhat confusingly doing away with the number scheme in favor of the simpler […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Brizzly, the name associated with a long-gone Twitter client, and later, a goofy project highlighting our addiction to social media, is coming back. And this time, it’s focused on serving the needs of Twitter power users in search of features Twitter itself has failed to build — like an Edit button and an auto-deletion option for tweets, among other things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

American-listed shares are off sharply this morning, falling after a steep selloff yesterday was not staunched by a presidential address. The declines echo what happened to Asian-listed stocks earlier today. All major American indices are now in bear-market territory, having shed the requisite 20% from recent highs. Today’s carnage is simply bleak. As we write to you, here’s where stocks are: Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA): -1,688.5, or -7.2% S&P 500: -191.2, or -7. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Have you ever seen a dead cat bounce? It’s a term that Wall Street traders coined to describe the moment when collapsing markets briefly rise before resuming a downward trajectory. It looks like investors new to the notion of an economic downturn may have seen their first such bounce yesterday. The glacial domestic response to the spreading novel coronavirus in the U.S. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NASA’s ambitious plan to put boots on the Moon in 2024 is looking increasingly costly — and increasingly unlikely — if the current cost overruns and delays are any indication, according to a report by the agency’s Office of the Inspector General. “NASA’s continued struggle with managing SLS Program costs and schedule has the potential to impact the Agency’s ambitious goals for the Artemis program,” reads the report issued yesterday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The European Parliament is instructing managers to prepare for all but a minority of staff to work remotely for 70% of the week as of next Monday — dialling up its response to Covid-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Full-time remote working may follow, it has also said. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It appears that the teaser from President Donald Trump’s press conference last night about the steps that the U.S. government might take to soften the economic blow of a more severe response from the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S. has had the desired effect. At least it looks that way, given how the stock market opened regular trading hours. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A small consolation in the growing COVID-19 crisis is that some of our moderate germophobia has begun to feel like a minor super power. As I got settled for a cross-country flight last week, I took out my hand wipes and did a whole number on the screen, tray table and arm rests, and this time no one looked at me funny. I go to a lot of conferences and trade shows and have to shake a lot of hands (though I’ve taken to the elbow bash in recent weeks) before handling my phone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices