TechCrunch Industry News

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

Welcome to the bloodbath. This morning trading was halted on the major stock exchanges after the S&P 500 fell to 7% triggering what are one of the so-called circuit breakers to stop an absolute market rout. Within seconds of opening stocks fell sharply lower, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 872.42(or 3.37%) to 24,9992.36, the S&P 500 slipping 193.41 (6.51%) to 2,778.96, and the Nasdaq off 90.16 or 6.96% at 1,205.58 to start the day. By the time the S&P fell to 7%, trading was halted. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

John Oliver slammed Disney-owned Hotstar on Sunday for censoring his show, “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” in India, saying the local streaming service has edited at least three episodes in recent months. A recent episode of “Last Week Tonight”, in which Oliver criticised the Indian government’s recent policies and its leader, Narendra Modi, never aired on Hotstar.[The same episode is available unedited on YouTube in India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Friday, Facebook announced that it would further attempt to limit coronavirus-related chaos on its platform by banning commerce listings and advertisements for medical face masks. “We’re monitoring COVID19 closely and will make necessary updates to our policies if we see people trying to exploit this public health emergency,” Facebook Director of Product Management Rob Leathern said in an update on Twitter. “We’ll start rolling out this change in the days ahead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Are you tired of TechCrunch reporting on the daily stock market gyrations? Well, we’re tired of writing about them. And yet here we are, because stonks yet again did wild things that we have to talk about. Markets are still skittish about the effect the rapidly spreading novel coronavirus, COVID-19, will have on the economy. And the U.S. is still figuring out exactly how many people in the country have been infected by the virus, and how aggressively it may need to respond. So far, the U.S. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bluecrew, a flexible staffing business owned by holding company IAC, is launching a new mobile app called Bluecrew Manager. Rather than relying on a network of independent contractors, Bluecrew hires its own W-2 employees, who in turn have the option to accept hourly jobs from Bluecrew customers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Israeli AI chipmaker Hailo today announced that it has raised a $60 million Series B funding round led by its existing investors, who were joined by new strategic investor ABB Technology Ventures, the venture arm of the Swiss-based multination ABB, NEC Corporation and Londons’ Latitude Ventures. The new funding will help Hailo to roll out its Hailo-8 Deep Learning chip and to get into new markets and industries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Just a few weeks back at CES, Google gave a sneak peak of a feature that would let your Android devices read entire web pages aloud to you — perfect for when you don’t have a hand free to scroll but still need to catch up on some text, or for when you just don’t feel like looking at your screen anymore. You’d say “Hey Google, read this page”, and they’d spin up Google Assistant’s neural networks to generate a pretty dang spot-on reading of it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On a day that saw the U.S. Federal Reserve try to flip the only switch it can to light up investor confidence, investors remained unconvinced of the short-term financial prospects of the U.S. and global economies. All three major indices saw red on Tuesday after a sharp Monday rally partially erased their historically bad week that came before. The see-saw of domestic equities continued for yet another day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Apple agrees to settlement of up to $500 million from lawsuit alleging it throttled older phones Apple Inc. has agreed to pay a settlement of up to $500 million, following a lawsuit accusing the company of intentionally slowing down the performance of older phones to encourage customers to buy newer models or fresh batteries. The preliminary proposed class action lawsuit was disclosed Friday night and would see Apple pay consumers $25 per-phone, as reported by Reuters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nasdaq have reversed course after a week of losses. The Dow was up 570.50 points to 25,979.86 and the Nasdaq was up 112.96 to 8680.33 near midday trading. The two major bellwethers of investor sentiment had a rough week last week as the spread of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, and the response from governments that it engendered cut into supply chains and corporate earnings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What’s a Corvette? To me, the formula is simple: Loads of power in an affordable package that can hold two golf bags. For the past 62 years, that meant putting the engine in the front and a stick shift on the floor. And now it’s all different, and it’s the start of something great. For the first time, the Corvette’s engine is in the middle of the car resulting in a radical departure in tradition. Because of this placement, the Corvette drives differently. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The world is bracing for the seemingly inevitable proliferation of SARS-COV-12, also known as COVID-19 and coronavirus, which has already paralyzed cities and isolated millions. In the U.S., especially the nonstop work culture in startups, we tend to think we’re immune to such things and carry on business as usual. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Building a rocket is a big operation, even when you’re printing them from the ground up, like Relativity Space . The launch startup is graduating from its initial office, which is a bit cramped for assembling rockets, to a huge space in Long Beach where the company will go from prototype to first flight. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, then start. Sound familiar? The Konami Code, as this sequence came to be known, is one of the most recognizable artifacts of an earlier era of gaming. Kazuhisa Hashimoto, its creator, has used up the last of his 30 lives. Hashimoto was a programmer at Konami, and created the code during the development of one of Konami’s best-known games of the 8-bit era: Gradius. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has updated its flagship model, the Raspberry Pi 4. It’s still the same awesome tiny single-board computer with a lot of connectors. But the entry level now comes with 2GB of RAM instead of 1GB of RAM for the same price of $35. The foundation says that RAM prices have been dropping lately, so it has become cheaper to build Raspberry Pi devices with more RAM. If you want more RAM, you can still buy a 4GB model for $55 — the price hasn’t changed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When Keith Block joined Salesforce from Oracle in 2013, the CRM giant was already a successful SaaS vendor on a billion dollar quarterly revenue cadence. When the co-CEO announced he was stepping down yesterday, the company reported revenue of $4.9 billion for the quarter. During his tenure, the company’s revenue more than quadrupled, earning an impressive $17. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One thing you can say for sure about 2020’s smartphone landscape: there’s no shortage of options. Sales have taken a dip in the last few years, causing a number of manufactures to get creative with their offerings. LG’s certainly in that boat. It’s been a less than spectacular few years for the company’s mobile offerings, but it’s not for a lack of trying. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mozilla will bring its new DNS-over-HTTPS security feature to all Firefox users in the U.S. by default in the coming weeks, the browser maker has confirmed. It follows a year-long effort to test the new security feature, which aims to make browsing the web more secure and private. Whenever you visit a website — even if it’s HTTPS enabled — the DNS query that converts the web address into an IP address that computers can read is usually unencrypted. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Walt Disney Company announced this afternoon that Robert Iger, the company’s long-time CEO who ushered in the company’s lush franchise and entertainment platform profits, will step down immediately as chief executive. Bob Chapek, a long-time senior exec at the company who most recently held the position of Chairman of Disney Parks, Experiences and Products, will succeed him. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Inspired by the work of Instacart shoppers over the last few years, a handful of workers at Target-owned Shipt, a grocery delivery service, are beginning to organize. With the help of two key Instacart shopper-activists, Vanessa Bain and Sarah Clarke, who goes by a pseudonym, Shipt workers are now demanding better wages and the elimination of what some describe as a culture of fear. “We want to be the first responders,” Clarke tells TechCrunch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices