TechCrunch Industry News

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

Disney is offering a discount on its new streaming service for select European markets ahead of its March 24th launch, the company announced on Monday. Customers who pre-order Disney+ before March 23rd will get £10 or €10 a full year’s subscription, bringing the cost down to around £49.99 or €59.99 per year (~$64 USD). The service initially debuts in the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria, and Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rallyhood says it’s “private and secure.” But for some time, it wasn’t. The social network designed to helping groups communicate and coordinate left one of its cloud storage buckets open and exposed. The bucket, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), was not protected with a password, allowing anyone who knew the easily-guessable web address access to a decade’s worth of user files. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hold that tweet — and add another one. Twitter is adding a new feature for mobile users to make it easier to link dispersed ‘shower thoughts’ together — and another thingstyleee. Per 9to5Mac, the feature — which Twitter tweeted about yesterday — is slowly rolling out to its iOS app. (At the time of writing we spotted it in Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Esports, video games and the innovations that enable them now occupy a central space in the cultural and commercial fabric of the tech world. For the investment firm Bitkraft Esports Ventures, the surge in interest means a vast opportunity to invest in the businesses that continue to reshape entertainment and develop technologies which have implications far beyond consoles and controllers. Increasingly, investors are willing to come along for the ride. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yesterday, Samsung announced that the Galaxy Flip Z sold out online. What, precisely, that means, is hard to say, of course, without specific numbers from the company. But it’s probably enough to make the company bullish about its latest wade into the foldable waters, in the wake of last year’s Fold — let’s just say “troubles.” Response to the device has been positive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

CBS All Access, the streaming service now owned by ViacomCBS following the merger, is expanding. Announced today as part of the company’s otherwise underwhelming Q4 earnings, the plan is to launch a new “broad pay” streaming service that will include CBS All Access content along with other ViacomCBS assets in film and TV to complement the company’s existing free streaming service Pluto TV and premium network Showtime. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Netflix announced today that it has acquired “Don’t Look Up,” a comedy written and directed by Adam McKay, with Jennifer Lawrence attached to star. The story sounds like a funhouse reflection of one of today’s other headlines, focusing on two “low-level astronomers” who try to warn the world about the dangers of an asteroid that’s approaching Earth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Security camera maker Ring is updating its service to improve account security and give more control when it comes to privacy. Once again, this is yet another update that makes the overall experience slightly better but the Amazon-owned company is still not doing enough to protect its users. First, Ring is reversing its stance when it comes to two-factor authentication. Two-factor authentication is now mandatory — you can’t even opt out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As we all saw in Oscar-winning short film Hair Love, black hair is beautiful but it’s also notoriously difficult to manage. One of the first hair memories Naza founder and CEO Natanya Montgomery has is of her mom brushing her hair into three afro puffs on the top of her head. When she was seven, she started coming to terms with the state of her hair, and that’s when her mom took her to the salon for the first time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In December, The New York Times reported a popular messaging app called ToTok was actually a spying tool used by the government of the United Arab Emirates to track users’ conversations, location, and social connections. The app was removed from the Google Play store in December, while Google investigated, then reinstated in early January. Google now confirms the app has again been removed, but this time declined to comment as to why. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This morning brought a look at some of what we’re missing at this year’s Mobile World Congress. The show may have been called off on account of coronavirus concerns, but the news goes on. We knew that TCL was planning to show off a number of “alternative” smartphone form factors, and one just showed up on CNET. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google said on Monday that it is winding down its Station program, through which it rolled out free Wi-Fi in more than 400 railway stations in India and in several other public places around the globe. Caesar Sengupta, VP of Payments and Next Billion Users at Google, said the program, launched in 2015, helped millions of users connect to the internet everyday — many for the first time. But as mobile data prices become affordable in many markets, Google Station is no longer needed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you’re ever felt like there just weren’t enough emoji options to express how you’re feeling, a new addition to Google’s Gboard keyboard, launching today, aims to help. Gboard for Android is introducing a feature called “Emoji Kitchen” which allows users to mash up different emoji then use them as stickers when messaging. The stickers will work across apps, including Gmail, Messages by Google, Messenger, Snapchat, Telegram, WhatsApp, and others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Instagram users who miss the reverse chronological feed might get a new way to see the most recent pics and videos from who they follow. Instagram has been spotted internally prototyping a “Latest Posts” feature that appears as a pop-up over the main feed and brings users to a special area showing the newest content from their network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Battery Ventures just closed on a whopping $2 billion across two funds, two years after its last fundraise Battery Ventures, the now 37-year-old investment firm, just closed on two new funds that — at $2 billion in capital commitments — nearly double the record-breaking $1.2 billion that the firm closed on exactly two years ago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Netflix is looking to get young adults hooked on its service by making its popular teenage rom-com, “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before,” available to stream for free to everyone in the U.S., including non-subscribers. This isn’t the first time Netflix has offered free streaming — it teased Brits last year by offering an episode of “The Crown” for free, and has run similar tests in markets like India and parts of South America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Samsung did a surprisingly good job keeping the Galaxy Fold under wraps, surprising the world with its first foldable this time last year during the Galaxy S10 unveil. When it came to the Galaxy Z Flip, on the other hand, the company just went ahead and showed the whole thing off during an Oscar ad buy. (Not to mention numerous Samsung employees playing around with the handsets in their seats this morning, ahead of unveil). Crazy world, these mobile phones. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Vanessa Bain (pictured above), a well-known gig worker-activist, has teamed up with fellow gig worker-activist Sarah Clarke (pseudonym) to form the Gig Workers Collective. It’s early days for the organization, which is a pending 501(c)(3) organization, but its ambitions are big. “We want to be the first responders that, whenever gig workers find out there is a pay cut or some type of issue, they’ll feel comfortable coming to us,” Clarke told TechCrunch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There’s this brilliant feeling on Fridays if you’re a reporter when you think that all the things you have to write about are complete. You kickstart some work for Monday. Maybe you tighten up a to-do list. Hell, you might even read some email. But then on Fridays like today, something eye-catching happens and the Great Content Gods demand written sacrifice and here we are. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Galaxy Fold felt like an omen for a burgeoning category. The fascinating and promising product was plagued by broken review units that forced Samsung to go back to the drawing board with a reinforced model. But even that version ultimately ran into issues, as I can personally attest. No doubt other companies readying their own devices took the opportunity to reconsider their strategy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Instagram may finally let IGTV video makers earn money 18 months after launching the longer-form content hub. Instagram confirms to TechCrunch that it has internally prototyped an Instagram Partner Program that would let creators earn money by showing advertisements along with their videos. By giving creators a sustainable and hands-off way to generate earnings from IGTV, they might be inspired to bring more and higher quality content to the destination. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Forescout, the network security company that has been publicly traded since 2017, announced today it was going private again. Private equity firms Advent International and Crosspoint Capital are acquiring the company in an all-cash purchase of $1.9 billion. The two private equity firms will pay $33 per share, which represented a premium of 30% over the company’s closing price of $25.45 on October 19, 2019. The stock hit $39. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

An algorithmic risk scoring system deployed by the Dutch state to try to predict the likelihood that social security claimants will commit benefits or tax fraud breaches human rights law, a court in the Netherlands has ruled. The Dutch government’s System Risk Indication (SyRI) legislation uses a non-disclosed algorithmic risk model to profile citizens and has been exclusively targeted at neighborhoods with mostly low-income and minority residents. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Shares of American electric car company Tesla are sharply higher again this morning, adding $122.40 (or 15.69 percent ) to their value before regular trading today. The gains come after Tesla has rapidly added value in recent days, including a nearly 20 percent gain yesterday during regular trading; shares of the company were worth around $560 a week ago. Today they are valued at around $900. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rocket Lab is proceeding as planned with its efforts to recover and reuse spent rocket boosters from its Electron launch vehicle, and has completed its first prototype parachute for use in the recovery process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today after the bell, Alphabet reported its fourth-quarter and full-year financial results. The company’s revenue grew from $39.3 billion in 2018 to $46.1 billion in 2019. The firm’s net income also expanded from $8.9 billion to $10.7 billion over the same time frame. The figures, when compared to expectations, were mixed. Alphabet beat analyst estimates on profit, but missed on revenue. Shares of the company are off around 4% in after-hours trading, following its disclosure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Truecaller, one of the world’s largest caller-identification service providers, has amassed 200 million monthly active users and is increasingly proving that it can turn a profit, it said Tuesday. The Swedish company has doubled its user base since February of last year, when it had about 100 million monthly active users. The firm took nine years to reach its first 100 million users, but just one more to double it. Its recent 50 million users joined the platform in the last five months. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NASA has awarded Maxar an estimated $142 million contract to demonstrate in-orbit spacecraft refueling and assembly of new components using a custom robotic platform in space. The space infrastructure dexterous robot, or SPIDER, program will be part of NASA’s Restore-L mission to demonstrate automation of proposed orbital tasks like reconfiguring or repairing a satellite or manufacturing new components from scratch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The millennial obsession with wellness and self-care has led to a booming business for meditation apps. In the first quarter of 2018, app intelligence firm Sensor Tower had reported the top 10 “self-care” apps had pulled in some $27 million in revenue. Fast-forward to the end of 2019, and the numbers have gotten much higher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gabi, a startup built to help consumers save money on home and auto insurance, announced today that it has closed a $27 million Series B. The company intends on using its new capital to rapidly expand its team and invest in its product. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices