TechCrunch Industry News

Apps from Chinese developers have been gaining popularity on Indian app stores for sometime. Last year, as many as 44 of the top 100 Android apps in India were developed by Chinese firms. But things have changed this year as local developers put on a fight. According to app analytics and marketing firm AppsFlyer, Indian apps as a whole have recaptured their original standing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last week, Spotify sent out a number of branded-USB drives to reporters with a note: “Play me.” It’s not uncommon for reporters to to receive USB drives in the post. Companies distribute USB drives all the time, including at tech conferences, often containing promotional materials or large files, such as videos that would otherwise be difficult to get into as many hands as possible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lenskart, an omni-channel retailer in India that sells eyewear products, said on Friday that it has raised $275 million in a new financing round from SoftBank Vision Fund as it looks to expand its business in the nation. As part of the new financing round, Series G, some of the nine-year-old startup’s existing investors are selling their stake, said Peyush Bansal, founder and chief executive Lenskart. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When in April of last year, the photo hosting service SmugMug acquired the photo-hosting service Flickr from Verizon’s digital media subsidiary, SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill said he was committed to breathing new life into the service, calling it “core to the entire fabric of the Internet.” MacAskill didn’t reveal at the time how much SmugMug — which is itself an independent, family-owned operation — paid for Flickr. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tesla owners have seen a bunch of games added to their car’s in-dash display over the last few months, from a handful of Atari classics to the painfully hard Cuphead. Next up? The oh-so-sweet farm living RPG, Stardew Valley. In addition to just being kind of cool, the in-dash games (playable only when parked, because duh) are meant to help Tesla owners kill time while at superchargers. Stardew Valley is… sort of the perfect game for this. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rocket Lab’s merch store has pretty much what you’d expect from a space-themed gift shop – baby onesies, t-shirts, caps and mission patches. But the commercial rocket launch company just added its latest product, and it’s a bit different from their standard fare: For just $7. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Facebook doesn’t want its hardware like Oculus and Portal to be at the mercy of Google because they rely on its Android operating system. That’s why Facebook has tasked a co-author of Microsoft’s Windows NT named Mark Lucovsky with building the social network an operating system from scratch, according the The Information’s Alex Heath. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amazon’s original Echo Wall Clock was mostly fine. Some consumers ran into connectivity issues with the device, but it was mostly okay. It’s one of the most passive members of the Echo family of devices, mostly doing its wall clock thing, until you need a time set. The latest addition to the line has something its predecessor lacked, however: a giant Mickey Mouse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Need more buttons for your PS4 controller? This gadget adds two on the caboose When you play games on your PS4, it’s fair to say that your thumbs and index fingers are generally doing most of the work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite closed at an all-time record high of 8,814.23, up 0.91% on the day. The Nasdaq is up more than 32% on the year. Turning the clock back, the Nasdaq Composite is up around 60% from the end of 2016. Compared to the anti-records set in 2009 during the doldrums that followed the 2008 crisis, the Nasdaq is up a staggering 594%. The huge run in value of technology stocks since the last recession is historic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The clock is ticking on Verizon’s plans to bring 5G to 30 cities. Short of an actual Christmas miracle, things are looking rough. On the upside, the carrier (and, disclosure, parent of TechCrunch) just brought the next-gen technology to a 19th city. And it’s a doozy. Verizon announced this morning that it’s flipped the switch on 5G in Los Angeles. Or parts of it, at least. You get the usual caveat with Verizon’s chosen 5G tech here. It’s fast, coverage is limited. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Launch provider Rocket Lab has opened the doors on LC-2, its first launch facility in the U.S., adding capacity and versatility for providing trips to orbit. And LC-2 already has its first customer: the U.S. Air Force’s Space Test Program. The company had a little shindig today at the facility, located on Wallops Island in Virginia — home to NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility as well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After last year’s stellar turn out of almost 1,000 Silicon Valley shakers and movers, TechCrunch is returning with the 3rd Annual Winter Party at Galvanize in San Francisco on February 7. The party will feature tasty beers, wine and canapés, party games and activities, plenty of photo ops (and our infamous karaoke), giveaways and some fun surprises. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Klarna CEO says “maybe” of taking public Europe’s most valuable fintech next year (but he’s not ruling out another round, either) Yesterday, at TechCrunch Berlin, we sat down with Sebastian Siemiatkowski, the cofounder and CEO of Klarna, a 15-year-old company that’s currently the most highly valued privately held fintech in Europe, following a $460 million investment that pegged the company’s worth at $5.5 billion back in August. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After last year’s stellar turn out of almost 1,000 Silicon Valley shakers and movers at our inaugural Winter Party, TechCrunch is returning with the 3rd Annual Winter Party in San Francisco on February 7. The party will feature tasty cocktails and canapés, party games and activities, plenty of photo ops, giveaways and some fun surprises. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

BeBlocky is using gaming to educate a new generation of African programmers Nathan Damtew, the founder of new Ethiopian education technology and gaming company BeBlocky, has always been interested in games. An avid Call of Duty player, the young entrepreneur, who founded BeBlocky in his senior year of college, was always struck by the disconnection between how adept his generation was at playing games and how little they knew about how those games were built. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After more than a year of teasing, Apple finally unveiled the new Mac Pro at WWDC in June. The long wait was finally over — though Apple left out one key detail: when, precisely the high end desktop would arrive, beyond a purposefully vague fall timeframe Earlier this, however, the company began sending out pre-pre-order notifications to potential consumers (spotted by Marques Brownlee), noting the orders will open December 10. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The first trailer for the NEW new Ghostbusters is here It’s been nearly a year since a teaser trailer revealed a world weary Ecto-1 beneath a tarp in some mysterious barn. Now, a few days after getting its official name, Ghostbusters: Afterlife has its first full trailer. The forthcoming film is helmed by Jason Reitman, son of original Ghostbusters director Ivan (who is on board as producer). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gal Gadot and Chris Pine are back in the first trailer for ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ Despite the financial success of of the goofily likable “Aquaman,” Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman is probably still the biggest draw in DC’s Extended Universe. She’s returning to big screens next year in “Wonder Woman 1984”, and Warner Bros released the first trailer over the weekend. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Uber’s just-released U.S. Safety Report sets forth in some detail the number of fatal accidents, and the good news is that the overall rate per mile is about half the national average. But the report makes some puzzling choices as far as what is included and excluded. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Homeland Security has confirmed it will not expand face recognition scans to U.S. citizens arriving and departing the country, days after it emerged the agency proposed making the scans for citizens mandatory. The department, whose responsibility is border protection and immigration checks, said in a government filingthat it it wanted to “amend the regulations to provide that all travelers, including U.S. citizens, may be required to be photographed upon entry and/or departure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Qualcomm’s holding its big annual get-together this week in Hawaii, portioning off Snapdragon news, piece by piece. Yesterday’s event was the big unveiling of the Snapdragon 865 and 765, the chips that will power most of next year’s premium and mid-tier handsets, respectively. Today, the components came into sharper focus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

YouTube is warning creators they may see their subscriber numbers decline this week as the result of a purge that will remove closed accounts from YouTube metrics. Closed accounts could refer to those that were willingly shut down by users or those that YouTube shut down for policy violations — like spam or abuse, for example. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AWS, the cloud division of Amazon, just announced the next generation of its ARM processors, the Graviton2. This is a custom chip design with a 7nm architecture. It is based on 64-bit ARM Neoverse cores. Compared to first-generation Graviton processors (A1), today’s new chips should deliver up to 7x the performance of A1 instances in some cases. Floating point performance is now twice as fast. There are additional memory channels and cache speed memory access should be much faser. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The 5G question has long been carts and horses. The next-generation wireless network has always been an inevitability, of course, but the rollout has always felt a bit piecemeal. T-Mobile, to its credit, is looking to flip the switch all at once (kind of), launching a “nationwide” deployment of 5G to a coverage area it says will reach 200 million of the U.S.’s 327 million residents. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A few weeks ago, Ubiquiti unveiled the UniFi Dream Machine, an all-in-one networking device that combines a router, a switch with four Ethernet ports and a Wi-Fi access point for $299. It has what Ubiquiti calls an integrated cloud key that lets you control your network. I’ve been using the UniFi Dream Machine on my home network for the past couple of weeks, so consider this a review of the device. Ubiquiti is a well-known networking brand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everyone. Thank you for welcoming me into you inboxes yet again. Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. After dodging your inboxes for a couple weeks as I ventured off to China for a TechCrunch event in Shenzhen, I am rested up and ready to go. If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox here, and follow my tweets here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google is giving away 3 months of Disney+ to new Chromebook owners Google is hoping to juice holiday sales of Chromebooks by tacking on a subscription to the hot new streaming service, Disney+. The company on Monday announced it would give Chromebook buyers three, free months of Disney+ with the purchase of new devices. Specifically, the deal is valid for Chromebooks bought between November 25, 2019 and January 21, 2020, or while supplies last. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Simple Contacts has launched a new service letting users try out new contact lenses for as little as $3. The company launched a little over three years ago as a way for contact lens wearers to slash their refill costs, has now expanded into a service that offers users a chance to try out different lenses to see what might be a better fit. With a fresh $2 million Simple Contacts looks to cut refill costs for lenses Contact lenses are a big business. Just ask Warby Parker, href="https://www. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Coup, an electric moped scooter-sharing service that operates in Berlin, Paris and Berlin, has announced in an email that it is going to shut down in all three cities. On Twitter, the company says that operating the service is “economically unsustainable” in the long term. “We plan to discontinue our service in Berlin and Tübingen in by the middle of December 2019. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It was the challenge heard around the electric vehicle world. And now it seems, the Ford F-150 versus Tesla Cybertruck tow battle that we were all ready for, probably won’t happen. A quick recap: Tesla CEO Elon Musk poked the figurative Dearborn, Michigan bear in the middle of the company’s Cybertruck unveiling when he played a video of the futuristic electric truck pulling an F-150 in what was pitched as a head-to-head contest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Editor’s note:Drew is a geek who first worked at AOL when he was 16 years old and went on to become a senior writer at TechCrunch. He is now the VP of Communications for venture equity fund Scaleworks. There are a few ways that people use Twitter, but for the most part the ones who have pushed the social platform into the national lexicon are regular users who like to communicate with each other using the thing. They’re the ones who use it a lot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Elon Musk took a big swipe at Ford during the unveiling of the Cybertruck. Mid-presentation, he played a video of a Cybertruck pulling an F-150 in what was pitched as a head-to-head contest. Many have questioned if it was a fair fight (I don’t think it was)… including Sundeep Madra, VP of Ford X, the automaker’s venture incubator. Madra tweeted to Elon Musk today, calling for Tesla’s CEO to send Ford a Cybertruck to do an “apples to apples” test. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After pounding the side of his new Cybertruck with a sledgehammer with not a mark left behind, Elon Musk turned his focus to the “Tesla Armor Glass”. As we all saw, the glass did not fare so well. A toss of a steel ball into the window caused it to splinter, catching everyone on stage off guard. “Oh my [bleeping] God,” said Musk. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Elon Musk revealed Thursday evening the Tesla Cybertruck, a futuristic vehicle that seemed stripped straight out of a post-apocalyptic era movie. The Tesla Cybertruck, which Musk unveiled in dramatic fashion and to the hoots and hollers of invited guests at the Tesla Design Center in Hawthorne, California, is made of cold-rolled steel, armored glass that did crack in one demonstration, and adaptive air suspension. And yet despite its cubist look and performance specs, its price is rather modest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tesla revealed its Cybertruck pickup last night,a SciFi-tastic wedge built from the same steel alloy that SpaceX is using for its Starship spaceship. Elon Musk spent about twenty minutes showing off the truck, with demos ranging from a game of tug-of-war against an F-150, to racing a Porsche, to a window strength test that didn’t go quite as planned. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The current app store ecosystem doesn’t favor the indie developer. According to new data from Sensor Tower, the top 1% of publishers globally accounted for a whopping 80% of the total 29.6 billion app downloads in the third quarter of 2019. That means just 20%, or 6 billion, downloads are left for the rest of the publishers. This bottom 99%, which equates to roughly 784,080 publishers, averaged approximately 7,650 downloads each during the quarter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Volkswagen revealed Tuesday evening a new concept vehicle called the ID Space Vizzion, and despite the crazy Frank Zappaesque name, this onemight actually make it into production in Europe and North America. The ID Space Vizzion is the seventh concept that VW has introduced since 2016 that uses its MEB platform, aflexible modular system — really a matrix of common parts — for producing electric vehicles that VW says make it more efficient and cost-effective. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

First came Pokémon GO. Then came Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. Then came… Catan? It’s starting to look like the next property to get Niantic’s “real world game” treatment will be Catan — the namesake island from the popular Settlers Of Catan board game series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Audi revealed Tuesday evening in Los Angeles the e-tron Sportback as the German automaker begins to chip away at its plan to launch more than 30 electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids by 2025. The e-tron Sportback reveal ahead of the LA Auto Show follows the launch earlier this year of Audi’s first all-electric vehicle, the 2019 e-tron. Audi has delivered 18,500 of its all-electric e-tron SUVs globally since March 2019 when the vehicle first came to market. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tesla is set to unveil its pickup this week and it needs to be widely different from its current lineup. The current line of Tesla vehicles share a lot of parts, and, logically, the Tesla pickup will do the same. However, a truck has different demands than a passenger car or sport utility vehicle. It has to be more robust and able to stand up to more abuse. It has to tow and haul and scale more than a mall flowerbed. The Tesla pickup is launching as Rivian’s electric pickup is nearing launch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Convoy, the digital freight network that connects truckers with shippers, has raised $400 million in a Series D funding round as it aims to scale its business amid an increasingly competitive market. The funding round brings Convoy’s post-money valuation to $2.75 billion. The round was co-led by Generation Investment Management and previous Convoy investor T. Rowe Price Associates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“There is but one truly serious question in philosophy, and that is suicide,” wrote Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus. This is equally true for a human navigating an absurd existence, and an artificial intelligence navigating a morally insoluble situation. As AI-powered vehicles take the road, questions about their behavior are inevitable — and the escalation to matters of life or death equally so. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Microsoft’s big experiment in real-world augmented reality gaming, Minecraft Earth, is live now for players in North America, the U.K. and a number of other areas. The pocket-size AR game lets you collect blocks and critters wherever you go, undertake little adventures with friends and, of course, build sweet castles. I played an early version of Minecraft Earth earlier this year, and found it entertaining and the AR aspect surprisingly seamless. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Disney+ has officially launched in the U.S.…and it’s struggling under the load. As is often the case with new streaming services, launch days bugs and crashes are today plaguing Disney+. This morning, users are reporting error messages when they try to stream content along with other connection issues, crashes, bugs, and more on the service’s first day out of the gate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When Samsung announced the Space Monitor, I knew in an instant that it was going to be something I had to try out in person. Now that I’ve had time to do so, I’m happy to say it’s much as advertised, a streamlined and solid monitor with a smart new design — but not necessarily one for everybody. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Who shot first? Han? Greedo? Who cares. MACLUNKEY! Disney+ launched this morning, and with it comes a mostly inexplicable change to one of cinema’s most debated scenes — the encounter between Han and Greedo at the Mos Eisley Cantina. For reasons unknown to anyone but George Lucas right now, a super brief but newly inserted clip has Greedo shout what the Internet has decided is “MACLUNKEY!” before taking his failed shot at Han. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Two security researchers have been crowned the top hackers in this year’s Pwn2Own hacking contest after developing and testing several high profile exploits, including an attack against an Amazon Echo. Amat Cama and Richard Zhu, who make up Team Fluoroacetate, scored $60,000 in bug bounties for their integer overflow exploit against the latest Amazon Echo Show 5, an Alexa-powered smart display. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices