TechCrunch Industry News

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

Hey everyone. Thank you for welcoming me into you inbox yet again. I got some awesome responses to the #DeleteLinkedIn newsletter last week, a few dozen emails (some of them angry) and plenty of tweets. Looking forward to chatting with some of you soon. On that note, I’m currently in China for a TechCrunch event that we’re having in Shenzhen and will be taking some time offline to travel a bit so I won’t be arriving in your inboxes the next two weeks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AT&T is being punished at last for its shady claims of plans with “unlimited data” but were in reality nothing of the kind: The company has agreed to a $60 million settlement with the FTC, which has pursued the case for years. Some 3.5 million affected customers can expect partial refunds — little more than pocket money, but it’s something. The complaint was filed almost exactly five years ago, after customer complaints from previous years had piled up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Neo4j, a popular graph database, is available as an open source product for anyone to download and use. Its enterprise product aimed at larger organizations is growing fast, but the company recognized there was a big market in between those two extremes, and today it introduced a new managed cloud service called Aura. They wanted something in the product family for smaller companies, says Emil Eifrem, CEO and co-founder at Neo4j . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Uber will become an ad platform, selling space inside its Eats app to restaurants hoping to lure in more food delivery orders. A recent Uber job listing spotted by TechCrunch seeks an Uber Eats Ads Lead “to lead the team and efforts responsible for creating a new ads business that enables eaters to discover new foods and restaurants to grow their customer base. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

WhatsApp, the popular messaging app owned by Facebook, has faced a lot of controversy over the role that Groups plays on the platform — both for Groups’ role in spreading spam, misinformation or worse; and for the fact that it can be very hard (actually impossible) to control when you are added except by blocking a specific contact altogether. Now, it seems that the company is finally starting to make some moves to change this. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The rumors are true. A week after word surfaced that Google planned to buy Fitbit, the companies have confirmed the purchase in a blog post authored by Google device SVP, Rick Osterloh. The match could ultimately prove beneficial for both parties. Google has struggled to make much of a dent in the wearables category, leading the software giant to purchase a large chunk of IP from watchmaker, Fossil for $40 million. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everyone. Thank you for welcoming me into you inbox yet again. Last week, I talked about SoftBank’s big embarrassment and how it could impact venture capital. 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

Amazon, Microsoft and Google are often referred to as the Big 3 in the cloud infrastructure market, and if you had any doubt about the growth potential of the cloud, take a look at this quarter’s eye-popping revenue numbers from these three companies, which reached almost $22 billion this earnings’s season. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Shelby GT500 is a beast on the track. It’s not a surprise. After a day driving around Las Vegas, I found something that surprised me: The GT500 is as comfortable on the road as it is on the track. The Shelby GT500 is an icon of motoring. The name implies a simple formula of stuffing a lot of power into a modest body. I’m pleased to report Ford stuck to the proven method for the 2020 GT500. A 5.2L supercharged engine provides 670 HP in this coupe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

An accidental sweep of the App Store removed more than 20 million ratings from the most popular apps — including from well-known brands like Google, Microsoft, Starbucks, Hulu, Nike and others — as well as from smaller developers. The issue began on October 23, 2019 and wasn’t resolved until yesterday, October 29. Apple hasn’t yet explained how such a sizable and impactful change to app ratings occurred. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“These $250 earbuds are nice.” That’s the first thing I wrote to a co-worker after unboxing and trying on the new AirPods. After wearing them around the New York City streets, the subway and into a couple of cafes, that pithy review stands. Here are a few more words: They’re super comfortable. I’ve used a lot of different Bluetooth earbuds. It’s a weird perk of my job. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google brings its ‘.new’ domains to the rest of the web, including to Spotify, Microsoft & others A year ago, Google rolled out “.new” links that worked like shortcuts to instantly create new Google documents. For example, you could type “doc.new” (without the quotes) to create a new Google Doc or “sheet.new” to create a new spreadsheet. Today, Google announced it’s bringing the .new shortcuts to the rest of the web. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Does quantum computing really exist? It’s fitting that for decades this field has been haunted by the fundamental uncertainty of whether it would, eventually, prove to be a wild goose chase. But Google has collapsed this nagging superposition with research not just demonstrating what’s called “quantum supremacy,” but more importantly showing that this also is only the very beginning of what quantum computers will eventually be capable of. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Microsoft posted quarterly results today that were well ahead of analysts’ expectations, but Azure’s growth rate continues to decline as it competes with AWS. The company’s revenue for the first quarter of the fiscal year rose 14% year-over-year to $33.1 billion. Net income increased 21% to $10.7 billion, or $1.38 per share. Revenue from Microsoft’s Productivity and Business Processes segment, which includes its Office products and LinkedIn, grew 13% to $11.1 billion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As Slack has grown in popularity, one of the company’s key differentiators has been the ability to integrate with other enterprise tools, but as customers use Slack as a central work hub, it has created its own set of problems. In particular, users have trouble understanding what apps they have access to and how to make best use of them. Slack announced several ways to ease those issues at its Spec developer conference today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I’ve been tearing my gadgets apart for as long as I can remember. Consoles, phones, printers, whatever — I’ve always needed to see what makes it all work. Sometimes they even work when I put them back together. As soon as Google announced that the new Pixel 4 had friggin’ radar built in for detecting hand gestures, I needed to see under the hood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Just 6% of US adults on Twitter account for 73% of political tweets…and they disapprove of Trump A small number of prolific U.S. Twitter users create the majority of tweets, and that extends to Twitter discussions around politics, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center out today. Building on an earlier study which discovered that 10% of users created 80% of tweets from U.S. adults, the organization today says that just 6% of U.S. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Scoot, owned by Bird, has just unveiled what it’s calling the Scoot Moped. At first glance, it appears to be Bird’s two-seater vehicle. In June, Bird unveiled the Cruiser, which can seat up to two people and be pedal-assist or just have a peg, depending on the market. While the Scoot Moped is meant for one person, the design and engineering of the Scoot Moped were based on the Bird Cruiser, according to Scoot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thousands of ransomware victims may finally get some long-awaited relief. New Zealand-based security company Emsisoft has built a set of decryption tools for Stop, a family of ransomware that includes Djvu and Puma, which they say could help victims recover some of their files. Stop is believed to be the most active ransomware in the world, accounting for more than half of all ransomware infections, according to figures from ID-Ransomware, a free site that helps identify infections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This morning, the Justice Department announced that it had brought charges against the administrator and hundreds of users of the “world’s largest” child sexual exploitation marketplace on the dark web. For me, it marked the end of a story I’ve wanted to write for two years. In November 2017, I was working for CBS as the security editor at ZDNet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices