TechCrunch Industry News

In addition to Samsung and Vizio, LG announced earlier this year that it would be adding support for Apple’s ecosystem to its TV operating system. According to a tweet from LG’s Australian account, the webOS update that adds support for HomeKit and AirPlay 2 will be released next week. Homekit is releasing in 1 week. Users require iOS 12.4 update to do Airplay2. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks to a rash of YouTube videos of traffic stops, wild crashes, and wacky antics, dashcams are becoming more and more popular with drivers. But does the world need one that shoots at 1080p and beams every minute of your drive back to a central storage device and can work as a Wi-Fi hotspot? PureGear thinks so. Their latest camera, the PureCam Connected Car Security System, shown at CES 2019, features front and back-facing cameras and 4G LTE connected. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I would have had a review of the WF-1000XM3s up sooner, but they arrived while I was traveling. That was a bummer for two reasons. First and most obviously is the fact that I hate being late with a review. Second and more selfishly, I really wanted to try them out on those 16-hour flights I just took to Hong Kong and back. It’s a use case for Sony’s new fully wireless earbuds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Moon bricks could keep the lights on and the heat up in Lunar colonies There may be no “dark side” of the Moon, but when and where it is dark, it’s dark — and stays that way for two weeks. If we’re going to have colonists up there, they’ll need to stay warm and keep the lights (among other things) on for the long lunar night. Turns out bricks made of Moon dust could be part of the solution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the house in which I grew up, a single framed newspaper front page loomed over us. “MAN ON MOON“, it declared jubilantly, in an enormous, suitably momentous typeface. Subheadings included “‘It’s very pretty up here … a fine, soft surface’” and, of course, “A giant leap for mankind.” One leap forward, three steps back. That newspaper was dated fifty years ago today, as I type this. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

China is BMW’s largest market, and the German automaker knows in order to capture the country’s demanding consumers, its future models must support robust autonomous driving capability. But to build it itself in China is hardly possible. The success of autonomous driving relies in part on high-definition mapping, a process that requires an expansive collection of geographic information. By law, foreign entities can’t host China-based data without local partnerships. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

WeWork CEO Adam Neumann has reportedly cashed out of over $700 million ahead of its IPO Adam Neumann, the co-founder and chief executive of the international real estate co-working startup, WeWork, has reportedly cashed out of more than $700 million from his company ahead of its initial public offering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Slack will reset the passwords of users it believes are affected by a historical data breach that affected the company more than four years ago. In 2015, the company said it was hit by hackers who gained access to its user profile database, including their scrambled passwords. But the hackers inserted code that scraped the user’s plaintext password as it was entered by users at the time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Would the internet be a better place if we all paid a little less attention to fake internet points? Instagram is still trying to figure it out. Just a few months back, Instagram started testing a design tweak that would no longer show the total number of “likes” other users’ posts had received. You could still see everyone that liked your photos and videos — but anyone else’s stuff? Don’t worry about it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

FaceApp, the AI-powered selfie-editing app that’s been having another viral moment of late, has now responded to a privacy controversy that we covered earlier here. We’ve pasted the company’s full statement at the bottom of this post. The tl;dr here is that concerns had been raised that FaceApp, a Russian startup, uploads users’ photos to the cloud — without making it clear to them that processing is not going on locally on their device. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With help from ‘Game of Thrones,’ HBO conquers Netflix in Emmy nominations When the Emmy nominations were announced last year, Netflix had a big win,overtaking HBO for the first time. But this year, HBO is back in the lead, with 137 nominations compared to Netflix’s 117. The Hollywood Reporter has tallied up the just-announced nominations, with Amazon Prime Video getting 47 nods and Hulu receiving 20. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The price of a Tesla vehicle equipped with “full self-driving” is about to get more expensive, the second time in the past several months the company has increased fees for a feature that isn’t completely functional. Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted Tuesday that the price of its full self-driving option will increase by $1,000 on August 16. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Like most companies, much of what Valve tinkers with behind the scenes never sees the light of day. Concepts are born, torn apart and rebuilt, and sometimes tossed away without anyone outside the company ever seeing a hint of it. Seems Valve is trying to change that, giving users an opportunity to provide feedback on potential new features before they’re fully baked. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission to the asteroid Ryugu is an ambitious one to begin with, and the team recently made the decision to up the stakes with a second touchdown on the space rock’s surface. Not only did all go as planned, but we now have the best shots of an asteroid’s surface ever to be sent back to Earth. Hayabusa2 is a very, very cool mission. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The new 2020 C8 Corvette won’t be revealed for six more days. But to hold us over, Chevrolet is showing off the steering wheel of the eighth generation vehicle. The photo, which Chevy teased Friday, is just the steering wheel. But there are hints and insights that even this single photo provides. For one, this new generation is unlike any of its predecessors. The leathered-wrapped steering wheel has the Corvette crossed flags logo as the centerpiece with two spokes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Boosted, the startup that got its beginnings with electric skateboards, has officially taken its first stab at electric scooters with the launch of the Boosted Rev. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks riding the Rev around the streets of San Francisco and, as I put in the headline, it’s fast, durable, fun and really heavy — 46 pounds to be exact. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google loves a good Easter egg. From cutesie Douglas Adams references to the search results for “askew” being just a liiiiittle bit crooked, there’s all sorts of stuff hiding in the search engine if you know the right thing to type or the right buttons to push. The latest addition — a fun little tennis game hidden within certain search results pages — is in honor of the Wimbledon tennis tournament. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Here’s a thing that should have never been a thing: Bluetooth-connected hair straighteners. Glamoriser, a U.K. firm that bills itself as the maker of the “world’s first Bluetooth hair straighteners“, allows users to link the device to an app, which lets the owner set certain heat and style settings. The app can also be used to remotely switch off the straighteners within Bluetooth range. Big problem, though. These straighteners can be hacked. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tesla owners and customers hoping for a refreshed Model S or Model X are going to be waiting indefinitely. Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted Monday night that there will be no “refreshed” Model X or Model S coming. In automotive speak, refreshed typically means small revisions to a vehicle model that extend beyond the typical yearly updates made by manufacturers. A refresh is not a major redesign, although there’s often a noticeable change to the vehicle model. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The BMW i8 is a lovely vehicle to drive even though it’s lacking. It hugs the road and commands attention. It’s thrilling in a way that few cars can achieve without speed. Sure, it’s quick, but it won’t set track records or quarter mile times. It just feels great to drive. By the numbers, there’s little reason to buy a $164,000 BMW i8 Roadster. Want speed? Buy a Porsche 911 Turbo for $161k or Corvette ZR1 for $123k or Nissan GT-R for $112k. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Chris Hogg Contributor Share on Twitter Chris Hogg is a digital health advocate interested in how new forms of health data are changing the relationship between physician and patient. As CCO of Propeller Health, he leads the company's San Francisco office and oversees the pharma BD, health system and payer sales, clinical and medical affairs and data science teams. Silicon Valley is obsessed with growth. And for digital health startups, that obsession is not only misguided, but dangerous. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Starbucks’ mobile ordering app has proven wildly popular for the company, with reports indicating that it had more users than the likes of Apple Pay or Google Pay last year. The convenience is just too alluring. When you’re late for work and forgot to eat, being able to order up a drink and a sandwich with a tap or two and have it ready for pick up by the time you pass the store seems sort of like magic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

HQ Trivia’s troubles continue after a failed mutiny to oust the CEO, a 92% decline in downloads since versus a year ago, and layoffs of 20% of its staff last week. Now TechCrunch has learned HQ has failed to install a new CEO after months of searching. Meanwhile, users continue to complain about delays for payouts of their prizes from the live mobile trivia game, and about being booted from the game for no reason while on the final question. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It was late afternoon on May 12, 2017. Two exhausted security researchers could barely unpack the events of what had just happened. Marcus Hutchins and Jamie Hankins, who were working from their homes in the U.K. for Los Angeles-based cybersecurity company Kryptos Logic, had just stopped a global cyberattack dead in its tracks. Hours earlier, WannaCry ransomware began to spread like wildfire, encrypting systems and crippling businesses and transport hubs across Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Brian Kateman Contributor Share on Twitter Brian Kateman is President and Cofounder of the Reducetarian Foundation. Fish make up 16% of animal protein consumed globally, anddemand is set to rise, accordingto the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, largely thanks to rising disposable incomes. But overfishing is hugely problematic – and it’s not sustainable to continue with the way things are. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If these past few weeks felt like the sky was falling, you weren’t alone. In the past month there were several major internet outages affecting millions of users across the world. Sites buckled, services broke, images wouldn’t load, direct messages ground to a halt, and calendar and email unavailable for hours at a time. It’s not believed any single event tied the outages together, more so just terrible luck for all involved. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you’re driving your car from Portland to Merced, you probably rely on GPS to see where you are. But what if you’re driving your Moon rover from Oceanus Procellarum to the Sea of Tranquility? Actually, GPS should be fine — if this NASA research pans out. Knowing exactly where you are in space, relative to other bodies anyway, is definitely a non-trivial problem. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For the first time, Apple has published the number of requests it’s received from governments to take down apps from its app store. In its latest transparency report published Tuesday, the tech giant said it received 80 requests from 11 countries to remove 634 apps from its localized app stores during July 1 and December 31, 2018. Apple didn’t list the apps that were removed but noted in most cases why the apps were pulled. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In a recent interview, Samsung CEO DJ Koh noted that the company was hard at work on Galaxy Fold fixes (he also said people won’t be using smartphones in five years, so who knows?). And now, a report from Bloomberg confirms that the company has put the finishing touches on those fixes two months after the handset was originally set to debut. So now what? We still don’t have a date. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tired of cleaning up after take-out or getting hangry waiting at your table in restaurants? Well Uber Eats is barging into the dine-in business. A new option in some cities lets you order your food ahead of time, go to the restaurant, then sit down inside to eat, a tipster from competing dine-in app Allset tells us. We tested it, and Uber Eats Dine-In even waives the standard Uber delivery and service fees. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For four months in 2018, U.S. prosecutors in Texas collected more than 9.2 million messages under a single court-authorized wiretap order, newly released figures show. The wiretap, granted by a federal judge in the Southern District of Texas, was granted as part of a narcotics investigation and became the federal wiretap with the most intercepts in 2018, according to the government’s annual wiretap report. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nielsen reports a record half a trillion on-demand music streams in U.S. so far this year Music streaming services have already delivered a new high of half a trillion (507.7 billion) on-demand streams in the first half of 2019, according to Nielsen’s mid-year Music Report released this week. This record number — an increase of 31. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It looks like choose-your-own-adventure Twitter games won’t be a one-hit wonder, now that Apple’s social team has adopted the format. A new tweet from the @AppleTV Twitter account today helps users find a movie to watch by having them click through a series of Twitter threads. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In its most recent report, Synergy Research, a company that monitors cloud marketshare, found that enterprise SaaS revenue passed the $100 billion run rate this quarter. The market was led by Microsoft and Salesforce. It shouldn’t be a surprise at this point that these two enterprise powerhouses come in at the top. Microsoft reported $10.1 billion in Productivity and Business Processes revenue, which includes Office 365, the Dynamics line and LinkedIn, the company it bought in 2016 for $26. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, so remember earlier today when I said that new 5G cities still qualify as news, for a little while longer, at least? AT&T is making it under the wire with the addition of Las Vegas to its growing portfolio of 5G business cities. The addition of Sin City brings the carrier’s total up to 20 cities for its 5G+ — a confusing branding it gave to avoid confusion with its purposefully confusing 5G E branding. Confused? Good. That was kind of the point. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Well, it’s official: The Office is leaving Netflix . Michael Scott and the rest of Dunder Mifflin will be heading for another streaming service come January 2021. By far the most popular show on Netflix in 2018, The Office was bound to leave the service eventually — or, at the very least, see some HUGE contract renegotiations. The show’s departure had been rumored a few times before now, but were quickly debunked. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Twitter Lists have never gotten the attention they deserve. A feature largely adopted by Twitter power users, lists allow you to create custom timelines by adding only those users whose tweets you want to track. And this can be done without having to also follow those Twitter accounts, which keeps your main timeline clutter-free. But the Twitter Lists feature has always been somewhat buried in Twitter’s interface — at least until now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As 5G networks begin rolling out and commercializing around the world, telecoms vendors are rushing to get a headstart. Huawei equipment is now behind two-thirds of the commercially launched 5G networks outside China, said president of Huawei’s carrier business group Ryan Ding on Tuesday at an industry conference. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The enterprise drone space has been heating up over the past couple years, but a startup in the entertainment drone space is raising the big cash now. The Drone Racing League is in the process of raising up to $50 million from investors in a Series C round according to SEC docs published today. The startup has already raised over $26 million of that figure and is looking to secure additional investors to close out the rest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A Netflix hack lets you feel the action in a scene by vibrating your phone Netflix Hack Day, the company’s internal hackathon, has a habit of producing some amazing gems — like a brain-controlled interface, a Fitbit hack that shuts off Netflix when you fall asleep, a Netflix app for the original NES, and a way to navigate the Netflix app with Face ID and ARKit, to name a few. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While mirrorless cameras accelerate into the future, medium format models are hearkening unto the past — and Hasselblad chief among them. Its new digital back fits lenses going back to the ’50s, and the tiny 907X camera body is about as lovely a throwback as one can imagine. The new set of systems, announced today, are somewhat different from what most people are used to. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Among the many spacecraft and satellites ascending to space on Monday’s Falcon Heavy launch, the Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 may be the most interesting. If all goes well, a week from launch it will be moving through space — slowly, but surely — on nothing more than the force exerted on it by sunlight. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The writing has been on the slate for some time now. Roughly this time last year, we reported that Google had wiped all tablet sales off its site. Turns out that was just a bug, but it seemed like an ominous portent of things to come. Google still went ahead and launched the Pixel Slate late last year, hoping the device would give users a much-welcome form factor alternative to its high-end Pixel Book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You surely know the whole deal about carts and horses by now. When Samsung’s first 5G handset, the Galaxy S10 5G, arrives on Sprint tomorrow, users will be able to get those blazing fast mobile speeds in all of four markets: Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Kansas City. Those all launched last week, after the arrival of the carrier’s first 5G handset, LG’s V50 ThinQ. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Startup Battlefield is known around the world as TechCrunch’s premier startup competition, and today we’re proud to announce that on November 11-12 we are producing our hardware-focused competition, Hardware Battlefield at TC Shenzhen in that amazing heartland of hardware, Shenzhen, China. The event this November will be TechCrunch’s fifth Hardware Battlefield, but our first ever in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NASA’s X-59 QueSST experimental quiet supersonic aircraft will have a cockpit like no other — featuring a big 4K screen where you’d normally have a front window. Why? Because this is one weird-looking plane. The X-59, which is being developed by Lockheed Martin on a $247 million budget, is meant to go significantly faster than sound without producing a sonic boom, or indeed any noise “faster than a car door closing,” at least to observers on the ground. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Good news for Apple Watch owners who don’t want to clutter up their Watch with unused apps. With the release of the new watchOS 6 operating system later this year, Apple will allow Apple Watch device owners to remove many more of the built-in, first-party apps from their smartwatch — including previously unremovable apps like Alarm, Timer, Stopwatch, Remote, Camera Remote, Radio, and others, as well as health apps like ECG, Breathe, Noise, and Cycle Tracking. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Making pourover coffee is a cherished ritual of mine on most mornings. But there are times I wish I could have a single cup of pourover without fussing about the kitchen — and the Geesaa, a new gadget seeking funds on Kickstarter, lets me do that. But it’s definitely still a ways from being a must-have. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sad news for anyone who loves geeky goods and top-notch April Fools’ jokes: ThinkGeek.com, the 20 year old online retailer known for selling more geek-centric gadgets and peripherals than you could fit in a TARDIS, is going away. According to an FAQ sitting at the top of its site, ThinkGeek isn’t “shutting down”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Freelance marketplace Fiverr had a good first day on the New York Stock Exchange. The company priced its IPO at $21 per share last night, raising around $111 million. It then started trading this morning at $26, with shares climbing for most of the day and closing at $39.90 — up 90% from the IPO price. Fiverr is one of the most well-known companies facilitating the so-called gig economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices