TechCrunch Industry News

Huawei’s founder has come out fighting against the U.S. government after he claimed that “there’s no way the US can crush us.” Ren Zhengfei, who founded the telecom company in 1987, doesn’t often make public statements, but, in a rare interview with the BBC, he defiantly claimed that Huawei’s business is growing stronger amid pressure from the U.S. government, whichis pursuing criminal chargesover alleged business dealings in Iran. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Alarming reports popped up on Twitter late Thursday of incident involving an armed individual at Netflix’s Hollywood office on Sunset Blvd. TechCrunch has confirmed with the Los Angeles Police Department that a call reporting a man with a gun first came in at 3:53 Pacific Time. According to the LAPD, there were no shots fired, no reports of injuries and the suspect in question has been taken into custody. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Did New York lose anything with Amazon’s rejection? It’s complicated. Amazon announced yesterday that it’s taking its ball and going home, rather than dealing with mean, pushy New Yorkers (warning: not an exact quote). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome back toEquity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was a treat. We had TechCrunch’s own Connie Loizos in the studio along with your humble servant and General Catalyst’s Niko Bonatsos. A fine group for a busy week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Boston and New York have been sporting rivals for decades, constantly fighting over bragging rights across all four major sports, but today the two cities had something in common neither was probably hoping for. Both had major tech companies back out of massive deals on the same day. It turns out, however, the two cities lost the deals for entirely different reasons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“If AI is so easy, why isn’t there any in this room?” asks Ali Farhadi, founder and CEO of Xnor, gesturing around the conference room overlooking Lake Union in Seattle. And it’s true — despite a handful of displays, phones, and other gadgets, the only things really capable of doing any kind of AI-type work are the phones each of us have set on the table. Yet we are always hearing about how AI is so accessible now, so flexible, so ubiquitous. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Apple has made a small but important change to iOS that will allow users an easier way to manage their app subscriptions. In the latest release of the mobile operating system (iOS 12.1.4 and 12.2 beta), the company has relocated the “Manage Subscriptions” setting so it’s only one click away when you tap on your profile in the App Store, instead of being buried more deeply within the settings. This may seem like a minor change, but it was a much-needed one. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Earlier this week, Slack announced that it has filed the paperwork to go public at some point later this year. The big question is, will the company exit into the public markets as expected, or will one of the technology giants swoop in at the last minute with buckets of cash and take them off the market? Slack, which raised over $1 billion on an other worldly $7 billion valuation, is an interesting property. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Micah Rosenbloom Contributor Micah Rosenbloom is a venture partner at Founder Collective. More posts by this contributor Business school grads and quants are winning the battle to create the next P&G Startups need to respect the laws of retail physics Unlike 2000 and 2008, everyone in the startup world is expecting a crash to come at any moment, but few are taking concrete steps to prepare for it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A decade ago, about a dozen or so engineers gathered at Google’s main Mountain View campus on Charleston Road to work on Project Chauffeur, a secret endeavor housed under the tech giant’s moonshot factory X. Project Chauffeur — popularly know as the “Google self-driving car project” — kicked off in January 2009. It would eventually graduate from its project status to become a standalone company called Waymo in 2016. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What to expect from Mobile World Congress 2019 Foldables and 5G all the way down I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: 2019 just might be the year that smartphones get fun again. After years of similar form factors and slight upgrades, the mobile industry’s back is against the wall. For the first time ever, sales are down, owning to economic factors and slower upgrade cycles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, and welcome back toEquity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week Kate Clark and I sat down to get through the biggest news in the venture and startup world. This is our regular episode of the week after a shot focused on the Slack IPO, and an interview concerning Facebook. So, back to our roots. And as has been the case for months and months now, there was a lot to get through. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you can’t beat or join them…force feed ’em? That appears to be Instagram’s latest strategy for IGTV, which is now being shoved right into Instagram’s main feed, the company announced today. Instagram says that it will now add one-minute IGTV previews to the feed, making it “even easier” to discover and watch content from IGTV. Uh. IGTV, you may recall, was launched last year as a way for Instagram to woo creators. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

French company Chauffeur-Privé is going to expand aggressively over the next couple of years. That’s why the company is changing its name to Kapten — a name that sounds less French. “We wanted to share with you a very important piece of news,” Kapten co-founder and CEO Yan Hascoet said in a press conference. “We changed our name while keeping the same positioning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tesla has opened an Amazon store to spread its swag far and wide Tesla has had a brisk merch business for years now, thanks to its fervent owner base and fans, who are enthusiastic supporters of the company and its CEO Elon Musk. But until now, those Tesla-branded items — everything from water bottles and hats to jackets, chargers and once a surfboard — have been sold through the automaker’s own website. Tesla has now expanded it merch ambitions and opened a store on Amazon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Vice Media plans to cut 250 jobs — about 10 percent of its total workforce. The Hollywood Reporter broke the news. When contacted by TechCrunch, a Vice spokesperson confirmed the story but declined to comment further. This comes after a brutal couple of weeks in the media business, as companies began the year with major cuts. BuzzFeed is trimming its staff by 15 percent. Verizon Media Group (which owns TechCrunch) laid off 10 percent of its workforce. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A number of Twitter users have been complaining that tweets that were retweeted by people they don’t follow are now showing in their timeline. The issue, thankfully, is not related to a new Twitter algorithm or recommendation system, as some had feared. Instead, the company confirmed that a bug affecting Android users was mislabeling the “social proof” tag on Retweets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lowe’s is killing off and bricking its Iris smart home products at the end of March If you’ve got any gear from Lowe’s Iris line of smart home products, it’s time to start looking for alternatives. Lowes has announced that the line is toast, with plans to flip the switch on “the platform and related services” at the end of March. In other words: much of this once smart connected gear is about to get bricked. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Two of Facebook’s four fact-checking partners in the U.S. have left the program as of the beginning of this year: Snopes, which recently rebuffed reports that its relationship with Facebook was strained, and the Associated Press. Both confirmed they are leaving the program, but left the possibility of future collaboration open. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I know first-hand how frustrating it is to get locked out of your Google accountand to lose access to much of your online life. I’m hoping this simple work-around will help get you get through the account recovery process much faster than the manual method, which takes a minimum of 3-5 days (and in my case ended up taking weeks). This week, a colleague who remembered my article on my lock-out experience, asked me for advice after she was locked out of her account. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nintendo held off on building smartphone games for years, but now they just can’t stop. They started with a little stumble with the short-lived Miitomo, but then found an audience with Super Mario Run. Then came Fire Emblem Heroes. Then Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, and Dragalia Lost. Next up? Dr. Mario. Nintendo announced this afternoon that it’s working on a title called Dr. Mario World, built in collaboration with LINE (as in the company that makes the LINE chat app. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here: 1. Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach Facebook managed to beat Wall Street’s estimates in its Q4 earnings despite a seemingly constant beatdown in the press. The company said it hit 2.32 billion monthly users, up 2.2 percent from 2. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you just tried to turn on your Xbox One and were met with nothing but a black screen: you’re not alone. A particularly bad outage in Xbox Live’s core services is causing the console to get stuck at boot. Microsoft is aware of the outage, and says they’ve “identified the cause”. We are aware of reports of Xbox One console startup, title update and sign-in errors. We will keep everyone informed once we have more information to share. Thank you all for your patience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you haven’t been paying attention to TikTok, you haven’t been paying attention. The short-form video app hailing from Beijing’s ByteDance just had its biggest month ever with the addition of 75 million new users in December — a 275 percent increase from the 20 million it added in December 2017, according a recent report from Sensor Tower. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Losing to the computer in StarCraft has been a tradition of mine since the first game came out in 1998. Of course, the built-in “AI” is trivial for serious players to beat, and for years researchers have attempted to replicate human strategy and skill in the latest version of the game. They’ve just made a huge leap with AlphaStar, which recently beat two leading pros 5-0. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

People are increasingly interested in finding a way to participate in the cannabis industry, and for good reason. It’s growing like a weed (yes, we said it). According to a San Francisco-based research company, Grand View Research, the global legal marijuana market is expected to reach $146.4 billion by end of 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome back toEquity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week we had the gang back together with our own Connie Loizos at the helm, Kate Clark in the studio as well, Alex on the phone, and Ed Sim from Boldstart Ventures onboard as well. A good crew for a busy week. Now that 2019 is fully underway, the news is back to its usual firehose-pace which means we had a lot to get through. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Smartphones are about to get more interesting, but is it enough to drive growth? As sales stagnate, will foldable phones and 5G be enough to save the day? Smartphone numbers are down. In 2018, global shipments dropped 3 percent, and while the long-promised arrival of 5G will help numbers get back into the black, IDC predicts that even then growth will be in the low-single digits. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mixtape, the podcast that goes a bit behind the headlines to bring tech to culture. This week Megan Rose Dickey and I welcome Tiana Kara, the head of partnerships and growth at #builtbygirls (which, like TechCrunch, is owned by Verizon Media Group). The organization connects girls and women between the ages of 15 and 22 with mentors of all stripes in the tech industry based on their interests. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sunil Nagaraj, who’d studied computer science as an undergrad at UNC Chapel Hill, landed two pretty nice gigs after deciding to pursue an MBA at Harvard Business School. First, he founded a venture-backed company called Triangulate — though he recognized when it was time to shut it down two years later. He then wound up working as a principal for Bessemer Venture Partners, a top-tier venture firm with locations around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We’ve got a double dose of exciting news for you, startup fans. First, we’re thrilled to announce that investment firms August Capital, SV Angel and Uncork Capital have partnered with us for the 2nd Annual TechCrunch Winter Party at Galvanize on February 8. And second, today we released into the wild another fresh, though limited, batch of tickets. If you haven’t snagged a ticket to this Silicon Valley shindig, take heed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Most of us believe our time is extremely valuable, certainly worth more than thirty cents. But then you read about human decision-making, and you have to wonder what goes through people’s heads. This time, it is Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at The Wall Street Journal, who wrote a review of Amazon Publishing, the printing house (if you will) of the ecommerce giant. Amazon published more than one thousand titles in 2017, and now commands roughly a majority of all book purchases made in the U.S. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Twitter accidentally revealed some users’ “protected” (aka, private) tweets, the company disclosed this afternoon. The “Protect your Tweets” settingtypically allows people to use Twitter in a non-public fashion. These users get to approve who can follow them and who can view their content. For some Android users over a period of several years, that may not have been the case – their tweets were actually made public as a result of this bug. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nasdaq’s BVP Emerging Cloud Index measures the performance of a portfolio of 45 SaaS stocks. Like much of the tech world, and the stock market in general, the final quarter of 2018 was not terribly kind. The good news is that there are signs of life lately. On November 19th, SaaS stocks had a noteworthy bad day. Everything was down, way down. As we reported, some examples included: Salesforce was down 8.7 percent to $121.01. Box was down 6.93 percent to $16.66 Workday was down 7.57 percent to $124. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome back toEquity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. We’re back! After what I think was our first-ever break, Kate Clark and I sat down to dig into the latest startup venture news. There was a lot. We had to skip a few rounds to squeeze the show down to size, but we still hit the biggest stories. First, Lime and Bird are raising again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Redpoint Ventures is doubling down on China. The firm, headquartered in Menlo Park, has filed documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to raise $400 million across two new China-focused funds. The firm has set a $300 million target for its second flagship China fund, a significant increase from the $180 million it garnered for its debut China fund in 2016. Redpoint is also raising a $100 million opportunityfund that will also focus on the Chinese tech startup market. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Spotify launches Car View on Android to make using its app less dangerous behind the wheel Spotify is making it easier to use its streaming app in the car, when the phone is connected to the vehicle over Bluetooth. The company today confirmed the launch of a new feature called “Car View,” which is a simplified version of the service’s Now Playing screen that includes larger fonts, bigger buttons, and no distractions from album art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why is one of the most popular Android apps running a hidden web server in the background? ES File Explorer claims it has over 500 million downloads under its belt since 2014, making it one of the most used apps to date. It’s simplicity makes it what it is: a simple file explorer that lets you browse through your Android phone or tablet’s file system for files, data, documents and more. But behind the scenes, the app is running a slimmed-down web server on the device. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

China accounted for nearly half of app downloads in 2018, 40% of consumer spend Global app downloads topped 194 billion in 2018, up 35 percent from 2016, according to App Annie’s annual “State of Mobile 2019” report released today. Consumer spending across app stores was up 75 percent to reach $101 billion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Philip Rosedale Contributor Philip Rosedale is co-founder and CEO of High Fidelity. A smartphone screen is a wonder of the world. It’s not just that it’s bright and colorful and sharp. In some ways, it’s as good as human biology allows. We’ve packed so many pixels into such a small space that any more would be lost on us. We can’t make the screens themselves bigger, because then they’d become too large to hold. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

VLC, the hugely popular media playing service, is filing one of its gaps with the addition ofAirPlay support as its just crossed an incredible three billion users. The new feature was revealed byJean-Baptiste Kempf, one of the service’s lead developers, in an interview with Variety at CESand it will give users a chance to beam content from their Android or iOS device to an Apple TV. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jason Rowley Contributor Jason Rowley is a venture capital and technology reporter for Crunchbase News. More posts by this contributor SoftBank’s Vision Fund inches closer to $100B The top 10 cities for $100M VC rounds in 2018 so far For the global VC industry, 2018 was asupergiantyear. Crunchbase projects that 2018 deal and dollar volume surpassed even the high-water mark left by the dot-com deluge and the drought that followed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gartner has released its quarterly PC sales survey for the fourth quarter of 2018, and it was the same old story. PC sales plunged in the fourth quarter and were down 1.3 percent for the year. The three top players — HP, Dell and Lenovo — accounted for 63 percent of sales worldwide in the quarter. The company found in their preliminary sales research that worldwide sales totaled 68.6 million units in the fourth quarter. That may sound like a big number, but it’s down 4. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Two and a half years after doing pushups onstage at Disrupt New York, Bay Area-based sports health company Halo Neuroscience is back with the second generation of its brain stimulating headphones. The biggest update to the spiky wearable this time around is a newfound focus on the headphone aspect of the product. The Halo Sport 2 adds Bluetooth audio — a nice change from its hardwired predecessor. After all, no one wants to be tethered while working out. Co-founder Dr. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

To paraphrase P. T. Barnum, “there’s a Bluetooth speaker born every minute.” At no time of year is that more true than at CES in Las Vegas, where they are bountiful beyond belief. But very few — nay, only one that I found — are made of concrete. And it’s French! The speakers immediately attracted my attention because of their simplicity and of course material. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Silicon Valley loves a party, and we’re ready to help you get your swerve on. We’ve just released a fresh batch of tickets to the 2nd Annual TechCrunch Winter Party. Our fabulous midwinter fete takes place on Friday, February 8 atGalvanizein San Francisco. Here’s a hot tip: buy your ticket now, because they won’t sit around for long. Last year, nearly 1,000 people came to the party and — as cliché as it sounds — a good time was had by all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Handheld retro gaming machines come and go, but few go so simply and effectively to the point as My Arcade’s Retro Champ. You stick in your NES cartridge, hit the power button, and assuming you blew on it beforehand, it powers up. This one sets itself apart with a big ol’ screen, Famicom compatibility, and a whopping 35-hour battery life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In moments of stress and anxiety, there are those of us who find it difficult to breathe — and paradoxically, many reach for a cigarette or vape as a way to manage that. But what if instead of nicotine or smoke, the device you grabbed put fresh air in your lungs and helped you calm down? That’s the idea behind the Kitoki. Looking a bit like an oversized bean with a sippy cup tip on the end, the Kitoki is a striking but not immediately attractive device. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here: 1. Magic Leap and other AR startups have a rough 2019 ahead of them 2018 was supposed to be the year where the foundation of AR was set to expand, but now it looks like momentum has been sucked out of the industry’s heavy hitters. 2. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In a new a16z podcast with the venture firm’s founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, there’s a lot to enjoy, from Andreessen’s TV show recommendations to Horowitz’s secret to excellent barbecue. (It’s pretty much just “time,” as you might imagine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices