TechCrunch Industry News

Barcelona-based Landbot, a ‘no-code’ chatbot builder, has bagged a $8M Series A led by the Spanish-Israeli VC firm Swanlaab, alongside support from Spain’s innovation-focused public agency, CDTI. Previous investors Nauta Capital, Encomenda and Bankinter also participated in the round. We last chatted to Landbot back in 2018 when it raised a $2.2M seed and had […] Learn more about your ad choices....

Netflix is always in search of a better way to instantly connect users to something to watch, instead of having them waste time unsuccessfully scrolling through all the available programming options. Now, the company says a recent test focused on solving this problem, Shuffle Play, has proven popular enough to roll out to all users […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adc...

India has asked WhatsApp to withdraw the planned change to its privacy policy, posing a new headache to Facebook-owned service that identifies the South Asian nation as its biggest market by users. In an email to WhatsApp head Will Cathcart, the nation’s IT ministry said WhatsApp’s planned update to its data-sharing policy raised “grave concerns […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastc...

TechCrunch is embarking on a major project to survey the venture capital investors of Europe, and their cities. Our survey of VCs in Bucharest and Romania will capture how the country is faring, and what changes are being wrought amongst investors by the coronavirus pandemic. We’d like to know how Romania’s startup scene is […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Samsung Electronics vice chairman Jay Y. Lee is back in prison following a retrial of his 2017 conviction in a bribery case that helped lead to the downfall of former South Korean president Park Guen-hye. The Seoul High Court sentenced Lee to 30 months on Monday. Lee was originally convicted of bribery in 2017 and […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I suspect it will be a while before I get excited over wireless earbuds. It’s not for a lack of trying on the part of manufacturers. In fact, quite the contrary. The category actually matured quite quickly, compared to various other verticals in the consumer electronics space. The truth is, most major hardware makers have […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amazon is selling access to the underlying technology stack of Alexa to let companies — starting with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles — build their own intelligent assistants with unique voices, skills and wake words. The new Alexa Custom Assistant product, which was announced Friday, can coexist and cooperate with the Alexa assistant. Theoretically, this means an […] Learn more about your ad choices. V...

Even before the leaks, we all saw the Galaxy Buds Pro coming. It was a given that the company was planning to deliver its own take on Apple’s AirPods Pro, with improved sound quality and active noise canceling. The real secret weapon here, however, may be the price. This morning’s S21 announcement found Samsung dropping […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For the last couple of years, Samsung’s CES press conferences have featured a parade of futuristic home robots. They’re are smart, dexterous and impressive (and reasonably adorable). But home robots are hard. Like, really, really hard. There’s a reason the robotic vacuum continues to be one real viable home robot nearly 20 years after the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices....

Payments company Checkout.com is raising once again. The company has closed a $450 million Series C round with Tiger Global Management leading the round — Greenoaks Capital and all existing investors are also participating. If you’re not familiar with the company, Checkout.com wants to build a one-stop shop for all things related to payments, such […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcas...

Smartphone sales are bad — and have been for a couple of years now. Certainly this ongoing pandemic hasn’t helped. All the talk about how 5G and new form factors were going to cause a kind of bounce-back all fell by the wayside, as people put a pause on unnecessary luxuries. Samsung is the only […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Alternative social media apps including MeWe, CloutHub and other privacy-focused rivals to big tech, are topping the app stores following Trump’s ban from mainstream social platforms like Facebook and Twitter and the more recent removal of conservative social app Parler from both the App Store and Google Play. In the days since the Parler ban, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastcho...

As CES starts in earnest today, I anticipate we’ll be seeing a lot of hardware focused on remote work. PC sales saw a nice spike last year, even as smartphone sales continued to slip. There was a lot of adapting that needed to be done, moving from offices to virtual work places, and now we’re […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

LG spent a good chunk of its CES press conference talking about its lineup of TVs for 2021. You can expect bigger, slimmer and brighter TVs. I’m not going to list the specifications of new models. But there are a few new features that are worth mentioning. LG doesn’t use Android TV for the operating […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It might be easier at this point to ask which tech platforms President Donald Trump can still use. Payment-processing company Stripe is the latest tech company to kick Donald Trump off of its platform, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. That means the president’s campaign website and online fundraising arms will no […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adcho...

Happy almost CES! Sure the year’s biggest consumer electronics show hasn’t officially kicked off, but, well, what do such arbitrary signposts really mean in a year like 2021, right? Samsung just dropped what’s almost certainly one of its biggest pieces of news for the show, with the arrival of the Galaxy Chromebook 2. The two-in-one […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/ad...

Tesla has started taking orders for a cheaper standard range version of the Model Y in an apparent reversal by CEO Elon Musk who earlier this year seemed to put plans to release the vehicle on hold.   Electrek was the first to report that Tesla had updated its website to include the Model Y standard […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Leave it to Lenovo to give the world a swiveling all-in-one. It’s kind of the company’s M.O. – not always the most necessary or practical, but never not interesting. When it comes to fairly staid product categories like this, I’m all for trying something a little weird. And hey, in a world of convertible and […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After pro-Trump extremists violently stormed the U.S. Capitol, a number of tech executives and industry leaders are calling on Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to more aggressively curb the president’s messages amplifying and endorsing violence. After Trump released a video calling the extremists “very special” and telling them to go home, […] Learn more about your ad choic...

Snapchat was among the first apps to leverage the iPhone 12 Pro’s LiDAR Scanner for AR, but now TikTok has followed suit. The social video app confirmed today it has launched its first-ever LiDAR-powered effect to help its users ring in the new year. The effect features an AR ball, similar to the one that […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Any teacher in the San Francisco Unified School District who needs a second monitor can request one free of charge from Two Screens for Teachers, the nonprofit that recently extended a similar privilege to Seattle educators. If you’re a teacher in SF, you can sign up here. Having a second monitor may sound like a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There’s a decent chance you missed the news back in May — there was, after all, a lot going on at the time. General Electric sold off its more than 100-year-old GE Lighting division to smart home company Savant. Today, the division’s new owner is announcing a key rebranding effort, six months after the initial […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Steel production accounts for roughly 8 percent of the emissions that contribute to global climate change. It is one of the industries that sits at the foundation of the modern economy and is one of the most resistant to decarbonization. As nations around the world race to reduce their environmental footprint and embrace more sustainable […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.c...

ShareChat, which added Twitter as an investor in 2019, is in talks to add two more American giants to its captable. The Indian social network is in advanced stages of talks to raise money from Google and Snap, three sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The new financing round — a Series E — […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NASA recently announced the astronauts who will be taking part in the Artemis missions, and among them is Anne McClain, who has spent 203 days in orbit and conducted two spacewalks on the ISS. With the space industry looking nothing like it did 10 years ago and new spacecraft and technologies on the rise, McClain […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices