TechCrunch Industry News

A state court has dismissed a high-profile case showing unsportsmanlike conduct by Google, which was caught red-handed using lyrics obviously scraped from Genius. Unfortunately for the latter, the complaints amount to a copyright violation — which wasn’t what the plaintiffs alleged, sinking the case. The lawsuit, filed in December, accused Google of violating Genius’s terms […] Learn more about yo...

Google has updated its Lookout app, an AI toolkit for people with impaired vision, with two helpful new capabilities: scanning long documents and reading out food labels. Paper forms and similarly-shaped products at the store present a challenge for blind folks and this ought to make things easier. Food labels, if you think about it, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/a...

Lucid Motors said Tuesday that its upcoming all-electric luxury sedan can travel 517 miles on a single charge — a range that, if validated by the U.S. EPA, blows past every other EV on the road today including Tesla. The estimated EPA range was released ahead of the September 9 reveal of the Lucid Air. […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google Maps is now also available on the Apple Watch so you can get your walking, biking and driving directions right on your wrist. Don’t expect to get a full-blown Maps app on your wrist, though. The new app is mostly focused on giving you directions to know places (think home, work, etc.). To start […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Moft is a clever company that makes clever products. For a while there, I was sporting their laptop stand. It was a head-turner when I used to unfold it during meetings — back when we used to do those in-person. The truth is, I ended up having to tear it off the bottom. It lasted […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

WordPress.com, a division of Automattic, is launching a new product called P2. And this time, it’s all about improving internal communications for private groups. As a remote company, Automattic has been using P2 internally for years to communicate asynchronously. It’s a place to share long-form posts, a repository to keep onboarding documents and other important […] Learn more about your ad choic...

Sony knows how to make a great pair of headphones. The WH-1000XM3 are one of the best received pairs of over-ear models in recent years. Two years later, the company is ready to unveil their successors, which sport a number of smart connected features. In fact, the WH-1000XM4 bring all sorts of nice upgrades to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Samsung’s made quality earbuds for a number of years now. They’re never particularly exciting or innovative, but they’re always a solid choice in an overcrowded market. Today’s big Unpacked event adds yet another model to the growing list of options. Already sporting the Galaxy Bean nickname based on early leaks, and for reasons that should […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoice...

YouTube has banned a large number of Chinese accounts it said were engaging in “coordinated influence operations” on political issues, the company announced today. 2,596 accounts from China alone were taken down from April to June, compared with 277 in the first three months of 2020. “These channels mostly uploaded spammy, non-political content, but a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit po...

Identifying the new context we’re asking the system to understand is the first step towards moving visual AI forward. Then we need more content. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Apple sold a lot of Macs last quarter — a record, in fact, for Q3, jumping a full 21%, year over year. Given the state of the world, with most office workers moving to a remote setup, there’s little surprise the company’s desktop and laptops moved at such an impressive clip. For that reason alone, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Surprise. The latest version of Google’s budget Pixel device will be one of the first two to get its next-gen technology. It’s an odd strategy, to be sure, but sometimes roadmaps work out like that, I guess. You can read basically everything you need to know about the Pixel 4a in my review here. It’s […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Pixel line has always felt like more of an underdog product than one should reasonably expect from a corporation as massive as Google. After years of partnerships and Nexus devices, when Google finally did enter the smartphone market in earnest, it found itself attempting to chip away at an already mature category — an […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

TikTok’s U.S. General Manager Vanessa Pappas has posted a video message to the platform that appears to be a response to reports from Friday that President Trump is working on an effective “ban” of the app in the U.S., a plan he shared with reporters from the White House pool on board Air Force One. […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lyft continues to expand beyond its core ride-hailing business into bikes, scooters, transit and now rental cars. The company said Thursday that it’s taking Lyft Rentals, a pilot program that launched in December, and expanding it through a partnership with Sixt. Lyft Rentals initially gave folks in Los Angeles and San Francisco the ability to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastcho...

Social video platform Triller has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against its biggest rival TikTok and parent company ByteDance. The suit, which was filed in the U.S District Court for the Western Division of Texas, claims TikTok is infringing on Triller’s U.S Patent No. 9,691,429. The patent covers a “systems and methods for creating music […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastch...

TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey the venture capital investors of Europe. 
Over the next few weeks, we will be ‘zeroing-in’ on Europe’s major cities, from A-Z, Amsterdam to Zurich, and many points in-between. It’s part of a broader series of surveys we’re doing to help founders find the right investors.   Our survey […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastch...

Google One, Google’s subscription program for buying additional storage and live support, is getting an update today that will bring free phone backups for Android and iOS devices to anybody who installs the app — even if they don’t have a paid membership. The catch: While the feature is free, the backups count against your […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While much of today’s Congressional grilling into the anticompetitive practices of the big tech giants focused on their core businesses, Amazon’s hardware also came in for close inspection during the hours-long interrogation. It was a small but significant exchange, because it touched on the breadth of the company’s services and how dominance in one area […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

Toppr, one of the largest online learning startups in India, has secured $46 million in a new financing round as it looks to scale its platform including a new product. Dubai-headquartered investment firm Foundation Holdings led the Mumbai-based seven-year-old startup’s Series D round. Kaizen Private Equity, an existing investor, also participated in the new round, […] Learn more about your ad cho...

Online alcohol delivery startup Drizly has told customers that it was hit by a data breach. In an email to customers obtained by TechCrunch, the company said that a hacker “obtained” some customer data. The hacker took customer email addresses, date-of-birth, hashed passwords, and in some cases delivery address, the email read. Drizly did not […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoi...

Google today announced its plans to build a new subsea cable with landing points in New York in the U.S. and Bude, UK and Bilbao, Spain in Europe. The new cable, named after the pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper, will join Google’s various other private subsea cables like Curie between the U.S. and South America, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Following earlier reporting, Google has confirmed that it will continue to allow employees to work from home through the end of June of next year. The company told TechCrunch that Sundar Pichai announced the plan in an email sent to staff earlier today. “To give employees the ability to plan ahead, we are extending our […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Earlier this year, the oft-mocked but actually pretty important new branch of the military, the Space Force, revealed an image that was suspiciously reminiscent of Star Trek. Now the Space Force has revealed a new, sharper graphic that is the force’s actual logo — and a motto to go with it: “Semper Supra,” or “always […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Online shopping service Instacart says reused passwords are to blame for a recent spate of account breaches, which saw personal data belonging to hundreds of thousands of Instacart customers stolen and put up for sale on the dark web. The company published a statement late on Thursday saying its investigation showed that Instacart “was not […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices...