TechCrunch Industry News

Cruise, the self-driving car subsidiary of GM that also has backing from SoftBank Vision Fund, automaker Honda and T. Rowe Price & Associates, is laying off nearly 8% of its more than 1,800-member workforce today as it tries to reduce costs during the COVID-19 pandemic. The layoffs will affect employees in Cruise’s product, marketing and […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.c...

France’s lower chamber of the parliament has voted in favor of a controversial law against hate speech on social networks and online platforms. As I described last year, online platforms will have to remove illicit content that has been flagged within 24 hours. Otherwise, companies will have to pay hefty fines every time they infringe […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/...

So, an eight-year product veteran from Facebook and an internationally renowned barista walk into a coffee bar… It’s not a joke. It’s the origin story for Taika, a new startup that’s aiming to bring natural stimulants to the masses through its juiced up coffee-beverages. The two co-founders, Michael Sharon, an eight-year veteran of Facebook’s mobile […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podc...

I’ve been following the Nura story since the Australian startup brought an unfinished prototype of its first headphones to our offices four years back. When I finally had the opportunity to review the Nuraphones the following year, I put the noise-adapting headphones at the top of my list of 2017’s best gadgets. There was a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg is admitting that the short-form video service’s launch hasn’t gone the way he’d hoped — and he knows what to blame for its issues. “I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus,” Katzenberg said in an interview with The New York Times. “Everything. But we own it.” Back in April, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Uber is in talks to buy GrubHub in an all-stock deal, The Wall Street Journal reports. This comes a few months after reports emerged that GrubHub was looking to sell Uber, DoorDash and others. According to the report, Uber approached GrubHub earlier this year with an offer, but the two companies are still in talks. […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Spotify is today introducing a new feature, Group Session, that will allow two or more of its Premium users in the same space to share control over they music being played. Essentially a “party mode” of sorts, Group Session participants can control what’s playing in real-time as well as contribute to a collaborative playlist for […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoi...

Yubico, a maker of security keys, has launched a new service that lets enterprise customers ship its YubiKey security keys directly to their employees, partners and customers — even to their homes. The service, dubbed YubiEnterprise Delivery, is a cloud-based dashboard that is available from anywhere. IT staff can log in, check their inventory levels […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit pod...

The original Go was a mostly well-received addition to the Surface line when it arrived in late 2018. It was a nice, pint-sized alternatively, positioned fairly well to serve as a secondary device for some. It did the convertible double duty and traveled well, but otherwise was lacking in guts and versatility. Launching at the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoice...

Since announcing the commercial availability of Spot, Boston Dynamics has presented a factotum of different gigs for the robot, from construction to telepresence. Last month, the company announced that it was partnering with local hospitals interested in using the platform to perform remote visits for COVID-19 victims. Turns out the global pandemic has spurred all […] Learn more about your ad choi...

Fresh off of a large round of layoffs, Lyft reported its Q1 results this afternoon. The ride-hailing company disclosed that it generated revenue of $955.7 million in the first three months of 2020, up 23% from its year-ago Q1 revenue result of $776 million. The company’s net loss of $398.1 million was also an improvement […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With the new MacBook, Apple closes one of the more unfortunate product chapters in its history. The upgraded 13-inch mercifully marks the end of the failed five-year experiment that was the butterfly switch. I won’t go into too much detail here. If you’ve purchased a MacBook in the past several years, you almost certainly know […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoice...

There’s something to be said for consistency through good times and bad, and one company that has had a staggeringly consistent track record is international data center vendor, Equinix. It just recorded its 69th straight positive quarters, according to the company. That’s an astonishing record, and covers over 17 years of positive returns. That means […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit po...

In an SEC filing dating back to last week, Uber disclosed that plans to layoff 3,700 employees. The figure amounts to around 14% percent of the ride hailing giant’s total workforce. In the document, the company states that the job loss is part of a planned reduction in operating expenses, “in response to the economic […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The days of the big product event are on hold for the foreseeable future. Until then, a big blog post will have to do. A day after announcing that Microsoft would be shifting focus away from dual-screen devices, Chief Product Officer Panos Panay took to the company’s Devices blog to show off a slew of […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tumblr is making a change to how it deals with hate speech on its blogging platform. The company announced today it will also remove the reblogs (repostings) from any blogs that were suspended for violating its policies around hate speech. Already, the company says it’s identified nearly 1,000 blogs that were banned for blatant violations […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices....

If you’ve got kids with you through this stay-at-home stretch, there’s a good chance you’re running low on new ways to keep them entertained. All the coloring pages have been colored in; the freeze dances frozen; the stickers stuck. Good news! Your iPhone is now a cat (congratulations!) You need to help your new cat […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jon Evans Contributor Jon Evans is the CTO of the engineering consultancy HappyFunCorp; the award-winning author of six novels, one graphic novel, and a book of travel writing; and TechCrunch's weekend columnist since 2010. More posts by this contributor How to make sense of the coronavirus chaos What do we do with the positives? It’s […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/...

When Roger Lee, the co-founder of Human Interest, heard that San Francisco imposed shelter-in-place orders, he started blogging about layoff news and posting crowdsourced lists of employees who were laid off. His goal was to increase awareness about layoffs and give recruiters a place to search for candidates. However, one week and 40 startup layoffs […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit pod...

Automatic, makers of a connected car dongle, emailed customers today to announce that the company will shut down all operations May 28. The company says it’s the casualty of the COVID-19 shutdown. “Like many other companies in the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic has adversely impacted our business,” it writes, “and we have made the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.co...

The coronavirus outbreak has driven more consumers to turn to their smart speakers for news, information, music and entertainment, according to new data released today by NPR and Edison Research. Around three-quarters of U.S. adults 18 and up said their routines have been impacted due to COVID-19 and their media habits have changed as a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.co...

About a year ago, Microsoft launched Visual Studio Online, its online code editor based on the popular Visual Studio Code project. It’s basically a full code editor and hosted environment that lives in your browser. Today, the company announced that it is changing the name of this service to Visual Studio Codespaces. It’s also dropping […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com...

Sarah Kunst graduated from college in 2008 and went straight into the luxury marketing world with a job at Chanel. Then, the stock market collapsed and Kunst was laid off. It was that layoff, Kunst says, that brought her to the world of startups and eventually to founding her own firm, Cleo Capital, to invest […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Security researchers are sounding the alarm over a newly discovered Android malware that targets banking apps and cryptocurrency wallets. The malware, which researchers at security firm Cybereason recently discovered and called EventBot, masquerades as a legitimate Android app — like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Word for Android — which abuses Android’s in-built accessibility features to […] Learn mor...

Tax policy is surely a complex beast, and depending on your political leanings, you probably have some strong feelings about how it should be implemented. Salesforce AI researchers are trying to build a model to bring artificial intelligence to bear on what will undoubtedly always be a highly political process. Richard Socher, who heads up […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices...