TechCrunch Industry News

The first quarter of 2020 ended with a whimper  — with the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500 and NASDAQ posting their worst quarter in decades — as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to cause uncertainty and volatility across all major stock market indices. At the beginning of the quarter, we were still basking in a […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Let’s be real: Now isn’t the ideal time to launch a health tracker. For a majority of us, expectations have dramatically plummeted for step counts, workout minutes and other gamified metrics. But hardware launches will, for the most part, go on. Fitbit eschewed its normal press event this time out — for increasingly good reason […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoic...

The last few weeks have just been dreadful for asset managers. Not only have the markets tanked the past few weeks (if slightly recovered from their lows since the signing of the U.S. stimulus bill), but the daily volatility of different assets is making it very hard to keep portfolios balanced. As an example, the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Microsoft today announced a ton of new features for its productivity apps, but it also used today’s release to highlight a few new features that are coming to its Chromium-based Edge browser in the near future. Most of these are pretty straightforward and expected, like its Collections bookmarking feature coming to mobile later this year, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices....

Only a few days after saying that he would like to see the country “opened up and raring to go by Easter” and maybe relax rules for at least some parts of the U.S. sooner than later, President Trump today announced that he is extending the government’s social distancing guidelines through April 30. “Nothing would […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The long-running Folding@Home program to crowdsource the enormously complex task of solving molecular interactions has hit a major milestone as thousands of new users sign up to put their computers to work. The network now comprises an "exaflop" of computing power: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Huawei has unveiled new flagship phones today, the P40, P40 Pro and P40 Pro+. These are beautiful phones with great specs. But it would only take you a few minutes to realize that there’s something odd with them. There is no Gmail, no Google Maps and no Google Play Store. Last year, the U.S. government […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The impacts of telecommuting, shelter-in-place laws, and home quarantines resulting from the COVID-19 outbreak are starting to impact broadband speeds across a number of U.S. cities, a new report has found. According to broadband analysis site BroadbandNow, 88 out of the top 200 most populous U.S. cities analyzed have now experienced some form of network […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

Web browser Brave is expanding its cryptocurrency features with an integration with cryptocurrency exchange Binance. Brave users will be able to buy, trade and receive crypto assets directly on the new tab page. In addition to a particular focus on privacy, Brave has been playing around with cryptocurrencies for a while. The company launched its […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastc...

Last week, popular music platform Bandcamp announced that it would be waiving its revenue shares from all sales for 24 hours, starting Friday morning. The move was an effort to help boost income for the innumerable artists who have been struggling to make ends meet as live performances have been canceled for the foreseeable future […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adch...

Apple has released software updates for the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple Watch, the Apple TV and the Mac. The biggest changes are on the iPad. Starting today, you can pair a mouse or trackpad with your iPad and use it to move a cursor on the display. Apple unveiled trackpad support for iPadOS when […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The technology industry’s central role in an American economy shaped by attempts to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 is being reflected in how investors are approaching markets in these turbulent times. As the broader economy stumbles, technology companies and the major exchange they call home seem to be somewhat more of a safe-haven given the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoi...

The flood of status symbol content into Instagram Stories has run dry. No one is going out and doing anything cool right now, and if they are, they should be shamed for it. Beyond sharing video chat happy hour screenshots and quarantine dinner concoctions, our piece-by-piece biographies have ground to a halt. Oddly, what remains […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoi...

The path forward now seems pretty clear. First we get through the grim month-and-more ahead, supporting health care workers in any way we can. (Tip: findthemasks.com lists where to donate PPE, personal protective equipment, in the US. If you have any, do so. We are very literally all in this together, and they need it […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With U.S. consumers asked to refrain from social gatherings and shelter-in-place at home due to COVID-19, media consumption is prepared to boom. Based on Nielsen data from prior major crises in recent U.S. history that forced consumers to stay home, total TV usage increased by nearly 60%. We’re not there yet, but consumption is starting […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.co...

Work in the time of coronavirus is driving huge growth in videoconferencing, as scores of office workers go remote and log on to meetings from home. Zoom — which offers a range of slick features like auto-transcription and virtual backgrounds — has been a key beneficiary of this viral boom. Back in February research analysts […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In a volatile trading session that saw the White House signal intentions to release the largest stimulus package since the great recession of 2008, American stocks made up for yesterday’s losses with major indices rising sharply. The return to gains was welcome after stocks posted huge losses to begin the week, tripping the market’s circuit […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoice...

At what is now a daily coronavirus press briefing at the White House, President Trump today said that Google CEO Sundar Pichai called him to apologize. What Pichai apologized for wasn’t immediately clear, but Trump then went on to praise Google’s communications team for supposedly substantiating Trump’s comments about Google’s coronavirus screening site. “I want […] Learn more about your ad choice...

Yesterday, San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced a lockdown for six Bay Area Counties: San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Marin, Contra Costa and Alameda. The public health order marks a big step to help reduce movement, potential transmission of COVID-19, of the nearly 7 million people within the Bay Area. It is important to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/...

Tesla said Monday it has started delivering the Model Y crossover to customers in the U.S., hitting a milestone one year after unveiling the prototype and six months ahead of schedule. Reports of deliveries started last week. The tweet from Tesla, which included a video of the Model Y being assembled and then hitting the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

An engineer from Charter, one of the largest phone and internet providers in the U.S., sent an email blast to a senior vice president and hundreds of engineers on Friday. In the email, Nick Wheeler, a video operations engineer based in Denver, criticized his employer for not allowing its staff to work from home despite ongoing […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoic...

After several weeks worth of leaks, the latest version of Apple/Beat’s Powerbeats arrive this week. One key thing many of the rumors got wrong is the name. There will be no Powerbeats 4 — not for now, at least. Instead, the company’s somewhat confusingly doing away with the number scheme in favor of the simpler […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Brizzly, the name associated with a long-gone Twitter client, and later, a goofy project highlighting our addiction to social media, is coming back. And this time, it’s focused on serving the needs of Twitter power users in search of features Twitter itself has failed to build — like an Edit button and an auto-deletion option for tweets, among other things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

American-listed shares are off sharply this morning, falling after a steep selloff yesterday was not staunched by a presidential address. The declines echo what happened to Asian-listed stocks earlier today. All major American indices are now in bear-market territory, having shed the requisite 20% from recent highs. Today’s carnage is simply bleak. As we write to you, here’s where stocks are: Dow...

Have you ever seen a dead cat bounce? It’s a term that Wall Street traders coined to describe the moment when collapsing markets briefly rise before resuming a downward trajectory. It looks like investors new to the notion of an economic downturn may have seen their first such bounce yesterday. The glacial domestic response to the spreading novel coronavirus in the U.S. Learn more about your ad ch...