TechCrunch Industry News

Rallyhood says it’s “private and secure.” But for some time, it wasn’t. The social network designed to helping groups communicate and coordinate left one of its cloud storage buckets open and exposed. The bucket, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), was not protected with a password, allowing anyone who knew the easily-guessable web address access to a decade’s worth of user files. Learn more abou...

Hold that tweet — and add another one. Twitter is adding a new feature for mobile users to make it easier to link dispersed ‘shower thoughts’ together — and another thingstyleee. Per 9to5Mac, the feature — which Twitter tweeted about yesterday — is slowly rolling out to its iOS app. (At the time of writing we spotted it in Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoice...

Esports, video games and the innovations that enable them now occupy a central space in the cultural and commercial fabric of the tech world. For the investment firm Bitkraft Esports Ventures, the surge in interest means a vast opportunity to invest in the businesses that continue to reshape entertainment and develop technologies which have implications far beyond consoles and controllers. Increas...

Yesterday, Samsung announced that the Galaxy Flip Z sold out online. What, precisely, that means, is hard to say, of course, without specific numbers from the company. But it’s probably enough to make the company bullish about its latest wade into the foldable waters, in the wake of last year’s Fold — let’s just say “troubles.” Response to the device has been positive. Learn more about your ad cho...

CBS All Access, the streaming service now owned by ViacomCBS following the merger, is expanding. Announced today as part of the company’s otherwise underwhelming Q4 earnings, the plan is to launch a new “broad pay” streaming service that will include CBS All Access content along with other ViacomCBS assets in film and TV to complement the company’s existing free streaming service Pluto TV and prem...

Netflix announced today that it has acquired “Don’t Look Up,” a comedy written and directed by Adam McKay, with Jennifer Lawrence attached to star. The story sounds like a funhouse reflection of one of today’s other headlines, focusing on two “low-level astronomers” who try to warn the world about the dangers of an asteroid that’s approaching Earth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastc...

Security camera maker Ring is updating its service to improve account security and give more control when it comes to privacy. Once again, this is yet another update that makes the overall experience slightly better but the Amazon-owned company is still not doing enough to protect its users. First, Ring is reversing its stance when it comes to two-factor authentication. Two-factor authentication i...

As we all saw in Oscar-winning short film Hair Love, black hair is beautiful but it’s also notoriously difficult to manage. One of the first hair memories Naza founder and CEO Natanya Montgomery has is of her mom brushing her hair into three afro puffs on the top of her head. When she was seven, she started coming to terms with the state of her hair, and that’s when her mom took her to the salon f...

In December, The New York Times reported a popular messaging app called ToTok was actually a spying tool used by the government of the United Arab Emirates to track users’ conversations, location, and social connections. The app was removed from the Google Play store in December, while Google investigated, then reinstated in early January. Google now confirms the app has again been removed, but th...

This morning brought a look at some of what we’re missing at this year’s Mobile World Congress. The show may have been called off on account of coronavirus concerns, but the news goes on. We knew that TCL was planning to show off a number of “alternative” smartphone form factors, and one just showed up on CNET. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google said on Monday that it is winding down its Station program, through which it rolled out free Wi-Fi in more than 400 railway stations in India and in several other public places around the globe. Caesar Sengupta, VP of Payments and Next Billion Users at Google, said the program, launched in 2015, helped millions of users connect to the internet everyday — many for the first time. But as mobi...

If you’re ever felt like there just weren’t enough emoji options to express how you’re feeling, a new addition to Google’s Gboard keyboard, launching today, aims to help. Gboard for Android is introducing a feature called “Emoji Kitchen” which allows users to mash up different emoji then use them as stickers when messaging. The stickers will work across apps, including Gmail, Messages by Google, M...

Instagram users who miss the reverse chronological feed might get a new way to see the most recent pics and videos from who they follow. Instagram has been spotted internally prototyping a “Latest Posts” feature that appears as a pop-up over the main feed and brings users to a special area showing the newest content from their network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adc...

Battery Ventures just closed on a whopping $2 billion across two funds, two years after its last fundraise Battery Ventures, the now 37-year-old investment firm, just closed on two new funds that — at $2 billion in capital commitments — nearly double the record-breaking $1.2 billion that the firm closed on exactly two years ago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Netflix is looking to get young adults hooked on its service by making its popular teenage rom-com, “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before,” available to stream for free to everyone in the U.S., including non-subscribers. This isn’t the first time Netflix has offered free streaming — it teased Brits last year by offering an episode of “The Crown” for free, and has run similar tests in markets like Ind...

Samsung did a surprisingly good job keeping the Galaxy Fold under wraps, surprising the world with its first foldable this time last year during the Galaxy S10 unveil. When it came to the Galaxy Z Flip, on the other hand, the company just went ahead and showed the whole thing off during an Oscar ad buy. (Not to mention numerous Samsung employees playing around with the handsets in their seats this...

Vanessa Bain (pictured above), a well-known gig worker-activist, has teamed up with fellow gig worker-activist Sarah Clarke (pseudonym) to form the Gig Workers Collective. It’s early days for the organization, which is a pending 501(c)(3) organization, but its ambitions are big. “We want to be the first responders that, whenever gig workers find out there is a pay cut or some type of issue, they’l...

There’s this brilliant feeling on Fridays if you’re a reporter when you think that all the things you have to write about are complete. You kickstart some work for Monday. Maybe you tighten up a to-do list. Hell, you might even read some email. But then on Fridays like today, something eye-catching happens and the Great Content Gods demand written sacrifice and here we are. Learn more about your a...

The Galaxy Fold felt like an omen for a burgeoning category. The fascinating and promising product was plagued by broken review units that forced Samsung to go back to the drawing board with a reinforced model. But even that version ultimately ran into issues, as I can personally attest. No doubt other companies readying their own devices took the opportunity to reconsider their strategy. Learn mo...

Instagram may finally let IGTV video makers earn money 18 months after launching the longer-form content hub. Instagram confirms to TechCrunch that it has internally prototyped an Instagram Partner Program that would let creators earn money by showing advertisements along with their videos. By giving creators a sustainable and hands-off way to generate earnings from IGTV, they might be inspired to...

Forescout, the network security company that has been publicly traded since 2017, announced today it was going private again. Private equity firms Advent International and Crosspoint Capital are acquiring the company in an all-cash purchase of $1.9 billion. The two private equity firms will pay $33 per share, which represented a premium of 30% over the company’s closing price of $25.45 on October...

An algorithmic risk scoring system deployed by the Dutch state to try to predict the likelihood that social security claimants will commit benefits or tax fraud breaches human rights law, a court in the Netherlands has ruled. The Dutch government’s System Risk Indication (SyRI) legislation uses a non-disclosed algorithmic risk model to profile citizens and has been exclusively targeted at neighbor...

Shares of American electric car company Tesla are sharply higher again this morning, adding $122.40 (or 15.69 percent ) to their value before regular trading today. The gains come after Tesla has rapidly added value in recent days, including a nearly 20 percent gain yesterday during regular trading; shares of the company were worth around $560 a week ago. Today they are valued at around $900. Lear...

Rocket Lab is proceeding as planned with its efforts to recover and reuse spent rocket boosters from its Electron launch vehicle, and has completed its first prototype parachute for use in the recovery process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today after the bell, Alphabet reported its fourth-quarter and full-year financial results. The company’s revenue grew from $39.3 billion in 2018 to $46.1 billion in 2019. The firm’s net income also expanded from $8.9 billion to $10.7 billion over the same time frame. The figures, when compared to expectations, were mixed. Alphabet beat analyst estimates on profit, but missed on revenue. Shares of...