TechCrunch Industry News

Truecaller, one of the world’s largest caller-identification service providers, has amassed 200 million monthly active users and is increasingly proving that it can turn a profit, it said Tuesday. The Swedish company has doubled its user base since February of last year, when it had about 100 million monthly active users. The firm took nine years to reach its first 100 million users, but just one...

NASA has awarded Maxar an estimated $142 million contract to demonstrate in-orbit spacecraft refueling and assembly of new components using a custom robotic platform in space. The space infrastructure dexterous robot, or SPIDER, program will be part of NASA’s Restore-L mission to demonstrate automation of proposed orbital tasks like reconfiguring or repairing a satellite or manufacturing new compo...

The millennial obsession with wellness and self-care has led to a booming business for meditation apps. In the first quarter of 2018, app intelligence firm Sensor Tower had reported the top 10 “self-care” apps had pulled in some $27 million in revenue. Fast-forward to the end of 2019, and the numbers have gotten much higher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gabi, a startup built to help consumers save money on home and auto insurance, announced today that it has closed a $27 million Series B. The company intends on using its new capital to rapidly expand its team and invest in its product. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Flexibits, the company behind popular calendar app Fantastical, is releasing Fantastical 3.0 on all platforms today — macOS, iOS, iPadOS and watchOS. New features include event proposals, interesting calendars, new calendar views and weather forecasts. I’ve been using the app on my Mac, iPhone and iPad for a week. The main difference with Fantastical 2 is that the app is now exactly the same acros...

Today after the bell, Apple reported the results of the first quarter of its fiscal 2020. The company’s revenue totaled $91.8 billion, far ahead of expectations of $88.43 billion. At the same time, the company’s per-share profit of $4.99 was greater than the market-anticipated figure of $4.54 per share. In immediate trading following the news, Apple’s stock is up several points. Learn more about y...

Apple’s increasing focus on its services business seems to be paying off, with the company reporting a record $12.7 billion in services net sales during the first quarter of its fiscal year — a year-over-year increase of roughly 17%. Services includes existing offerings like iCloud and Apple Music, as well as a number of new subscriptions that Apple has launched in the past year, such as Apple Arc...

In nearly a decade of attending Sundance, I’ve never seen a scene like the premiere of the documentary Miss Americana, detailing the last year and a half or so of Taylor Swift’s life. The crowd before letting into the theater was huge, blistering with rumors about whether or not there was so many guests and press that there wouldn’t be room for ticketed attendees and whispers about which door Swif...

This morning Mural, a software startup focused on visual collaboration1, announced that it closed a $23 million Series A round of capital. The funds come after MURAL, formerly Mural.ly, had raised just a few million dollars previously. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Two years after Vine’s co-founder Dom Hofmann announced he was building a successor to the short-form video app, today Byte makes its debut on iOS and Android. Byte lets you shoot or upload and then share six-second videos. It comes equipped with standard social features like a feed, Explore page, notifications, and profiles. For now, though Byte lacks the remixability, augmented reality filters,...

Samsung, which once led the smartphone market in India, slid to the third position in the quarter that ended in December even as the South Korean giant continues to make major betson the rare handset market that is still growing. According to research firm Counterpoint, Chinese firm Vivo surpassed Samsung to become the second biggest smartphone vendor in India in Q4 2019. Xiaomi, with command over...

Time is supposed to make technology better. The idea is simple: With more time, humans make newer, better technology and our lives improve. Except for when the opposite happens. Google is a good example of this. I’ve been harping on the matter for a while now. Google mobile search, in case you haven’t used it lately, is bad. It often returns bloated garbage that looks like a cross between new Yaho...

U.S. mobile app subscription revenue jumped 21% in 2019 to $4.6B across the top 100 apps Outside of in-app purchases in mobile games, subscription revenue from non-game apps helped to boost 2019’s mobile consumer spend — a figure that reached $120 billion globally last year, according to a recent report by App Annie. Now, new data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower indicates U.S. subscription...

Did you notice a recent change to how Google search results are displayed on the desktop? I noticed something last week — thinking there must be some kind of weird bug messing up the browser’s page rendering because suddenly everything looked similar: A homogenous sea of blue text links and favicons that, on such a large expanse of screen, come across as one block of background noise. Learn more a...

If robots are to help out in places like hospitals and phone repair shops, they’re going to need a light touch. And what’s lighter than not touching at all? Researchers have created a gripper that uses ultrasonics to suspend an object in midair, potentially making it suitable for the most delicate tasks. It’s done with an array of tiny speakers that emit sound at very carefully controlled frequenc...

Your Sonos system will stop receiving updates if you have an old device Smart speaker manufacturer Sonos has announced that the company is going to drop support for some of its products. Sonos stopped selling these devices a few years ago. While nothing lasts forever, dropping support is going to have a lot of implications and shows once again that the connected home isn’t as future-proof as expec...

One of the big questions I got around the time the Apple Card launched was whether you’d be able to download a file of your transactions to either work with manually or import into a piece of expenses management software. The answer, at the time, was no. Now Apple is announcing that Apple Card users will be able to export monthly transactions to a downloadable spreadsheet that they can use with th...

Deep tech VCs on what they view as some of the most impactful young startups right now During this week’s Democratic debate, there was a lot of talk, unsurprisingly, about ensuring the future of this country’s children and grandchildren. Climate change was of particular interest to billionaire Tom Steyer, who said repeatedly that addressing it would be his top priority were he elected U.S. preside...

Max Q is a new weekly newsletter all about space. Sign up here to receive it weekly on Sundays in your inbox. We’re off and running with good milestones achieved for NASA’s commercial crew program, which means it’s more likely than ever we’ll actually see astronauts launch from U.S. soil before the year is out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

North of Silicon Valley, protected by the Point Reyes National Seashore, is the only operational ship-to-shore maritime radio station. Bearing the call sign KPH, the Point Reyes Station is the last of its kind. KPH is divided between two physical stations: one, knows as the voice, is responsible for transmitting; the other half of the station, known as the ears, was where human operators listened...

I talked yesterday about how VCs are just tired these days. Too many deals, too little time per deal, and constant hyper-competition with other VCs for the same equity. VCs are just tired One founder friend of mine noted to me last night that he has already received inbound requests from more than 90 investors over the past year about his next round — and he’s not even (presumably) fundraising. Le...

Xiaomi said today it is spinning off POCO, a sub-smartphone brand it created in 2018, as a standalone company that will now run independently of the Chinese electronics giant and make its own market strategy. The move comes months after a top POCO executive — Jai Mani — and some other founding and core members left the sub-brand. The company today insisted that POCO F1, the only smartphone to be l...

Here is a small but useful new feature in Google Chrome: global media controls that allow you to control all of the audio and video sources in your current tabs from a single widget. With this, you can switch to the next song from your favorite web-based music streaming service, start and stop a YouTube video that’s playing the background or switch back and forth between what’s playing in multiple...

In a little over a week, the travel metasearch engine Hipmunk will shut down. It’s an abrupt and disappointing end for a product acquired by SAP Concur around three and a half years ago. It didn’t have to go this way, though. We’re now hearing that Hipmunk co-founders Adam Goldstein and Reddit CEO Steve Huffman (both of whom left Hipmunk in years prior) made an offer to buy the company back rather...

If you’re still using Hipmunk for trip planning, it’s time to find another site. Sooner than later, really. The Hipmunk team announced this afternoon that it’ll be shutting down in just one week’s time. Come January 23rd, says the blog post, both the Hipmunk website and app will be shuttered. The team also tweeted: We’re saying goodbye. On Jan. 23, 2020, the Hipmunk product will be retired; the ap...