TechCrunch Industry News

I there’s one thing I know, it’s that music is the best thing our species has every created. If there are two things I know, it’s the music thing and also that that rabbits aren’t hamsters. Listen, Spotify, I get the whole pet playlists thing. A curated playlist based on your listening preferences and a few sliders to determine an animal’s mood. It’s cute. But as one of millions of rabbit owners i...

Microsoft has released a security patch for a dangerous vulnerability affecting hundreds of millions of computers running Windows 10. The vulnerability is found in a decades-old Windows cryptographic component, known as CryptoAPI. The component has a range of functions, one of which allows developers digitally sign their software, proving that the software has not been tampered with. Learn more ab...

Visa announced today that it is buying financial services API startup Plaid for $5.3 billion. Plaid develops financial services APIs. It is akin to what Stripe does for payments, but instead of facilitating payments, it helps developers share banking and other financial information more easily. It’s the kind of service that makes sense for a company like Visa. The startup bought Quovo two years ag...

Today in regular trading, shares of American electric car manufacturer Tesla surged past the $500 mark. Tesla, perhaps the most famous electric vehicle company in the world, has had tumultuous last twelve months on the public markets. The company’s shares have traded as low as $176.99 in the past 52 weeks, and, as has high as $507.50 today. The company is worth $507.28 per share at the moment, val...

Amazon has fired a number of employees after they shared customer email address and phone numbers with a third-party “in violation of our policies.” The email to customers sent Friday afternoon, seen by TechCrunch, said an employee was “terminated” for sharing the data, and that the company is supporting law enforcement in their prosecution. Amazon confirmed the incident in an email to TechCrunch....

Okay, I’ve slept on it. I was skeptical at first, but after a good night’s sleep, let’s do this. I want a Ballie. All of the people and the pets in the below video seemed super into it. Where did I sign up? Okay, let me back up a second. I’d like a little hands on time with the robotic ball first. Or at very least a more in-depth demo. But once we’ve gotten those out of the way, yeah, totally. Let...

All of that genetic material that 23andMe has been collecting is finally being used for commercial drug development — specifically dermatological drugs. The company inked an agreement with Spanish pharmaceutical developer Almirall, which concentrates on medical dermatology treatments, for the development of dermatological treatments based on an antibody developed by 23andMe. Learn more about your...

Assa Abloy, the world’s largest lock maker and the parent company of August Home and Yale, announced some new products at CES this week. The company didn’t talk about doorbell cameras at all — it could be related to recent Ring’s controversies. As a well-known brand when it comes to smart lock in the U.S., August Home is iterating and refining with new products without any groundbreaking change. T...

The new Pax Era Pro vaporizer packs a host of improvements and brings increased transparency to the user. Pop in a pod, and the smartphone companion app displays a wealth of information generally unavailable to the average user. The idea is to provide more peace of mind about what’s in each pod and this system is launching at exactly the right time. The Era Pro uses proprietary cartridges embedded...

TCL is hardly a household name in the smartphone space. That’s hardly surprising, however, as the Chinese electronics company is better known for sub-brands like Alcatel and BlackBerry (hardware, not software — long story). Late last year, the company began really pushing its branded devices in Europe, a strategy it’s set to expand upon with some more cutting edge devices. Learn more about your ad...

The Audi AI:ME is a concept for future urban travel. The little car is autonomous, has a surprisingly spacious interior, and it’s equipped with a host of exterior lights designed to better communicate with the outside world. No, really. There are lights everywhere. [gallery ids="1929915,1929905,1929900,1929895,1929913,1929894,1929914"] The idea is to surround the vehicle with multi-purpose lights....

Some devices need no explanation. The Galaxy S10 and Note 10 Line are not such devices. They’re more nebulous, walking an interesting line, between premium and mid-range. They’re a clear attempt by Samsung to change with a smartphone buying public that have balked at the idea of $1,000+ device. Samsung announces ‘Lite’ versions of the Galaxy S10 and Note 10 On that front, they make plenty of sense...

Concept PCs are a lot like concept cars. The idea comes from a decent enough place, but mostly they exist to make you feel bad an inadequate about your current dumb device. It’s a metaphor for life, really. In that spirit, here are a trio of concept PCs that Dell debuted this week at CES. Honestly, none are too farfetched. One looks an awful lot like an existing product, and the other two are pret...

This matcha maker is (most likely) coming soon to a coworking space near you Over the past few years, matcha has become a kind of unavoidable phenomenon in cities like New York and L.A. The finely ground green tea powder is everywhere from coffee shops to bodegas to standalone stores. And it’s about to make its way to your startup/coworking space kitchen. At CES tonight, World Match Inc. took the...

HTC can’t seem to catch a break. The once-king-of-the-hill smartphone vendor, which had a terrible 2018, continued to bleed last year, according to financial disclosuresit made on Monday. HTC reported revenue of 10,015 TWD ($333 million) in 2019, down 57.8% from 23,741 TWD ($789 million) it posted the year before, and whopping 87% below over $2 billion it grossed in 2017. Learn more about your ad...

Nearly a year after stepping down as chief executive of HBO, Richard Plepler and his production company Eden Production have signed a five-year deal with Apple TV+. Plepler started at HBO back in 1993 and became CEO in 2013. During his time in that role, HBO had continued success with shows new (“True Detective” and “Big Little Lies”) and old (“Game of Thrones”). Learn more about your ad choices....

Loft may have better product market fit in Brazil than Opendoor does in the U.S.. And now the São Paulo-based property tech company has growth funding to prove it. Andreessen Horowitz is doubling down on its first Brazil investment with Loft, a two-year-old real estate marketplace. The $175 million Series C was co-led by Vulcan Capital. In the U.S., sites like Opendoor give us visibility into how...

In Marc Benioff’s book, Trailblazer, he tells the tale of how Steve Jobs planted the seeds of the idea that would become the first enterprise app store, and how Benioff eventually paid Jobs back with the gift of the AppStore.com domain. While Salesforce did truly help blaze a trail when it launched as an enterprise cloud service in 1999, it took that a step further in 2006 when it became the first...

Shares of NIO, a China-based electric car manufacturer, are soaring this morning after the company’s Q3 2019 earnings beat investor expectations. NIO’s surprise win comes directly on the heels of Tesla, a competitor, announcing the delivery of its first cars made in China, NIO’s home market. NIO went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2018 for $6.26 per share. Its value has plunged as a publ...

Welcome to the third annual TechCrunch Include Progress Report. Our editorial and events teams work hard throughout the year to ensure that we bring you the most dynamic and diverse group of speakers and judges to our event stages. And finally, at the tail end of 2019, we bring you … 2018 data. (You can see 2017 data here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Look, this is the last post I’m writing in 2019 and I’m tired. But I can’t let the year close without taking stock of how well tech stocks did this year. It was bonkers. So let’s mark the year’s conclusion with some notes for our future selves. Yes, we know that the Nasdaq has been setting new records and SaaS had a good year. But we need to dig in and get the numbers out so that we can look back...

2019 was the year wireless earbuds went mainstream. The category has been around much longer, of course, and Apple really broke the whole thing open a full three years ago, with the release of the first AirPods, but sales exploded in 2019. The category experienced a 183% YOY increase in shipments last quarter, according to a new study. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adc...

VMware is closing the year with a significant new component in its arsenal. Today it announced it has closed the $2.7 billion Pivotal acquisition it originally announced in August. The acquisition gives VMware another component in its march to transform from a pure virtual machine company into a cloud native vendor that can manage infrastructure wherever it lives. It fits alongside other recent de...

It’s the slowest week of the year for gadget news. Christmas is in the rearview, and it’s a few days until the new year. After that, it’s a straight shot to CES and then MWC. Meantime, best we’ve got going for us are a handful of rumors, including a peek at what Google’s next budget might could potentially possibly conceivably look like. Per renders from OnLeaks and 91Mobiles, a vision of the Pixe...

A security researcher has found several vulnerabilities in a number of Ruckus Wireless routers, which the networking giant has since patched. Gal Zror told TechCrunch that the vulnerabilities he found lie inside in the web user interface software that runs on the company’s Unleashed line of routers. The flaws can be exploited without needing a router’s password, and can be used to take complete co...