TechCrunch Industry News

Hey, so remember earlier today when I said that new 5G cities still qualify as news, for a little while longer, at least? AT&T is making it under the wire with the addition of Las Vegas to its growing portfolio of 5G business cities. The addition of Sin City brings the carrier’s total up to 20 cities for its 5G+ — a confusing branding it gave to avoid confusion with its purposefully confusing 5G E...

Well, it’s official: The Office is leaving Netflix . Michael Scott and the rest of Dunder Mifflin will be heading for another streaming service come January 2021. By far the most popular show on Netflix in 2018, The Office was bound to leave the service eventually — or, at the very least, see some HUGE contract renegotiations. The show’s departure had been rumored a few times before now, but were...

Twitter Lists have never gotten the attention they deserve. A feature largely adopted by Twitter power users, lists allow you to create custom timelines by adding only those users whose tweets you want to track. And this can be done without having to also follow those Twitter accounts, which keeps your main timeline clutter-free. But the Twitter Lists feature has always been somewhat buried in Twi...

As 5G networks begin rolling out and commercializing around the world, telecoms vendors are rushing to get a headstart. Huawei equipment is now behind two-thirds of the commercially launched 5G networks outside China, said president of Huawei’s carrier business group Ryan Ding on Tuesday at an industry conference. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The enterprise drone space has been heating up over the past couple years, but a startup in the entertainment drone space is raising the big cash now. The Drone Racing League is in the process of raising up to $50 million from investors in a Series C round according to SEC docs published today. The startup has already raised over $26 million of that figure and is looking to secure additional inves...

A Netflix hack lets you feel the action in a scene by vibrating your phone Netflix Hack Day, the company’s internal hackathon, has a habit of producing some amazing gems — like a brain-controlled interface, a Fitbit hack that shuts off Netflix when you fall asleep, a Netflix app for the original NES, and a way to navigate the Netflix app with Face ID and ARKit, to name a few. Learn more about your...

While mirrorless cameras accelerate into the future, medium format models are hearkening unto the past — and Hasselblad chief among them. Its new digital back fits lenses going back to the ’50s, and the tiny 907X camera body is about as lovely a throwback as one can imagine. The new set of systems, announced today, are somewhat different from what most people are used to. Learn more about your ad...

Among the many spacecraft and satellites ascending to space on Monday’s Falcon Heavy launch, the Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 may be the most interesting. If all goes well, a week from launch it will be moving through space — slowly, but surely — on nothing more than the force exerted on it by sunlight. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The writing has been on the slate for some time now. Roughly this time last year, we reported that Google had wiped all tablet sales off its site. Turns out that was just a bug, but it seemed like an ominous portent of things to come. Google still went ahead and launched the Pixel Slate late last year, hoping the device would give users a much-welcome form factor alternative to its high-end Pixel...

You surely know the whole deal about carts and horses by now. When Samsung’s first 5G handset, the Galaxy S10 5G, arrives on Sprint tomorrow, users will be able to get those blazing fast mobile speeds in all of four markets: Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Kansas City. Those all launched last week, after the arrival of the carrier’s first 5G handset, LG’s V50 ThinQ. Learn more about your ad choices....

Startup Battlefield is known around the world as TechCrunch’s premier startup competition, and today we’re proud to announce that on November 11-12 we are producing our hardware-focused competition, Hardware Battlefield at TC Shenzhen in that amazing heartland of hardware, Shenzhen, China. The event this November will be TechCrunch’s fifth Hardware Battlefield, but our first ever in China. Learn m...

NASA’s X-59 QueSST experimental quiet supersonic aircraft will have a cockpit like no other — featuring a big 4K screen where you’d normally have a front window. Why? Because this is one weird-looking plane. The X-59, which is being developed by Lockheed Martin on a $247 million budget, is meant to go significantly faster than sound without producing a sonic boom, or indeed any noise “faster than...

Good news for Apple Watch owners who don’t want to clutter up their Watch with unused apps. With the release of the new watchOS 6 operating system later this year, Apple will allow Apple Watch device owners to remove many more of the built-in, first-party apps from their smartwatch — including previously unremovable apps like Alarm, Timer, Stopwatch, Remote, Camera Remote, Radio, and others, as we...

Making pourover coffee is a cherished ritual of mine on most mornings. But there are times I wish I could have a single cup of pourover without fussing about the kitchen — and the Geesaa, a new gadget seeking funds on Kickstarter, lets me do that. But it’s definitely still a ways from being a must-have. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sad news for anyone who loves geeky goods and top-notch April Fools’ jokes: ThinkGeek.com, the 20 year old online retailer known for selling more geek-centric gadgets and peripherals than you could fit in a TARDIS, is going away. According to an FAQ sitting at the top of its site, ThinkGeek isn’t “shutting down”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Freelance marketplace Fiverr had a good first day on the New York Stock Exchange. The company priced its IPO at $21 per share last night, raising around $111 million. It then started trading this morning at $26, with shares climbing for most of the day and closing at $39.90 — up 90% from the IPO price. Fiverr is one of the most well-known companies facilitating the so-called gig economy. Learn mor...

Walmart is taking aim at Instacart, Target’s Shipt, and Amazon Prime Now/Whole Foods with a new grocery delivery subscription service called simply, “Delivery Unlimited.” Before, Walmart shoppers could order groceries online and pick them up at their local store for free or they could opt to pay the $9.95 (or sometimes less) per-order delivery fee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastch...

A computer science student has scraped seven million Venmo transactions to prove that users’ public activity can still be easily obtained, a year after a privacy researcher downloaded hundreds of millions of Venmo transactions in a similar feat. Dan Salmon said he scraped the transactions during a cumulative six months to raise awareness and warn users to set their Venmo payments to private. Learn...

Lightspeed Venture Partners, a firm behind the likes of BetterUp, Aurora, Goop and dozens of others, will allocate more capital to mature companies with the hiring of three new partners. Adam Smith, Amy Wu and Arsham Memarzadeh join the Menlo Park-headquartered venture capital fund’s growth practice. The team is led by longtime partner Will Kohler and Brad Twohig, who joined LSVP in 2018 to amp up...

Ask any venture capitalist about the most important ingredient to success in startups, and they’ll tell you it centers on founders who can persuade not only investors to part with some of their capital but, more important, who can convince people to leave what are often more stable jobs in order to build a company from scratch. Ryan Cohen certainly fits the description. Learn more about your ad ch...

Details of the Pixel 4 have been swirling around this week, so Google has decided to just leak the design of its next phone via its official Twitter account, revealing the backplate and new camera module on the smartphone. “Well, since there seems to be some interest, here you go! Wait ’til you see what it can do. #Pixel4″ the tweet from the company’s verified @MadeByGoogle account read. Renders...

Elon Musk: There is not a demand problem for the Tesla Model 3 Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s opening comments at the annual shareholder’s meeting went straight to a question that has been looming over the automaker since it reported wider-than-expected losses and a one-third drop in deliveries in the first quarter: demand. “We get this question a lot. I want to be clear, there is not a demand problem,” Mu...

Joanna Glasner Contributor More posts by this contributor Which public US universities graduate the most funded founders? Big revenues, huge valuations and major losses: charting the era of the unicorn IPO Sometimes a person (I’m not naming names here) tires of staring at startup funding data, and her hungry mind wanders to pizza. But ordering a pizza in real life isn’t always the best choice for...

Vive Pro Eye launches in US, costs four times as much as Rift S HTC had the hottest VR headset out of the gate in 2016, but the thinning margins on consumer hardware thanks to Oculus have pushed them into the enterprise business. Today, the company released the Vive Pro Eye headset, its latest enterprise play that integrates eye-tracking camera to give users an additional input mode and a way for...

One of the bigger security announcements from Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference this week is Apple’s new requirement that app developers must implement the company’s new single sign-on solution, Sign In with Apple, wherever they already offer another third-party sign-on system. Apple’s decision to require its button in those scenarios is considered risky — especially at a time when the compan...