TechCrunch Industry News

It’s a bit strange to hear that the world’s leading social network is pursuing research in robotics rather than, say, making search useful, but Facebook is a big organization with many competing priorities. And while these robots aren’t directly going to affect your Facebook experience, what the company learns from them could be impactful in surprising ways. Though robotics is a new area of resear...

When your game tops a hundred million players, your thoughts naturally turn to doubling that number. That’s the case with the creators, or rather stewards, of Minecraft at Microsoft, where the game has become a product category unto itself. And now it is making its biggest leap yet — to a real-world augmented reality game in the vein of Pokemon GO, called Minecraft Earth. Learn more about your ad...

Sometimes you need scrambled eggs. And with that thought, toady at the Overland Expo in Flagstaff, AZ, Rivian announced a major accessory for its electric pickup: A camp kitchen. The unit slides out from the Rivian R1T’s so-called gear tunnel that lives between the bed and cab. The kitchen includes storage and a stove that’s powered by the R1T’s 180kWh battery pack. This kitchen unit is the first...

On the heels of Clutter announcing a large growth roundof $200 million earlier this year, the storage startup is cleaning up the competitive field. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Clutter has purchased the storage business of erstwhile rival Omni. Omni will remain an independent company, which will now instead focus on rentals of personal items. That business was originally built around...

Premium smartphone manufacturers have moved the needle on pricing, but 2019 may well go down as a kind of golden age for budget flagships. Apple, Google and Samsung are all in that business now, and OnePlus has once again shown the world how to offer more for less. And then there’s the new ZenFone. It’s a bit of an understatement to suggest that Asus has had trouble breaking into the smartphone sp...

TikTok tops the iOS App Store for the fifth quarter in a row Despite a $5.7 million FTC fine and changes to restrict its use by under 13-year-olds, TikTok retained its No. 1 position as the most downloaded app on the Apple App Store for the fifth consecutive quarter, according to a new report from Sensor Tower. The app saw more than 33 million App Store downloads during Q1, and was followed by You...

Forget all those whiskey brands from musicians and celebs — there’s A.I. whiskey now. Microsoft this week announced it has teamed up with Finnish tech company Fourkind and Sweden-based distillery Mackmyra Whisky to create the “world’s first whisky developed with artificial intelligence.” Oh no! Here’s how it will work. As part of the distillation process, whiskey first spends time — typically year...

Amazon want to be plenty of things, the most predictable of which is its ambitions to control America’s shipping backbone. The company’s efforts to bring users whatever they desire in 24 hours requires movements by land, air and sea. Today, the company broke ground on expanding its airborne ambitions, breaking ground on a three million square-foot Prime Air airport outside Cincinnati (in Kentucky)...

Stocks had their best trading day in a while on Tuesday as investors took a break from selling to assess the actual effects of the trade war with China. Both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 gained back some of their losses with the DJIA climbing 207.06 points to close at 25,532.05 and the S&P hitting 2,834.41, up 0.8%. The Nasdaq Composite Index wrapped its trading day at 7,734.49...

Twitter is finally allowing a number of locked users to regain control of their accounts once again. Around a year after Europe’s new privacy laws (GDPR) rolled out, Twitter began booting users out of their accounts if it suspected the account’s owner was underage — that is, younger than 13. But the process also locked out many users who said they were now old enough to use Twitter’s service legal...

Today at a packed event blocks from the White House, Jeff Bezos took the stage in front of select members of the media, executives, government officials and a gaggle of middle schoolers to reveal new details of his plan to get to the Moon by 2024. Blue Origin is going to send humans to space on New Shepard later this year and has unveiled a lunar lander, called “Blue Moon”, to access the resource-...

Aspiring space tourism outfit Virgin Galactic has just announced its readiness to shift its operations to New Mexico’s Spaceport America, from which the company’s first commercial flights will take off. “Virgin Galactic is coming home to New Mexico where together we will open space to change the world for good,” said Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson at a press event. Learn more about your ad cho...

Every so often, a big corporation manages to play the news cycle just right. Generally such things aren’t recommended and can fairly easily backfire, but the MillerCoors-owned Blue Moon Brewery would have been silly not to have capitalized on yesterday’s big announcement from Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin. Sodowe https://t. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ouch. Yikes. Oof. Sigh. Those are some of the friendlier phrases I imagine came out of the mouths of bankers, investors, executives and really anyone who has been paying close attention to Uber’s road to the stock markets today when the company debuted on the New York Stock Exchange below its initial public offering price. The ride-hailing business (NYSE: UBER), previously valued at $72 billion by...

Uber has set its initial public offering at $45 per share, per reports, raising $8.1 billion in the process. The price, which falls at the low end of Uber’s planned range, values Uber at $82.4 billion. Uber has yet to officially confirm its IPO price in an amended S-1 filing. The pricing comes one day after drivers all over the world went on strike, with drivers in San Francisco protesting right o...

Singapore has passed a controversial bill that could equip the government with extensive powers to police online media and free speech. The bill was first drafted last month and, as had been expected, it passed 72-9 in Singapore’s parliament, dominated by the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) party, late on Wednesday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The stock market has already seen some wild fluctuations this week in anticipation of the latest volley in a trade war ramping up between the U.S. and China. Now it seems the President is making good on his promise to further increase tariffs on goods from the country. Reuters is reporting that the U.S. is set to increase import tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods from 10 to 25 percent....

Google today announced that the Kotlin programming language is now its preferred language for Android app developers. “Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first,” Google writes in today’s announcement. “Many new Jetpack APIs and features will be offered first in Kotlin. If you’re starting a new project, you should write it in Kotlin; code written in Kotlin often mean much less code...

Hello old friend. I knew you would be back. I didn’t know how or when, but I knew we would be reunited again. It turns out all it would take was a cratering smartphone market to bring you back around. Google, of course, famously stood its ground on the importance of the 3.5 mm for the first Pixel, only to drop it a generation later. Now that the company’s got a budget offering in the form of the P...

Did you just open Firefox only to find all of your extensions disabled and/or otherwise not working? You’re not alone, and it’s nothing you did. Reports are pouring in of a glitch that has spontaneously disabled effectively all Firefox extensions. Each extension is now being listed as a “legacy” extension, alongside a warning that it “could not be verified for use in Firefox and has been disabled”...

With Uber expected to make its debut on the public market by Friday, May 10, on-demand ride-hailing drivers are planning to strike on Wednesday. The New York Taxi Workers Association is calling on U.S.-based drivers to stand in solidarity with drivers in London and log off from both Uber and Lyft on May 8 between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. STRIKE STRIKE STRIKE! We are calling on all people of good conscien...

In 2006, New Line Cinema added five days of reshoots for Snakes on a Plane, six months after principal filming had wrapped. The new shoots helped change the film’s rating from PG-13 to R, courtesy of, among other things, the addition of the line “I have had it with these motherf****** snakes on this motherf****** plane!” It was an early and still one of the best known instances of a film being alt...

Coinbase, the $8 billion-valued crypto exchange, has lost its CTO after Balaji Srinivasan announced his departure from the company. Srinivasan became the U.S. company’s first CTO one year ago after it acquired Earn.com, where he was CEO and co-founder. Given the tenure — one year and one day — it looks like Srinivasan’s departure comes after he served the minimum agreed period with Coinbase. Learn...

Bradley Tusk’s story is well-known by now. A political operative who managed Michael Bloomberg’s successful third mayoral campaign, Tusk soon turned a bonus from his powerful boss into an opportunity that most people can only dream about. He launched his own business to help clients navigate turbulent regulatory waters, and one of his first calls came from Uber. Which paid him in stock. Learn more...

Developer season has begun! Next week, Google will be putting on a big party at the pointy outdoor amphitheater in Mountain View. It’s shaping up to be a biggie, too, if this week’s Google earnings call was any indication. Sundar Pichai teased out a number of upcoming offerings from the company that we can expect to see on full display at the show. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastch...