TechCrunch Industry News

What to expect from Mobile World Congress 2019 Foldables and 5G all the way down I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: 2019 just might be the year that smartphones get fun again. After years of similar form factors and slight upgrades, the mobile industry’s back is against the wall. For the first time ever, sales are down, owning to economic factors and slower upgrade cycles. Learn more abou...

Hello, and welcome back toEquity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week Kate Clark and I sat down to get through the biggest news in the venture and startup world. This is our regular episode of the week after a shot focused on the Slack IPO, and an interview concerning Facebook. So, back to our roots. And as has been the case for...

If you can’t beat or join them…force feed ’em? That appears to be Instagram’s latest strategy for IGTV, which is now being shoved right into Instagram’s main feed, the company announced today. Instagram says that it will now add one-minute IGTV previews to the feed, making it “even easier” to discover and watch content from IGTV. Uh. IGTV, you may recall, was launched last year as a way for Instag...

French company Chauffeur-Privé is going to expand aggressively over the next couple of years. That’s why the company is changing its name to Kapten — a name that sounds less French. “We wanted to share with you a very important piece of news,” Kapten co-founder and CEO Yan Hascoet said in a press conference. “We changed our name while keeping the same positioning. Learn more about your ad choices....

Tesla has opened an Amazon store to spread its swag far and wide Tesla has had a brisk merch business for years now, thanks to its fervent owner base and fans, who are enthusiastic supporters of the company and its CEO Elon Musk. But until now, those Tesla-branded items — everything from water bottles and hats to jackets, chargers and once a surfboard — have been sold through the automaker’s own w...

Vice Media plans to cut 250 jobs — about 10 percent of its total workforce. The Hollywood Reporter broke the news. When contacted by TechCrunch, a Vice spokesperson confirmed the story but declined to comment further. This comes after a brutal couple of weeks in the media business, as companies began the year with major cuts. BuzzFeed is trimming its staff by 15 percent. Verizon Media Group (which...

A number of Twitter users have been complaining that tweets that were retweeted by people they don’t follow are now showing in their timeline. The issue, thankfully, is not related to a new Twitter algorithm or recommendation system, as some had feared. Instead, the company confirmed that a bug affecting Android users was mislabeling the “social proof” tag on Retweets. Learn more about your ad cho...

Lowe’s is killing off and bricking its Iris smart home products at the end of March If you’ve got any gear from Lowe’s Iris line of smart home products, it’s time to start looking for alternatives. Lowes has announced that the line is toast, with plans to flip the switch on “the platform and related services” at the end of March. In other words: much of this once smart connected gear is about to g...

Two of Facebook’s four fact-checking partners in the U.S. have left the program as of the beginning of this year: Snopes, which recently rebuffed reports that its relationship with Facebook was strained, and the Associated Press. Both confirmed they are leaving the program, but left the possibility of future collaboration open. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I know first-hand how frustrating it is to get locked out of your Google accountand to lose access to much of your online life. I’m hoping this simple work-around will help get you get through the account recovery process much faster than the manual method, which takes a minimum of 3-5 days (and in my case ended up taking weeks). This week, a colleague who remembered my article on my lock-out expe...

Nintendo held off on building smartphone games for years, but now they just can’t stop. They started with a little stumble with the short-lived Miitomo, but then found an audience with Super Mario Run. Then came Fire Emblem Heroes. Then Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, and Dragalia Lost. Next up? Dr. Mario. Nintendo announced this afternoon that it’s working on a title called Dr. Mario World, built i...

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here: 1. Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach Facebook managed to beat Wall Street’s estimates in its Q4 earnings despite a seemingly constant beatdown in the press. The company said...

If you just tried to turn on your Xbox One and were met with nothing but a black screen: you’re not alone. A particularly bad outage in Xbox Live’s core services is causing the console to get stuck at boot. Microsoft is aware of the outage, and says they’ve “identified the cause”. We are aware of reports of Xbox One console startup, title update and sign-in errors. We will keep everyone informed o...

If you haven’t been paying attention to TikTok, you haven’t been paying attention. The short-form video app hailing from Beijing’s ByteDance just had its biggest month ever with the addition of 75 million new users in December — a 275 percent increase from the 20 million it added in December 2017, according a recent report from Sensor Tower. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.c...

Losing to the computer in StarCraft has been a tradition of mine since the first game came out in 1998. Of course, the built-in “AI” is trivial for serious players to beat, and for years researchers have attempted to replicate human strategy and skill in the latest version of the game. They’ve just made a huge leap with AlphaStar, which recently beat two leading pros 5-0. Learn more about your ad...

People are increasingly interested in finding a way to participate in the cannabis industry, and for good reason. It’s growing like a weed (yes, we said it). According to a San Francisco-based research company, Grand View Research, the global legal marijuana market is expected to reach $146.4 billion by end of 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome back toEquity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week we had the gang back together with our own Connie Loizos at the helm, Kate Clark in the studio as well, Alex on the phone, and Ed Sim from Boldstart Ventures onboard as well. A good crew for a busy week. Now that 2019 is fully underway, the news is back to its...

Smartphones are about to get more interesting, but is it enough to drive growth? As sales stagnate, will foldable phones and 5G be enough to save the day? Smartphone numbers are down. In 2018, global shipments dropped 3 percent, and while the long-promised arrival of 5G will help numbers get back into the black, IDC predicts that even then growth will be in the low-single digits. Learn more about...

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mixtape, the podcast that goes a bit behind the headlines to bring tech to culture. This week Megan Rose Dickey and I welcome Tiana Kara, the head of partnerships and growth at #builtbygirls (which, like TechCrunch, is owned by Verizon Media Group). The organization connects girls and women between the ages of 15 and 22 with mentors of all stripes in the tech industry ba...

Sunil Nagaraj, who’d studied computer science as an undergrad at UNC Chapel Hill, landed two pretty nice gigs after deciding to pursue an MBA at Harvard Business School. First, he founded a venture-backed company called Triangulate — though he recognized when it was time to shut it down two years later. He then wound up working as a principal for Bessemer Venture Partners, a top-tier venture firm...

We’ve got a double dose of exciting news for you, startup fans. First, we’re thrilled to announce that investment firms August Capital, SV Angel and Uncork Capital have partnered with us for the 2nd Annual TechCrunch Winter Party at Galvanize on February 8. And second, today we released into the wild another fresh, though limited, batch of tickets. If you haven’t snagged a ticket to this Silicon V...

Most of us believe our time is extremely valuable, certainly worth more than thirty cents. But then you read about human decision-making, and you have to wonder what goes through people’s heads. This time, it is Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at The Wall Street Journal, who wrote a review of Amazon Publishing, the printing house (if you will) of the ecommerce giant. Amazon published more than one thousan...

Twitter accidentally revealed some users’ “protected” (aka, private) tweets, the company disclosed this afternoon. The “Protect your Tweets” settingtypically allows people to use Twitter in a non-public fashion. These users get to approve who can follow them and who can view their content. For some Android users over a period of several years, that may not have been the case – their tweets were ac...

Nasdaq’s BVP Emerging Cloud Index measures the performance of a portfolio of 45 SaaS stocks. Like much of the tech world, and the stock market in general, the final quarter of 2018 was not terribly kind. The good news is that there are signs of life lately. On November 19th, SaaS stocks had a noteworthy bad day. Everything was down, way down. As we reported, some examples included: Salesforce was...

Hello and welcome back toEquity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. We’re back! After what I think was our first-ever break, Kate Clark and I sat down to dig into the latest startup venture news. There was a lot. We had to skip a few rounds to squeeze the show down to size, but we still hit the biggest stories. First, Lime and Bird are r...