TechCrunch Industry News

Redpoint Ventures is doubling down on China. The firm, headquartered in Menlo Park, has filed documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to raise $400 million across two new China-focused funds. The firm has set a $300 million target for its second flagship China fund, a significant increase from the $180 million it garnered for its debut China fund in 2016. Redpoint is also raisin...

Spotify launches Car View on Android to make using its app less dangerous behind the wheel Spotify is making it easier to use its streaming app in the car, when the phone is connected to the vehicle over Bluetooth. The company today confirmed the launch of a new feature called “Car View,” which is a simplified version of the service’s Now Playing screen that includes larger fonts, bigger buttons,...

Why is one of the most popular Android apps running a hidden web server in the background? ES File Explorer claims it has over 500 million downloads under its belt since 2014, making it one of the most used apps to date. It’s simplicity makes it what it is: a simple file explorer that lets you browse through your Android phone or tablet’s file system for files, data, documents and more. But behind...

China accounted for nearly half of app downloads in 2018, 40% of consumer spend Global app downloads topped 194 billion in 2018, up 35 percent from 2016, according to App Annie’s annual “State of Mobile 2019” report released today. Consumer spending across app stores was up 75 percent to reach $101 billion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Philip Rosedale Contributor Philip Rosedale is co-founder and CEO of High Fidelity. A smartphone screen is a wonder of the world. It’s not just that it’s bright and colorful and sharp. In some ways, it’s as good as human biology allows. We’ve packed so many pixels into such a small space that any more would be lost on us. We can’t make the screens themselves bigger, because then they’d become too...

VLC, the hugely popular media playing service, is filing one of its gaps with the addition ofAirPlay support as its just crossed an incredible three billion users. The new feature was revealed byJean-Baptiste Kempf, one of the service’s lead developers, in an interview with Variety at CESand it will give users a chance to beam content from their Android or iOS device to an Apple TV. Learn more abo...

Jason Rowley Contributor Jason Rowley is a venture capital and technology reporter for Crunchbase News. More posts by this contributor SoftBank’s Vision Fund inches closer to $100B The top 10 cities for $100M VC rounds in 2018 so far For the global VC industry, 2018 was asupergiantyear. Crunchbase projects that 2018 deal and dollar volume surpassed even the high-water mark left by the dot-com delu...

Gartner has released its quarterly PC sales survey for the fourth quarter of 2018, and it was the same old story. PC sales plunged in the fourth quarter and were down 1.3 percent for the year. The three top players — HP, Dell and Lenovo — accounted for 63 percent of sales worldwide in the quarter. The company found in their preliminary sales research that worldwide sales totaled 68.6 million units...

Two and a half years after doing pushups onstage at Disrupt New York, Bay Area-based sports health company Halo Neuroscience is back with the second generation of its brain stimulating headphones. The biggest update to the spiky wearable this time around is a newfound focus on the headphone aspect of the product. The Halo Sport 2 adds Bluetooth audio — a nice change from its hardwired predecessor....

To paraphrase P. T. Barnum, “there’s a Bluetooth speaker born every minute.” At no time of year is that more true than at CES in Las Vegas, where they are bountiful beyond belief. But very few — nay, only one that I found — are made of concrete. And it’s French! The speakers immediately attracted my attention because of their simplicity and of course material. Learn more about your ad choices. Vis...

Silicon Valley loves a party, and we’re ready to help you get your swerve on. We’ve just released a fresh batch of tickets to the 2nd Annual TechCrunch Winter Party. Our fabulous midwinter fete takes place on Friday, February 8 atGalvanizein San Francisco. Here’s a hot tip: buy your ticket now, because they won’t sit around for long. Last year, nearly 1,000 people came to the party and — as cliché...

Handheld retro gaming machines come and go, but few go so simply and effectively to the point as My Arcade’s Retro Champ. You stick in your NES cartridge, hit the power button, and assuming you blew on it beforehand, it powers up. This one sets itself apart with a big ol’ screen, Famicom compatibility, and a whopping 35-hour battery life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/...

In moments of stress and anxiety, there are those of us who find it difficult to breathe — and paradoxically, many reach for a cigarette or vape as a way to manage that. But what if instead of nicotine or smoke, the device you grabbed put fresh air in your lungs and helped you calm down? That’s the idea behind the Kitoki. Looking a bit like an oversized bean with a sippy cup tip on the end, the Ki...

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. Magic Leap and other AR startups have a rough 2019 ahead of them 2018 was supposed to be the year where the foundation of AR was set to expand, but now it looks like momentum has been sucked out of the indu...

In a new a16z podcast with the venture firm’s founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, there’s a lot to enjoy, from Andreessen’s TV show recommendations to Horowitz’s secret to excellent barbecue. (It’s pretty much just “time,” as you might imagine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s tax season! You know what that means? It’s scamming season, too. You might have heard this story before. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We know Disney’s Star Wars Land (or “Galaxy’s Edge”, if we’re being formal) is opening sometime in summer 2019. But thats about as exact as anyone at Disney would get. The rumors said June. Now, it seems, so does Disney CEO Bob Iger. Iger casually dropped the June target in an interview with Barron’s (as spotted by the OC Register). You can read the full interview here, but the key bit comes in a...

Listen, everyone. It’s not every day that a new fact comes to light regarding a game that came out more than 30 years ago. And I happen to love it when retro games get broken in fabulous and entertaining ways. So the news that The Legend of Zelda for NES has a minus world like Super Mario Bros and others hit me like like a freight train. The phenomenon was discovered by Youtuber SKELUX, who starts...

Samsung always has a huge presence at CES, but it isn’t the giant TVs and flashy next-generation gadgets that have my attention this year; it’s this simple, flexible monitor that looks like it would be right at home in any workspace. It’s called the Space Monitor, presumably because it gives you space, not because it’s meant for use in space. I don’t see why you couldn’t, though. Learn more about...

Well, what have we here? If it isn’t the Samsung Galaxy S10, courtesy of perennial smartphone outer, EVLeaks. This marks one the first good looks we’ve got at the phone, which is likely due out in a couple of months at Mobile World Congress. It’s a pretty rough photo — the icons are all blurred out and the cropping job isn’t great, likely in an effort to conceal the source. Learn more about your a...

As anyone from the Gizmondo to the Virtual Boy can tell you, it’s tough to launch a console. Of course, it’s helps when your device apparently comes pre-loaded with thousands of games from big name companies like Nintendo, Sony, Square and Bandai. It was clear the moment they were launched that Soulja Boy’s SouljaGame console and handhelds were too good to be true, in spite of his insistence that...

Shine, one of the many apps capitalizing on the growing self-care trend, has now brought its app used by 3 million people to Android devices. Originally launched as a simple messaging bot that doled out life advice and motivation, Shine has grown over the years to become a larger self-help platform aimed largely at the millennial crowd – and in particular, millennial women. Learn more about your a...

The timing is… less than ideal. Just as the industry is recovering from a holiday-induced hangover, we’re thrust into the country’s largest consumer electronics show. The timing, of course, is not coincidental. The show is intended to offer a preview for the tech year to come. Many companies thrive on CES’s pace. It’s a five-day deluge of tech news, and, for many, it’s the largest platform they’ll...

Earlier this year, Netflix was seen testing a bypass of iTunes billing across dozens of markets worldwide. As 2018 draws to a close, Netflix – the App Store’s top grossing app –has ditched the ability for new users to sign up and subscribe to the streaming service within its iOS app across all global markets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

My parents are approaching 60. When they were young, they hung out at diners, or drove around in their cars. My generation hung out in the parking lot after school, or at the mall. My colleague John Biggs often talks of hanging out with his nerd buddies in his basement, playing games and making crank calls. Today, young people are hanging out on a virtual island plagued by an ever-closing fatal st...