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Maybe it was her lipstick applying robot. Or her terrifying vegetable-chopping death machine. Or the robot that tried its best (and failed wonderfully) to feed her breakfast. Chances are good you’ve seen one of Simone Giertz’s ridiculous creations, be it on the Colbert show or GIF’d into your newsfeed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jason Rowley Contributor Jason Rowley is a venture capital and technology reporter for Crunchbase News. More posts by this contributor International growth, primarily in China, fuels the VC market today Corporate venture investment climbs higher throughout 2018 A few months ago, Crunchbase Newsreportedthat a longstanding period of SaaS investment stagnation had come to an end. Learn more about you...

Makula Dunbar Contributor Makula Dunbar is a writer with Wirecutter. More posts by this contributor The best gear for starting a small business The best games and gear for game night Editor’s note: This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter’s independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and TechCrunch may earn affiliate commissions. Learn more abou...

Recent reports that Softbank may take a majority stake in WeWork has added fuel to the already hot market for start-ups in the workspace and property tech sectors. One of the more compelling companies that stands to benefit from this trend is New York-based Convene. Started by co-founders Ryan Simonetti (CEO) and Chris Kelly (President), 500-person strong Convene has distinguished itself as a top-...

I miss the old MacBook Pro. Remember when the MacBook Pro had a good keyboard? Or an SD Card slot? Or an escape key? I miss the time when the MacBook Pro was 2mm thicker than the current version but had a full-size USB port. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When Discord first launched its new built-in game store just a few weeks back, there was one big caveat: it was available to only a tiny, tiny slice of its 150M users. 50,000 of them, to be exact — all of them in Canada. Today it’s going global. Discord says that access to its store should be rolling out to the rest of the world throughout the day. Discord’s move to become a store comes just weeks...

The Voyage may be dead, but the Kindle line still has some life left in it. This time last year, Amazon upgraded the high-end Oasis model, and now the mid-range Paperwhite is getting a little love. The workhorse of the company’s devoted e-reader line just got a handful of upgrades that will give users a more premium experience, while keeping the device’s starting price at $130. Waterproofing is th...

Good news! Apple now allows U.S. customers to download a copy of their data, months after rolling out the feature to EU customers. But don’t be disappointed when you get your download and find there’s almost nothing in there. Earlier this year when I requested my own data (before the portal feature rolled out), Apple sent me a dozen spreadsheets with my purchase and order history, a few iCloud log...

Twitter users on iOS were hit with a strange bug today. Instead of receiving notifications that included the tweet itself, they received a string of alphanumeric characters. The issue only affected iOS users, we confirmed with the company, and has since been resolved. Twitter was quick to address the problem, following complaints from Twitter users about the weird notifications. Twitter CEO Jack D...

The charmingly outdated media player Winamp is being reinvented as a platform-agnostic mobile audio app that brings together all your music, podcasts and streaming services to a single location. It’s an ambitious relaunch, but the company behind it says it’s still all about the millions-strong global Winamp community — and as proof, the original desktop app is getting an official update as well. L...

It’s 8:00 PM on Friday night and you’re home alone and already drunk. Oh, is that just me? Well no matter. Snapchat has made lenses for your cat now. Yes, that’s right. Your cat! This is what the internet is made for, friends. Not all that fake news and trolling. Not having to read tweets where people use words like “woke” unironically. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/ad...

Google unveiled a number of new products Tuesday at its big hardware event, including the Google Home Hub and Google Pixel Slate. But the Pixel 3, the company’s new smartphone was the real star. The Pixel 3, which is available in two sizes and starts at $799, comes in three colors and has a rear 12.2 megapixel camera as well as a dual front camera. What’s inside the phone is a host of new apps and...

Moving air — that’s the through line across most of Dyson’s products. The vacuums, fans, hand dryers, hair driers — at their heart, they all the do the same thing. Same goes for the new Dyson Airwrap, which has figured out a way to leverage vacuum power into hair curling. Here’s how Dyson describes it, At the heart of this story comes a radical idea: harness Dyson’s digital motor to create a pheno...

Tech stocks tanked today amid a broader stock market slide as nervous investors worried that the ten year bull run in public stocks may be coming to an end. The S&P 500 dropped 3.3 percent while Nasdaq composite index (which is the market where many of the largest U.S. tech companies are traded) lost 4% of its value, falling 315.97 points. The net result is that the hand of the market is crushing...

Google just one-upped Apple in a significant way by addressing a problem that’s plaguing U.S. cellphone owners: spam calls. The company’s new Pixel 3 flagship Android smartphone is first to introduce a new call screening feature that leverages the built-in Google Assistant. The screening service transcribes the caller’s request in real-time, allowing you to decide whether or not to pick up, and gi...

With its latest consumer hardware products, Google’s prices are undercutting Apple, Samsung, and Amazon. The search giant just unveiled its latest flagship smartphone, tablet, and smart home device and all available at prices well below their direct competitors. Where Apple and Samsung are pushing prices of its latest products even higher, Google is seemingly happy to keep prices low and this is c...

Google today announced that its Pixel phones will soon get support for Smart Compose in Gmail. Smart Compose automatically finishes your sentences for you as you type, based on what Google knows about how you and others write similar sentences. Smart Compose can also auto-complete addresses for you. Google first launched this feature with its redesigned Gmail for the web, but it’s now bringing thi...

2018 has been a good year for ridiculous, gargantuan LEGO builds. Just weeks ago, there was that life size, driveable LEGO Bugatti. Now someone has gone and built a mega-sized recreation of Apple’s new Cupertino “spaceship” campus – otherwise known as Apple Park. Coming in at roughly 85,000 pieces, the build took designer Spencer_R a little over two years to complete, with many of those hours spen...

Analytics company Mixpanel is currently tracking the install base of iOS 12. And the latest version of iOS is quite popular as it’s already installed on roughly 47.6 percent of all iOS devices. 45.6 percent of devices still run iOS 11, and 6.9 percent of iOS users run an older version. Adoption rate is an important metric for app developers. With major iOS releases, Apple also releases new framewo...

In what might be the most ridiculous stunt ever pulled in the art world, a Banksy piece has, in a sense, self-destructed. Right in front of an audience of would-be buyers. A framed canvas version of Banksy’s Girl with Balloon was set to be auctioned at Sothebys in London. As the auction came to a close with a final bid of £953,829 (a little over $1.25 million), the print’s frame began… beeping. Th...

Hello and welcome back toEquity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was a treat. We had Danny Crichton in the studio. We had Connie Loizos in the studio. I was in the studio. And our guest, the excellentAndy McLoughlin, a partner at UnCork Capital, was in the studio as well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoice...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk trolled the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in a tweet Thursday afternoon, poking the bear that just days before had agreed to settle securities fraud charges against the billionaire entrepreneur. The tweet, sent out at 1:16 pm PT Thursday, says: “Just want to that the Shortseller Enrichment Commission is doing incredible work. And the name change is so on point!” The S...

We’ve known for a few months now that Jon Favreau was working on a live-action Star Wars series for Disney’s upcoming (but as of yet unnamed) streaming service. But that’s about all we knew. Until now! Favreau just dropped a few huge details out of nowhere. In a surprise Instagram post, Favreau mentioned: It’s at least tentatively called “The Mandalorian”. For the unfamiliar, Mandalorians are a gr...

In 2015, the San Francisco-based education platform MasterClass was founded with an express mission to provide everyone access to “genius,” whether it be in filmmaking, directing, book writing, cooking, tennis, basketball, comedy, acting, screenwriting, photography — even producing electronic music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Want excitement? Here’s something approaching that. Today’s Microsoft October event wasn’t exactly a blockbuster, but product lead Panos Panay did mention that this is the most new Surface products the company has crammed into one event. There was a lot of stuff to get through in the hour or so — though the majority of the announcements were spec bumps to existing products. Learn more about your a...