TechCrunch Industry News

Just over a year after Skype introduced a colorful, Snapchat-inspired makeover which included its own version of “stories,” the company says it’s now going to refocus on simplicity – and it’s ditching stories along the way. The redesign had been met with a lot of backlash. Skype had clearly wanted to appeal to a more youthful demographic with its update, but in doing so, it cluttered the user expe...

Mercedes-Benz unveiled Tuesday the EQC, an all-electric crossover that kicks off the German automaker’s plans to invest more than $12 billion to produce a line of battery-powered models under its new EQ brand. The automaker plans to invest another $1.2 billion in global battery production, Daimler AG Chairman and Mercedes-Benz CEO Dieter Zetsche said. The Mercedes EQC, which is expected to go on s...

The Mavic Pro was a revelation. It wasn’t a perfect product, to be sure, but it represented a new paradigm for DJI and the consumer drone industry in general. It was compact, folding up into a nice, portable package, while still being portable enough to shove into a backpack. It was also the beginning of a new line for the company, paving the way for the Mavic Airand Spark — both even more portabl...

Disrupt SF (Sept 5-7) approaches with just a few days until things kick off. We have an all-star lineup that only TechCrunch can assemble, and we’re expecting our largest number of attendees yet. Check out our star-packed agenda here, and keep reading to find out everything you need to make for a stellar conference experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The interconnectedness of the cloud has allowed us to share content widely with people inside and outside the organization and across different applications, but that ability has created a problem of its own, a kind of digital fragmentation. How do you track how that piece of content is being used across a range of cloud services? It’s a problem Box wants to solve with its latest features, Activit...

Googleisn’t one to shy away from bold claims. “We have had no reported or confirmed account takeovers since implementing security keys at Google,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. And it’s probably true. Think of a security key as like a two-factor authentication code that’ssent to your phone — but instead a USB stick in your pocket. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoi...

SurveyMonkey, which helps businesses gather feedback through its survey platform, has submitted paperwork to the SEC for its upcoming NASDAQ public offering. The company plans to raise $100 million in the IPO, per the filing, though that’s likely a placeholder amount. The company, which will list under the symbol SVMK, has yet to price its shares. Most recently, SurveyMonkey brought in $250 millio...

What do you do if you’re a European startup competing against the likes of Box and Dropbox, and are looking to make a splash in international markets like the U.S.? Well, if you’re the Dutch startup WeTransfer (which raised a cool $25 million about three years ago to take the U.S. market by storm), you get weird. Really, really, avant garde-level weird. WeTransfer, Funky Dutch Cousin Of Dropbox An...

Back in March, Nest and Yale teamed up to release a smart door lock to complement Nest’s then brand-new video doorbell. It’s a solid piece of hardware, but it had a curious quirk for something made under Google’s watch: it didn’t work with Google Home or Google Assistant. That’ll change later this week. On August 29th, the lock will be getting an update that adds Google Assistant and Home support...

No, it’s not just you. Yes, Slack is having connectivity issues yet again. Though this time, they seem a bit less pronounced. I know we’re having some problems off and on, with different channels appearing offline. For the most part, however, communication is still up, so you probably won’t be able to convince your boss to take the rest of the day off. Sorry. We're investigating the cause of conne...

If you’re not sure about watching a whole movie where your point-of-view is limited to computer and smartphone screens, you’re not alone — “Searching” filmmakers Aneesh Chaganty and Sev Ohanian told me they had very similar reservations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

At least eleven people have been shot and four people were killed in a mass shooting attack at a livestream event debuting the new “Madden NFL 19” game at an arcade in Jacksonville, Fla., according to local news reports. The Jacksonville Sheriff’s office confirmed on Twitter that one suspect was dead at the scene and the police were still investigating. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podc...

Hello and welcome back toEquity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week we had a full house which was super great. TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos and Sarah Buhr held down the fort in San Francisco along with our guest, Susan Mac Cormac, a partner at Morrison Foerster where she works on some of the most interesting deals in the private c...

AWS cuts in half the price of most of its Lightsail virtual private servers AWS Lightsail, which launched in 2016, is Amazon’s answer to the rise of Digital Ocean, OVH and other affordable virtual private server (VPS) players. Lightsail started as a pretty basic service, but over the course of the last two years, AWS added features like block storage, Windows support and additional regions. Learn...

Tim Kentley-Klay, the co-founder and CEO of secretive self-driving vehicle company Zoox, was fired suddenly Wednesday by the company’s board. Kentley-Klay’s departure was firstreported by The Information, which cited an unnamed source. Kentley-Klay later tweeted a statement confirming that he had been fired by the board. Kentley-Klay and Zoox could not be reached for comment. TechCrunch will updat...

The Mosaic Manufacturing Palette 2 – an upgrade the original Palette – is a self-contained system for full color 3D printing. It works by cutting and splicing multiple filament colors and then feeding them through as the object is printed. The system uses a unique and internal cutter called the Splice Core that measures and cuts filament as it prints, ensuring the incoming filament can change colo...

Are you trying to stay off social media, but just can’t seem to stop yourself from posting? When random thoughts pop into your head, do you find yourself launching Twitter and typing before you remember you’re trying to quit? Well, now there’s a better way. Hello, Brizzly. Brizzly is a revolutionary new app designed just for social media quitters. With Brizzly, you can satisfy your over-sharing ur...

Streaming TV services now reach 5% of U.S. Wi-Fi households, up 58% since last year The number of U.S. households watching streaming TV services – those that deliver cable TV-like programming over the internet – has grown a remarkable 58% over last year, according to new data from comScore. However, these services still account for a small portion of the overall market, as only 5 percent (4.9 mill...

Joanna Glasner Contributor More posts by this contributor Boston-area startups are on pace to overtake NYC venture totals While tech waffles on going public, biotech IPOs boom Unicorn exits are taking flight. With the IPO window wide open, an apparent record number of venture-backed companies privately valued over $1 billion have launched public offerings this year. Learn more about your ad choice...

Twitter tried to downplay the impact deactivating its legacy APIs would have on its community and the third-party Twitter clients preferred by many power users by saying that “less than 1%” of Twitter developers were using these old APIs. Twitter is correct in its characterization of the size of this developer base, but it’s overlooking millions of third-party app users in the process. Learn more...

In the future everyone will be naked for fifteen minutes. It’s with this novel thought in mind that I connect with a model named Nazanin who will walk me through the new world of bi-directional teledildonic cam life. I was there to test a new device from Kiiroo called the Kiiroo Launch. This novel sex jar connects with a Flashlight – essentially a masturbator – and can send and receive signals fro...

Hello and welcome back toEquity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was a corker. We had Alex Wilhelm in-studio with ourguest Minal Hasan, founder of K2 Global, and TechCrunch’s Danny Chriton jumped in from New York to help the crew dig through the biggest and best stuff from the last seven days. It’s been busy, to say the least...

Tim Merel Contributor Tim Merel is managing director of Digi-Capital. More posts by this contributor China could beat America in AR/VR long-term Ubiquitous AR to dominate focused VR by 2022 AR/VR/XR are going to be big, but not everyone will win. Today’s market is a collection of related point solutions to specific problems, but not a fully functioning ecosystem. Not yet. Learn more about your ad...

It’s hard to be a fan of Twitter right now. The company is sticking up for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, when nearly all other platforms have given him the boot, it’s overrun with bots, and now it’s breaking users’ favorite third-party Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Twitterificby shutting off APIs these apps relied on. Worse still, is that Twitter isn’t taking full responsibility for its deci...

U.S. accelerator Y Combinator is expandingto China after it announced the hiring of former Microsoft and Baidu executive Qi Lu who will develop a standalone startup program that runs on Chinese soil. Shanghai-born Lu spent 11 years with Yahoo and eight years with Microsoft before a short spell with Baidu, where he was COO and head of the firm’s AI research division. Now he becomes founding CEO of...