Tech News

[embedded content] Here we go with the last show of 2021, recorded in mid-December. It was Frank Radice’s last show from New York before he returned to London. It was nice to bid the year goodbye, but we were careful not to say good riddance like we did in 2020. It was nice to feel

What if the auto industry’s best solution to the chip shortage was not simply making more chips? Suppose we instead got a handle on what might be called “feature bloat” — the tendency, fueled by sales competition, to slather new cars with as much technology as possible? Surveys show that consumers want — and expect

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the

Mergers and acquisitions are notoriously tricky to navigate from a leadership and culture perspective. They require a thoughtful approach to working with a new CEO and joining teams as one workforce — a journey familiar to us and recently acquired Auth0. Okta and Auth0 have their share of differences — we’re enterprise-focused, to start, while

TechCrunch Experts is off to a great start in 2022! Growth marketing (TechCrunch+) After talking to marketing leaders for a year, here’s my advice for CEOs: Rebecca Lynn, co-founder and general partner of Canvas Ventures, wrote about the latest challenges facing growth marketing teams and shared some of the the advice she’s given and received

Apple Fitness+ is introducing a new “Collections” feature along with a new “Time to Run” series starting on January 10th. Collections are a curated series of workouts and meditations from the Fitness+ library organized to help users reach a goal. The feature draws on nearly 2,000 workouts to give users a new way to get

Age-tech startups at this year’s CES demonstrated the potential breadth of the sector. If tech can help an older person live more comfortably, it can also help out a lot of other people. After all, the usefulness of things like mobility aids, health monitoring platforms and long-term financial planning aren’t limited to the elderly. Yesterday,

LinkedIn, now with more than 800 million people listing their professional profiles to build out their careers, is taking its next steps to get them to spend more time on the platform. The company is rolling out a new events platform, where it will be listing, hosting and marketing interactive, virtual live events. It is

SOCAR, a south Korean car-sharing startup, has filed for an initial public offering, announced on Wednesday by Korea Exchange. The details – the number of shares to be offered in the IPO and the price range – have not yet been determined, said a spokesperson at SOCAR.  SOCAR has reached approximately $834 billion (1 trillion

OpenSea, the well-known NFT marketplace, has raised a $300 million round at a $13.3 billion valuation. Newcomer broke the news yesterday before the company confirmed the transaction. For critics of the present-day cryptoeconomy and NFT market, the round was perhaps more evidence of how overheated things have become. After all, OpenSea last raised at a

Brankas, an open banking startup for Southeast Asian markets, is entering the new year with a $20 million Series B. The funding was led by Insignia Ventures Partners, with participation from returning investors Beenext and Integra Partners. Other backers included Visa (Brankas was a member of its 2021 Accelerator Program), AFG Partners and Treasury International,

At CES, Nvidia today put a strong emphasis on its GeForce Now game streaming service, its competitor to the likes of Google’s Stadia (that’s still around, right?), Amazon’s Luna and Microsoft’s increasingly popular Xbox Cloud Gaming service. All of these use a different business model, with GeForce Now making it easy for players to bring

CES, in general, isn’t much of a phone show. That certainly applies to Samsung, which tends to save its big mobile news for Mobile World Congress, a month or two from now. Instead, the event is more about big things: TVs, washing machines, etc. Over the past few years, however, the electronics giant has used

The long, lonesome death of the classic BlackBerry brand hits another milestone tomorrow, as the company finally end access to legacy services. Users still hanging onto devices running BlackBerry OS 7.1 and BlackBerry 10 will lose substantial functionality, on Tuesday January 4. The list includes – but is not limited to – key features like

[embedded content] This argument over Web3 is really exciting. How does one call out either of the two main protagonists? Jack Dorsey has an unlimited hall pass now that he’s free of Wall Street’s hound dogging adult supervision of Twitter, and he’s using it for some subtle purpose. I don’t know the guy well, but

The Indian antitrust watchdog on Friday ordered an investigation into Apple’s business practices — in particular, the company mandating iPhone app developers to use a proprietary payments system — in India, where the American firm commands less than 2% of the smartphone market. The Competition Commission of India, which ordered the Director General to conduct

I spent a chunk of yesterday morning rediscovering the big trends of CES 2012. It’s a strange experience, examining so much technology that feels — at once — extremely dated and very recent. With 10 years between you and an event, the macro trends really take shape. Some items are a clear part of a

New Zealand, a country of 5 million people in the South Pacific, has witnessed a shifting tech startup landscape over the last couple of years. While some major global companies like Xero, Rocket Lab, LanzaTech and Seequent have shined a spotlight on New Zealand’s startup scene, the country historically hasn’t had access to much venture

Technology has come a long way in 2021. There’s widespread mRNA vaccines! An asteroid-deflecting space mission! A very powerful laptop with a very controversial notch! But it’s unfortunately easier to think about the cringiest moments of the year than it is to remember times when we marveled at indoor farming robots.  So hop aboard the choo-choo-cheugy

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. As is tradition on the show, we used the last episode of the year to make predictions about the next year. To continue an annual tradition, Grace and Chris joined Natasha and Mary

There is often a mistaken impression that covering the enterprise is kind of dull when compared to the consumer side of the house, but having followed the space for a couple of decades now, I can tell you that nothing could be further from the truth. For one thing, there’s big money in the enterprise,

Two years ago, the African tech ecosystem saw newfound attention from global players that translated to the continent’s best year of receiving venture capital. From varying sources, it is estimated up to $2 billion went into African tech startups in 2019. With high-profile visits from the most famous Jacks (Ma and Dorsey), a long-awaited first

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Hello again friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch for December 29, 2021. This is going to be the last Daily Crunch for the year, as the news machine seems to be winding

The past twelve months in cybersecurity have been a rough ride. In cybersecurity, everything is broken — it’s just a matter of finding it — and this year felt like everything broke at once, especially towards the end of the year. But for better or worse, we end the year knowing more than we did

GlobalBees, which raised one of the largest Series A financing rounds in India earlier this year, has entered the unicorn club as the New Delhi-headquartered firm scales its Thrasio-like house of brands. Premji Invest, the investment firm controlled by Indian tycoon Azim Premji, led the nine-month-old startup’s Series B financing round, the young firm disclosed

If you’ve visited a crypto company’s website recently, you’ve probably visited a URL ending in “.xyz” instead of its cheugier counterpart, .com. From fintech Block, formerly known as Square, to venture firm Paradigm, to blockchain startups like Mirror, .xyz has become the go-to URL ending for many web3 companies. But what does it mean, and

Sean Fanning Contributor Sean Fanning is a vice president on OpenView’s Investment team. Before that, he led the firm’s Proactive Portfolio Management function and acted as director of corporate development, supporting the portfolio on inorganic and balance sheet related initiatives. The flow of capital in SaaS is becoming increasingly bifurcated. There are the “haves” (public

Laura E. Thomas Contributor Laura E. Thomas is the senior director of National Security Solutions at quantum sensing and computing company ColdQuanta. She is a former Central Intelligence Agency case officer and Chief of Base who built and led sensitive programs at CIA headquarters and abroad in multiple international assignments. The TechCrunch Global Affairs Project examines the

Naren Gupta, a venture capitalist who co-founded Nexus Venture Partners to help plant Indian SaaS startups on the world map, died on Saturday. He was 73. Gupta, who moved to the U.S. to pursue higher education in late 1960s, co-founded Integrated Systems, a software firm that was ultimately sold to Intel. After leaving the firm,