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Hamburg’s state government has been formally warned against using Zoom over data protection concerns. The German state’s data protection agency (DPA) took the step of issuing a public warning yesterday, writing in a press release that the Senate Chancellory’s use of the popular videoconferencing tool violates the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) since

EV startup Canoo has hired hundreds of employees and is homing in on a production date, but critical milestones including landing a battery supplier remain, according to the company’s second quarter earnings report. Canoo’s earnings report comes just a few weeks after the company’s first investor relations day when it named Dutch company VDL Nedcar

Hello readers: Welcome to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. Two housekeeping slash teasers … Stay tuned this week for a series of articles on Nuro reported by investigative science and tech reporter Mark Harris with assistance from

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by what the weekday Exchange column digs into, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.  Happy weekend, friends. I am writing to you on Friday afternoon after powering through a grilled cheese.

“I like to think of successful brand-building as creating a company that customers would be upset to separate from their identity,” growth marketing expert Julian Shapiro told us earlier this week. “For example, they’d cease to be the man with Slack stickers all over his laptop. Or the woman who no longer wears Nike shoes

After all the leaks and teases, Lamborghini has finally announced its new hybrid-engine Countach. Thankfully, almost everything you need to know about the car is in its model designation: LPI 800-4. The first part is short for Longitudinale Posteriore Ibrido, referencing how the powertrain is mounted lengthwise toward the back of the supercar and the

A group of senators sent new Amazon CEO Andy Jassy a letter Friday pressing the company for more information about how it scans and stores customer palm prints for use in some of its retail stores. The company rolled out the palm print scanners through a program it calls Amazon One, encouraging people to make

Earlier this year, Nothing launched the Ear (1) with a grand idea: earbuds as fashion accessories. Sure, the company talked a lot about the non-invasiveness of transparent design, but at the end of the day, the product’s launch on StockX betrayed a focus on the fashion forward. In that respect, Samsung’s new Galaxy Buds 2

Talkdesk, a provider of cloud-based contact center software, announced $230 million in new Series D funding that more than triples the company’s valuation to $10 billion, Talkdesk founder CEO Tiago Paiva confirmed to TechCrunch. New investors Whale Rock Capital Management, TI Platform Management and Alpha Square Group came on board for this round and were

Sophie Alcorn Contributor Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Dear Sophie: Which immigration options allow

As Baby Boomers (aged 57-75 at this point) and Gen X (aged 41-56) head into their dotage, they are no longer the “senior citizens” of yore, being still active and, often, healthy. But leaving work means they lose about half of their social network, which has a negative impact on wellbeing. Plus, the pandemic increased

After the bell today, Coinbase reported another period of impressive results in its second quarter earnings report. During the quarter, Coinbase’s total revenue reached $2.23 billion, which helped the company generate net income of $1.61 billion in the three-month period. The company benefited from a one-time line item worth $737.5 million, which stemmed from what

Despite the prevalence of shopping malls and the emergence of VC-backed e-commerce companies like Jumia, informal retail in Africa is still king. A 2016 study by PwC states that 90% of sales in Africa’s major economies come through informal channels — markets and kiosks. This presents a large market ripe for digitization, and over the

Ariana Grande strutted and soared around a candy-colored series of Fortnite sets in Epic’s latest major in-game live music event. The multi-day “tour” offered gamers and Grande fans alike plenty to enjoy while showcasing Epic’s impressively smooth and visually inventive vision for live events that millions of people can enjoy simultaneously. Fortnite players have known

Just two months after its last funding announcement, Indonesian crypto assets platform Pintu has closed a $35 million Series A+. The new round was led by Lightspeed Ventures, with participation from returning investors like Alameda Ventures, Blockchain.com Ventures, Castle Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Intudo Ventures and Pantera Capital. Pintu’s previous funding, a $6 million Series

Hello friends! That’s what Lucas always starts off with, right? Lucas is out for a few weeks, so I’ll be handling Week In Review until he’s back. TL;DR on me: I’m Greg, and I’ve been with TechCrunch for a long, long time. I joined around the time Twitter found the vowels in its name and

Thanks for reading Startups Weekly. Want the weekly digest in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.  I spoke to my editor this week about the usual: upcoming stories, the future of the podcast and the existential dread of imposter syndrome amid a year-and-a-half of extreme change. The last bit took up the majority of

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 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone.

[embedded content] Writing our way out of the place we’re in is tricky. The words come easily enough, each measured for its emotional weight in the stream of issues we face. It’s possible this paragraph will disappear as I find my ground. Mandates, Cuomo, Olympic mental gymnastics, where we were two weeks ago and how

Andy Yang joined Indiegogo at a turbulent time. As the crowdfunding platform’s then-CEO stepped aside for personal reasons, the service also reportedly grappled with layoffs. Coming on board after a stretch with Reddit, the new CEO would have less than a year at the helm before COVID-19 turned the globe upside down. Now 13 years

Indian online learning platform Vedantu is not engaging to sell the firm to edtech giant Byju’s, a top executive said on Friday. A report by Indian news outlet Entrackr said early Friday that Byju’s had offered $700 million to $800 million to acquire Bangalore-based Vedantu, which counts Accel and GGV Capital among its investors. In a

Apple later this year will roll out new tools that will warn children and parents if the child sends or receives sexually explicit photos through the Messages app. The feature is part of a handful of new technologies Apple is introducing that aim to limit the spread of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) across Apple’s

Data science platform Dataiku announced today it has raised a $400 million Series E, bringing its valuation to $4.6 billion. The round was led by Tiger Global, with participation from returning investors like ICONIQ Growth, CapitalG, FirstMark Capital, Battery Ventures, Snowflake Ventures and Dawn Capital. New investors included Insight Partners, Eurazeo, Lightrock and Olivier Pomel,

Japanese startup ispace has raised $46 million in a fresh round of Series C funding as it looks to complete three lunar lander missions in three years. The funding will go toward the second and third of the planned missions, scheduled for 2023 and 2024. The first mission, which ispace aims to conduct in the

Karan Bajaj, the founder and chief executive of WhiteHat Jr, is leaving the firm a year after selling the startup for $300 million to Indian edtech giant Byju’s. In an email to employees on Wednesday, Bajaj and Byju’s founder and chief executive Byju Raveendran said the departure follows a “mutually decided” decision made at the

Chris Nicholson Contributor More posts by this contributor UPDATED: Machine learning can fix Twitter, Facebook, and maybe even America Superintelligence, roughly defined as an AI algorithm that can solve all problems better than people, will be a watershed for humanity and tech. Even the best human experts have trouble making predictions about highly probabilistic, wicked

Inequalities between women and men in the workplace have been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic and are likely to persist in the near future, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO). The World Economic Forum estimates globally it will take 267.6 years to close the gender gap in economic participation and opportunity. So it’s even

Stewart Hillhouse Contributor Stewart Hillhouse writes actionable growth marketing insights as senior content lead at Demand Curve. By night, he interviews marketers and creatives on his podcast, Top Of Mind. Before getting into marketing, Stewart was a semi-professional lumberjack. He also writes at stewarthillhouse.com. More posts by this contributor Demand Curve: Email marketing tactics that

Kuda Bank, the London-based, Nigerian-operating startup that is taking on incumbents in the country with a mobile-first, personalised and often cheaper set of banking services built on newer, API-based infrastructure, has been on a growth tear in the last several months, and to fuel its expansion, it has now raised another round of funding. TechCrunch

Duolingo landed onto the public markets this week, rallying excitement and attention for the edtech sector and its founder cohort. The language learning business’ stock price soared when it began to trade, even after the unicorn raised its IPO price range, and priced above the raised interval. Duolingo’s IPO proves that public market investors can