News

With a growing number of challenger banks taking on the U.S. market, one of the original startup banks, Simple — now owned by BBVA — has taken the unusual step of removing a core banking feature: bill pay. The company claimed the feature was under-utilized and usage was trending downwards, which is why it decided […]

Gamers feel passionately about loot boxes, turns out some elected officials do too. A new Senate bill was formally introduced today with bipartisan support and it could categorically shift how today’s top platforms and distribution platforms monetize the titles they sell. The bill’s introduction was first reported by The Verge. The bill asserts

Brad Bao, a Lime co-founder and long-time Tencent executive, will assume chief responsibilities.

Canopy, an upscale, profitable developer of co-working spaces, has expanded its footprint in San Francisco to a third location on the heels of a strategic financing round. Co-founded by the product designer Yves Behar; the second generation design-build developer Amir Mortazavi; and serial entrepreneur and medical office space developer Steve Moheb

It's not really clear just yet exactly what all these powerful, agile quadrupedal robots people are working on are going to do, exactly, but even so it never gets old watching them do their thing. The latest is an Italian model called HyQReal, which demonstrates its aspiration to winning strongman competitions, among other things, by pulling a

Cars are here to stay, whether they have drivers or not. Automakers can ensure their seat at the table by implementing strategies better suited for the digital age.

Streem, an AR startup that is meshing teleconferencing software with computer vision tech, has acquired a small U.K. startup called Selerio that’s also building out augmented reality technologies. The startups were both members of betaworks’ VisionCamp accelerator program last year where they met and collaborated while tackling separate compute

Snap has brought on its first-ever diversity and inclusion lead, former Google Director of Diversity Strategy Oona King. In a memo sent to Snap employees today, Snap Chief People Officer Lara Sweet announced King’s hiring. Although Snap is late in the game of hiring a diversity lead and has yet to release a diversity report, […]

This post and podcast include spoilers for “Game of Thrones.” Remember how it felt six weeks ago, right before “Game of Thrones” returned for its final season? The excitement? The anticipation? That was so, so long ago. Darrell Etherington, the original co-host of the Original Content podcast, joins us once again to wrap up our […]

Julian Assange, founder of whistleblowing site WikiLeaks, has been charged with more than a dozen additional charges by U.S. federal prosecutors, including under the controversial Espionage Act — a case that will likely test the rights of freedom of speech and expression under the First Amendment. Assange, 47, was arrested at the Ecuadorean embas

E-commerce platform Shopify has quietly made an acquisition to continue its expansion of the services and products that merchants can sell and purchase through its platform. It has acquired Handshake, a New York startup that offers a commerce platform for businesses that sell wholesale goods. Shopify has confirmed the deal in a short statement: “

Scott Gottlieb, the former Food and Drug Administration chief, became known during his tenure for his efforts to regulate the tobacco and e-cigarette industries — and for his particular focus on Juul, the fast-growing e-cigarette company that Gottlieb squarely blames for creating a “youth epidemic” of e-cigarette use by teenagers. Indeed, whe

Eight Microsoft interns have developed a new language learning tool that uses the smartphone camera to help adults improve their English literacy by learning the words for the things around them. The app, Read My World, lets you take a picture with your phone to learn from a library of more than 1,500 words. The […]

Aurora, the self-driving car startup backed by Sequoia Capital and Amazon, is in an acquiring mood. The company, founded in early 2017 by Chris Urmson, Sterling Anderson and Drew Bagnell, announced Thursday that it acquired lidar company Blackmore. The Blackmore purchase follows another smaller, and previously unknown, acquisition of 7D Labs that o

Unprotected left-hand turns are tough for robots and humans alike. The compounding variables of crossing in front of oncoming traffic make it one of the toughest maneuvers in driving. It’s one of the toughest challenges for self-driving platforms — even more so as drivers often look for non-verbal cues from other drivers to when it’s […]

Breaking into the launch industry is no easy task, but New Zealand's Rocket Lab has done it without missing a step. The company has just completed its third commercial launch of 2019, and is planning to increase the frequency of its launches until there's one a week. It's ambitious, but few things in spaceflight aren't.

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. Indiegogo hires Reddit’s Andy Yang as new CEO CEO David Mandelbrot is stepping down, and according to sources close to the […]

Amazon and Walmart’s problems in India look set to continue after Narendra Modi, the biggest force to embrace the country’s politics in decades, led his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party to a historic landslide re-election on Thursday, reaffirming his popularity in the eyes of the world’s largest democracy. The re-election, which gives

Amazon probably knows everything else about you at this point, so why not let it track your emotions, too? The company is said to be working on a wearable wellness device said to be able to determine a user’s emotional state. Word arrives from a Bloomberg story based on “internal documents.” This comes on the […]

Just a bit shy of a year ago, Patrick Stewart blew the minds of Star Trek fans everywhere by taking the stage at the Las Vegas Star Trek convention to announce he was returning to the role of Jean-Luc Picard. His return would come in the form of a series made for CBS’ streaming service, […]