PlayStation 4’s next big software update is going out now to beta testers, and it adds a lot for owners of the console to get excited about. There’s support for external USB HDDs, which means regardless of how much internal storage you have on your PS4, you can add up to 8TB of additional space via external drives, ensuring you’ll never run out of room for games and saves.… Read More
The dating game sure is tough to maintain. Zurich-based dating app Blinq has been acquired by a Swiss outdoor advertising firm, APG|SGA, with the latter coveting the team’s experience in rolling out beacon networks for a new division that will be developing interactive ads. Read More
Snap files publicly for its massive IPO, Uber will pause its service in Taiwan starting February 12th, Pokémon GO crosses $1 billion in revenue, Facebook lets you search images by content and Licking County government gets its offices shut down by ransomware. All this on Crunch Report! Read More
Medium CEO Ev Williams announced today at Upfront Summit that his company will launch a consumer subscription product, with the first version coming this quarter. This could help develop an additional revenue stream apart from advertisements. Finding a strong revenue source is critical, since Medium decided to lay off 50 staff, close its New York office, and announce a new direction last… Read More
Tesla CEO Elon Musk issued a statement about his participation in Donald Trump’s economic advisory council, and a scheduled meeting of the group tomorrow. Musk said that he and others on the council will take the opportunity to voice their opposition to the president’s executive order on immigration and suggest how it might be changed. Musk took the opportunity to specifically… Read More
Drone racing as a sport is taking off, with teams, sponsors and television networks all getting in on the action of this developing scene. There’s a professional drone racing league, live streaming and even drone-racing simulators, where drone-pilot hopefuls can try emulating the real thing. But what if you want to actually take to the skies with a racing drone? Team… Read More
Snapchat parent Snap Inc. has finally revealed its long-awaited IPO filing. The social messaging company, which plans to go public in early March, just shared details about its growth trajectory and financials. And while we knew that Snap has raised at least $2.4 billion in capital from a long list of investors, we now know the ownership percentages. We also know the pre-IPO values of… Read More
WhatsApp proved itself to be the most YOLO-crypto company of 2016 when it turned on end-to-end encryption by default last April for its more than 1 billion users. (Facebook, WhatsApp’s parent company, took a more cautious approach when it added opt-in encryption to Messenger.) But WhatsApp’s all-in approach has come at a cost — the company’s executives were arrested… Read More
Most of today’s Snap coverage will be about its revenue and daily average usage numbers, but there was one small tidbit that emerged that will mean big business for the company’s cloud infrastructure partner, Google. In Snap’s S-1 filing, the company announced a license platform agreement it struck with Google for its cloud infrastructure services. Under the terms of… Read More
Now that Snap is revealing its financial guts to the world in its filing for its initial public offering, we’re getting a small glimpse at how much the company is paying to acquire startups. As Snap becomes a larger company and is able to amass more of a cash pile, it’ll be able to start picking off startups that can either fill out the company’s ranks with talent or add… Read More
Snapchat was flying high in early 2016, but the launch of direct competitor Instagram Stories coincided with a massive drop in how fast Snapchat was growing, judging by new stats in its IPO filing. That aligns with our report that multiple analytic providers and social media talent managers saw a big decline in Snapchat usage after Instagram Stories came out. While we can’t be sure… Read More
Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and businessman Dan Gilbert are set to announce Microsoft is moving downtown from the suburbs. TechCrunch has confirmed the move with several trusted sources and learned that Microsoft will occupy 50,000 square feet in One Campus Martius, a building owned in part by Dan Gilbert and home to a large chunk of the Quicken Loans team. Microsoft’s Detroit operation… Read More
Ousted Snapchat early employee Reggie Brown was paid $157.5 million in a settlement in September 2014 to close off a 2013 lawsuit he had brought against other co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, alleging that they had taken his original idea and run with it, pushing him out of the company without compensation in the process.
The details were made public for the first time in… Read More
Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat and Spectacles, included in its filing to go public a brief tidbit on diversity. Unlike tech companies like Apple, Google, Twitter, Facebook and several others, Snap has not released a diversity report. At the end of 2016, Snap employed 1,859 employees, but Snap won’t say how diverse it is. “That’s because we believe diversity is… Read More
Snapchat, which filed for its initial public offering today, sees potential risks to its business in cybersecurity and international regulation, particularly in China and the European Union.
Security breaches — and the privacy concerns that follow — have already caused problems for Snapchat, according to its filing. The document refers to a CEO impersonation scam that occurred… Read More
Snap, Inc. just released its IPO and there’s a lot to take away, but from a hardware perspective there’s not much present – which is actually telling in itself. The S-1 filing contains a few references to Spectacles, but they don’t suggest Snap’s view of itself as a camera company leans very heavily on its hardware products or pipeline. But that could still change,… Read More
Snapchat parent Snap Inc. wanted to present a growing and and highly engaged user base today in its bid to go public. But there are reasons for concern, especially when you look more closely at user growth in Europe and the rest of the world With the release of the company’s S-1 filing today, Snap revealed that at the end of 2016 the company had 158 million daily active users who… Read More
Evan Spiegel’s letter to investors would fit in a 10 second snap. The CEO’s penchant for minimalist design seems to have influenced the opening statement in today’s Snap Inc S-1 filing to go public. It’s just a 1/16th the length of Mark Zuckerberg’s letter when Facebook went public. But it was enough for him to declare the camera as the “starting… Read More
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has removed himself from Donald Trump’s economic advisory group, as first reported by both Recode and the New York Times, and confirmed by TechCrunch. Kalanick was set to speak with Trump tomorrow at a meeting of the President’s advisory council on business matters, which was established late last year and which also includes SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. The… Read More
This is another incremental step in the process of going public, but it’s probably the most important because we’re finally getting our first glimpse at the financial guts of the company. Snapchat has gone from a zeitgeist-y app among a younger audience to one with more than 150 million daily users — and one with a strong pitch to advertisers based on the engagement of the… Read More
