When Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks, formerly of Pinterest’s policy team, alleged racial and gender discrimination at Pinterest in June, the hope was for Pinterest to make them whole and address its culture of alleged discrimination, Ozoma told TechCrunch. But that’s not what happened. Just two months later, former Pinterest COO Françoise Brougher sued […]
Periscope is shutting down, Samsung has plans for more foldable devices and Airbnb sets new diversity goals. This is your Daily Crunch for December 15, 2020. The big story: Goodbye, Periscope It’s official: Twitter -owned live-streaming app Periscope is shutting down by March of next year. That’s not hugely surprising, both because Jane Manchun Wong […]
Nine months into the pandemic, one of the first states to institute a shut down is back at square one. Following a major spike in COVID-19 cases, California governor Gavin Newsom reinstituted major closures across the state, leaving many residents in search of new avenues to acquire essentials without leaving their home. Robomart is seemingly […]
Rocket launch startup Astra has joined an elite group of companies that can say their vehicle has actually made it to orbital space — earlier than expected. The company’s Rocket 3.2 test rocket (yes, it’s a rocket called “Rocket”) passed the Karman line, the separation point 100 km (62 miles) up that most consider the […]
While it doesn’t appear to be completely down like it was yesterday morning, we’re hearing many reports from Gmail users that the email service is having major issues right now. Some users are reporting that Gmail is particularly slow, while others are reporting constant error messages. One TechCrunch writer, meanwhile, noticed that emails he was […]
On Monday, Pluralsight, a Utah-based startup that sells software development courses to enterprises, announced that it has been acquired by Vista for $3.5 billion. The deal, yet to close, is one of the largest enterprise buys of the year: Vista is getting an online training company that helps retrain techies with in-demand skills through online […]
We hope regulators and the commercial players can work together to find a lasting solution in the relatively near future, rather than waiting for a catastrophic failure before taking action.
BoxCast, a Cleveland-based company aiming to make it easy to live stream any event, has raised $20 million in Series A funding. Co-founder and CEO Gordon Daily said that when the company first launched in 2013, “streaming wasn’t something that everyone understood,” and you needed professional help to live stream anything. BoxCast is supposed to […]
Following recent reports, Periscope announced today that it will end operations as a standalone app by March 2021. The Twitter -owned company referred to its current operations as “unsustainable” in an open letter posted today. It also cited a decline in usage in recent years as a driving factor. “Leaving it in its current state […]
The past eight or so months have been profoundly difficult for musicians. With touring ground to a halt and streaming services offering fractions of cents, livelihoods have been utterly upended for countless artists. Since March, however, Bandcamp has been a rare beacon for many musicians. On the first Friday of every month, the service has […]
Airbnb, which recently went public and became a $100 billion company, has set two goals to try to improve diversity at the home-sharing and experiences company because it “is nowhere near satisfied with the status quo,” the company wrote in a blog post. By the end of 2025, Airbnb is aiming for 20% of its […]
Zoox, the autonomous vehicle company that was acquired this year by Amazon, revealed this week the product of six years of work: A purpose-built self-driving vehicle designed to carry people — and someday maybe even packages — in dense urban environments. The company’s story has captured the attention of skeptics and supporters alike, perhaps because […]
Frank, a startup best known for helping college students secure and manage financial aid, is expanding into a new part of the edtech world. Namely, finding and taking online classes, with the company helping students deploy their financial aid money to open digital slots at more than 100 colleges. As a company, Frank straddles the […]
Extra Crunch is excited to announce we’re renewing our Partner Perk with DocSend. Annual and two-year members of Extra Crunch that are new to DocSend can get up to 90% off an annual plan. DocSend is a secure document-sharing platform that not only lets you share your documents with ease, but it also provides you […]
Surprise! Among Us is now available on the Nintendo Switch for $5.00. The Switch version features cross-platform play allowing PC, mobile and Switch players to play a game together. The hit game just launched on the gaming platform after becoming a surprise hit during the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally launched in 2018, the game found an […]
Let’s preface this year’s predictions by acknowledging and admitting how hilariously wrong we were when this time last year we said that 2020 “showed promise.” In fairness (almost) nobody saw a pandemic coming. The pandemic is, and remains, a global disaster of epic proportions that’s forced billions of people into lockdown, left economies in tatters […]
When large companies like Netflix or Amazon want to test the resilience of their systems, they use chaos engineering tools designed to help them simulate worst-case scenarios and find potential issues before they even happen. Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels introduced the company’s Chaos Engineering as a Service offering called AWS Fault […]
When it first launched nearly three years ago, Fifth Wall had a vision of leveraging capital limited partners from across the real estate development and construction business to back the technologies the industry needed most. That early vision resonated so well that the firm has grown from managing one fund of $212 million to holding […]
Google Photos is rolling out a series of updates to its Memories feature, which surfaces your best photos from years past. Over the next month, Memories will be expanded to include 3D Cinematic photos, updated collage designs and new types of Memories, the company says. These “new types” of Memories may include those of the […]
