I’m glistening. My heart rate is finally slowing a bit as I type this. The slightest hints of my asthma are subsiding. I’m not going to tell you I feel “good,” as relative as that term might be in a year when everything has gone to hell somehow both gradually and all at once over […]
Virgin Galactic attempted a test flight of its SpaceShipTwo Unity spaceplane on Saturday, but the flight was cut short after the spacecraft detached from its carrier aircraft. A failsafe prevented Unity’s rocket engines from firing up, because the computer that monitors the rockets somehow lost their connection to the rocket engines themselves, Virgin Galactic revealed […]
The hectic M&A cycle we have seen throughout 2020 continued this weekend when Vista Equity Partners announced it was acquiring Pluralsight for $3.5 billion. That comes out to $20.26 per share. The company stock closed on Friday at $18.50 per share on a market cap of over $2.7 billion. With Pluralsight, Vista gets an online […]
Update: It looks like various services are starting to come back again, but with some glitches (such as the address bar in Gmail not working correctly). A Google spokesperson has now provided us directly with a statement about the outage: “Today, at 3.47AM PT Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to […]
Everybody thought the deal was done — Take-Two was supposed to acquire Codemasters for nearly $1 billion. Take-Two even reached an agreement with the board of Codemasters. But Electronic Arts crashed the party at the last minute and offered even more money. EA now plans to buy Codemasters for $1.2 billion. Sky News originally reported […]
The rush to capitalize on the shift to online learning, post-pandemic, continues. IntellectoKids, a developer of educational apps for children aged 3 to 7 years, has raised $3 million in a Series A financing led by US-based Allrise Capital and other investors, including Genesis Investments. The platform offers parents of preschool children ‘gamified’ educational content […]
Exoskeleton technology has been one of the more interesting developments in the world of robotics: instead of building machines that replace humans altogether, build hardware that humans can wear to supercharge their abilities. Today, German Bionic, one of the startups designing exoskeletons specifically aimed at industrial and physical applications — it describes its Cray X […]
Cledara, the SaaS purchase and management platform that helps bring greater viability and control over a company’s sprawling software subscriptions, has raised $3.4 million in additional funding. The round is led by Nauta Capital, with participation from existing investor Anthemis. It comes off the back of the startup growing revenues by 20x in 2020 — […]
Nokia, the 155-year-old iconic firm that has manufactured a range of items from rubber to cables to phones and telecommunications equipment, is ready to expand to a new category. The Finnish firm on Monday launched the Nokia PureBook X14 laptop in collaboration with Walmart -owned Flipkart for the Indian market. The Nokia PureBook X14, which […]
The Chinese government is moving to curb the power of some of China’s most influential internet companies. The country’s top market regulator announced Monday that it is fining Alibaba and China Literature, Tencent’s e-book spinoff, for failing to report their past acquisition deals for clearance. The cases involve Alibaba’s equity investments in major Chinese mall […]
Pioneered by WeChat almost four years ago, mini-apps are now common in China and India, and gaining traction in other markets, too. Mini-apps, or lightweight apps designed for integration into host apps, allow smartphone users to access several services through one app, saving them data and storage space. They also give host apps more ways […]
Ola said on Monday that it has signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of Tamil Nadu in India to set up what it claims would be the “world’s largest scooter manufacturing facility” in the South Indian state as the Indian ride-hailing firm begins a new push with electric vehicles. The SoftBank-backed Indian ride-hailing […]
Reddit announced that it has acquired short video platform Dubsmash. The deal’s terms were undisclosed. Dubsmash will retain its own platform and brand, and Reddit will integrate its video creation tools. Its co-founders, Suchit Dash, Jonas Drüppel and Tim Specht, will join Reddit. According to Crunchbase data, the app has raised $20.2 million from investors […]
“Mank” is a change of pace for director David Fincher — instead of exploring the world of startup backstabbing (“The Social Network”), political backstabbing (“House of Cards”) or actual stabbings (“Seven,” “Zodiac,” “Gone Girl,” “Mindhunter” etc.), Fincher takes us back to ’30s and ’40s Hollywood. Working from a script by Fincher’s late father Jack, the movie […]
The place we’re in, the valley of the dolls between the vote and the Inauguration, is overshadowed by the battle to save our lives. The vaccines look promising, and so does the persistence of the Trumpster to play his games. Somehow we have to live with that, on both sides. In the business we’re in, […]
Welcome back to Human Capital, where I break down the latest in diversity, equity and inclusion, and labor in tech. This week, Twitter dropped its latest diversity report and Tesla released its first one ever. Meanwhile, Google CEO Sundar Pichai apologized for the way things went down with Dr. Timnit Gebru, a prominent researcher in […]
Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Subscribe here. Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors. Welcome to the depths of December, a time in which […]
Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7 a.m. PT). Subscribe here. Maybe it is a stock market bubble, or a tech-stock bubble at least. And maybe DoorDash, Airbnb and C3.ai and their bankers should have priced higher regardless to take advantage of all […]
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 is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in global consumer spend in 2019. Not including third-party Chinese app stores, iOS and Android […]
