- January 23rd, 2020
- 09:10 PM
- Software Motor Company, which develops software to make electric motors in HVAC systems more efficient, raises $25M from BMW to apply its tech to electric cars (Eric Walz/Futurecar.com)
- 08:44 PM
- DHS issues an alert about six flaws in popular health care devices from GE Healthcare that could affect device functionality and expose patients' health info (Jeff Stone/CyberScoop)
- 08:44 PM
- Amazon claims Prime Video has 65K titles, but 66% of those are user uploaded, including thousands of short instructional clips and conspiracy-theory videos (Wall Street Journal)
- 08:18 PM
- Experts say FTI's report on the hack of Bezos' phone does not explain why FTI wasn't able to decrypt the malicious file or perform actions like jailbreaking (Shannon Vavra/CyberScoop)
- 07:52 PM
- Bear Robotics, which is developing self-driving robot waiters, raises $32M Series A led by SoftBank (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)
- 07:26 PM
- Tech executives and employees, particularly from Facebook, have become increasingly common targets for swatting; Adam Mosseri was swatted in November (Sheera Frenkel/New York Times)
- 06:34 PM
- New York-based project management platform Clubhouse raises $25M Series B led by Greylock Partners, source says at a valuation of $100M (Alex Konrad/Forbes)
- 05:42 PM
- San Diego-based edge AI chip maker Kneron raises $40M led by Horizons Ventures, bringing the total raised in its Series A round to $73M (DealStreetAsia)
- 05:16 PM
- Match Group invests in safety app Noonlight to add features like a panic button, check-in, and photo verification to its dating apps, starting with Tinder (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
- 05:16 PM
- TikTok inks licensing deal with Merlin to use music from independent labels in videos and new Resso streaming service (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)
- 04:50 PM
- Hivebrite, a community management and engagement platform, raises $20M Series A led by Insight Partners, bringing its total raised to about $23M (Kyle Wiggers/VentureBeat)
- 04:24 PM
- NYPD disputes facial recognition firm Clearview AI's claim that it identified a terrorism suspect; company's founders have previous connections to the far right (BuzzFeed News)
- 04:24 PM
- Microsoft starts rolling out developer kits and emulators for its dual-screen Surface Duo Android phone and Windows 10X-based Surface Neo (Mary Jo Foley/ZDNet)
- 03:58 PM
- Google's new look for desktop search results blurs the lines between ads and search results, leading many critics to identify it as a dark pattern (Jon Porter/The Verge)
- 03:32 PM
- Niantic says it helped drive more than $249M in tourism revenue for the cities on its events list in 2019 through its walking games like Pokémon Go and Ingress (Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat)
- 03:32 PM
- Google helps publish largest high-resolution map of brain neurons of a fruit fly, using a machine learning technique called flood-filling networks (Gregory Barber/Wired)
- 02:40 PM
- Proxyclick, a Belgian provider of enterprise visitor management software, raises $15M Series B led by Five Elms Capital (Annie Musgrove/Tech.eu)
- 01:48 PM
- Inside the IRS's 8-year audit into Microsoft after the company sold its IP to a factory it owns in Puerto Rico to reduce tax rate on US profits from ~35% to ~2% (Paul Kiel/ProPublica)
- 12:30 PM
- Interview with David Cicilline, the chairman of the House subcommittee on antitrust, on his approach to investigation of Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon (Politico)
- 07:44 AM
- Game studio Playful Studios, which raised $23M from a host of individual investors in August, says it is laying off a significant portion of its full-time staff (Mike Minotti/VentureBeat)
- 05:08 AM
- Outlier, which uses machine learning to spot anomalies in business data, raises $22.1M Series B led by Emergence, bringing its total raised to $30M+ (Kyle Wiggers/VentureBeat)
- 04:16 AM
- Austin-based Vapor IO, an edge computing startup, raised $90M from Berkshire Partners and wireless infrastructure giant Crown Castle, says total raise $100M+ (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)
- 03:24 AM
- Twitter is rolling out a pop-up feature that lets users add an emoji reaction to a Direct Message, similar to a feature in iMessage (Chance Miller/9to5Mac)
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- 02:33 AM
- Epic Systems, a leading provider of digital medical records, calls on large hospitals to oppose proposed US rules that would open up access to patient records (Christina Farr/CNBC)
- 01:15 AM
- India-based Zoomcar, a car rental platform which has its own fleet and also lets users rent out their own cars, raises $30M as part of an ongoing $100M Series D (Salman S.H./Livemint)
- January 22nd, 2020
- 11:58 PM
- Federal filings: Google spent ~$150M on lobbying over the past decade in the US, followed by Facebook with ~$81M, and Amazon at nearly $80M (Tony Romm/Washington Post)
- 11:06 PM
- An in-depth look at the long history of facial recognition, focusing on Woody Bledsoe, a University of Texas professor working in the 1960s backed by the CIA (Shaun Raviv/Wired)
- 10:14 PM
- Sources: ByteDance is seeking a US-based CEO for TikTok and has interviewed candidates; current head Alex Zhu may still manage product and engineering in China (Bloomberg)
- 08:56 PM
- Interview with Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr., on his $10M smartphone forensics lab and balancing public safety while working under Apple and Google's rules (William D. Cohan/Fast Company)
- 08:56 PM
- Disney sold its FoxNext video game unit, which it acquired with 21st Century Fox's entertainment assets, to Scopely, a Culver City-based mobile game developer (Alex Weprin/Hollywood Reporter)
- 08:30 PM
- Microsoft will forcibly install the Bing extension in Chrome for Office 365 ProPlus users starting mid-February, to change the default search engine to Bing (Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet)
- 08:04 PM
- Google says it found five separate flaws in Apple's Intelligent Tracking Prevention tool for Safari that lets users' browsing behavior be tracked (Madhumita Murgia/Financial Times)
- 07:38 PM
- CB Insights: global AI startup funding reached $26.6B in 2019 across 2,200 deals, up from $22.1B across 1,900 deals in 2018; 10 AI companies had $100M+ rounds (Khari Johnson/VentureBeat)
- 07:12 PM
- Indian mobility startup Zoomcar, which has a P2P marketplace for vehicles that users can drive themselves, raises $30M as part of an ongoing $100M Series D (Miguel Cordon/Tech in Asia)
- 07:12 PM
- In a first for the US, a district encompassing Greater Seattle will let 1.2M voters cast votes on smartphones in a February 11 election (Miles Parks/NPR)
- 06:46 PM
- Leaked FTI Consulting report: investigators found a suspicious encrypted file on Jeff Bezos' iPhone, causing data transfers to jump by ~29,000%, but no malware (VICE)
- 05:54 PM
- FOIA docs: law enforcement in over 11 states, including CA, FL, and NY, spent $4M+ over the past decade on software and devices that can break into smartphones (Michael Hayes/OneZero)
- 05:54 PM
- Email collaboration startup Front raises $59M Series C led by a group of CEOs from Atlassian, Okta, Qualtrics, and Zoom, following its $66M Series B in 2018 (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)
- 05:54 PM
- UN experts say Saudis likely used NSO Group's Pegasus mobile spyware to hack Jeff Bezos' phone in May 2018, six months after the Saudis obtained the spyware (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch)
- 05:28 PM
- British government proposes sweeping changes to privacy protections for under-18s, requiring platforms turn on heightened privacy settings by default and more (Natasha Singer/New York Times)
- 05:28 PM
- Amazon says Amazon Music has 55M users across six different price tiers, including a free tier, "nearly all" of which are paying subscribers (Anna Nicolaou/Financial Times)
- 05:28 PM
- Motorola says its foldable Razr will be available for pre-order on January 26, one month after originally planned, arriving on February 6 (Chaim Gartenberg/The Verge)
- 05:02 PM
- UN special rapporteurs say they are "gravely concerned" about the alleged hacking of Jeff Bezos' phone by Saudi's MbS, calling for further investigations (Stephanie Kirchgaessner/The Guardian)
- 04:36 PM
- Behind the scenes at Rotten Tomatoes, whose Tomatometer is run by 12 "curators" who read just about every review from a pool of about 4,500 approved critics (Simon Van Zuylen Wood/Wired)
- 03:18 PM
- Sysdig, which offers tools to secure container environments, raises $70M Series E led by Insight Venture Partners, bringing its total raised to $206M (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)
- 03:18 PM
- French SaaS startup LumApps, which provides a cloud-based enterprise communication platform, raises €63.1M Series C led by Goldman Sachs (Charlotte Tucker/EU-Startups)
- 03:18 PM
- Placer.ai, which offers location and foot traffic analytics for the retail industry, raises $12M Series A led by JBV Capital (Catherine Shu/TechCrunch)
- 02:26 PM
- Analysis of 11,430 Play Store apps in 2019 found that 14.2% used a privacy policy with contradicting statements about user data collection practices (Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet)
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- 10:38 AM
- Uncertainty grows for Chinese workers in Silicon Valley after trade war tensions, the Huawei controversy, and cases of Chinese accused of stealing trade secrets (Yuan Yang/Financial Times)
- 05:52 AM
- Judge dismisses Sidecar's lawsuit against Uber; Sidecar, a ride-hailing company that closed in 2015, had accused Uber of using anti-competitive practices (Kanishka Singh/Reuters)
- 05:00 AM
- GM's Cruise unveils Origin, its first driverless vehicle with no steering wheel or pedals, says it will share more info about its production plans in the future (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)
- 04:08 AM
- Sources: Quibi's CEO Meg Whitman, in an internal meeting, compared reporters' friendly rapport with their sources to how sexual predators groom their targets (The Information)
- 03:16 AM
- Stillfront Group, a Sweden-based group of gaming studios, is acquiring mobile gaming studio Storm8 for $300M, of which $75M will be in Stillfront shares (Mike Minotti/VentureBeat)
- 01:58 AM
- Source: the new low-cost iPhone, which looks like iPhone 8 and has a 4.7" screen, will enter production in February and may be announced as early as March (Bloomberg)
- 01:32 AM
- How social networks cite the Stored Communications Act, a privacy law from the '80s, to withhold information that might exonerate defendants in criminal cases (Megan Cassidy/San Francisco Chronicle)
- 12:40 AM
- Corporate moving services startup Shyft, which claims its tech is 95% accurate at identifying volume and weight of the move via video call, raises $15M Series A (Anthony Ha/TechCrunch)
- January 21st, 2020
- 11:22 PM
- Analysis: Netflix now boasts 1,211 originals and has been adding one show a day on average over the past eight months (Joshua Fruhlinger/Thinknum)
- 11:22 PM
- IBM's Q4 revenue grew slightly to $21.77B, beating expectations after five quarters of declines, with Red Hat revenue up 24% YoY; stock up 4%+ after hours (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
- 10:56 PM
- Sources: a WhatsApp message from an account belonging to Saudi Arabian Crown Prince MbS was sent to Jeff Bezos in 2018 with a file that hacked Bezos' phone (Stephanie Kirchgaessner/The Guardian)
- 10:30 PM
- Netflix Q4 revenue grew 31% YoY to $5.467B and net income rose to $587M, surpassing 100M paid memberships outside the US; global paid net additions totaled 8.8M (Netflix IR)
- 09:12 PM
- Facebook says it plans to hire 1,000 workers in the UK this year, with over half in technology, bringing its total in the UK to over 4,000 (Reuters)
- 08:46 PM
- Google debuts experimental wellbeing apps including Activity Bubbles, which slowly fill the screen after unlocking, and wallpaper showing phone usage time (Garrett Bridges/Android Police)
- 08:20 PM
- SCOTUS declines to review Facebook facial recognition case, meaning FB will likely face a class-action suit alleging its photo-tagging feature violated IL law (Emily Birnbaum/The Hill)
- 07:54 PM
- Massachusetts-based startup Berkshire Grey, which develops AI-powered pick-and-place retail and warehouse robots, raises $263M Series B led by SoftBank (Brian Heater/TechCrunch)
- 07:28 PM
- Skylo emerges from stealth and announces a $103M Series B led by SoftBank to connect IoT devices to satellite networks using the Narrowband IoT protocol (Darrell Etherington/TechCrunch)
- 06:36 PM
- Sources: Business Insider, Vox Media, The Information, Axios, and Politico all turned profits in 2019, in some cases for the first time ever (Sara Fischer/Axios)
- 06:36 PM
- Federal court reverses $10.1M judgment against Nintendo in case involving the Wii remote, calling iLife Technologies' patent for motion sensing tech "abstract" (Kyle Orland/Ars Technica)
- 05:44 PM
- Dapp.com 2019 report: total volume of dapps reached $10B from 9 leading blockchains, up 58.5% YoY, and the number of active dapp users doubled YoY to 3.11M (Dapp.com)
- 04:52 PM
- Intezer, which identifies and tracks new malware by analyzing existing malware to detect code reuse and coding similarities, raises $15M Series B (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)
- 04:26 PM
- Snyk, which helps developers find vulnerabilities in their open source apps, raises $150M at a $1B+ valuation, led by New York-based private equity firm Stripes (Paul Sawers/VentureBeat)
- 04:00 PM
- AppsFlyer, a mobile ad attribution platform, raises $210M Series D led by General Atlantic at a $1.6B valuation (Allison Schiff/AdExchanger)
- 03:34 PM
- Flutterwave, which provides payment services for companies operating in Africa, raises $35M Series B led by Greycroft and eVentures, partners with Worldpay (Jake Bright/TechCrunch)
- 03:08 PM
- Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 720G, 662, and 460 chipsets with support for Wi-Fi 6 and NavIC, India's homegrown GPS (Sumukh Rao/Technology Personalized)
- 03:08 PM
- Source: Uber is testing a feature letting drivers in three California cities set fares on rides from the airport; drivers can charge up to 5x the Uber fare (Preetika Rana/Wall Street Journal)
- 03:08 PM
- France has agreed to suspend this year's digital tax until the end of 2020 as part of trade negotiations with the US (Reuters)