Tech

The novel coronavirus disease has reminded millions that handwashing is a great way to avoid preventable diseases. Christine Schindler, the CEO and co-founder of PathSpot, has been preparing for the past three months for the past three years. “I’ve been obsessed with handwashing,” Schindler said, who has a background in biomedical engineering and public health.

Run The World, a year-old startup that’s based in Mountain View, Calif., and has small teams both in China and Taiwan, just nabbed $10.8 million in Series A funding co-led by earlier backer Andreessen Horowitz and new backer Founders Fund. It’s easy to understand the firms’ interest in the company, whose platform features every functionality

In a live-streamed town hall, Mark Zuckerberg gave an overview for what he expects in the near future as Facebook pursues accommodations to keep workers productive and safe during the COVID-19 crisis. The move comes as large tech companies reassess the viability of their iconic Silicon Valley campuses, now empty as the pandemic keeps most

As we move deeper into the pandemic, it’s clear that the way we conduct business is changing, maybe forever. That means that business has to change too — and fast. But if you’ve never conducted business digitally or only nominally, how do you suddenly transform on the fly? Salesforce Commerce Cloud CEO Mike Micucci says

MC Hammer on Tuesday, January 28, 2020 Nathan Congleton | NBC | NBCU Photo Bank If you tuned into the Clubhouse app Monday night, you could have heard a lively discussion on how the coronavirus is affecting the prison population. Speakers included MC Hammer, political commentator Van Jones, writer and activist Shaka Senghor and venture capitalists Marc

Today GoPro entered the cutthroat business of personal lighting. This is the GoPro Zeus Mini; it looks like a rad little light, though it’s a curious product from an action camera company. The waterproof Zeus Mini costs $69.99 and ships with a magnetic spring clip. GoPro says the light is also compatible with all of

Khatabook, a startup that is helping small businesses in India record financial transactions digitally and accept payments online with an app, has raised $60 million in a new financing round as it looks to gain more ground in the world’s second most populous nation. The new financing round, Series B, was led by Facebook co-founder

Starting today, you’ll be able to browse and buy products directly from a business’ Facebook Page or Instagram profile. Both Facebook and Instagram already supported a degree of ecommerce — for example, Facebook has its Marketplace and will likely make a bigger push through its Libra cryptocurrency initiative, while Instagram allows users to buy products

Microsoft today announced the launch of the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, an industry-specific cloud solution for healthcare providers. This is the first in what is likely going to be a set of cloud offerings that target specific verticals and extends a trend we’ve seen among large cloud providers (especially Google), who tailor specific offerings to

Disney‘s Head of Streaming, Kevin Mayer, is set to become TikTok’s chief executive, TikTok announced Monday. Mayer will also serve as chief operating officer of ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, effective June 1. Disney’s stock fell nearly 1% in after-hours trading Monday following the announcement after closing the trading day up 7.15%. It’s

The COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in a wave of Chinese companies with manufacturing operations to produce virus-fighting equipment: Shenzhen-based electric vehicle giant BYD quickly moved to launch what it claims to be the world’s largest mask plant; Hangzhou-based voice intelligence startup Rokid is making thermal imaging glasses targeted at the US market; and many more. The

A famous investor published notes today concerning its startup investments, detailing where they excelled and where they struggled. To understand why we care about this particular investor’s results, a little context helps. The investor in question is Japanese telecom giant and startup benefactor SoftBank, which reported its fiscal year’s results this morning. SoftBank’s investments are

Ann Miura-Ko Contributor Ann Miura-Ko is a co-founding partner at Floodgate, a seed-stage VC firm. A repeat member of the Forbes Midas List and the New York Times Top 20 Venture Capitalists Worldwide, she earned a PhD in math modeling of cybersecurity at Stanford University. More posts by this contributor You need a minimum viable

Most companies don’t have the personnel to do AI well, so they turn to platform vendors like Adobe for help. Like other platforms, it has been building AI into its product set for several years now, but wanted to give marketers a set of tools that take advantage of some advanced AI capabilities out of

The homepage of the “Tribune Times Today.” All the news that’s fit to copy. Megan Graham Last month, a story I’d written had just gone live. I punched a few keywords into Google search to pull it up so I could grab the link. That was when I noticed a publication called the “New York

French startup Angell has signed a wide-ranging partnership with SEB, the French industrial company behind All-Clad, Krups, Moulinex, Rowenta, Tefal and others. As part of the deal, SEB will manufacture Angell’s electric bikes in a factory in Is-sur-Tille near Dijon, France. SEB’s investment arm, SEB Alliance, is also investing in Angell . The terms of

Editor’s note: Get this weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7am PT), just subscribe here. Commercial real estate, the traditional heart of most cities, may have lost its reason to exist in the last few months. The world is about to find out what the situation

Jinyan Zang Contributor Jinyan Zang is a researcher at Data Privacy Lab and a Ph.D. candidate in Government at Harvard University . Latanya Sweeney Contributor Latanya Sweeney is a professor of government and technology in residence at Harvard University’s Department of Government, editor-in-chief of Technology Science and the founding director of the Technology Science Initiative

It seems that we are in the middle of a mini acquisition spree for Kubernetes startups, specifically those that can help with Kubernetes security. In the latest development, Venafi, a vendor of certificate and key management for machine-to-machine connections, is acquiring Jetstack, a UK startup that helps enterprises migrate and work within Kubernetes and cloud-based ecosystems,

Rachel Ford Hutman is embracing a more natural style a few months into the pandemic Source: Rachel Ford Hutman Rachel Ford Hutman, a California blonde for years, is now embracing a more natural look. After shelter-in-place was declared in San Diego to stem the spread of Covid-19, she tried to use a coloring spray to

Having a holistic picture of your health might not mean just wearing a device like an Apple Watch that can monitor your biometrics – researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) have developed a new system that can figure out when and where in-home appliances like hair dryers, stoves, microwaves and washing

Taking care of your emotional wellbeing is as important as physical health, but in Asia, the topic is often stigmatized. Intellect, a Singapore-based startup, wants to make the idea of mental health more approachable with an app that offers self-guided exercises based on cognitive behavorial therapy techniques. The company develops consumer and enterprise versions of

Zoom was never meant to be a social network, but the enterprise video chat app has become essential software for those looking to stay in touch with friends and family during the pandemic. Today, Facebook looks to steal back the service’s social video chat growth as it globally launches Messenger Rooms, its new group video

Just weeks after announcing a deal to acquire 5G specialist Affirmed Networks, Microsoft is making another acquisition to strengthen its cloud-based telecoms offering. It’s acquiring Metaswitch Networks, a UK-based provider of cloud-based communications products used by carriers and network providers (customers include the likes of BT in the UK, Sprint, and virtual network consortium RINA.

When Jessica Naro was told she would need to report back to work Wednesday at Tesla’s automobile assembly plant in Fremont, California, her first thought was that it wasn’t safe to do so. She was worried about her health as the sole provider for her family, but even more worried she’d be exposed to the

Your life probably involves a lot more videoconferencing now than it did a few weeks ago – even if it already did involve a lot. That’s not likely going to change anytime soon, so why not make the most of it? The average MacBook webcam can technically get the job done, but it’s far from

Despite the economic disruptions associated with the coronavirus pandemic, cloud vendors are holding up well as many client companies and their employees work from home. With stores closed, it’s natural that e-commerce would also perform strongly — after all, it’s also cloud-based, and folks working from home are shifting their shopping from brick-and-mortar to digital.

Facebook has agreed in principle to pay $52 million to compensate current and former content moderators who developed mental health issues on the job. The Verge reported Tuesday that the settlement will cover more than 11,000 content moderators who developed depression, addictions and other mental health issues while they worked moderating content on the social

Atlassian announced today that it was acquiring Halp, an early stage startup that enables companies to build integrated help desk ticketing and automated answers inside Slack. The companies did not disclose the purchase price. It was a big day for Halp, which also announced its second product today called Halp Answers. The new tool will

Uber made an offer to buy food delivery company Grubhub, according to a person familiar with the matter.  Grubhub‘s stock skyrocketed as much as 37% Tuesday following an initial Bloomberg report that Uber approached the company with a takeover offer. Grubhub’s stock was halted for a few minutes due to volatility before resuming trading. It was

Sonos has introduced a trio of new hardware today, adding three new smart speakers to its lineup, including the Sonos Arc soundbar that includes Dolby Atmos support, as well as Sonos Five, the next version of its Sonos Play:5 speaker, and a third-generation Sonos Sub. All of these will require the new S2 app that

When Zach Sims first started pitching his coding startup, Codecademy, he framed it to investors as a corporate tutoring company. That was intentional, despite the fact that edtech is a $5 trillion business. “It was much easier for investors to understand instead of an education company,” he said, noting that the industry has long been

Facebook is announcing a handful of new features that will allow users to show their support for small businesses and get the latest updates as those businesses deal with the fallout — economic and otherwise — of the COVID-19 pandemic. The social network is introducing a new section called Businesses Nearby, which will allow you

“I just think change unfairly favors the startup, the nimble small company,” says Roelof Botha. The Sequoia partner, whose portfolio includes Unity, 23andMe, Instagram, Instacart, Xoom and YouTube, says he’s hopeful about the opportunities this pandemic has created for companies across a variety of sectors, including healthcare, cloud computing, social and others. We spoke for

Tesla says it has started the process to resume operations and released a plan to bring its employees and contractors back to work, amid an escalating dispute with local health authorities in California over a shelter-in-place order that has kept the automaker’s Fremont factory idle during the coronavirus pandemic.  “Our restart plan is the result of

The X-37B spaceplane sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel, and its mysterious past is equally evocative. What does the military put in this long-term orbital vehicle? Turns out it’s exactly the kind of neat, but not mind-blowing, science you’d expect to find in such a thing — though solar-powered masers do sound pretty

Editor’s note: Get this weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use every Saturday morning by email (7am PT). Subscribe here. A specific type of small startup has a window to raise crowdfunding in a somewhat less regulated way than normally required in the U.S., based on a temporary set of rule changes

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending

Microsoft and Amazon are at it again as the fight for the Defense Department JEDI contract continues. In a recent series of increasingly acerbic pronouncements, the two companies continue their ongoing spat over the $10 billion, decade-long JEDI contract spoils. As you may recall (or not), last fall in a surprise move, the DoD selected

A pedestrian adjusts his facemask while walking past a closed Artisan House restaurant in Los Angeles on May 7, 2020. Frederic J. Brown | AFP | Getty Images The Covid-19 pandemic continues to disrupt economies and lives in ways we never could have imagined. But the world won’t stay on lockdown forever. We asked public health

Xiaomi, Vivo, Samsung, Oppo and other smartphone companies have received approval from some state governments in India to partially resume manufacturing and assembling of devices amid the ongoing lockdown in the world’s second largest handset market that completely shut operations at these plants in late March. The companies said that they have secured permission to

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. This week shares of SaaS and cloud companies reached new record highs as investors bid their equities higher following an earnings cycle that came in better than some expected. SaaS stocks, as measured by the

A coronavirus conspiracy video featuring a well-known vaccine conspiracist is spreading like wildfire on social media this week, even as platforms talk tough about misinformation in the midst of the pandemic. In the professionally-produced video, a solemn interviewer named Mikki Willis interviews Judy Mikovits, a figure best known for her anti-vaccine activism in recent years.

Rish Joshi Contributor Rish is an entrepreneur and investor. Previously, he was a VC at Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI fund), co-founded a fintech startup building an analytics platform for SEC filings and worked on deep-learning research as a graduate student in computer science at MIT. More posts by this contributor The future of deep-reinforcement learning,

Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff speaks during a press conference where Alphabet announced it will develop an area of Toronto’s waterfront on October 17, 2017. Mark Blinch | Reuters Alphabet-owned Sidewalk Labs withdrew its plans for a “smart district” in Toronto on Thursday due to continued economic uncertainty, the company confirmed Thursday.  The project has

Despite the worldwide impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, global smartwatch shipments continued to grow during the first three months of the year, driven by online sales, says a new report by research firm Strategy Analytics. Shipments grew 20% annually to reach 13.7 million units in the first quarter of 2020, up from 11.4 million units

When I first met Bustle Digital Group’s Jason Wagenheim, it was right as New York City was beginning to go into lockdown. The BDG offices were empty thanks to the company’s newly instituted work-from-home policy, but it still seemed reasonable to meet in-person to learn more about BDG’s broader vision. At the time, Wagenheim —

IRL, the recently pivoted calendar app that aggregates live virtual events, has today launched a web version of the platform. The company, which has $11 million in funding from Goodwater Capital, Founders Fund and Floodgate, started as a social planning app that helped folks find each other in the real world, based on interest and