“Gossip Girl,” the soapy CW drama about wealthy teenagers behaving badly in New York City’s Upper East Side, is returning to TV thanks to HBO Max. Specifically, the streaming service has placed a 10-episode, straight-to-series order for an updated version of the show. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Joshua Safran (a writer and executive producer […]

The trucking world has been inundated in recent years by startups and large companies alike pitching an array of automated driving technology and business strategies, all aiming to solve the big three problems with freight: safety, fuel costs and driver shortages. For Peloton Technology, a Silicon Valley company that launched in 2011, the answer doesn’t […]

Ahead of World Emoji Day on Wednesday, July 17, Apple and Google announced plans to bring an expanded set of emoji to their respective platforms. Today, the Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit organization responsible for determining which emoji get the green light, is relaunching its website with an updated, modern design that aims to make its […]

Facebook is leaning on fears of China exporting its authoritarian social values to counter arguments that it should be broken up or slowed down. Its top executives have each claimed that if the U.S. limits its size, blocks its acquisitions or bans its cryptocurrency, Chinese company’s absent these restrictions will win abroad, bringing more power […]

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Elon Musk’s Neuralink looks to begin outfitting human brains with faster input and output starting next year Musk said that in […]

Set in the city where startup dreams began, TechCrunch’s flagship tech conference — Disrupt San Francisco 2019 — takes place October 2-4. And with more than 10,000 attendees converging on Moscone North Convention Center, the networking possibilities can seem downright daunting. More like a contact sport than a business opportunity, right? Why waste your valuable […]

While AWS leads the cloud infrastructure market by a wide margin, Microsoft isn’t doing too badly, ensconced firmly in second place, the only other company with double-digit share. Today, it announced a big deal with AT&T that encompasses both Azure cloud infrastructure services and Office 365. A person with knowledge of the contract pegged the […]

LightSail 2 may still have at least a few days to go before it begins its primary purpose, by unfurling the solar sail it has on board and finding out more about propelling a spacecraft using only the force of photons, but it’s not wasting any time on its orbital voyage. New photos from the […]

There is a special chaos that happens when a startup reaches 30 employees. People have a harder time tracking what's going on, and it’s easy for some to feel left out or ignored.

With commercial launch services expected to reach $7 billion by 2024, there’s increasing demand for an array of new technologies that can offer advantages to companies looking to get communications infrastructure in orbit. That’s one of the reasons behind the new $25.5 million financing for Momentus, which sells in-space shuttle services to move satellites between […]

In an effort likely aimed at boosting family memberships, Spotify this morning announced a new partnership with Disney on the creation of a Disney Hub on its streaming service. Here, Disney fans in select markets including the U.S. will find a selection of Disney playlists, like soundtracks from Disney, Pixar and Marvel movies, Star Wars […]

Fifth Wall Ventures, an investor in Clutter, b8ta, ClassPass, Lime and others, has raised $503 million for its sophomore venture capital fund. The firm, which closed on $212 million for its debut fund in May 2017, prefers to invest in the burgeoning real estate industry, but has made opportunistic investments in other sectors. The Los […]

FaceApp, the AI-powered selfie-editing app that’s been having another viral moment of late, has now responded to a privacy controversy that we covered earlier here. We’ve pasted the company’s full statement at the bottom of this post. The tl;dr here is that concerns had been raised that FaceApp, a Russian startup, uploads users’ photos to […]

The need-to-know takeaways from VidCon 2019 Extra Crunch media columnist Eric Peckham took part in all the craziness that has become VidCon this past week, where 75,000 influencers, YouTubers, advertisers, and more congregate in one place to see how many likes they all can generate (and I guess to discuss business strategy). This year, there […]