TechCrunch

Engine Biosciences raises $10 million in Southeast Asia’s largest institutional seed round

Life sciences startups in Asia are getting another boost with the $10 million investment in Engine Biosciences — a biotech company that’s applying machine learning to genomics for drug discovery.<p>With its headquarters in both Singapore and San Francisco, the company has managed to attract some …

A new study of Airbnb paints an ugly picture of the company’s impact on New York City housing

For anyone who knows their city well, it’s easy to see that the short-term rental boom spurred by Airbnb’s massive popularity is changing things. Figuring out what exactly is changing and how quickly is trickier. In New York, those changes are have kept Airbnb and city regulators engaged in a …

SpaceX’s rocket booster survived descent despite no landing attempt

SpaceX flew a mission today that didn’t include a controlled recovery attempt of the Falcon 9 booster involved in the launch. Even still, the first stage survived the return to Earth pretty much intact, and the company will now try to recover it from the Atlantic Ocean to see what kind of shape …

Mobile delivers high exit multiples despite broader market slowdown

In the world of mobile apps, numbers come in two sizes: big and bigger.<p>More than one billion people use Facebook’s mobile app every day. Instagram — another Facebook property — has well over 100 million photos and videos uploaded to the platform every 24 hours. And untold millions of emails, …

Watch what it actually looks like when CRISPR snips a strand of DNA

The CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technique is an important concept to know about in these days of biotech advances, but it can be pretty difficult to visualize properly. Is it really like molecular scissors? Where does the DNA go? Is it a big molecule or a small one? Fortunately a group has created a …

The Last Episode Of | Crunch Report

Equifax launches its credit locking app and extends free credit freezes through June

Today was supposed to be the deadline for Equifax’s free credit freeze offering, but the company has decided to extend the service to consumers for another five months. Now, Equifax customers can request a credit freeze through June 30.<p>Still, January 31 <i>is</i> the last day to cash in on free credit …

WhatsApp hits 1.5 billion monthly users. $19B? Not so bad.

Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp sounds smarter and smarter. Today CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that WhatsApp now has 1.5 billion users and sees 60 billion messages sent per day. That’s compared to 1.3 billion users in August.<p><i>We’ll have more info soon</i>

Facebook reduces time spent by 2 min/user/day to push well-being

Facebook is putting it’s short-term money where it’s mouth is, reducing the presence of viral videos in an effort to boost well-being of users of its site. Today CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that “Already last quarter, we made changes to show fewer viral videos to make sure people’s time is well …

Pandora is laying off about 5 percent of workforce

Streaming music service Pandora is laying off about five percent of its employee base and taking “other cost-saving measures” in an attempt to save about $45 million annually. According to Pandora’s 8-K filing, employees were notified today of the plan and the company expects the staff reduction to …

Soraa’s new light bulbs skip the smart home and focus on the science of the color spectrum

Everyone’s trying to build a better light bulb. These days, that means things like adjustable colors and smart home connectivity — for most companies. Bay Area startup Soraa is skipping all the noise for the moment, instead making color its primary focus. For five years, the company’s been …

EBay Q4 falls short on sales of $2.6B, EPS in line at $0.59, full year revenues of $9.6B

EBay reported its Q4 and full-year earnings after market close today, where it reported sales of $2.6 billion and adjusted earnings per share of $0.59 for the quarter (versus $0.54 a year ago), and $9.6 billion in revenues for the year. While the holiday season, which fell into the quarter that …

Shutterfly stock hits all-time high after snapping up the leader in kids’ class photos

One day after announcing strong earnings and the massive strategic acquisition of the leader in yearbook and school photos, Shutterfly is watching its shares soar.<p>It’s quite a turn for a company that just over a year ago was staring at a massive new market competitor in Amazon, whose entry into the …

Twitter now says 1.4 million people interacted with Russian trolls during 2016 presidential campaign

Twitter has now updated the number of people engaging with Russian trolls during the 2016 presidential campaign to 1.4 million. That’s more than double the initial 677,775 Twitter originally said had seen, followed or retweeted one of these accounts earlier this month.<p>The new number reflects those …

Facebook survives Q4 with slowing 1.4B daily users but record $12.97B revenue

Despite worries about Russia and that passive News Feed scrolling hurts us, Facebook beat expectations again in its Q4 2017 earnings report. Facebook now has 1.4 billion daily users, up 2.18% compared to growing 3.8% to 1.37 billion users in Q3. That’s a sizeable slow down. It reached $12.97 …

SpaceX successfully launches GovSat-1 on a flight proven Falcon 9

SpaceX has launched a Falcon 9 rocket loaded with a geocommunications satellite commissioned by the Government of Luxembourg. The satellite, created by Orbital STK and to be operated by SES, will support humanitarian and military operations for Luxembourg, among other communications functions.<p>The …

PayPal sees 24% revenue growth in its latest quarter

PayPal impressed Wall Street when it reported fourth-quarter earnings after the bell on Wednesday. The global payments giant beat analyst expectations for both sales and profit.<p>PayPal reported $3.71 billion in revenue on a foreign-exchange neutral basis, or 24% growth from the same period last …

Microsoft’s Azure revenue nearly doubled year-over-year in its second quarter

Microsoft posted a relatively good second quarter this year that continued the ongoing process of its growth into a major cloud entity, in addition to saying it would be taking a significant charge as part of the major tax bill signed late last year.<p>In particular, Microsoft said that its Azure …

Watch SpaceX launch a flight-proven Falcon 9 live here

SpaceX’s launch livestream is already started for its GovSat-1 mission, which is launching a satellite from the government of Luxembourg into geostationary transfer orbit.<p>The launch window opens at 4:25 PM EST and will not include a recovery attempt for the Falcon 9 first stage, which has been used …

Hulu’s Live TV app now lets you personalize the Olympics to your liking

Teased earlier this month at CES, Hulu today has quietly launched its personalized Olympics experience in its Live TV app. The company hasn’t officially announced the new feature, but the option to track your favorite Olympics events pops up when you launch the app today, allowing you to pick from …

GoPro adds mobile cloud backup to its Plus subscription service

Whether the action cam business can alone sustain the GoPro business (in light of the recent Karma drone program shutdown) is going to at least rely on them continuing to dominate it and find new revenue streams within it. Part of this strategy will be continuing to refine the company’s $4.99 per …

Lexip’s joystick-mouse combo is a strange but promising hybrid

While at CES I try to avoid getting bogged down by dozens of random gadgets, and this time I mostly succeeded — but the mouse reviewer in me was intrigued by Lexip’s new gaming mouse that’s also a sort of floating joystick. It’s a strange but cool idea, and although the learning curve is high, I …

Supermedium launches its virtual reality web browser backed by Y Combinator

Virtual reality’s content problem has been so frustrating for users because the medium’s promise has been that it can take users anywhere. As developers continue to build up these worlds, Supermedium is launching out of Y Combinator’s winter batch with a browser that it hopes can show people the …

ICO “rounds” are coming

Last summer, the news came in dribs and drabs about initial coin offerings, the crowd sales of new cryptocurrencies that give entrepreneurs access to funding. A warning here that some coins sold in ICOs could be considered securities. An alert there that celebrity endorsements of ICOs might be …

Oops! Don’t say ‘Google’ in your Alexa voice app, Amazon says

The competition between Alexa and Google Assistant is fierce. How fierce? Cover all of Las Vegas in Google Assistant ads for CES fierce? Put voice assistance in weird things like a light switch or a fridge fierce? How about <i>“don’t dare utter our competitor’s name in your voice app”</i> fierce?<p>Yep, …

Square Cash expands bitcoin buying and selling to all users

A few months ago we wrote that Square’s peer-to-peer payment app called Square Cash was running a bitcoin trial for select users. These users had the ability to buy and sell bitcoin using whatever payment method they had attached to the app.<p>Well now the payments company just announced that all …

Juniper Square raises $6M for its real estate investment platform

The real estate industry was relatively slow to adopt technology, but it’s now quickly catching up. That means that virtually every part of the industry is seeing a lot of startup activity. Juniper Square, which today announced it has raised a $6 million Series A round led by Felicis Ventures, is …

Nuro’s self-driving vehicle is a grocery-getter and errand-runner

Not every self-driving car has to be able to move passengers from point A to point B. Take, for example, Nuro: The startup just revealed their unique autonomous vehicle platform, which is more of a mobile small logistics platform than a self-driving car.<p>The company, which has been working away in …

Actress Maisie Williams to launch Daisie, a social app for talent discovery and collaboration

Actress Maisie Williams, best known for her role as Arya Stark on <i>Game of Thrones</i>, is the latest celeb to venture into tech entrepreneurship, with the launch of a new company aimed at connecting creatives, called Daisie. Available later this summer as a mobile app, Daisie will offer a platform where …

Polymail looks to unify business email tools into a single web app

If you’re more of a Gmail power user (or even semi-power user) and other email services geared toward work, you’ve probably installed plenty of plugins like Rapportive to make your job a little bit easier.<p>And while it’s all fine to try to pull together a suite of plugins to make that a little bit …