Tech

Netflix is developing features that would allow members to play its mobile games with one another and competitively rank themselves on gaming leaderboards. The company, starting last month, quietly launched the ability for users to create unique “game handles” in a subset of its mobile games, including Into The Breach, followed by Bowling Ballers, Mahjong

Argyle, which wants to help companies and institutions get access to employment records, has laid off a number of employees across all departments, TechCrunch has learned from sources. A spokesperson for the company confirmed the workforce reduction to TechCrunch, saying that it let go of 6.5% of the team, or 20 people. The figure provided

Healthcare startups often face unique challenges — something Well Health founder Guillaume de Zwirek understands. Together with Freestyle Partner, Jenny Lefcourt, the two will speak on the strategies used by de Zwirek as he built and scaled WELL Health into a leading healthcare startup. This TechCrunch Live event opens on August 31 at 11:30 a.m.

T-Mobile and SpaceX have announced that Starlink satellites launched next year will be able to connect directly to the carrier’s phones over existing cellular bands. The companies hope to enable global roaming wherever satellite coverage exists, and the service may potentially be added for free to existing T-Mobile plans. SpaceX’s Elon Musk and T-Mobile’s Mike

Across much of the U.S. this summer, as temperatures soared nearly every afternoon, air conditioners clicked on again and again, sending electricity demand through the roof. Just north of Boston, the normally temperate coastal city of Beverly was no exception. Since the Fourth of July, the city has experienced nearly 20 days when temperatures crested

Instagram is now allowing users to share anyone’s posts or Reels through a QR code. What’s more, users can also share a QR code location through its searchable Map experience. While people usually think about sharing posts through direct messages or a URL QR code can be effective in marketing campaigns — for example, the

The explosive Twitter whistleblower complaint that was made public yesterday — detailing a raft of damning allegations across security, privacy and data protection issues (among others) by Twitter’s former former head of security, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko — contained references to European regulators along with claims that the social media firm had misled or intended to

Chinese smartphone titan Oppo will keep Germany as its main operational hub for its European business despite recently withdrawing sales from the country, Billy Zhang, the firm’s vice president of overseas sales and services, told media on Monday. Oppo halted sales in Germany this month after losing a patent lawsuit to the Finnish telecoms giant

Adani Group said Tuesday it will buy a majority stake in NDTV, a high-profile Indian news organization, in an apparent hostile takeover as the billionaire Gautam Adani looks to expand his media ambitions. AMG Media Networks, Adani’s unit, has indirectly taken control of about 29.18% stake in New Delhi Television by executing options from a

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Goood [time of day] dear [name]. You know what we’re psyched about? The agenda for TC Disrupt just dropped, and it’s going to be an absolute corker of an event. Aaaah. Check

Jonathan Naymark Contributor Jonathan Naymark is the general manager of Codecademy for Business at Codecademy, an online learning platform that offers courses across web development, data science, cybersecurity and more. Launching a B2B product within a B2C company presents distinct challenges as you attempt to strike a balance between successfully establishing a new product and

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg was roundly mocked for the bad graphics in his preview of a new expansion of Horizon Worlds, Meta’s metaverse effort. His quick response promising better avatars for the actual launch speaks to just how much appearances do matter in these situations. Now, in a spot of perfect timing, a startup out

“Build it or else.” That was the gist of U.S. Senator Joe Manchin’s discussions with the automotive industry regarding EV tax credits. Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, had grown increasingly concerned about China’s dominance of the lithium-ion battery market, and he told car companies that they needed to move vast swaths of the global

Late-stage rounds seem to be hitting the gym this year. A new report from Carta — a dataset that TechCrunch got a preview of earlier in August — indicates that late-stage rounds are seeing their heft rapidly shrink as 2022 continues. The cap table management company sits atop a regular inflow of startup information, from

European food ordering and delivery giant Just Eat Takeaway has revealed that it’s selling its stake in Brazil’s iFood for up to €1.8 billion ($1.8 billion) to Prosus. The initial deal will amount to €1.5 billion in cash, plus another €300 million depending on the performance of iFood over the next 12 months. News of the

One doubts Samsung’s convictions at their own peril. The company will be the first to point to the O.G. Note phablet as the ultimate expression of this phenomenon. The line may be gone, having been absorbed into the flagship Galaxy S product, but its influence on the industry is still being felt a decade after

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. Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by

Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Reading recently about Germany’s €30 billion plan for its startups, I was intrigued. Did the country start to envy La French Tech? Is it

Hello hello! We’re back with another edition of Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly recap the top stories to hit TechCrunch across the last seven days. Want it in your inbox? Sign up here.  other stuff a16z backs WeWork founder’s new thing: When a company implodes hard enough that it inspires a miniseries,

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. It’s been a week of people trying to make sense of what’s happening in tech. If you’ve been compartmentalizing: Cheers! Now let me walk you through what’s been going on. On Monday,

Zūm’s mission is simple — to introduce student transportation that is reliable, efficient, sustainable and transparent. To achieve the feat of modernizing an incredibly outdated, stuck-in-the-mud system, Zūm relies on cloud-based analytics software to create an agile bus routing system with real-time visibility for schools and parents. The startup also uses a diverse fleet that

John Carmack, the game developer who co-founded id Software and served as Oculus’s CTO, is working on a new venture — and has already attracted capital from some big names. Carmack said Friday his new artificial general intelligence startup, called Keen Technologies, has raised $20 million in a financing round from former GitHub CEO Nat

A new company from the creators of the Godot game engine is setting out to grab a piece of the $200 billion global video game market — and to do so, it’s taking a cue from commercial open source software giant Red Hat. Godot, for the uninitiated, is a cross-platform game engine first released under

I have been carrying both of Samsung’s new foldables on my person when I leave the house for the last few days. It’s mostly for testing purposes, of course, but there’s also a fun game I like to play when I see people I know. I pull them both out, stick them in front of

Facebook this year has been struggling to maintain its position among the Top 10 apps on the U.S. App Store, according to an analysis of iPhone App Store data. As younger consumers shift to newer social networking experiences like TikTok and now BeReal, the tech giant’s big blue app has lost traction in the App

Sofy, a startup developing a testing platform for mobile app devs it claims is used by Microsoft, today closed a $7.75 million seed round that brings its total capital raised to $9.5 million. Voyager Capital led the tranche with participation from PSL Ventures, GTMFund and Revolution, providing cash that CEO Syed Hamid says will be

The power grid supply in Africa is erratic and inconsistent, affecting rural and urban households and businesses. For restaurants or neighborhood stores dealing with perishables, frozen foods and beverages, having intermittent electricity inhibits the growth of their businesses. Some of them turn to diesel-fueled generators, which are expensive and toxic, to provide electricity. Companies such

In the U.S., most electric vehicle owners say that public chargers are easy to use. That is, when they actually work. A new J.D. Power survey finds that, while public charging stations are a tad easier to come by these days, faulty chargers are souring the experience and hampering EV adoption. That’s no good, because

Bangalore-based Exponent Energy might have come up with a way to deliver 15-minute rapid charging for electric vehicles. The startup, which just raised a $13 million Series A, relies on a combination of its proprietary battery pack and charging infrastructure to achieve such a feat. Exponent Energy’s business model is geared towards OEMs building commercial

After permanently banning parties and events on all Airbnb listings in June, the company is hardening its anti-party stance by launching new screening tools in the U.S. and Canada. The firm’s “anti-party” tech is an algorithm to identify potential rule-breakers by looking at signals like the history of positive reviews, how long the user has