This week, we welcome guest Hana Mohan to our podcast Found. Hana is the co-founder and CEO of MagicBell, a new startup she created with Josue Montano that just recently graduated from Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 cohort. MagicBell is a full-featured, plug-and-play notifications inbox aimed at developers who want to build one into their own […]
Monthly Archives: May 2021
Big Tech is now worth so much we’ve forgotten to be shocked by the numbers
Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. If you want it in your inbox every Saturday morning, sign up here. Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors. TechCrunch isn’t a public-market-focused publication. We […]
Emotional marketing and an e-mail titan walk into a bar
My mom cuts to the chase when she is describing my beat to others. In her words, I cover companies like Uber before they become companies like Uber. And honestly? I can’t exactly disagree with the description. The best feeling in tech journalism is telling a story about a startup before it becomes a household […]
Is Washington prepared for a geopolitical ‘tech race’?
When Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sat down with Chinese officials in Anchorage, Alaska for the first high-level bilateral summit of the new administration, it was not a typical diplomatic meeting. Instead of a polite but restrained diplomatic exchange, the two sides traded pointed barbs for almost two hours. […]
The most disastrous sales cycle in the world
Startups constantly talk about being mission-oriented, but it’s hard to take most of those messages seriously when the mission is optimizing cash flow for tax efficiency. However, a new generation of startups is emerging that are taking on some of the largest global challenges and bringing the same entrepreneurial grit, operational excellence, and technical brilliance […]
This Week in Apps: EU rules Apple’s a monopoly, Spotify and Facebook team up, ATT arrives
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. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices […]
Can speculative fiction teach us anything in a world this crazy?
There’s an old saw from Mark Twain about how truth is stranger than fiction, and I think it’s fair to say we’ve lived through a very strange reality this past year. With all the chaos and change, we’re led to a foundational question: what’s the purpose of speculative fiction and its adjacent genres of science […]
What India needs to get through its covid crisis
Damage control With the humanitarian crisis in India worsening, immediate and aggressive measures are needed to stabilize the situation and buy time for vaccine production to ramp up. The crisis is already spreading beyond India’s borders and will require coordinated global action. Speed is critical. As Michael Ryan of the World Health Organization noted in […]
An ambitious plan to tackle ransomware faces long odds
Miragec | Getty Images reader comments 29 with 17 posters participating Share this story Schools, hospitals, the City of Atlanta. Garmin, Acer, the Washington, DC, police. At this point no one is safe from the scourge of ransomware. Over the past few years, skyrocketing ransom demands and indiscriminate targeting have escalated, with no relief in […]
Ford’s ever-smarter robots are speeding up the assembly line
Enlarge / Ford is adding artificial intelligence to its robotic assembly lines. reader comments 2 with 2 posters participating Share this story In 1913, Henry Ford revolutionized car-making with the first moving assembly line, an innovation that made piecing together new vehicles faster and more efficient. Some hundred years later, Ford is now using artificial […]