Wednesday, March 4, 2020

Daily Crunch - Coronavirus prompts more cancellations

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Wednesday, March 04, 2020 By Anthony Ha

Google cancels its big developer conference, Justin Kan’s legal startup shuts down and Robinhood offers more details about a recent outage. Here’s your Daily Crunch for March 4, 2020.

Google cancels its 2020 I/O developer conference

After Facebook canceled its F8 developer conference and Google itself moved its Cloud Next event in April to a digital-only conference, this wasn’t a huge surprise, but it provides another sign of how the COVID-19 coronavirus is clearing the 2020 industry calendar.

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg has outlined some of the steps that Facebook and his family's nonprofit, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, are taking to respond to the pandemic. Facebook's response focuses on three areas: providing accurate information, stopping misinformation and providing data for research.

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$75M legal startup Atrium shuts down, lays off 100

Justin Kan's hybrid legal software and law firm startup Atrium is shutting down today after failing to figure out how to deliver better efficiency than a traditional law firm. The startup has now laid off all its employees; it will return some of its $75.5 million in funding to investors, including Series B lead Andreessen Horowitz. The separate Atrium law firm will continue to operate.

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Robinhood offers $15 discount, blames outage on record trades

It wasn't the leap year, a coding blip or a hack that caused Robinhood's massive outages earlier this week that left customers unable to trade stocks. Instead, the co-CEOs write that "the cause of the outage was stress on our infrastructure — which struggled with unprecedented load. That in turn led to a 'thundering herd' effect — triggering a failure of our DNS system."

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Robinhood offers $15 discount, blames outage on record trades image

India lifts ban on cryptocurrency trading

India's Supreme Court has overturned the central bank's two-year-old ban on cryptocurrency trading in the country in what many said was a "historic" verdict. The Reserve Bank of India had imposed a ban on cryptocurrency trading in April 2018 that barred banks and other financial institutions from facilitating "any service in relation to virtual currencies."

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The future of gig work could involve unions and co-ops

Behind the scenes, an alternative approach to California’s AB 5 worker protection law has been picking up steam. Called the Cooperative Economy Act, the draft legislation is designed to accomplish much of what AB 5 aims to achieve, such as worker protections and benefits. But it also brings unions and co-ops into the mix. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

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The future of gig work could involve unions and co-ops image

Image Credits: CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP / Getty Images

VSCO's new editing tool Montage lets you edit and layer both photos and video

VSCO already allowed users to apply photo-like edits to their videos by doing things like applying filters or adjusting the exposure. But Montage is an entirely different sort of video editing experience.

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Uber sold its food delivery business in India to Zomato for $206M

In January, Uber announced that it had sold the India business of Uber Eats to Zomato for a 9.99% stake in the loss-making Indian food delivery startup. In a regulatory filing, the company has now disclosed that the deal was worth $206 million.

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Tuesday, March 3, 2020

Daily Crunch - Waymo raises $2.5B

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Tuesday, March 03, 2020 By Anthony Ha

Alphabet’s self-driving car company raises its first outside investment, Robinhood goes down and Pixel phones get new gesture controls. Here’s your Daily Crunch for March 3, 2020.

Waymo brings in $2.25B from outside investors, Alphabet

This is the company's first external investment, led by Silver Lake, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Mubadala Investment Company, with participation from Magna, Andreessen Horowitz and AutoNation and parent company Alphabet.

Waymo has long focused on testing and eventually launching an on-demand ride-hailing service called Waymo One using its autonomous vehicles in the suburbs surrounding Phoenix. In October, Waymo began pulling safety drivers out of some of the vehicles on its Waymo One service.

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Waymo brings in $2.25B from outside investors, Alphabet image

Image Credits: Dllu / Wikimedia Commons under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

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Robinhood will offer 'case-by-case' compensation for its outage on the day markets gained $1.1 trillion

The company issued a statement early Tuesday saying that the outage began at around 9:30 AM Eastern on Monday, when the company experienced what it called instability in the part of its infrastructure that allows the company's systems to communicate with each other. The breakdown resulted in outages that took down the company's stock-trading app, website and help center.

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Pixel phones updated with new gesture controls, emoji, AR effects & more

Already, Motion Sense allowed Pixel 4 owners to skip forward or go back to a previous song without touching their screens. With today's update, they'll also be able to pause and resume music by making a tapping gesture above the phone.

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Pixel phones updated with new gesture controls, emoji, AR effects & more image

Image Credits: JOHANNES EISELE/AFP / Getty Images

Honeywell says it will soon launch the world's most powerful quantum computer

In a race where most of the major players are vying for attention, Honeywell has quietly worked on its efforts for the last few years (and under strict NDAs, it seems). But today, the company announced a major breakthrough that it claims will allow it to launch the world's most powerful quantum computer within the next three months.

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Connie Chan of Andreessen Horowitz discusses consumer tech's winners and losers

Chan joined the firm in 2011 after working at HP in China. From her temporary offices located in a modest skyscraper with unobscured views of San Francisco, she and Connie Loizos talked about where she sees the biggest opportunities right now, along with how big of an impact fears over coronavirus could have on the startup industry — and for how long. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

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Connie Chan of Andreessen Horowitz discusses consumer tech's winners and losers image

Brooklinen raises $50M to open more stores and expand internationally

Recent headlines are spurring bigger questions about the direct-to-consumer retail business, with Blue Apron exploring a potential sale and Casper also disclosing disappointing growth and persistent losses. But co-founder and CEO Rich Fulop said his company is "a little bit different," and it's a crucial difference: Brooklinen is profitable.

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Announcing the agenda for TC Sessions: Mobility 2020

TC Sessions: Mobility is back in San Jose on May 14, and we're excited to give the first peek of what and who is coming to the main stage. We're not revealing everything just yet, but already this agenda highlights some of the best and brightest minds in autonomous vehicles, electrification and shared mobility.

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Monday, March 2, 2020

Daily Crunch - Nokia's CEO is stepping down

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Monday, March 02, 2020 By Anthony Ha

Nokia announces a big leadership change, an AT&T streaming service expands and we look at how our jobs may have to evolve during to the coronavirus pandemic. Here’s your Daily Crunch for March 2, 2020.

Rajeev Suri to step down as Nokia CEO; Pekka Lundmark to take over

The company, like its rivals Sweden-based Ericsson and Chinese giant Huawei, has shifted its attention in recent years to aggressively build a portfolio of technologies and products for 5G networks.

"After 25 years at Nokia, I have wanted to do something different," said Rajeev Suri, who will leave his current position on August 31 and continue to serve as an advisor to the Nokia Board until the end of this year. Pekka Lundmark is expected to start in his new role on September 1.

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Rajeev Suri to step down as Nokia CEO; Pekka Lundmark to take over image

Image Credits: Jason Alden / Bloomberg / Getty Images

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Streaming service AT&T TV launches nationwide, but isn't meant for cord cutters

Not to be confused with AT&T TV Now — AT&T's over-the-top live TV service aimed at cord-cutters, previously called DirecTV Now — the new service is more of an alternative to AT&T-owned DirecTV. AT&T TV offers hundreds of live TV channels, plus 40,000 on-demand titles, and 500 hours of DVR space on a set-top box.

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How to work during a pandemic

The world is bracing for the seemingly inevitable proliferation of  the COVID-19 coronavirus, which has already paralyzed cities and isolated millions. Devin Coldewey offers some guidelines for CEOs, aspiring founders and tech industry employees on how they can continue working in this environment.

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How to work during a pandemic image

Image Credits: Marc Romanelli / Getty Images

mParticle raises $45M to help marketers unify customer data

A whole industry of customer data platforms has sprung up since mParticle was founded back in 2013, all offering tools to help marketers create a single view of their customers by unifying data from various sources.

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Making money from games: The future of virtual economies

In part six of our series about "multiverse" virtual worlds, we explore the dynamics of games' virtual economies, the exchange of virtual assets for real money, challenges with money laundering and underage gambling, the compliance infrastructure needed for virtual economies and the challenges in balancing a virtual economy's monetary supply. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

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Making money from games: The future of virtual economies image

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India's Spinny raises $43.7M to expand its online platform for selling used cars

Niraj Singh, co-founder and chief executive of the startup, told TechCrunch that Spinny brings the trust factor that people are looking for when they are purchasing a car.

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This week's TechCrunch podcasts

The latest full-length episode of Equity looks at the stock market’s tumble due the coronavirus pandemic, while the Monday news roundup discusses the continuing trickle of tech IPOs. (Original Content will be back next week!)

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