Free Spotify comes to Alexa – TechCrunch

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. Spotify’s free music service will now stream on Alexa devices, plus Bose and Sonos smart speakers Spotify has worked with Amazon…

Michael Grimes, “Wall Street’s Silicon Valley whisperer,” says direct listings are “absolutely” more efficient than IPOs – TechCrunch

Michael Grimes has been called “Wall Street’s Silicon Valley whisperer” for landing a seemingly endless string of coveted deals for his bank, Morgan Stanley. In more recent years, it has served as the lead underwriter for Facebook, Uber, Spotify and Slack. Grimes, who has been a banker for 32 years — 25 of them at…

Best Black Friday iPhone Deals

With Black Friday coming up fast, it’s time to start thinking about the types of deals you seek, whether you’re looking to upgrade an older phone for yourself or planning a special gift for a friend or family member. We’re expecting a ton of deals on laptops, headphones, gaming devices, and, of course, iPhones. We…

Sonos acquires voice assistant startup Snips, potentially to build out on-device voice control – TechCrunch

Sonos revealed during its quarterly earnings report that it has acquired voice assistant startup Snips in a $37 million cash deal, Variety reported on Wednesday. Snips, which had been developing dedicated smart device assistants that can operate primarily locally, instead of relying on consistently round-tripping voice data to the cloud, could help Sonos set up…