IPO-bound Lyft has employed a head of diversity and inclusion before, but this time, the person in this role has a more holistic mission. Today, Lyft is announcing Monica Poindexter, formerly Facebook’s global head of diversity business partners, has joined the company to lead the transportation company’s inclusion and diversity efforts. “I’m in a unique…
Remember when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to show off his company’s clunky Spaces VR tech by taking a virtual tour of hurricane-hit Puerto Rico in 2017? This is nothing like that. The company has quietly been developing a revolutionary system to create virtual avatars of people that closely resemble them in their facial features…
WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram faced a widespread outage yesterday with users from around the world reporting issues with sending messages on WhatsApp and Messenger, posting feeds on Facebook and accessing other features on the three Facebook-owned platforms. While the outage was quite troubling both for the social media giant and its millions of users, guess…
AngelPad just wrapped the 12th run of its three months long New York City startup accelerator. For the second time, the program didn’t culminate in a demo day; rather, the 19 participating startups were given pre-arranged one-on-one meetings with venture capital investors late last week. AngelPad co-founders Thomas Korte and Carine Magescas did away with…
On-demand food delivery startup DoorDash has been under fire as of late for its practices around paying drivers. In an email to drivers today, obtained by TechCrunch, DoorDash said drivers received an average of $17.50 or more per hour on deliveries in 2018. That figure, of course, does not take into account cost of mileage,…
Each week, Extra Crunch members have access to conference calls moderated by the TechCrunch writers you read every day. This week, security reporter Zack Whittaker discussed his exclusive report about Tufts University veterinary student Tiffany Filler who was expelled on charges she hacked her grades. Being Canadian and therefore in the U.S. on a student visa,…
Soft, biologically inspired robots have become one of the field’s most exciting offshoots, with machines that are capable of squeezing between obstacles and conforming to the world around them. A joint project between MIT CSAIL and Harvard’s Wyss converts those learnings into a simple, soft robotic gripper capable of handling delicate objects and picking up…
Google is shutting down its Emmy Award-winning VR film division, Spotlight Stories, after six years of building out content, Variety reports. We’ve reached out to Google for confirmation. “Google Spotlight Stories means storytelling for VR. We are artists and technologists making immersive stories for mobile 360, mobile VR and room-scale VR headsets, and building the…
Google is a tech powerhouse in many categories, including advertising. Today, as part of its efforts to improve how that ad business works, it provided an annual update that details the progress it’s made to shut down some of the more nefarious aspects of it. Using both manual reviews and machine learning, in 2018, Google…
Last night, Google dropped the first beta of the upcoming version of its mobile operating system – Android Q. While it’s just available for the Google Pixel (all generations) owners to try out, it’s packed with promising features – especially for photography enthusiasts. While it’s just available for Google Pixel (all generations) owners to try…
