Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Sure, we just aired a new episode, but things keep happening, and after talking about this crop of IPOs for so long, we can’t help ourselves. (You can follow us on Twitter, here and here, by the way,…
Alphabet’s urban planning subsidiary announced today the launch of CommonSpaces. The new app was created to give park operators and community members a place to enter and organize observations about parks and other publics spaces. Interested parties can create a web portal for a space. The organizer defines the parameters of a study, outlining what…
The race to give Chinese users their daily dose of news intensifies as Qutoutiao, a rival to TikTok parent Bytedance, net an installment of sizable backing. Alibaba is injecting $171 million in a convertible loan to Qutoutiao, the three-year-old news and video aggregation startup, according to an announcement released Thursday. The transaction will convert into about…
Fresh from picking up a majority stake in Europe-based The Next Web, the Financial Times is buying another tech blog. The newspaper, which was founded in 1888, is adding Singapore-based Deal Street Asia to its roster with a deal expected to close in April, according to three sources with knowledge of discussions. Founded in 2014…
Lyft raised more than $2 billion Thursday afternoon after pricing its shares at $72 apiece, the top of the expected range of $70 to $72 per share. This gives Lyft a fully-diluted market value of $24 billion. The company will debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange Friday morning, trading under the ticker symbol “LYFT.” The…
Here’s a well-earned retirement. Kazuo Hirai, the former CEO who spearheaded Sony’s turnaround in recent years, is leaving the company following 35 years of service, according to an announcement made today. Hirai became Sony CEO in 2012, replacing Sir Howard Stringer with a mission of bringing the good times back to the then-bloated electronics giant through…
Extra Crunch offers members the opportunity to tune into conference calls led and moderated by the TechCrunch writers you read every day. This week, TechCrunch Editor-in-Chief, Matthew Panzarino, offered his analysis on the major announcements that came out of Apple’s keynote event this past Monday. Behind a series of new subscription and media products, Apple…
Apple’s latest-generation Apple Watch doesn’t just have a curved display and a new industrial design, one of the major features of the Watch when it launched last year were its advanced health-tracking capabilities, particularly in regards to heart health and AFib detection. Those features arrived in the US in December, but users abroad have had…
Here’s an interesting twist on the story from last week about the break-up between Shopify and Mailchimp, after the two said they were at odds over how customer data was shared between the two companies. It turns out that before it parted ways with Shopify, Mailchimp had quietly made an acquisition of LemonStand, one of the…
Beware children. April Fools’ Day is nearly upon us. It’s arguably the worst day of the year, but one we stubbornly cling to because of tradition. Tech companies certainly aren’t immune from the draw of building up and instantly crushing the dreams of millions of users, and pranks have become pretty common place with many…
