Facebook will take a cut of up to 30% on fan subscriptions, beginning on January 1, 2020. The social network is revealing its plans as part of a broader slate of monetization-related announcements this week at VidCon. The news confirms a TechCrunch report earlier this year that Facebook would be taking a 30% share of subscription…
Spotify’s Lite app is now official. The app has been in beta since last year, and now Spotify is officially releasing it in 36 countries worldwide. The app is designed to work on patchy or weak internet connections and, at just 10MB, it is small enough to cater to lower-end devices that have limited storage…
Just in time for tonight’s Home Run Derby, Major League Baseball is rolling out a new feature on its Ballpark app that utilizes Apple’s Business Chat feature for a customized in-person experience. MLB says it’s the first league to roll out the feature, letting users ask location-specific questions — though Apple Business Chat has been…
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. It was a really bad month for the internet In the past month, there were several major internet outages affecting millions…
DigitalBridge, the Manchester, U.K.-based startup using technology to help solve the “imagination gap” when planning home renovations, has picked up £3 million in new backing. The round is led by Maven Capital Partners via two funds it manages: £1.5 million from Maven’s Venture Capital Trusts (VCTs) and £1.5 million from the NPIF Maven Equity Finance,…
When Landon Brand and Benjamin Stansfield graduated from the University of Southern California this year, they already had the plans for Project Wren, their service for selling carbon offsets to a new generation of conscious consumers. Along with fellow co-founder Mimi Tran Zambetti (who’s still attending USC), Brand and Stansfield aim to make carbon offsets…
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. I was in the studio alone this week with the wonderful Clara Sieg of Revolution, an early-stage venture capital fund that invests in disruptive startups from underrepresented geographies. As you might have guessed, we talked about the rising…
Drone delivery service Project Wing (or just Wing as it’s now called) graduated from Google X last year to become an independent Alphabet business, and recently won governmental approval to operate in the suburbs outside the Australian capital, Canberra. There, its service delivers food, coffee, pet supplies and more to area residents. Related to these…
Next Ventures, an investment firm led by Lance Armstrong, has filed to raise $75 million for its debut venture capital fund. According to paperwork submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this morning, Armstrong and Next Ventures general partner Lionel Conacher have so far attracted $24.5 million from limited partners to back startups in…
Way back in February, Mozilla announced an upcoming collaboration with Scroll aimed at finding a way to help fund news outlets. The organization appears ready to finally launch to the service, sending users a survey, along with invites to an upcoming beta launch of what it calls “Firefox Ad-free Internet.” The service is one of…
