Google has lit the news canon at its annual India event which takes place in New Delhi today. The search giant announced changes to its Tez payment service, and it has also introduced a subtle AI-powered feature for its Google Go search app: website reading. You can bet these are the first of many product announcements…
Oliver Rippel Contributor Oliver Rippel is the chief executive officer of Naspers’ global business to consumer subsidiaries and investments. Two weeks ago, Walmart concluded its investments to acquire a majority stake in Flipkart. This is one of the largest transactions in e-commerce and in the internet space globally, with Walmart deploying US$16 billion to obtain an approximate 77 percent shareholding at…
Toyota is investing $500 million into Uber. Under the agreement, Toyota vehicles will be equipped with Uber’s self-driving technology, an unnamed source familiar with the deal told TechCrunch. The investment was first reported by the WSJ. TechCrunch confirmed the Toyota-Uber agreement with a source familiar with the deal. Uber declined to comment on the deal.…
Microsoft published a news item announcing Xbox All Access on the Xbox blog and then unpublished it. But multiple news outlets spotted the article before Microsoft could take the post down. So now that the cat is out of the bag, it looks like Microsoft’s new hardware and software subscription is real. There have been…
The Chinese government announced it will reform the transportation industry to safeguard passengers, three days after a female passenger was allegedly raped and murdered by a Didi Chuxing driver last Friday. Provinces and autonomous regions are now tasked with setting up passenger safety committees by the end of this month and ensuring that incidents are…
In tech circles, it would be easy to assume that the world of high-impact charitable giving is a rich man’s game where deals are inked at exclusive black tie galas over fancy hors d’oeuvre. Both Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Benioff have donated to SF hospitals that now bear their names. Gordon Moore has given away $5B…
The slings and arrows aimed at tech’s titans these days are almost too numerous to count. Jeff Bezos: squandering money on space while exploiting warehouse employees. Mark Zuckerberg: complicit in everything from genocide to the death of democracy. Larry Page and Sergey Brin: in bed with China and the military. Elon Musk: where even to…
It’s not been a great week for cell carriers. EE was hit with two security bugs and T-Mobile admitted a data breach. Now, Sprint is the latest phone giant to admit a security lapse, TechCrunch has learned. Using two sets of weak, easy-to-guess usernames and passwords, a security researcher accessed an internal Sprint staff portal. Because…
Tesla will remain a public company, CEO Elon Musk said Friday night, less than three weeks after he announced to the world via Twitter that he was considering taking the electric automaker private at $420 a share. Musk, who posted the announcement via Tesla’s blog, said Friday that after speaking with shareholders and investigating the…
So much for summer Fridays. Yesterday, BuzzFeed reported that a dozen tech companies, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Snapchat, would meet at Twitter headquarters on Friday to discuss election security. For two of them, that wasn’t the only meeting in the books. In what appears to be a separate event on Friday, Facebook and Microsoft…
