Lyft has another year of building out its autonomous driving program under its belt, and the ride-hailing company has been expanding its testing steadily throughout 2019. The company says that it’s now driving four times more miles on a quarterly basis than it was just six months ago, and has roughly 400 people worldwide dedicated…
The planned $26 billion merger between T-Mobile and Sprint has been approved by the Justice Department and the FCC, but it’s not a sure thing yet. To sweeten the deal, T-Mobile is dangling three big free and cheap data initiatives that will only go through if the merger does. A little sugar helps the medicine…
Does it feel like your iPhone is being a little quick to shut down apps running in the background lately? Go update it. Apple has just released iOS 13.2.2, which patches up this issue (which caused background apps to “quit unexpectedly”), along with a handful of other annoyances. While it doesn’t offer up anything in…
Veritas Genetics, a DNA testing startup, has said a data breach resulted in the theft of some customer information. The Danvers, Mass.-based company said its customer-facing portal had “recently” been breached but did not say when. Although the portal did not contain test results or medical information, the company declined to say what information had…
The property industry — covering people and businesses that invest in, build, purchase or rent, and maintain property — is hugely fragmented when it comes both to data sources, and the companies that work within it. Today, a New York-based startup that is building a database that helps bring all of that together is raising…
Nigerian internet service provider Tizeti has launched its first 4G LTE network. The Y-Combinator backed startup — that uses solar powered towers to deliver net connectivity — has built its premier 4G capable tower in the city of Port Harcourt, where Tizeti will offer its first 4G and ISP services. The company operates primarily in…
Microsoft is setting itself some high goals for its new Chromium-based Edge browser. As Chuck Friedman, the corporate vice president for Edge told me, he wants Edge to hit one billion users — a number that would start to rival Chrome’s numbers. First, though, Friedman’s team has to get version 1.0 of Edge out to…
Following the death of five people at a Halloween party hosted at a California Airbnb rental, and a scathing Vice report outlining Airbnb’s failure to prevent nation-wide scams, the company says it will begin verifying all seven million of its listings. Airbnb properties will soon be verified for accuracy of photos, addresses, listing details, cleanliness,…
Pokémon GO and games like it can’t exist without waypoints — the in-game locations that correlate to real world points of interest, acting as the Pokéstops, gyms, etc. The more waypoints they have around the world, the better the game becomes. But building up these databases of waypoints is tough. A company can’t do…
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. Google launches OpenTitan, an open-source secure chip design project The aim of the new coalition is to build trustworthy chip designs…
