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. Apple bans Facebook’s Research app that paid users for data In the wake of TechCrunch’s investigation, Apple blocked Facebook’s Research VPN…
Brown, Cony and the gang are coming to a credit card near you in Japan. Line, the messaging app company behind the cute sticker characters, announced today that it is bringing its payment service to plastic through a tie-in with Visa. Line is Japan’s largest chat app with an estimated 50 million registered users. The cards…
Desperate for data on its competitors, Facebook has been secretly paying people to install a “Facebook Research” VPN that lets the company suck in all of a user’s phone and web activity, similar to Facebook’s Onavo Protect app that Apple banned in June and that was removed in August. Facebook sidesteps the App Store and…
When Apple lowered guidance on earnings earlier this month, it cited markets like China as a major factor in its disappointing numbers. Sure enough, when earnings hit today, things didn’t look great, as iPhone revenues dipped 15 percent year over year for the quarter. In an interview with Reuters earlier today, Tim Cook noted that…
Nvidia today announced that its Quadro Virtual Machine Workstation (vWS) is now available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. The promise of the Quadro vWS it to allow businesses to run high-end graphics applications in the cloud, using any of the Nvidia’s high-end and mid-level cloud GPUs like the P100, V100, P4 or P40. For the Azure…
Jigsaw, the cybersecurity-focused division owned by Google parent Alphabet, is now allowing political organizations in Europe to sign up for its anti-web-flooding technology for free. Until now, the free-to-use technology designed to protect political campaigns and websites against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks — dubbed Project Shield — was only available to news sites and journalists, human…
Hims, known by many for its phallic New York subway advertisements, has raised an additional $100 million in venture capital funding on a pre-money valuation of $1 billion. The round was first reported by Recode and confirmed to TechCrunch by sources with knowledge of the deal. A growth-stage investor has led the round, which is ongoing,…
Elizabeth Aguilera Contributor Elizabeth Aguilera is an award-winning multi-media journalist who will cover health and social services for CALmatters. She joins CALmatters from Southern California Public Radio/KPCC 89.3, where she produced stories about community health. It was way easier for candidate Gavin Newsom to endorse single-payer healthcare coverage for everyone than it is now for Gov. Newsom…
Smartphone numbers are down all over — but things look especially stark in China these days. Tim Cook cited softened demand in the world’s largest smartphone market as a key factor in its lowered guidance, and Apple is far from alone in feeling the pinch. Today, Canalys reported another large drop in the country for…
Didi Chuxing, China’s largest ride-hailing startup which claims over 550 million registered users, is deepening its focus on electric vehicles after it announced a joint venture with BAIC, a state-owned automotive giant. ‘Jingju’ — as the venture is called — is a partnership between Didi and BAIC affiliate Beijing Electric Vehicle that will develop “next-generation connected-car…
