Category: Tech news

The crooks used emulators to mimic the phones of more than 16,000 customers whose mobile bank accounts had been compromised.

Now is the time to create your own content. This gear can help you get great audio and video quality from the start.

Whether your kids are going to school or playing outside, you’ll need comfortable face coverings. These are the ones my little monsters will tolerate.

Astronomers get their wish—new ultra-precise distance measurements between Earth and the stars—but that only intensifies a cosmic crisis.

Pubes protect you; head hair keeps you warm. But beards and mustaches seem to exist for mainly ornamental reasons.

In a Covid-inspired pivot, chefs around the world are offering interactive cooking classes online that help groups of disparate strangers learn some new tricks.

Stop the chatter and find your quiet place.

Or for yourself, because we all deserve a little treat.

Don’t blow your savings on a new bicycle. Instead, learn how to better maintain the one you’ve already got and swap out some key components along the way.

All the most important stories about the biggest hack in years.

You have to do more than just plug and go. Let us help you pick the best cable for your device, and adjust your laptop and your TV settings for the best picture.

Widely used herbicides are struggling to kill some weeds. Some experts think heat could be part of the problem.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, as expected after an independent panel commissioned by the administration recommended its approval earlier this week. This is the second vaccine now authorized for use in the U.S. under EUA, after the Pfizer -BioNTech vaccine was approved last week.

Moderna’s vaccine could begin being administered to Americans by “Monday or Tuesday” next week, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci speaking to NBC’s Today show in a new interview. That’s in keeping with the timelines between the Pfizer EUA and the first patients actually receiving the vaccine last week.

Like Pfizer’s vaccine, Moderna’s is an mRNA therapy. That means that it contains no actual virus — just genetic instructions that tell a person’s body to create a specific protein. That protein is more or less identical to the one that SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, uses to attach to a host’s cells and replicate. Moderna’s vaccine causes a person to create just the protein, which on its own is harmless, and then their natural defenses via their immune system react to that and develop a method for fighting it off. That defense system is “remembered” by the body, while the vaccine itself naturally dissolves after a brief time, leaving a person with immunity but nothing else.

The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which has yet to be approved for use in the U.S., uses a weakened and modified common cold virus that doesn’t spread in humans to create the spike protein in recipients, resulting in the body generating its own immune response. That’s a much more tried-and-tested method for creating a vaccine, but both Moderna and Pfizer’s mRNA therapies have shown to be very effective in preliminary data from their large Phase 3 clinical trials.

The rest of the world may be slowing down as we prepare for Christmas and the new year, but we are not taking our foot off the gas.

Alex Wilhelm keeps a close watch on the public markets in his column The Exchange, but this week, he branched out to look at some of the metrics underpinning soaring cryptocurrency prices and turned his gaze on StockX, the consumer reseller marketplace that just raised $275 million in a Series E that values the company at approximately $2.8 billion.

“Selling a tenth of your company for north of a quarter-billion may be somewhat common among late-stage software startups with tremendous growth,” he says, but “don’t laugh — the round actually makes pretty OK sense.”

Our staff continues to file their end-of-year stories: We ran a post this morning by Manish Singh that studies India’s massive total addressable market for retail. The nation has more than 60 million mom-and-pop neighborhood stores, and companies like Walmart and Amazon are eager to offer help with payments, logistics and inventory management — as are hundreds of native and foreign startups.

In an interview with author and MIT professor Sinan Aral, Managing Editor Danny Crichton discussed some of the debates currently swirling around the desire in some quarters to regulate social media platforms. In “The Hype Machine,” Aral explores topics like neuroscience, economics and misinformation before offering potential solutions for resolving what he calls “a full-blown social media crisis.”

The stories that follow are an overview of Extra Crunch from the last five days. Complete articles are only available to members, but you can use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one or two-year subscription. Details here.

Thank you very much for reading Extra Crunch this week; I hope you have a safe, relaxing weekend!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

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Unpacking Poshmark’s IPO filing

How did fashion marketplace Poshmark go from posting regular losses in 2019 to generating net income in 2020?

After the company filed a public S-1 last night, Alex Wilhelm pondered the question this morning in The Exchange.

Like many e-commerce platforms, Poshmark saw a surge in activity during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it also slashed its marketing spend, which helped boost profits. As the cash-rich company prepares its road show, “Poshmark is valuable,” Alex concluded.

“How valuable the market will decide. But who will it enrich with its final pricing decision?”

Just how bad is that hack that hit US government agencies?

The breach of FireEye and SolarWinds by hackers working on behalf of Russian intelligence is “the nightmare scenario that has worried cybersecurity experts for years,” reports Zack Whittaker.

The intrusion began several months ago, but news of the breach wasn’t made public until this week.

“Given that potential victims include defense contractors, telecoms, banks, and tech companies, the implications for critical infrastructure and national security, although untold at this point, could be significant,” said Erin Kenneally, director of cyber risk analytics at Guidewire, an industry platform for insurance carriers.

In his analysis for Extra Crunch, Zack breaks down the rippling effects of supply-chain attacks that can compromise platforms like SolarWinds, which is used by more than 420 of the Fortune 500.

From startups to Starbucks: The embedded API opportunity

Embedded finance connects services like payment processing with everyday activities like grabbing a coffee before unlocking an e-scooter.

“The ability to be at the right place at the right time, supporting consumers and merchants alike, where they want it, how they want it and when they want it — cannot be understated,” says Simon Wu, an investment director with Cathay Innovation.

In a post that identifies embedded finance’s top providers and enablers, he offers advice for startups and established brands that are hoping to “earn and build customer loyalty while generating new revenue streams.”

Is rising usage driving crypto’s recent price boom?

Bitcoin is at an all-time high.

CoinMarketCap reports that crypto market values have reached almost $659 billion; that figure was just $140 billion in March 2020.

“These gains have created a huge amount of wealth for crypto holders,” Alex Wilhelm wrote yesterday.

To get a better handle on why crypto values are sky-bound, he parsed some basic industry metrics, including the number of unique bitcoin addresses, fees paid and transactions per day.

“Do the price gains make sense in the short term? Who knows,” he wrote, “but they are not based on nothing.”

2020 was a disaster, but the pandemic put security in the spotlight

For his year-end Extra Crunch story, security reporter Zack Whittaker looked back at the myriad security challenges and vulnerabilities COVID-19 brought to the fore.

The hacks of Fire Eyes and SolarWinds were just one link in the chain: How well is your company prepared to deal with file-encrypting malware, hackers backed by nation-states or employees accessing secure systems from home?

“With 2020 wrapping up, much of the security headaches exposed by the pandemic will linger into the new year,” says Zack.

Inside Zoox’s six-year ride from prototype to product

After six years of research and development, autonomous vehicle company Zoox this week unveiled an electric robotaxi that can carry four people at a maximum speed of 75 miles per hour.

Automotive writer Kirsten Korosec interviewed Zoox co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson to learn more about the vehicle’s development and how the company overcame a series of technical and legal challenges.

“I would say that if you have a big idea and you’re confident that it makes sense, you should at least explore the idea, rather than giving up because the current regulations aren’t designed for it,” said Levinson.

Kirsten only had 15 minutes to interview Levinson, but this comprehensive interview covers topics like regulatory compliance, Zoox’s relationship with parent company Amazon and the highest (and lowest) moments he experienced along the way.

Pluralsight $3.5B deal signals a matured edtech market

In one of the largest enterprise acquisitions of 2020, Visa Equity Partners this week purchased Utah-based edtech startup Pluralsight for $3.5 billion.

According to the entrepreneurs and investors reporter Natasha Mascarenhas spoke to, this deal “shows the strength of edtech’s capital options as the pandemic continues.”

“What’s happening in edtech is that capital markets are liquidating,” a major change from “the old days where the options to exit were very narrow,” says Deborah Quazzo, a managing partner at GSV Advisors and seed investor in Pluralsight.

Dear Sophie: How did immigration change for startup founders in 2020?

Dear Sophie:

I’m on an F1 OPT and am about to incorporate a startup with my two American co-founders.

What were the biggest immigration changes in 2020 affecting us?

—Ambitious in Albany

How to pick an investor in good or bad times

Founders and the VCs who back them may not be friends, but they’re usually friendly.

Investors are on a first-name basis with entrepreneurs from their portfolio companies and frequently have candid conversations with them about life, work and the world in general. In the before times, they might even have shared a meal or attended a baseball game together.

But make no mistake, it is a top-down relationship — the investor will always have the upper hand. When an entrepreneur accepts a check, they are hiring their next boss.

In an Extra Crunch guest post, Quiq CEO and founder Mike Myer poses two questions for founders who are considering a new relationship with a VC:

• How can the investor help the business?
• What’s the risk that the investor will hurt the business?

From India’s richest man to Amazon and 100s of startups: The great rush to win neighborhood stores

In India, about 90% of consumers buy their everyday goods from neighborhood-based kirana stores instead of supermarkets.

As a result, U.S. retail giants like Walmart and Amazon have adopted an “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach, offering the nation’s 60 million mom-and-pop shops software for inventory control, payments and e-commerce.

India’s retail market will be worth an estimated $1.3 trillion by 2025, but e-commerce represents just 3% of that activity today, reports Manish Singh.

For his final Extra Crunch story of 2020, he looked at the startups and major players who are hoping to carve out their niche in one of the world’s largest retail ecosystems.

ClickUp CEO talks hiring, raising and scaling in the white-hot productivity space

Earlier this year, business productivity software startup ClickUp raised a $35 million Series A.

Now, just six months later, the company has closed a second round of $100 million that values the San Diego-based startup at $1 billion.

Lucas Matney interviewed CEO Zeb Evans this week to learn more about how the company was buoyed by pandemic-based behavior shifts that doubled its customer base and multiplied revenue by a factor of nine.

“I think that the biggest thing that we’ve always focused on is shipping a new version of ClickUp every week. That is our differentiation,” he said. “We’ve kind of created these iterative cycles called natural product-market fit and it’s been hard to keep up with that.”

2020’s top 10 enterprise M&A deals totaled a staggering $165B

In 2018, the total value of the year’s 10 top enterprise mergers and acquisitions reached $87 billion; last year, that figure fell to just $40 billion.

But in 2020, 10 M&A deals accounted for $165.2 billion.

“Last year’s biggest deal — Salesforce buying Tableau for $15.7 billion — would have only been good for fifth place on this year’s list,” notes enterprise reporter Ron Miller. “And last year’s fourth largest deal, where VMware bought Pivotal for $2.7 billion, wouldn’t have even made this year’s list at all.”

We interview the senior senator from Minnesota about fitness trackers, Sony pulls “Cyberpunk 2077” from the PlayStation Store and Indian delivery startup Zomato raises a massive round. This is your Daily Crunch for December 18, 2020.

The big story: Amy Klobuchar discusses Amazon Halo concerns

Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar recently wrote an open letter to Alex Azar of the Department of Health and Human Services, in which she discussed Amazon’s Halo fitness tracker and expressed concern that “the Halo appears to collect an unprecedented level of personal information.”

Klobuchar elaborated on these issues in an interview with TechCrunch. HHS, she said, “should play a larger role in ensuring data privacy when it comes to health” and work with the FTC “to come up with some rules to safeguard private health information.”

Klobuchar added, “I think the Amazon Halo is just the ultimate example of it, but there’s a number of other devices that have the same issues.”

The tech giants

CD Projekt Red, Sony, Microsoft offer refund to Cyberpunk 2077 customers after bug complaints — Sony has pulled “Cyberpunk 2077” from its PlayStation Store after a flood of complaints.

The big Google DOJ antitrust case probably won’t go to trial until 2023 — In a status hearing Friday, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta set a tentative date for the case.

Twitter bots and memorialized users will become ‘new account types’ in 2021 — Twitter plans to add a way of distinguishing bots and other automated accounts.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Indian food delivery giant Zomato secures $660M — The 12-year-old startup is also in the process of closing a $140 million secondary transaction.

Bumble reportedly filed confidentially for an IPO — The news that Bumble is pursuing an IPO is not a surprise.

Unfold launches lightweight, link-centric profiles called Bio Sites — Squarespace acquired social media startup Unfold last year.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

From India’s richest man to Amazon and 100s of startups: The great rush to win neighborhood stores — After spending more than a decade disrupting neighborhood stores in the U.S. and other markets, Amazon and Walmart are employing a different strategy in India.

Watch Space Force commander Gen. John Raymond explain public-private partnerships for space defense — The Space Force commander explained how the new military service operates like a startup and how startups can learn from the Space Force.

Unpacking Poshmark’s IPO filing — From posting regular losses in 2019 to generating net income in 2020.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

TechCrunch Early Stage is coming back in a big way in 2021 — TC Early Stage is all about providing founders access to the top experts across the core competencies involved in entrepreneurship.

Tips for applying an intersectional framework to AI development — What can we do to move away from using AI/ML models that demonstrate unfair bias?

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 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.