Day: February 1, 2019

While blockchain emerged first as a platform for currency and value, its employment in the tokenization of data and information has become recognized as being of at least, if not more, underlying value. You could perhaps even use it to track movements on a grid associated with mobility. That was the underlying idea behind the […]

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. We dismantle Facebook’s memo defending its ‘Research’ The fallout continues following TechCrunch reporting about a Facebook app that was paying people […]

While it appears that overall economic activity could be slowing down, one area that continues to soar is the cloud business. Just this week, Amazon and Microsoft reported their cloud numbers as part of their overall earnings reports. While Microsoft’s cloud growth was flat from the previous quarter, it still grew a healthy 76 percent […]

The sheer scale of global financial crime is not to be underestimated. The U.K.’s National Crime Agency recently observed that it’s “in the hundreds of billions of pounds” annually, and that’s just in the U.K. In the U.S., domestic financial crime, excluding tax evasion, generates approximately $300 billion of proceeds each year for potential laundering. […]

Huawei mobile chief Richard Yu has already made mention of the company’s upcoming foldable phone amid talks of smartphone world domination. This morning, however, we caught our first glimpse of the handset in profile, along with the promise of more, arriving February 24, during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Foldables are very much heating up […]

Amazon had a record-breaking holiday quarter, with revenue of $72.4 billion and profits of $3 billion, but it’s not making much money off its top-selling item, the Alexa-powered Echo Dot. While the e-commerce giant said the device was its 2018 holidays best seller across all products, it also reminded investors on yesterday’s earnings call that […]

Vice Media plans to cut 250 jobs — about 10 percent of its total workforce. The Hollywood Reporter broke the news. When contacted by TechCrunch, a Vice spokesperson confirmed the story but declined to comment further. This comes after a brutal couple of weeks in the media business, as companies began the year with major […]

Sony posted record quarterly earnings this week on the strength of very strong music profits. Those numbers were catapulted thanks to the company’s $2.3 billion acquisition of EMI as part of an ever-consolidating music industry. The electronics giant’s operating profit rose to $3.46 billion for the quarter — up from $3.21 billion a year prior, […]

Juul Labs, the e-cig company under fire for its product’s popularity with young people, has brought on a new VP of Intellectual Property Protection with Adrian Punderson, formerly of PwC and Apple. Punderson’s job is all about working alongside government agencies, as well as Juul Labs Intellectual Property VP Wayne Sobon, to combat the sale […]

Twilio’s bid to become the go-to platform for all of a business’s external communication needs took a big step ahead today. The company said that it has closed its acquisition of email specialist SendGrid. First announced four months ago, Twilio today said the all-stock deal is valued at $3 billion — up from a $2 billion […]