Facing increasing scrutiny from international and domestic regulators, the Altria Group has decided to write down its investment into the e-cigarette company Juul by $4.5 billion. That’s roughly one-third of the $12.8 billion that the tobacco giant had invested into Juul a little less than one year ago. Juul Labs gets $12.8 billion investment from Marlboro maker […]
Paidy, a Japanese financial tech startup that provides instant credit to consumers in Japan, announced today that it has raised a total of $143 million in new financing. This includes an $83 million Series C extension from investors, including PayPal Ventures, and debt financing of $60 million. The funding will be used to advance Paidy’s […]
Just around 9:45 a.m. Pacific Time on February 28, 2017, websites like Slack, Business Insider, Quora and other well-known destinations became inaccessible. For millions of people, the internet itself seemed broken. It turned out that Amazon Web Services was having a massive outage involving S3 storage in its Northern Virginia datacenter, a problem that created […]
Using a computer and modern software can be a chore to begin with for the visually impaired, but fundamentally visual tasks like 3D design are even harder. This Stanford team is working on a way to display 3D information, like in a CAD or modeling program, using a “2.5D” display made up of pins that […]
The world of phone-based AR has involved a lot of promises, but the future that’s developed has so far been more iterative and less platform shift-y. For startups exclusively focused on mobile AR, there’s been some soul-searching to find ways to bring more lightweight experiences to life that don’t require as much friction or commitment […]
In the two years since Sidewalk Labs pitched its vision for a grand smart city development — encompassing an entire neighborhood on the Toronto waterfront — the project has been beset by controversy and criticism. On one hand, the 12-acre project in Toronto’s Quayside district promised to be a proving ground for the latest thinking […]
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. Jack Dorsey says Twitter will ban all political ads Arguing that “internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse,” […]
Album VC, a Lehi, Utah-based early-stage venture firm that’s been known until now as Peak Ventures, just gathered up $75 million in capital commitments for its third early-stage fund. The development shows investor confidence in Album’s young team, which came together in 2014 after the founder of Zinch — a site connecting colleges and students […]
A security researcher has found several vulnerabilities in the popular open-source Horde web email software that allow hackers to near-invisibly steal the contents of a victim’s inbox. Horde is one of the most popular free and open-source web email systems available. It’s built and maintained by a core team of developers, with contributions from the […]
Here’s a horror scenario for you: you’re flying in a small plane and suddenly the single pilot who knows how to fly passes out. In the movies, somebody would probably talk one of the passengers through safely landing the plane. In reality, that’s unlikely. Flying planes is hard. Now, however, planes outfitted with the Garmin […]