Nearly every online publisher has launched or announced a paywall — but of course, even the ones that are successful won’t convince every reader, or even the majority of readers, to sign up. Now Piano and True[x] say they’ve found a more effective way to monetize the rest of the audience, without threatening crucial subscription […]

Apple always has an interesting ad for the holiday season. This time, it’s a cute little animated short film. It feels like a hybrid between a Pixar movie and a Wes Anderson creation. Named “Share Your Gifts,” the ad focuses on a dreamy teenager who spends a lot of time on her MacBook. She regularly […]

A ruling in late October against a little-known French adtech firm that popped up on the national data watchdog’s website earlier this month is causing ripples of excitement to run through privacy watchers in Europe who believe it signals the beginning of the end for creepy online ads. The excitement is palpable. Impressively so, given […]

Four days ago the crypto markets were crashing hard. Now they’re crashing harder. Bitcoin, which hasn’t fallen past $6,000 for months, has dumped to $4,413.99 as of this morning, and nearly everything else is falling in unison. Ethereum, flying high at $700 a few months ago, is at $140. Coinbase, that bastion of crypto stability, […]

Elon Musk’s dabble with the doobage in a September radio interview may have sparked more than just an outpouring of adulation from his acolytes (and a fairly interesting conversation around artificial intelligence, social media, invention and space). The Washington Post reports that the folks at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration were less than amused with […]

More than half a million users have installed Android malware posing as driving games — from Google’s own app store. Lukas Stefanko, a security researcher at ESET, tweeted details of 13 gaming apps — made by the same developer — which were at the time of his tweet downloadable from Google Play. Two of the apps […]

The social media singularity continues with the arrival of Snapchat Stories-style slideshows on LinkedIn as the app grasps for relevance with a younger audience. LinkedIn confirms to TechCrunch that it plans to build Stories for more sets of users, but first it’s launching “Student Voices” just for university students in the U.S. The feature appears […]

Black Friday is, for the most part, bad. People are awful, retailers pull all sorts of shenanigans to make it seem like you’re getting a better deal than you are and a lot of people end up buying junk they don’t need to make the day feel like a “success.” But you know that. If […]

Another day, another stock market setback for once high-flying technology companies, which have lost roughly $1 trillion in the latest stock market slide. Shares of the core group of consumer technology companies, including Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet and Netflix, are falling again — contributing to the big indexes like the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the […]

FedEx is turning to a relatively new and unknown startup as it ramps up its efforts to electrify its fleet of delivery vans. The company announced Tuesday plans to add 1,000 electric delivery vehicles from Chanje Energy, a California-based and China-backed startup founded in 2015. FedEx is purchasing 100 of the vehicles from Chanje Energy. It will lease […]

Fifteen weeks after Facebook announced its “Your Time on Facebook” tool that counts how many minutes you spend on the app, the feature is finally rolling out around the world. Designed to help you manage your social networking, the dashboard reveals how many minutes you’ve spent on Facebook’s app on that device each day for […]

Valve has quietly updated the Steam page for the Steam Link. The message says that Valve is discontinuing the Steam Link. The device will become unavailable once all units have been sold. When Valve introduced the Steam Link in 2015, your TV setup was completely different. Google, Amazon and Apple just released Android TV, the […]

On Black Friday, YouTube says it’s teaming up with Warner Bros. Pictures to allow viewers to watch “The Lego Movie” for free as part of a promotion for the upcoming sequel. YouTube recently (and quietly) began making certain movies like “Rocky,” “The Terminator” and “Legally Blonde” available for free, with advertising. This campaign is an […]

Agora, a developer of cloud communication APIs, will create products for new markets and verticals after raising a $70 million Series C led by Coatue Management. Existing investors SIG, Morningside Capital and Shunwei Capital also returned for the round, which brings Agora’s total funding so far to $125 million. The startup’s APIs are used by […]