Joanna Glasner Contributor More posts by this contributor Corporate biotech venture funding rises again 2019 US VC funds take a more boutique approach Insurance policies are confusing as hell, but the basic business proposition is pretty simple. For policyholders, it’s a way to get paid if something bad happens. And for insurers, it’s a way […]

It’s tax season, which has me thinking about one of decentralized technology’s holy grails: self-sovereign identities. It’s a stirring vision, of a world in which control over our driver’s licenses, passports, birth certificates, social security numbers — the table stakes to participate in the modern economy — rests in our hands, rather than that of […]

Tesla is preparing to roll out a more capable and robust version of its automated parking feature known as Enhanced Summon next week, CEO Elon Musk tweeted Saturday. The tweet comes just days after the company released a new version of Navigate on Autopilot, an advanced driving feature that is viewed as a step towards […]

The Global Positioning System time epoch is ending and another one is beginning, an event that could affect your devices or any equipment or legacy system that relies on GPS for time and location. Most clocks obtain their time from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). But the atomic clocks on satellites are set to GPS time. The […]

Editor’s Note: refocused newsletters It was another dizzying week here at Extra Crunch as you will shortly see in this newsletter. One change that we are making: we are simplifying our newsletters to keep you better informed on what is happening on Extra Crunch. We are merging the daily, weekly, and article editions of this […]

Joanna Glasner Contributor More posts by this contributor Corporate biotech venture funding rises again 2019 US VC funds take a more boutique approach Venture investment in space technology is hitting stratospheric heights in recent quarters. But investors in the sector are betting it will rocket higher still. The latest example of high-velocity funding is satellite […]

Extra Crunch offers members the opportunity to tune into conference calls led and moderated by the TechCrunch writers you read every day. This week, TechCrunch’s Kirsten Korosec and Kate Clark led a deep-dive discussion into Lyft’s IPO and the outlook for the business going forward. After skyrocketing nearly 10% on its first day hitting the […]

Let’s start this week’s newsletter with some data. Nationally, startups pulled in $30.8 billion in the first quarter of 2019, up 22 percent year-on-year, according to Crunchbase’s latest deal round-up. A closer look at the numbers shows a big drop in angel funding and a slight decrease in mega-rounds, or financings larger than $100 million. […]

Photo editing app-maker VSCO has filed a lawsuit against competitor PicsArt. The suit focuses on 19 PicsArt filters that were supposedly “reverse engineered from VSCO’s filters,” with VSCO alleging it’s become a legal issue involving false advertising and violations of the app’s terms of service. “VSCO has invested significant time and resources in developing its presets […]

It’s getting low down and dirty out there again in the ride-hailing wars. According to a new report from The Information, newly public Lyft threatened Morgan Stanley with legal action earlier this week, demanding in a letter that the bank stop marketing a short-selling product that it believed was disrupting trading in its stock. It […]