Dissecting what Lyft’s IPO means for Uber and the future of mobility

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 public markets, Lyft stock has faded back down towards its IPO price as some investors grow more concerned over the company’s path to profitability (or lack thereof) and the long-term fundamentals of the business....

Read More

Startups Weekly: US companies raised $30B in Q1 2019

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. The number of mega-rounds fell to 57 deals in Q1 and deal value was down too. With that said, mega-rounds still accounted for $16.4 billion, making Q1 2019 the second-best quarter on record for mega-rounds. The...

Read More

VSCO sues PicsArt over photo filters that were allegedly reverse-engineered

{rss:content:encoded} VSCO sues PicsArt over photo filters that were allegedly reverse-engineered https://tcrn.ch/2CXpF6K http://bit.ly/2OTdMUf April 05, 2019 at 11:46PM 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 [a.k.a....

Read More

On balance, the cloud has been a huge boon to startups

Today’s startups have a distinct advantage when it comes to launching a company because of the public cloud. You don’t have to build infrastructure or worry about what happens when you scale too quickly. The cloud vendors take care of all that for you. But last month when Pinterest announced its IPO, the company’s cloud spend raised eyebrows. You see, the company is spending $750 million a year on cloud services, more specifically to AWS. When your business is primarily focused on photos and video, and needs to scale at a regular basis, that bill...

Read More

Snap is channeling Asia’s messaging giants with its move into gaming

Snap is taking a leaf out of the Asian messaging app playbook as its social messaging service enters a new era. The company unveiled a series of new strategies that are aimed at breathing fresh life into the service which has been ruthlessly cloned by Facebook across Instagram, WhatsApp, and even its primary social network. The result? Snap has consistently lost users since going public in 2017. It managed to stop the rot with a flat Q4, but resting on its laurels isn’t going to bring the good times back. Snap has taken a three-pronged approach:...

Read More

Boomplay, a Spotify-style music and video streaming service for African music and Africa, raises $20M

While Spotify dukes it out with Apple and other big tech names to target high-end users in mostly developed markets, a startup out of China has raised some money to expand its music streaming business in the massive but still nascent market of Africa. Boomplay, a service founded by Transsnet — a joint venture between Chinese phone maker Transsion and Chinese consumer apps giant NetEase — has raised $20 million in outside funding as it looks to break into more sub-Saharan countries and continue to build up its database of music tracks. The company...

Read More

Snap is channeling Asia’s messaging giants with its move into gaming

Snap is taking a leaf out of the Asian messaging app playbook as its social messaging service enters a new era. The company unveiled a series of new strategies that are aimed at breathing fresh life into the service which has been ruthlessly cloned by Facebook across Instagram, WhatsApp, and even its primary social network. The result? Snap has consistently lost users since going public in 2017. It managed to stop the rot with a flat Q4, but resting on its laurels isn’t going to bring the good times back. Snap has taken a three-pronged approach:...

Read More

Landed raises $7.5 million Series A to help teachers buy homes

Teachers are notoriously underpaid, and buying homes is notoriously expensive. This is where Landed, which just raised a $7.5 million Series A round led by Initialized Capital, comes in. Landed helps educators buy homes by providing them with down-payment assistance. That’s because many teachers leave their jobs due to a lack of stable housing. In Berkeley, Calif., for example, more than half of the school district’s employees reported they considered leaving because of the high costs of housing. “Our mission is to help these people build financial...

Read More

The Google Assistant on Android gets more visual responses

{rss:content:encoded} The Google Assistant on Android gets more visual responses https://tcrn.ch/2G2WcdJ https://tcrn.ch/2uN0XBB April 05, 2019 at 07:00PM About half a year ago, Google gave the Assistant on phones a major visual refresh. Today, the company is following up with a couple of small but welcome tweaks that’ll see the Assistant on Android provide more and better visual responses that are more aligned with what users already expect to see from other Google services. That means when you ask for events now, for example, the response will...

Read More

Twitter’s latest test focuses on making conversations easier to follow by labeling tweets

Twitter continues to experiment with ways to make conversations on its platform easier to follow. In addition to its prototype app twttr, which is testing threaded replies, the company also recently tested labeling replies to highlight those from the “original tweeter” – meaning it would show when the person who first tweeted a post then replied within the conversation thread. Now, Twitter is changing up this labeling system again. On Thursday, the company said a new test was rolling out which would instead label the “original tweeter” as “Author”...

Read More

Lotame pitches an ‘unstacked’ approach to selling data tools

Lotame is unveiling what it says is a new approach to the data management business, with what it calls an “unstacked” strategy. Adam Solomon, a former Time Inc. and Viacom executive who recently joined Lotame as chief marketing officer, said this new strategy is illustrated by the launch of Data Stream, which allows publishers and marketers to combine their first party data with Lotame’s device graph connecting consumer data across devices. The company offered these capabilities before, but Solomon said Data Stream allows Lotame to break it...

Read More

The future of a16z, Lyft’s sinking stock and another IPO to watch

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week your humble Equity squad (Kate Clark, Alex Wilhelm) were stoked to take on as much as we could with what little time we had. We kicked off with a speed round that turned out to not be very quick and then dug into the biggest news of the week. The Not-So-Speed-Round: Affirm raised $300 million at nearly $3 billion valuation. The round marks another win for Max Levchin’s company and is another point on...

Read More