Yesterday, Samsung announced that the Galaxy Flip Z sold out online. What, precisely, that means, is hard to say, of course, without specific numbers from the company. But it’s probably enough to make the company bullish about its latest wade into the foldable waters, in the wake of last year’s Fold — let’s just say […]

Another on-demand transport app is making a move into payments to expand the existing relationship with its customers (and subsequent margins that it makes from serving them). Bird today announced the launch of Bird Pay, a service that will let people use its app to purchase items from local participating businesses alongside renting scooters. The service […]

A few months ago, the idea of a hand-washing app would have seemed trivial, at best. We’re all adults here, right? We’ve been washing our hands our entire lives. But things change. It’s mid-April and we’re afraid to go outside and engage with other humans — and thorough hand-washing is one of very few tools […]

In its first-quarter earnings report today, Samsung said it expects the COVID-19 pandemic to continue impacting its business for the rest of the year, cutting into sales for smartphones and TVs, but increasing demand for PCs, servers and memory chips as people continue to work or study from home. Samsung’s results for the first-quarter of […]

Less than 24 hours after it was reported that Uber was considering layoffs of 20% of staff, its big rival Lyft is announcing its own cuts. Today the company said it would be reducing employee count by 17%, working out to 982 employees, and furloughing an additional 288, due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic […]

Suppliers that exploited cheaper labour hit by big wage bills for shuttered plants

Transport demand will rebound while the pandemic will reboot the use of plastics

It’s fair to say that even before the impact of COVID-19, companies had begun a steady march to the cloud. Maybe it wasn’t fast enough for AWS, as Andy Jassy made clear in his 2019 Re:invent keynote, but it was happening all the same and the steady revenue increases across the cloud infrastructure market bore […]

Ali Amin-Javaheri grew up in the chemicals business. His father had worked for Iran’s state-owned chemical company and when the family fled the country in the nineteen eighties during the Iran-Iraq war, they first settled in Houston where employers welcomed the senior Amin-Jahaveri’s experience. Houston in the 80s was dominated by the petrochemicals industry and […]

Mike Mackenzie’s daily analysis of what’s moving global markets

Mobile app market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, which provides data-driven insights about the app economy, has raised $45 million in new funding from Riverwood Capital. This is the first significant investment the now-profitable company has seen since its $1 million seed round in 2013. The investment speaks to the growing demand for data about the […]

Tumblr is making a change to how it deals with hate speech on its blogging platform. The company announced today it will also remove the reblogs (repostings) from any blogs that were suspended for violating its policies around hate speech. Already, the company says it’s identified nearly 1,000 blogs that were banned for blatant violations […]

Risk of further bad news from the high street

I am a US citizen who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years

Lofty ideas about open economies will have to be sold on directly improving voters’ lives

The attempt to set up gender equality and ethnic diversity as the enemies of prosperity is telling

Ever since it first started rolling out, 5G skeptics have attempted to link the next-gen cellular technology to all manner of health issues. Most recently, it’s become an easy scapegoat for the global COVID-19 pandemic, given the rapid rise of both. Conspiracy theories have gained such a foothold that vigilantes have taken matters into their […]

Costs are falling — but it still looks far more expensive than it should

‘The old globalised order is fracturing. We are seeing wartime-style falls in GDP’

Might we all be better off if government loans were fast converted into equity?

Favourable trends in employment relative to population are not going to be repeated

As borrowers and spenders of last resort, governments must act now to avert a depression

To avert disaster, solidarity between countries must be as strong as within them

It is simply another policy tool, neither the royal road to hyperinflation nor a cure-all

The internet has, for better or worse, become the default platform for people seeking information, and today one of the companies leveraging that to deliver educational content has raised some funding to fuel its next stage of growth. Udemy, which provides a marketplace offering some 150,000 different online learning courses from business analytics to ukulele […]

The right candidate to fill your job may not actually be looking for a job right now. HireSweet, which is part of Y Combinator’s current class of startups, is trying to help companies find exactly these candidates that are perfect for a job but not actively looking. Like so many other recruiting platforms, the HireSweet […]

In an unprecedented move to reassure customers and flag the potential for misinformation about COVID-19 on their platforms, all of the major social media companies and their parent corporations issued a joint statement on their efforts. “We invite other companies to join us as we work to keep our communities healthy and safe,” the statement […]

The tech industry is mobilizing its considerable resources to attempt to support efforts against the growing global coronavirus pandemic. Over the weekend, the CEOs of Amazon, Apple and Microsoft all shared updates regarding some aspects of their company’s ongoing contributions, which range from donations of medical supplies and personal protective equipment (PPE) for frontline healthcare […]

Like many other websites at the moment, the career-oriented networking platform LinkedIn has seen a big boost in traffic as a result of people being asked to work from home and stay indoors overall to slow the spread of the coronavirus, with a bump of 55% more conversational activity between existing connections in recent weeks. […]

Action camera manufacturer GoPro has announced some massive organizational changes at the company. In particular, the company is laying off more than 200 employees — which represents a 20% staff reduction. GoPro plans “office space reductions in five geographies” as well as a reduction in operating expenses. The company expects a “$100 million reduction in […]

Amazon workers across the world are formalizing their activism with the creation of the Amazon Workers International. Its first action is a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Amazon Director of UK Customer Fulfillment Stefano Perego in which the group demands the company makes permanent certain steps Amazon has implemented amid the COVID-19 pandemic. […]

It’s fair to say that even before the impact of COVID-19, companies had begun a steady march to the cloud. Maybe it wasn’t fast enough for AWS, as Andy Jassy made clear in his 2019 Re:invent keynote, but it was happening all the same and the steady revenue increases across the cloud infrastructure market bore […]

Ali Amin-Javaheri grew up in the chemicals business. His father had worked for Iran’s state-owned chemical company and when the family fled the country in the nineteen eighties during the Iran-Iraq war, they first settled in Houston where employers welcomed the senior Amin-Jahaveri’s experience. Houston in the 80s was dominated by the petrochemicals industry and […]

Amazon is in hot water with a powerful congressional committee interested in the company’s potentially anticompetitive business practices. In a bipartisan letter sent Friday to Jeff Bezos, the House Judiciary committee demanded that the Amazon CEO explain discrepancies between his own prior statements and recent reporting from The Wall Street Journal. Specifically, the letter addressed […]

AWS today announced the launch of the Elemental Link, a small hardware device that makes it easy to connect a live video source to the AWS Elemental Media Live service for broadcast-grade live video processing in the cloud. The $995 Link, which weighs in at less than a pound, is meant to allow Media Live […]

Apple will patch a newly discovered iPhone vulnerability that security researchers say hackers have already used to steal data from their victims’ devices. News of the vulnerability dropped Wednesday by security firm ZecOps. Zuk Avraham, the company’s chief executive, said the firm found the bug last year during a routine investigation. At least six organizations […]

Apple plans to fix an iPhone email security bug, Magic Leap cuts 1,000 staffers and Google is requiring all advertisers to identify themselves. Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 23, 2020. 1. A new iPhone email security bug may let hackers steal private data According to security firm ZecOps, the bug is in the iPhone’s […]

The latest budget iPhone arrived this month to largely positive reviews. The next flagship, on the other hand, may have to wait. The COVID-19 pandemic is having all manner of knock-on effects on the global economy, and the supply chain is certainly not immune. The Wall Street Journal this morning is reporting that the iPhone […]

It’s fair to say that even before the impact of COVID-19, companies had begun a steady march to the cloud. Maybe it wasn’t fast enough for AWS, as Andy Jassy made clear in his 2019 Re:invent keynote, but it was happening all the same and the steady revenue increases across the cloud infrastructure market bore […]

YouTube is giving advertisers a few more tools to reach consumers and measure ad effectiveness on TVs. These tools already exist for YouTube on other platforms, but now the Google -owned video service is bringing them to connected televisions. In a blog post, it says this is in response to how YouTube viewership has grown […]

The coronavirus is proving to have an unexpected upside for the adtech industry. The U.K.’s data protection agency has paused an investigation into the industry’s processing of internet users’ personal data, saying targeted suspension of privacy oversight is merited because of disruption to businesses as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The investigation into adtech […]

Catering and ground-handling company excluded from Canberra’s coronavirus support scheme

Banks try to limit fallout from collapse of Singapore commodities trader Hin Leong

Government’s travel ban due to coronavirus makes it nearly impossible for citizens to return home

US asset manager apologises following comments by company’s president over debt rules

We find ourselves in a time when certain businesses are being asked to scale to levels they never imagined. Sometimes that increased usage comes in bursts, which means you don’t want to pay for permanent extra capacity you might not always need. Today, Confluent introduced a new scale-on-demand feature for its Apache Kafka cloud service […]

When the shutdown began six weeks ago, the powers that be at Box sat down for a meeting to discuss the situation. They weren’t in the same room of course. They were like everyone else, separated by the virus, but they saw this as a key moment for Box as a company. They had been […]

Harbr co-founder Anthony Cosgrove has been working with data for over 15 years, so he has an inkling of some of the problems associated with pulling data together in a way that makes it easy for others to consume, whether internally or externally. Like many entrepreneurs before him, he decided to start a company to […]

It’s not a converted industrial warehouse in Brooklyn. Or a stately, century-old building in the Flatiron. But YC-backed Regalii’s atypical office location up in the Dominican-heavy Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan has given it plenty of insights into its working-class immigrant customer base. The startup, co-founded by several Latino founders who personally knew the hassles of sending money home, […]

The aggregate gains are distributed unevenly — witness how well the top 1 per cent have done