Private equity firm Vista Equity Partners said on Friday it will invest $1.5 billion in Reliance Jio Platforms, joining social conglomerate Facebook and Silver Lake that have also made bets on the Indian telecom giant in recent weeks. The planned announcement, which would give the U.S.-headquartered software-focused buyout firm Vista Equity Partners a 2.32% stake in […]

After months of testing, Facebook’s redesign is finally official. Announced last year at F8, the more minimalist approach to its desktop design has been rolled out in waves. In March, the company added an option to try out the new version. Users could switch back and leave feedback for why they had done so. This […]

Ideally governments would co-ordinate fiscal policy but there is no sense of urgency

No surprise, really, that 5G smartphone sales are on the way up. Frankly, there’s really no other way to go, according to the latest numbers from NPD’s Mobile Phone Tracking. The firm noted that 5G handsets accounted for less than 1% of total sales in the U.S. The hurdles are also what you’d expect: namely, […]

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 […]

A lot of restaurants have shuttered in the wake of stay-at-home guidance and government orders for non-essential businesses to close down, so a startup called Cheetah that provided a wholesale delivery service for them pivoted to selling to consumers, and now it’s raised a round of funding, both to expand its business and to help […]

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 […]

After a quarter in which eBay, tussling with an activist investor, completed the sell-off of its ticketing business StubHub for $4 billion and saw appointed a new CEO after its previous one departed, while also weathering waves of surging demand and dodgy supply resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, today the e-commerce company reported its Q1 […]

Despite traffic for many online properties being at an all-time high, advertising has fallen off a cliff because of the downturn in consumer activity outside the home and the wider economic pressures resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. And today, Twitter reported quarterly earnings that bore this trend out. The ad-based social networking and media company said that […]

Some big M&A is afoot in Israel in the world of smart transportation. According to multiple reports and sources that have contacted TechCrunch, chip giant Intel is in the final stages of a deal to acquire Moovit, a startup that applies AI and big data analytics to track traffic and provide transit recommendations to some […]

On the heels of a spate of reports over the weekend, today Intel confirmed its latest move to grow its automotive division. The chip giant is acquiring Moovit, an Israeli startup previously backed by Intel that analyses urban traffic patterns and provides transportation recommendations with a specific focus on public transit. The deal values Moovit at […]

The regulators said “NO” when Telefonica tried to combine its O2 operations in the UK with rival carrier, Hutchison-owned Three, back in 2015. But Telefonica didn’t let go of the idea of divestment, and five years later, in the middle of a health pandemic with related threats of a global economic depression looming over us, […]

Chief executive criticised over move to offer liability cover following premium increase

Shares soar in after-hours trading following better than expected figures

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

Wunderlist is going away, but fans of the productivity app may find some consolation in founder Christian Reber’s announcement that he is launching a new startup called Superlist. “Superlist will be more than just a todo app, but never as bloated as the project management software you loathe to use,” he tweeted. “Slick, fast, and […]

The original Go was a mostly well-received addition to the Surface line when it arrived in late 2018. It was a nice, pint-sized alternatively, positioned fairly well to serve as a secondary device for some. It did the convertible double duty and traveled well, but otherwise was lacking in guts and versatility. Launching at the […]

A series of big bankruptcies is unlikely but debt workouts will slow economic recovery

Contrary to some fears, equity calls on the London market have been relatively orderly

Facebook is today rolling out a tool that will allow users in the U.S. and Canada to export their Facebook photos and videos to Google Photos. This data portability tool was first introduced in Ireland in December, and has since been made available to other international markets. To use the feature, Facebook users will need […]

The coronavirus outbreak has driven more consumers to turn to their smart speakers for news, information, music and entertainment, according to new data released today by NPR and Edison Research. Around three-quarters of U.S. adults 18 and up said their routines have been impacted due to COVID-19 and their media habits have changed as a […]

Record usage of grocery delivery services amid the COVID-19 pandemic has led to delayed orders, fewer open delivery windows and, on occasion, an inability to even book a delivery time slot. Walmart now hopes to capitalize on the increased demand for speedier delivery with the introduction of a new service that allows consumers to pay […]

Facebook is expanding its Community Help hub to better serve local communities amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The hub has already seen significant usage by those requesting food, supplies and information about local resources, as well as use by volunteers and groups willing to lend a hand. Now, Facebook is adding more features to the hub […]

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 […]

Cutting the cord with cable or satellite TV used to mean a cost savings. But with the growing number of streaming services on the market, many consumers are finding that becoming a cord cutter is just as expensive, if not more so, as being a pay TV customer. As a result, many consumers continue to […]

Tinder will add a video dating feature in the second quarter of this year, parent company Match announced on Tuesday as part of its Q1 2020 earnings report. The company also detailed the coronavirus impact, which slowed Tinder user growth in the quarter, as social distancing requirements and government lockdowns went into effect. Match didn’t […]

TiVo today is launching a new device, its would-be Fire TV Stick competitor known as the TiVo Stream 4K. First announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, this $50 Android TV-powered HDMI dongle is TiVo’s attempt to insert itself into the streaming media device market. The new dongle arrives at a time when TiVo […]

YouTube TV is expanding its lineup of channels thanks to a new, multi-year distribution agreement with ViacomCBS, announced this morning. The Google-owned streaming TV service is gaining 14 new ViacomCBS channels as a result of the deal, including news, sports, and entertainment offerings. It will also continue to carry CBS broadcast stations, CBS Sports Network, […]

I am concerned about inheritance tax if my husband and I were to die prematurely

We are returning to the UK from the US following the virus outbreak

Quarter after quarter, familiar stories have appeared. The smartphone market, once seemingly bulletproof, has suffered. The list of factors is long, and I’ve written about them ad nauseam here, but the CliffsNotes version is: costs are too high, innovation is too incremental and most people already own a device that will be plenty good for […]

Apple and Google are providing additional resources for developers working with the first version of their Exposure Notification API, the development tools the companies have created and are working on in order to provide a cross-platform way for public health agencies to notify individuals of a potential exposure to a person with a confirmed case […]

The UK’s data protection watchdog confirmed today the government still hasn’t given it sight of a key legal document attached to the coronavirus contacts tracing app which is being developed by the NHSX, the digital transformation branch of the country’s National Health Service . Under UK and EU law, a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) […]

The UK has this week started testing a coronavirus contacts-tracing app which NHSX, a digital arm of the country’s National Health Service, has been planning and developing since early March. The test is taking place in the Isle of Wight, a 380km2 island off the south coast of England, with a population of around 140,000. […]

The UK may be rethinking its decision to shun Apple and Google’s API for its national coronavirus contacts tracing app, according to the Financial Times, which reported yesterday that the government is paying an IT supplier to investigate whether it can integrate the tech giants’ approach after all. As we’ve reported before coronavirus contacts tracing […]

Apple has awarded $10 million from its Advanced Manufacturing Fund to COPAN Diagnostics, a company focused on producing sample collection kits for testing COVID-19 to hospitals in the U.S. The money comes from the fund that Apple established to support the development and growth of U.S.-based manufacturing, but is particularly notable because to date, the […]

With the new MacBook, Apple closes one of the more unfortunate product chapters in its history. The upgraded 13-inch mercifully marks the end of the failed five-year experiment that was the butterfly switch. I won’t go into too much detail here. If you’ve purchased a MacBook in the past several years, you almost certainly know […]

The Labour MP on his vision of civic service, Jeremy Corbyn — and forging unity around the maypole

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

In a choice between discussing the WTO and the WHO, I’d take a rules-of-origin trade debate any day

Britain has less margin for error because it is zigging to everyone else’s zag

With police enforcing the lockdown, it may mean new roles for some old telly favourites

No family song on Facebook, no dance routine, no home-grown tomatoes… is it time to raise our game?

Post-lockdown, technology could help us contain Covid-19. But why stop there?

Those with the fewest rights are least able to demand a safe workplace

Before lockdown, my desire to eat Hobnobs outweighed my desire to be thinner. Not any more

For the past eighteen months, the iPad Pro has been my only machine away from home, and until recently, I was away from home a lot, traveling domestically and internationally to event locations around the world or our offices in San Francisco, New York and London. Every moment of every day that I wasn’t at […]

Over the past two years, I’ve typed nearly every word I’ve written while traveling on the iPad Pro’s Smart Keyboard Folio. For more on why, you can see my iPad Pro review here. For the purposes of this look at the new Magic Keyboard, though, you should probably just know two things about the old […]

Update: We mistakenly noted in an earlier version that Chaudhri had been a part of Microsoft’s Hololens team. The story has been updated to remove the reference.  In his two decades at Apple, Imran Chaudhri worked on many of the company’s most iconic product lines, including the iPhone, iPad and Mac. The designer left the […]

Commercial real estate owners, brokers and landlords have collectively made many hundreds of billions of dollars a year in recent years as the economy zipped along. Now, they’re getting clobbered by the pandemic-fueled economic crisis. Worse, their industry may be forever changed by it. To state the obvious, extracting rent from nearly anyone right now […]