Day: March 12, 2019

More than a year after the deal was first announced, it looks like Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox is about to close. Disney announced today that the deal is “expected to become effective at 12:02 a.m. Eastern Time on March 20, 2019,” suggesting that it has obtained the final approval needed, specifically from regulators […]

We can’t wait to see all of you at TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics + AI, which takes place April 18 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. That’s still slightly more than a month away, but your opportunity to buy an early-bird ticket — and save $100 — disappears in just three short days. When that day arrives, […]

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Facebook’s ad team shoots itself in the foot by pulling Elizabeth Warren campaign ads Facebook’s advertising department pulled Elizabeth Warren campaign […]

At a time when the gig economy is under heavy scrutiny around its practices of classifying workers as 1099 independent contractors, IPO-bound Uber has officially settled a six-year-long case regarding this exact topic. Today, Uber agreed to pay $20 million to settle the class-action lawsuit, brought forth by Douglas O’Connor and Thomas Colopy way back […]

Artificial intelligence, or what passes for it, can be found in practically every major tech company and, increasingly, in government programs. A joint Harvard-MIT program just unloaded $750,000 on projects looking to keep such AI developments well understood and well reported. The Ethics and Governance in AI Initiative is a combination research program and grant […]

Firefox Send, Mozilla’s free, encrypted file-transfer service, is officially launching to the public today following its debut as a “Test Pilot” experiment back in August 2017. The service allows web users to share files up to 2.5 GB in size through the browser, while protecting them with end-to-end encryption and a link that automatically expires […]

When the bubble burst in the year 2000, Tanya Van Court lost over $1 million in stock and options over the course of a few minutes. Then and there she vowed to never let something like that happen to her children. Five years later, her daughter Gabrielle was born. At the time, she was a […]

Venture capitalists’ latest on-demand delivery bet is in the pharmaceutical space. Truepill, an online pharmacy powering delivery for the likes of Hims, Nurx, LemonAID and other direct-to-consumer healthcare brands, has nabbed a $10 million Series A from early-stage VC fund Initialized Capital. The investment brings the Y Combinator graduate’s total raised to $13.4 million. Y […]

Stash, the fintech startup and app that aims to introduce new people to the world of investing, is unveiling some interesting new services while also announcing that it has raised more funding to expand its business. The company is introducing mobile-based banking accounts from Green Dot Bank, and, alongside it, a new rewards program called […]

Pitched as “travel insurance for people who don’t like insurance,” U.K.-based Pluto Insurance is officially launching today with an online travel insurance product targeting millennials. Citing research that says 40 percent of millennials don’t actually buy travel insurance, mistakenly believing that it isn’t required, the mobile-first offering not only attempts to demystify travel insurance, but […]