Mission Everywhere

Netflix is at a turning point where the company will soon discover whether or not its brand still has staying power and the ability to dominate in today’s streaming market, given the abundance of choice available to consumers. On Tuesday, Netflix announced its plan to roll out its password-sharing restrictions to a global audience, including the U.S., years after having encouraged the practice as a means of introducing its service to a wider range of consumers. These days, however, Netflix sees moochers as lost profits, estimating there are 100 million households globally sharing their user accounts, 30 million of which are in the U.S. and Canada. To some extent, consumer backlash against the crackdown has to do with Netflix’s complete shift in its position on password sharing. There was a time when the company believed that people who benefited from a shared password would eventually convert to become a Netflix member — but that hasn’t always proven to be true. In 2016, Netflix’s ...

Google Chrome is releasing a new update that makes it easier to customize and personalize your browser’s look, the company announced on Tuesday. For years, Chrome has had a “Customize Chrome” option at the bottom right of your screen, and now the company is introducing a new side panel to make the customization process easier. Now, a new side panel will open with the available customization features. In this new panel, you can experiment with different features and easily see how they will show up on your New Tab page as you make changes. The new side panel remembers your customization edits as you go, Google says. Image Credits: Google Chrome has hundreds of images across different categories that you can browse from the side panel by clicking “Change theme.” You can choose from categories like “Landscapes” to “Seascapes.” If you have trouble picking just one image, you can choose to have a rotating background by clicking on any theme collection and turning on the “Refresh dail...

Episode Six , a global payments and banking infrastructure provider, today announced that it raised $48 million in a Series C funding round led by Avenir with participation from Anthos Capital. In an email, CEO John Mitchell said that the tranche  will be used to expand Episode Six’s go-to-market efforts and scale its business as the company looks to drive digital transformation journeys for banks and companies operating within the payments space. Episode Six was founded in 2015 by Mitchell, Chermaine Hu and Futeh Kao. Seeking to overcome the limitations of legacy payments tech, the co-founders built a platform designed to streamline various payment processes while reducing costs. “For CTOs and heads of product who want to grow their books and create competitive products, our platform allows them to launch new products quickly to meet a customer’s evolving needs and capture market share,” Mitchell told TechCrunch in an email interview. “For CIOs looking for payments at scale with...

Last week, Montana governor Greg Gianforte signed a law that banned TikTok in the state . Now the company is hitting back with a lawsuit that aims to keep the app available to Montanans. In the complaint, TikTok argues that Montana’s ban violates the Constitution by limiting the company’s right to host and distribute user-created content. TikTok also argues that Montana is overstepping its role by attempting to legislate matters of national security rather than deferring to federal regulators, placing an undue burden on its ability to conduct interstate business in the process. TikTok is asking the court for an injunction to block Montana’s ban, which, if granted, would allow the app to conduct business as usual in the state while the courts sort out the relevant issues. “We are challenging Montana’s unconstitutional TikTok ban to protect our business and the hundreds of thousands of TikTok users in Montana,” TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter told TechCrunch. “We believe our leg...

The Apple Store could be expanding beyond tech products. As the company continues to invest in its original Apple TV+ content, a recent Bloomberg report indicates that Apple plans to introduce a new product category for its online store– merchandise tied to its popular TV shows. This includes “ Ted Lasso ” merch, which is rounding out its third — and possibly last — season. The potential addition of Apple TV+ merch on the Apple Store could mark the first time the company has sold these types of products directly to customers, reported Bloomberg. Apple will roll out the apparel early next month, the publication noted, and its retail stores will promote a QR code that directs shoppers to the new collection. Apple was not immediately available to comment to TechCrunch. Warner Bros. has offered “Ted Lasso” merch through its online shop for quite some time, including the recently launched special edition Monopoly and UNO board games, as well as figurines, mugs, sta...

New usernames aren’t the only change coming to the popular chat app Discord, now used by 150 million people every month. The company is also testing a suite of parental controls that would allow for increased oversight of Discord’s youngest users, TechCrunch has learned and Discord confirmed. In a live test running in Discord’s iOS app in the U.S., the company introduced a new “Family Center” feature, where parents will be able to configure tools that allow them to see the names and avatars of their teen’s recently added friends, the servers the teen has joined or participated in, and the names and avatars of users they’ve directly messaged or engaged with in group chats. However, Discord clarifies in an informational screen, parents will not be able to view the content of their teen’s messages or calls in order to respect their privacy. This approach, which toes a fine line between the need for parental oversight and a minor’s right to privacy, is similar to how Snapchat implement...

Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. It was another busy week in the transportation world and no surprise, Tesla  was one of the headliners. The company held its annual shareholder meeting and as per ushe, CEO Elon Musk shared tidbits and musings about the company. While some of this was rehashing old information, there were a number of notable and newsmaker moments. Top of the list? JB Straubel , a Tesla co-founder and former CTO, has returned as a board member . Other items that got my attention included another delay for the next-gen Roadster , hints of two upcoming EV products and Musk’s decision to “ try a little advertising .” Here’s a roundup of our coverage . Speaking of Musk, he lost another bid to end a 2018 settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that requires oversight of some of his Tesla-related tweets. The upshot: The Twitter sitter ...

Welcome to Startups Weekly, with your shiny, newly minted host, yours sincerely. If you’ve seen my name on TechCrunch, it’s probably because of my popular Pitch Deck Teardown series , where I take a startup’s pitch deck and celebrate the good, lambast the bad and use both to learn more about what the world of VC pitching looks like. This week, I published the 50th installment of the series (hooray!) with a deep dive into the deck Danish company Ageras used to raise a $36 million round from private equity investors. If you’re feeling brave, I’d love to take a loving, educational hack-and-slash at your pitch deck, too . Go on, it’ll be fun. Maybe. Okay, that’s quite enough of the navel gazing, let’s get on to what happened in the world of startups. Startups are acquired mostly for their staff all the time. Investors generally don’t love it when that happens — it’s usually not a great outcome for them — but it can be a great way for startup founders to get a soft landing when a compan...

Helping developers do more in less time has become a priority for organizations. As the ambit of SaaS sprawls ever wider and DevOps grows more popular, companies are discovering that they need to alleviate the cognitive load on developers, who often have to be aware of all the microservices available to them. While this problem was initially addressed with service catalogs, the category has morphed into something more ambitious: a one-stop-shop that lets devs access all the microservices and tools in their ecosystem. Called internal developer portals, this category is quickly gaining traction at software-heavy companies as they seek to improve their developer experience, and thus, efficiency. According to Forrester , 87% of DevOps leaders agreed that increasing developer productivity is a priority for the next 12 months. Per Gartner , “these portals enable software engineering leaders to create a versatile ‘app store’ that increases software reuse, improves the developer onboarding ...

Stoke Space has received multiple investments from In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, TechCrunch has learned. Stoke Space and In-Q-Tel have not publicly announced their relationship before. While In-Q-Tel is legally a separate entity from any government agency, it receives all of its funding from government partners, including the defense and intelligence community. In-Q-Tel Principal William Morrison confirmed he led the most recent investment, which closed at the end of February, and that the firm has made multiple investments in the company before. In addition to the investment, the two entities also signed a “technology development agreement,” an In-Q-Tel spokesperson said. Stoke joins a very small cadre of launch companies — including Rocket Lab and ABL Space Systems — that have received investment from the firm. “The team has been incredible at execution, insanely capital efficient,” Morrison said. Kent, Washington-based Stoke was founded i...

Remotely monitoring patients without violating their privacy is a challenging task. But one co-founder believes that she’s cracked the code. I’m excited to announce I’m speaking with Romi Gubes, the CEO of Sensi.AI,a startup that has developed 24/7 audio-based AI software to detect and predict physical, cognitive and emotional care-related anomalies that can impact the health and wellbeing of those receiving in home care to prevent unwanted occurrences from happening. We’ll be joined on this TechCrunch Live event by Sergey Gribov, General partner at Flint Capital and a board member at Sensi.AI, who previously founded the enterprise assets management company AB Systems. This TechCrunch Live event is free to attend, and I hope you can make it. Register here . We’ll cover a range of topics during the interview, particularly on the technical side of Sensi.AI’s platform, which monitors patients’ rooms in an ostensibly privacy-preserving way. Given the tendency of algorithms to pick up bi...

Radiator Labs , a company born to solve steam radiator night sweats (an all – too – common problem in cities such as New York), is expanding beyond smart radiator covers with $30 million in fresh funds. The firm also announced a new name, Kelvin . Climate tech-focused investor 2150 led Kelvin’s series A round, while Schmidt Family Foundation (aka Google money), Partnership Fund for NYC (aka private equity money) and “several previous investors” also chipped in, the company said in a statement. When Kelvin’s “Cozy” radiator cover debuted on Kickstarter, the company promoted it as a “NEST thermostat” for overly hot radiators. Since then, the product evolved from cloth covers for renters (think: giant oven mitts) into a series of sleeker metal covers offered to buildings under a subscription, costing “around $10-15 / apartment / month,” Kelvin told TechCrunch. Kelvin declined to share its valuation, and said it will use the money to expand into the UK, Germany and other parts of Eu...

The crypto industry continues to face myriad headwinds, but there’s no shortage of startups and founders diving into the space. Alliance DAO, a web3 accelerator and builder community, had its most recent cohort, also known as ALL10, present their ideas on Wednesday during a demo day, exclusively covered by TechCrunch. Check out the previous Alliance DAO demo days we covered here in November and here in July. Twice a year, Alliance DAO brings in web3 founders for a three-month program. The current cohort had a record 1,692 applications, up 77.5% from its previous cohort, Qiao Wang, a core contributor at Alliance DAO, said during the event. Of that number, only 16 startups made the cut and graduated from the program. The latest cohort makes for a good snapshot of what’s happening in the industry at large, Wang said. Many of the teams are looking at improving popular crypto sub-sectors, like the Bitcoin network, appchains, rollups-as-a-service, zero-knowledge proofs, proof-of-physic...