Latest and Hotest Technology Updates

Hi again friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch for Monday, December 27.

I continue to captain the USS Cruncherprise while Alex is out on vacation. If you’re missing his wit and wisdoms, fear not: He’ll be back next week.

As I mentioned last week, the news cycle tends to get a bit quieter in these last weeks of December — so expect these daily recaps to be a bit more compact accordingly. We should be back in the full swing of things next week, if only because that’s when CES is happening. (And, yes, it’s apparently still happening, despite a number of the biggest companies pulling out.)

—Greg

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Remembering the startups we lost in 2021: Houseparty! Dark Sky! Loon! A few members of the TC team put together a list of the products, projects and tech companies that shut down (or announced plans to shutdown) this year. Fry’s Electronics gets an honorable mention because, though it was hardly a startup, its shutdown leaves a massive “pyramid-shaped hole in the hearts of many who grew up wandering its aisles.”
• TC’s fav things: Team TC also put together its annual list of its “favorite things” of the year, with “things” defined … as, well, anything. We love doing this one; it ends up being a big mish-mashed list of stuff worth knowing about (I really can’t stop listening to Kirsten’s air traffic controller music recommendation), and doubles as a little glimpse into the in-the-moment headspaces of the folks who keep this place going.
• Is accessibility awareness resulting in better accessibility? Companies are doing a better job of talking about accessibility, but are their words leading to actual results? Joe Devon, co-founder of the Global Accessibility Awareness Day, takes us on a deep dive into the data.

Startups/VC

• Naren Gupta passes away: The co-founder of Nexus Venture Partners died on Saturday at the age of 73. Manish Singh shares details of Gupta’s life, his many successes and how the venture capitalist helped “plant Indian SaaS startups on the world map.”
• Teesas raises $1.6M: Less than two months after launch, Nigerian edtech startup Teesas has raised a $1.6 million pre-seed round. The company offers a subscription program for students that delivers live/recorded content designed to pair right up with what they’re learning in school.
• Jupiter raises $86 million: The Indian neobank startup, not the gas planet. Just a few months after launching publicly, the company’s founder says the service has “just short of half a million users.” This round values the company at $711 million, more than doubling its valuation from August.

Foreign investors, mature startups redraw New Zealand's VC funding landscape

For a country with just over five million people, New Zealand’s startup ecosystem is punching well above its weight.

In 2020, investors bet $158 million on 108 deals, the third consecutive year of growth. After a series of exits like RocketLab, Pushpay and Seequent, foreign investors like Sequoia and Founders Fund have taken notice.

“I'm hopeful over the next five years we're going to start seeing more unicorns and real successes coming out of the market, which I think will create a positive halo effect and that'll create the next generation of founders,” said James Pinner, acting CEO of New Zealand venture fund Elevate.

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Read More

Big Tech Inc.

• More big companies back out of CES: While the Consumer Electronics Show is still set to go on as planned, a number of huge companies won’t be there this time — at least, not in person. T-Mobile was the first huge name to drop its in-person presence at the show due to the ongoing COVID spike; a number of companies have since followed their lead, including Google, Lenovo, Intel, GM, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon.
• TikTok moderator sues: Content moderation is a massive challenge that, arguably, no major social network has gotten right. Machines aren’t really up to the job yet, and hiring people to do it is like saying “You know all the vile, horrifying, absolute-worst bits of the internet? Here’s a firehose of it!” A TikTok moderator sued parent company ByteDance this week over trauma they experienced on the job; according to the complaint, tackling the “sheer volume of content” required moderators to “simultaneously view three to 10 videos at the same time.”

TechCrunch Experts

Are you all caught up on last week's coverage of growth marketing and software development? If not, read it here.

TechCrunch wants you to recommend growth marketers who have expertise in SEO, social, content writing and more! If you're a growth marketer, pass this survey along to your clients; we'd like to hear about why they loved working with you.

Read More

• Software Engineer- Service Automation at National Communications Services Inc (Anywhere)
• Web Applications Developer at MiraCosta College (Oceanside, CA, USA)
• Software Engineer at Local Kitchens (San Francisco, CA, USA)
• Information Technology System Integration Specialist at National Employment Law Project (Washington, D.C., USA)
• Associate Professor or Professor, Information Systems at Monash University (Clayton VIC 3800, Australia)

See more jobs on CrunchBoard

Post your tech jobs and reach millions of TechCrunch readers for only $200 per month.

Hi again friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch for Monday, December 27.

I continue to captain the USS Cruncherprise while Alex is out on vacation. If you’re missing his wit and wisdoms, fear not: He’ll be back next week.

As I mentioned last week, the news cycle tends to get a bit quieter in these last weeks of December — so expect these daily recaps to be a bit more compact accordingly. We should be back in the full swing of things next week, if only because that’s when CES is happening. (And, yes, it’s apparently still happening, despite a number of the biggest companies pulling out.)

—Greg

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Remembering the startups we lost in 2021: Houseparty! Dark Sky! Loon! A few members of the TC team put together a list of the products, projects and tech companies that shut down (or announced plans to shutdown) this year. Fry’s Electronics gets an honorable mention because, though it was hardly a startup, its shutdown leaves a massive “pyramid-shaped hole in the hearts of many who grew up wandering its aisles.”
• TC’s fav things: Team TC also put together its annual list of its “favorite things” of the year, with “things” defined … as, well, anything. We love doing this one; it ends up being a big mish-mashed list of stuff worth knowing about (I really can’t stop listening to Kirsten’s air traffic controller music recommendation), and doubles as a little glimpse into the in-the-moment headspaces of the folks who keep this place going.
• Is accessibility awareness resulting in better accessibility? Companies are doing a better job of talking about accessibility, but are their words leading to actual results? Joe Devon, co-founder of the Global Accessibility Awareness Day, takes us on a deep dive into the data.

Startups/VC

• Naren Gupta passes away: The co-founder of Nexus Venture Partners died on Saturday at the age of 73. Manish Singh shares details of Gupta’s life, his many successes and how the venture capitalist helped “plant Indian SaaS startups on the world map.”
• Teesas raises $1.6M: Less than two months after launch, Nigerian edtech startup Teesas has raised a $1.6 million pre-seed round. The company offers a subscription program for students that delivers live/recorded content designed to pair right up with what they’re learning in school.
• Jupiter raises $86 million: The Indian neobank startup, not the gas planet. Just a few months after launching publicly, the company’s founder says the service has “just short of half a million users.” This round values the company at $711 million, more than doubling its valuation from August.

Foreign investors, mature startups redraw New Zealand's VC funding landscape

For a country with just over five million people, New Zealand’s startup ecosystem is punching well above its weight.

In 2020, investors bet $158 million on 108 deals, the third consecutive year of growth. After a series of exits like RocketLab, Pushpay and Seequent, foreign investors like Sequoia and Founders Fund have taken notice.

“I'm hopeful over the next five years we're going to start seeing more unicorns and real successes coming out of the market, which I think will create a positive halo effect and that'll create the next generation of founders,” said James Pinner, acting CEO of New Zealand venture fund Elevate.

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Read More

Big Tech Inc.

• More big companies back out of CES: While the Consumer Electronics Show is still set to go on as planned, a number of huge companies won’t be there this time — at least, not in person. T-Mobile was the first huge name to drop its in-person presence at the show due to the ongoing COVID spike; a number of companies have since followed their lead, including Google, Lenovo, Intel, GM, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon.
• TikTok moderator sues: Content moderation is a massive challenge that, arguably, no major social network has gotten right. Machines aren’t really up to the job yet, and hiring people to do it is like saying “You know all the vile, horrifying, absolute-worst bits of the internet? Here’s a firehose of it!” A TikTok moderator sued parent company ByteDance this week over trauma they experienced on the job; according to the complaint, tackling the “sheer volume of content” required moderators to “simultaneously view three to 10 videos at the same time.”

TechCrunch Experts

Are you all caught up on last week's coverage of growth marketing and software development? If not, read it here.

TechCrunch wants you to recommend growth marketers who have expertise in SEO, social, content writing and more! If you're a growth marketer, pass this survey along to your clients; we'd like to hear about why they loved working with you.

Read More

• Software Engineer- Service Automation at National Communications Services Inc (Anywhere)
• Web Applications Developer at MiraCosta College (Oceanside, CA, USA)
• Software Engineer at Local Kitchens (San Francisco, CA, USA)
• Information Technology System Integration Specialist at National Employment Law Project (Washington, D.C., USA)
• Associate Professor or Professor, Information Systems at Monash University (Clayton VIC 3800, Australia)

See more jobs on CrunchBoard

Post your tech jobs and reach millions of TechCrunch readers for only $200 per month.

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for December 22, 2021! Greg here again. I’ll be handling the newsletter for Alex for this final stretch of the year while he takes a very much deserved break.

Tech news tends to get a little quieter during these last weeks of the year because … well, holidays. But if anything big happens, we’ll make sure you know about it! —Greg

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Essential’s spiritual successor: Over the years, the smartphone arena has sort of boiled down to iPhone versus whatever Android phone is cool right now. Is there room for another contender? A bunch of former employees of Essential — a company that shipped one phone before shutting down and selling the brand to OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei — think so and are working on a privacy-centric Android phone under the brand OSOM (pronounced “awesome” because why not.)
• Bluetooth COVID-19 test has bugs: An at-home COVID-19 test that uses a Bluetooth-enabled analyzer to provide certified results? Sounds handy. Unfortunately, researcher Ken Gannon found that this one can seemingly be manipulated.
• Fisher-Price’s Chatter phone has bugs, too: Speaking of Bluetooth bugs, it looks like this nostalgia-tastic novelty speaker might have some issues of its own. If you have one, it sounds like you might want to make sure it’s properly hung up when not in use.

Startups/VC

• Veho gets valued at $1B: Veho, a New York-based startup trying to simplify next-day package delivery, just raised $125 million in a round valuing the company at $1 billion. Its thing, writes Christine Hall, is “providing transparency into deliveries that starts with the option of when, where and how customers want their packages delivered.”
• Dealroom raises €6 million: A European competitor to products like PitchBook/CB Insights/Crunchbase has raised €6 million in a Series A. Alex Wilhelm has the breakdown of what the company is focusing on, what it's doing differently and where it goes from here.
• Triller to go public via merger: It might not have the same name recognition, but TikTok rival Triller is still making moves. Triller announced this week that it’ll go public by way of a reverse merger with Massachusetts-based video tech company SeaChange, with the new combo company calling itself “TrillerVerz Corp.”

Start building your brand book with a visioning workshop

Before spending six figures to develop a brand ethos, early-stage startup teams must first create a solid foundation that reflects their collective vision.

In the first of a series of articles on startup branding, Fuel Capital CMO Jamie Viggiano walks readers through the process of setting up a workshop where your founding team can “dig deep into your collective motivations, inspirations and ambition.”

This exercise is a critical investment: If you hire a branding agency or a consultant, they will do this work without you and the result will be inevitably less authentic.

“Skipping ethos work is a costly mistake that produces a disjointed and rudderless brand, directly and negatively impacting the growth potential of the company,” writes Viggiano.

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Read More

Big Tech Inc.

• Zillow makes house hunting a co-op game: The pandemic got people used to doing more stuff together remotely — working, watching movies, playing games, etc. It also spiked the popularity of poking around Zillow as a pastime. Zillow is mashing those two trends together, tapping Apple’s SharePlay to allow users to hunt for homes together from afar.

TechCrunch Experts

TechCrunch wants you to recommend software consultants who have expertise in UI/UX, website development, mobile development and more! If you're a software consultant, pass this survey along to your clients; we'd like to hear about why they loved working with you.

• Associate Professor or Professor, Information Systems at Monash University (Clayton VIC 3800, Australia)
• Senior Laravel Developer at Mia Share, Inc. (Anywhere)
• Senior Software Engineer, iOS at Primer (San Francisco, CA, USA)
• Bioinformatics Engineer at Simons Foundation (New York, NY, USA)
• Software Engineer, Backend Infrastructure at BeyondView (San Francisco, CA, USA)

See more jobs on CrunchBoard

Post your tech jobs and reach millions of TechCrunch readers for only $200 per month.