Growth of Sony Group’s semiconductor business has slowed, reflecting a plunge in shipments of image sensors for smartphones to Huawei Technologies as a result of the US-China trade war. Although Sony has avoided a fall in the volume of shipments thanks to orders from other Chinese smartphone makers, the recovery of earnings appears likely to…
Read more
Tristan Abbey Contributor Tristan Abbey is President of Comarus Analytics LLC. He served as senior policy advisor at the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and as director for strategic planning at the National Security Council. No single question bedevils American energy and environmental policy more than nuclear waste. No, not even a…
Read more
Excessively fragile, overdependent on unproven companies and prone to human errors that can wipe out service to millions — the outages that often hit online services can make the internet feel like a house of cards. Digital life has become so important during the pandemic, why do we depend on a communications network whose reliability…
Read more
The day after Lehman Brothers collapsed, Jeff Lawson sat in the office of a venture capitalist who liked his idea for a voice messaging program but couldn’t commit to an investment. “Super interesting, but sorry, no,” Lawson recalls the investor saying. That scenario repeated itself during the summer of 2008, and Lawson failed to raise…
Read more
A ticket to take a brief trip to space with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos next month has been sold at auction for $28m. The bidding process, which began in early May, drew offers from more than 7,000 participants from 159 countries, Blue Origin said. The price had stood at $4.8m ahead of Saturday’s live auction,…
Read more
Blue Origin has its winning bidder for its first ever human spaceflight, and the winner will pay $28 million for the privilege of flying aboard the company’s debut private astronaut mission. The winning bid came in today during a live auction, which saw 7,600 registered bidders, from 159 countries compete for the spot. This was…
Read more
In a world of talking points and corporate jargon, opinions are refreshing — and Expensify CEO and founder David Barrett is full of them. One of his earliest lessons in life, for example, was that basically everyone is wrong about basically everything. If instilling that at a young age doesn’t force you to become an…
Read more
Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors. A small programming note: The Exchange…
Read more
The announcement of new iPad software at this year’s WWDC conference had an abnormally large expectation hung on it. The iPad lineup, especially the larger iPad Pro, has kept up an impressively frantic pace of hardware innovation over the past few years. In that same time frame, the software of the iPad, especially its ability…
Read more
Apple went big on security and privacy during its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) keynote this week, showcasing features from on-device Siri audio processing to a new privacy dashboard for iOS that makes it easier than ever to see which apps are collecting your data and when. While typically vocal about security during the Memoji-filled, two-hour-long(!)…
Read more