Williesha Morris Contributor Williesha Morris has been a journalist and freelancer off-and-on for over a decade. When she’s not writing, she’s reading, playing video games or chatting about the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In 2011, a product developer named Fred Davison read an article about inventor Ken Yankelevitz and his QuadControl video game controller for quadriplegics. At…
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MasterClass, which sells a subscription to celebrity-taught classes, sits on the cusp of entertainment and education. It offers virtual, yet aspirational learning: an online tennis class with Serena Williams, a cooking session with Gordon Ramsay. While there’s the off chance that an instructor might actually talk to you — it has happened before — the…
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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. First and foremost, Equity was nominated a Webby for “Best Technology Podcast”!!! Drop everything and go Vote for Equity! We’d appreciate. A lot. And even if we lose, well, we’ll keep doing our thing and making each other…
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Google today announced a sizable update to its Anthos multicloud platform that lets you build, deploy and manage containerized applications anywhere, including on Amazon’s AWS and (in preview) on Microsoft Azure. Version 1.7 includes new features like improved metrics and logging for Anthos on AWS, a new Connect gateway to interact with any cluster right…
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A month after reports that Microsoft sought to buy the hot voice chat app Discord surfaced, those talks are off, a source familiar with the deal confirmed to TechCrunch. Discord is considering plans to stay independent, possibly charting a path to its own IPO in the not-too-distant future. The Wall Street Journal first reported news…
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A court in Houston has authorized an FBI operation to “copy and remove” backdoors from hundreds of Microsoft Exchange email servers in the United States, months after hackers used four previously undiscovered vulnerabilities to attack thousands of networks. The Justice Department announced the operation on Tuesday, which it described as “successful.” In March, Microsoft discovered…
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Microsoft is understandably positioning the latest additions to its Surface line as productivity devices. Laptop sales, in particular, have jumped amid the pandemic, as many have scrambled to shift to a work from home setting. With that in mind, the latest version of the Surface Laptop is far and away the headline item amid a…
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Microsoft makes a big healthcare tech acquisition, Twitter is building a presence in Africa and Apple may be cooking up some new smart home products. This is your Daily Crunch for April 12, 2021. The big story: Microsoft acquires Nuance for $19.7B Microsoft announced this morning that it’s acquiring speech-to-text company Nuance Communications for $19.7…
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When Microsoft announced it was acquiring Nuance Communications this morning for $19.7 billion, you could be excused for doing a Monday morning double take at the hefty price tag. That’s surely a lot of money for a company on a $1.4 billion run rate, but Microsoft, which has already partnered with the speech-to-text market leader…
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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You…
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