Technology News – Top Stories

Does the algorithm know you too well? Here’s how to shake up your recommendations for a more varied listening experience.

Whether you want to battle Star Wars spaceships or shoot a cinematic masterpiece, one of these picks is going to be perfect for you.

If you’re thinking, “Oh, I just need to suck it up,” stop. What you’re feeling is real. Here’s how to cope.

The robo-vessel will map the ocean floor, and its solar-powered sensors will sample fish DNA and collect climate data.

In Pixar’s new film, Soul, the protagonist wakes up in the body of a cat. It’s a common enough trope—but it gets messier the more you think about it.

Over the course of his presidency, he managed to be consistently wrong, outrageous, and dangerous in equal measure. We look back at his most notorious remarks.

Reopening in the fall was a massive gamble. At one high-poverty elementary school, navigating the risks paid off.

Elemental reactions, like shooting a dynamite-filled barrel or using an ice spell to cross a stream, are an important way for designers to bring worlds to life.

With the last year changing how (and where) many of us work, organizations have started to rethink how well they manage their employees, and what tools they use to do that. Today, one of the startups that is building technology to address this challenge is announcing a major round of funding that […]

Launching rockets from planes is a decades-old concept that never really took off. Billionaire Richard Branson thinks its time has come.

There are dozens of ways to tote around your photo and video gear. We’ve reviewed our favorites.

Our nation’s failure to invest in information technology has severely limited our Covid response. A federal chief experience officer could change that.

We spoke to two award-winning authors for their tips on how to make it from start to finish. Here's how they take notes, organize chapters, and—yes—get comfy.

Imagine if we lived on a cube-shaped Earth. How would you find the shortest path around the world?

Here's how to keep your recommendations and history at least semi-private. No one needs to know how much Bridgerton you watched.

In an interview with WIRED, former secretary of defense Ash Carter discussed how to build morality into AI—and make sure other countries do too.

If the Covid vaccine push has proved anything, it’s that big government works.

The two major investigations into the origins of the pandemic are compromised by potential conflicts of interest. Those problems need to be fixed—fast.

Plus: A dark web takedown, a bitcoin scam, and more of the week's top security news.

Everyone in the game may be hot, but some of the characterizations we see aren't as subversive as you might think.

The Mini 2 is still lightweight yet has enough flying power for some windy conditions, and it comes equipped with a better camera.

Some time ago, I gave up on the idea of identifying a thread that could connect each story in this weekly roundup. There are no unified theories for technology news.

GitLab has confirmed with TechCrunch that it oversaw a $195 million secondary sale that values the company at $6 billion. CNBC broke the story earlier today. The company’s impressive valuation comes after its most recent 2019 Series E in which it raised $268 million on a 2.75 billion valuation, […]

Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson knows a thing or two about unleashing developers. His company has garnered a market cap of almost $60 billion by creating a set of tools to make it easy for programmers to insert a whole host of communications functionality into an application with a couple of lines of code. […]

Today, let's peek at new and historical growth numbers from Gthmhub, Perdoo, WorkBoard, Ally.io, Koan and WeekDone.

Harness, the startup that wants to create a suite of engineering tools to give every company the kind of technological reach that the biggest companies have, announced an $85 million Series C today on a $1.7 billion valuation. Today’s round comes after 2019’s $60 million Series B, which had a […]

Small enterprises remain one of the most underserved segments of the business market, but the growth of cloud-based services — easier to buy, easier to provision — has helped that change in recent years. Today, one of the more promising startups out of Europe building software to help SMEs run […]

In a move that could have wide ramifications across the tech landscape, Intel announced that VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger would be replacing interim CEO Bob Swan at Intel on February 15th. The question is why would he leave his job to run a struggling chip giant. The bottom line is he has a long history

It’s estimated that there were some 50 billion connected devices globally in 2020, and while that really says a lot about how far we’ve come in tech, for many it also speaks to a big issue: security vulnerabilities, with the devices themselves, plus all the components and services running on […]

Stacklet, a startup that is commercializing the Cloud Custodian open-source cloud governance project, today announced that it has raised an $18 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Addition, with participation from Foundation Capital and new individual investor Liam Randall, who […]

You & Mr. Jones announced today that it has added $60 million in new funding from Merian Chrysalis, bringing the Series B round announced in December to a total of $260 million. The round values the company at $1.36 billion, post-money. You & Mr. Jones takes its name from CEO David Jones, […]

As ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft continue to find their feet in a new landscape for transportation services — where unessential travel is being actively discouraged in many markets and people remain concerned about catching the coronavirus in restricted, shared spaces — a smaller […]

We are more than seven years into the notion of modern containerization, and it still requires a complex set of tools and a high level of knowledge on how containers work. The DockerSlim open-source project developed several years ago from a desire to remove some of that complexity for developers. […]

Cockroach Labs, makers of CockroachDB, have been on a fundraising roll for the last couple of years. Today the company announced a $160 million Series E on a fat $2 billion valuation. The round comes just eight months after the startup raised an $86.6 million Series D. The latest investment was led […]

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week. I hope we can all look forward to a nice, boring weekend with no breaking news alerts.

Applications networking company F5 announced today that it is acquiring Volterra, a multi-cloud management startup, for $500 million. That breaks down to $440 million in cash and $60 million in deferred and unvested incentive compensation. Volterra emerged in 2019 with a $50 million investment from […]

RedHat today announced that it’s acquiring container security startup StackRox. The companies did not share the purchase price. RedHat, which is perhaps best known for its enterprise Linux products has been making the shift to the cloud in recent years. IBM purchased the company in 2018 for a […]

The ongoing push for social distancing to slow the spread of COVID-19 has meant that more people than ever are using internet-based services to get things done. And that is having a direct impact on digital customer service, which is seeing unprecedented traffic and demands when things are not […]

As the pandemic took hold in 2020, companies accelerated their move to cloud services. Lacework, the cloud security startup, was in the right place at the right time as customers looked for ways to secure their cloud native workloads. The company reported that revenue grew 300% year over year for […]

The COVID-19 pandemic and specifically need for social distancing to slow the spread of the virus have continued to keep many of us away from the office. Now, increasingly, many organizations and people believe that it could usher in a more permanent shift to remote, distributed and virtual work. […]