Author: Bilal

Many major websites and services were unreachable for a period Friday afternoon due to issues at Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS service. The outage seems to have started at about 2:15 Pacific time and lasted for about 25 minutes before connections began to be restored. Early reports suggested Google DNS may also have been affected, but this turned … Continue reading Cloudflare DNS goes down, taking a large piece of the internet with it Continue Reading →

We continue to be stuck inside, and video games continue to sell well. It’s pretty much as simple as that, honestly. I mean, there’s more nuance than that, obviously, but that’s really the top line takeaway from NPD’s June gaming numbers. More specifically, last month saw $1.2 billion total spent on gaming, up 26% from the … Continue reading Gaming sales had another great month in June Continue Reading →

Welcome to The Exchange, an upcoming weekly newsletter featuring TechCrunch and Extra Crunch reporting on startups, money and markets. You can sign up for it here to receive it regularly when it launches on July 25th, and catch up on prior editions of the column and newsletter here.  It’s Saturday, July 18, and this is The Exchange. Today … Continue reading The Exchange: Which VCs are the most popular, why enterprise startups are hot, and how patient are public investors? Continue Reading →

One of the upsides of this job is that you get to see everything going on out there in the startup world. One of the downsides of this job is seeing just how many ideas out there aren’t all that original. Every week in my inbox, there is another no-code startup. Another fintech play for … Continue reading The dual PhD problem of today’s startups Continue Reading →

Xpeng, an electric vehicle startup run by former Alibaba executive He Xiaopeng, said Monday it has raised around $500 million in a Series C+ round to further develop models tailored to China’s tech-savvy middle-class consumers. The announcement followed its Series C round of $400 million closed last November. A source told TechCrunch that the company’s valuation at … Continue reading China’s EV startup Xpeng pulls in $500 million Series C+ Continue Reading →

We speak with Dell’s Travis North about all things laptop cooling from heat pipes to vapor chambers, high temperatures and more. That high-performance CPU or GPU you’re eyeballing for your next laptop is nothing if it’s not backed by an effective cooling system. Yet consumers tend to know very little about the cooling in a laptop. We … Continue reading Cool it! We talk laptop thermals with an expert from Dell Continue Reading →

If you’re sick of taking shaky smartphone videos or want to improve the video quality on your vlog, now might be the time to invest in DJI’s Osmo Pocket gimbal camera. The 12-megapixel camera can shoot 4K video at up to 60 frames per second, and the gimbal provides 3-axis mechanical stabilization. Originally listed at $399, the … Continue reading DJI’s Osmo Pocket gimbal camera drops to $250 on Amazon Continue Reading →

It’s targeted at business professionals, but consumers can use it too. One of the biggest success stories to come out of this pandemic is the video-conferencing company Zoom. As many of us transitioned to working from home, Zoom saw its user base grow exponentially. According to a recent earnings report, it went from 10 million daily … Continue reading Zoom launches a line of hardware for home use Continue Reading →

Over 2,500 mobile games have been removed from China’s App Store during the first week of July, according to a new report from app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The removals were expected due to a planned crackdown on unlicensed games, but this data is the first to demonstrate the impact on the app economy. For comparison, … Continue reading Over 2,500 games removed from Apple’s China App Store in early July, as crackdown begins Continue Reading →

A team of researchers working out of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) have developed a two-way wireless data connection for use underwater. Strong wireless data connections are basically taken for granted in our daily lives, from cell service to home WiFi networks, but it’s actually tremendously challenging to create high-speed wireless connections … Continue reading Researchers develop laser-based underwater WiFi system for sub-sea data networks Continue Reading →