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January 6, 2021, is the day of Daily Crunch! We have an editorial from Pete Buttigieg, breaking media news, and killer notes on this year's strange CES confab. There are a lot of updates from startup land. Alex wants to have some fun.
The top 3 tech companies.
Brian Heater has the must-read from this year's kinda-IRL CES event. We are paying attention despite the fact that TechCrunch did not attend in-person due to spiking COVID-19 cases. If you want to know more about what it looks like to cover the event from a distance, you can ask Devin Coldeway.
The New York Times is buying The Athletic, a company that went about hiring all the newspaper sports reporters it could. The price was reported to be $550 million. That is a lot of money, but not much in terms of startup terms. The media is a hard game.
Cuban-backed fintech goes public. Dave does because the startup finally rode its blank-check company to the public markets. The CEO of the company spoke to TechCrunch about the transaction, its timing and what is ahead for the company.
Pete Buttigieg is the Secretary of Transportation for the United States. From a transit perspective, he talks about innovation and the role of government in the creation of what's next.
The companies are startups/VC.
Something fun is needed before we jump into our usual mix of startup updates. A four week testing of a service from Ultrahuman was done by a tech journalist. She says that becoming a cyborg is no longer as sci-fi as that sounds, but that the post is a great look into how we may care for our bodies in the future.
How will the selloff affect NFTs? The last day, before a partial recovery, the price of cryptocurrencies sold off sharply. What impact will falling prices have on NFTs and other assets?
According to Lucas Matney, most of the lending platforms rely on an end user's existing coin. A16z led the effort that raised $25 million.
I have not heard that Hopin has raised another trillion dollars in the last few months, which feels like a surprise given how busy that company was in the last few years. Zuddl shows that the virtual events space is still attracting capital. Zuddl's name is like a mix of zoodle and muddle, which is what the company's name reminds me of, so I protest gently against it.
The mental health startup market is growing fast, with Little Otter and Mined being noted on the blog today. Two rounds in the same space in a single day is like a data point to me.
The golden era of online piracy is behind us, but that doesn't mean that some services that broke the law didn't keep the flame of the past alive. For a while. I am sure some of you will be sad that Popcorn Time is over.
Reliance Retail put in $200 million of the total for a 25.8% stake in Dunzo, which is focused on hyperlocal delivery in seven Indian cities. Hyperlocal, rapid delivery is a big push around the world. We are curious about the economics involved, but it is clear that there is appetite to invest in the thesis.
There was more. Rupifi raised $25 million to build its B2B payments business in India, while JABU raised $3.2 million for its B2B e-commerce business, and Payfit became France's latest unicorns after raising $259 million. Some people in the venture world are curious about the pace of private-market investing because it is so busy.
There are 5 growth marketing predictions.
Growth expert Jonathan Martinez shares several tactics early-stage companies can use to capitalize on these trends in our latest guest column.
He shared methods for testing ads, his ideas about video ads and influencer marketing, and a few thoughts about privacy changes.
I think we will start seeing heavy investments by Facebook and other social media platforms to keep users on their platforms, where they will still have access to first-party data, writes Martinez.
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Big Tech is a company.
The company behind Facebook and the virtual reality platform, Meta, appears to have had a good holiday sales cycle. The companion app for the headset was downloaded 2 million times since Christmas Day. A lot of headsets.
A new format of advertising has been introduced by Spotify. The parades are coming. New ways for me to support musical artists that I love is what I want from the service. The business side of the company is being worked on by Spotify. I suppose part of my job is listening to music. C'mon. Focus on music again!
The Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés handed out a quarter billion worth of fines to Facebook and Google for failing to respect local and pan-EU cookie consent rules. It is starting to add up that American tech companies have paid fines to various EU countries.
The experts of tech.
SEAN GLADWELL is the image credit.
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