When the British travel agency and tour company Thomas Cook went bankrupt and folded on Monday, it was more than the end of the world’s oldest travel company. Thomas Cook opened in 1841, but when it closed 600,000 people still had trips booked with the firm—which bundled packages of flights, hotels, and so on. About…

Every evening after getting back from his studies, Alip Erkin sits at home in Sydney, Australia, and opens up the video-sharing app TikTok on his Android phone. He’s looking for something in particular: videos from Xinjiang, in northwest China, which he left for the last time in 2012. Since then, Xinjiang has been rapidly transformed…

Hermann Fritz heard the news on the radio. It was the day after Christmas in 2004, and Fritz, a civil engineer who lived in Georgia, was visiting his parents' home in Zurich, Switzerland, for the holidays. The reporter's voice crackled through the speaker: There had been an earthquake in the Indian Ocean. A tsunami had…

Congratulations to all the motivated hackers, coders, devs and designers who took action and secured their spot in the TechCrunch Hackathon at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. We limited participation to…

At its developer conference Wednesday, Oculus showed off a pair of prototype designs for its next high-end headsets. Two years ago, Oculus showed off its Half Dome prototype which utilized…

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week Kate and Alex were back at TechCrunch’s San Francisco HQ to huddle over the…

At the end of its hardware event today, Amazon announced a new program for testing and selling its own experimental, limited-volume hardware: Day 1 Editions. The first of these new…

Two years ago, Oculus announced a radical departure in how they were funding virtual reality developers. Instead of partnering with a ton of upstart teams looking to explore the medium…

At its annual hardware event in Seattle, Amazon today announced Sidewalk, a new low-bandwidth, long-distance wireless protocol the company is developing to connect all of the IoT devices in and…

Amazon had a lot of surprises at this morning’s big event in Seattle. This one, however, we saw coming from a mile away. Echo Buds are the company’s attempt to…