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1. PayPal to acquire shopping and rewards platform Honey for $4B
Currently, Honey’s 17 million monthly active users take advantage of its suite of money-saving tools to track prices, get alerts, make lists, browse offers and participate in a rewards program called Honey Gold.
The acquisition, which is PayPal’s largest to date, will give the payments giant a foothold earlier in the customer’s shopping journey. Instead of only competing on the checkout page against credit cards or Apple Pay, for example, PayPal will leap ahead to become a part of the deal discovery process, as well.
2. Alphabet’s Loon signs deal with Telefonica to provide internet to remote parts of the Amazon
Loon is Alphabet’s high-altitude balloon company that is using its stratospheric technology to provide internet connectivity on Earth. This is Loon’s third commercial contract, including one with Telkom Kenya which is also awaiting final regulatory sign-off, and an arrangement with Canadian company Telecast to develop a coordination system for a future planned low-Earth orbit satellite constellation.
3. Apple expands and updates its ‘Everyone Can Code’ program
The company says it has redesigned the “Everyone Can Code” curriculum with a focus on introducing coding to more elementary and middle school students, while also adding more resources for teachers, a new student guide and refreshed Swift Coding Club materials.
4. G Suite users get more AI writing help, Google Assistant calendar integration and more
Unlike other grammar tools, Google’s version utilizes a neural network approach to detect potential grammar issues in your text — similar to the techniques used for building effective machine translation models. The company is also bringing to Docs the same autocorrect feature it already uses in Gmail.
5. Announcing TechCrunch Early Stage, a new event series all about founders
Our TC Early Stage events will be smaller (and more affordable) than Disrupt, with a focus on giving early-stage founders the information they need to be successful. The first will be in San Francisco on April 28, followed by one in Paris on October 28 and another in New York City (date TBA, but hey, we’re coming back to NYC!).
6. Sonos acquires voice assistant startup Snips, potentially to build out on-device voice control
Snips, which had been developing dedicated smart device assistants that can operate locally (instead of relying on consistently round-tripping voice data to the cloud) could help Sonos set up a voice control option for its customers that has better privacy and is focused more narrowly on music control.
7. Reimagine inside sales to ramp up B2B customer acquisition
User-first products are driving rapid company growth in an era where individuals discover, adopt and share software they like throughout their organizations. This is great if you’re a Slack, Shopify or Dropbox — but what if your company doesn’t fit that profile? (Extra Crunch membership required.)
