Techcrunch blog!: Daily Crunch - Thanksgiving online shopping spikes in 2019

Friday, November 29, 2019 • By Darrell Etherington

Black Friday! Consumerism!

It’s that time of year when things are discounted, mostly all at once, and among all those things there is a subsection of things that is probably actually worth purchasing, especially if you genuinely have a use for it and it’s not typically on sale at any other time of the year.

That day also just happens to come right after Thanksgiving, which is slowing being absorbed into Black Friday and the amalgam entity it has formed with the increasingly meaninglessly-named Cyber Monday. But things are still happening in technology news, as you can see in The Daily Crunch today.

Thanksgiving shopping tops $4.2 billion

Yeah a lot of people aren’t waiting for Black Friday to buy stuff online this year – early 15% more stuff than last year, in fact. And it’s unsurprisingly happening more on mobile.

Is this good? It is if you’re in the e-commerce business. It probably isn’t if you bought another discounted gadget that will go into a drawer or closet, never to be retrieved.

Thanksgiving shopping tops $4.2 billion image

Image Credits: imagedepotpro / Getty Images

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Mixcloud data breach exposes 20 million user records

The Mixcloud data breach happened in November, and TechCrunch’s Zack Whittaker broke the story today. 20 million is a lot of records, and the UK-based streaming platform hasn’t said anything about the dump just yet. The good news is that the passwords data exploded appears to be SHA-2 scrambled, which means there are slim chances of unscrambling those passwords.

Intel says Qualcomm unfairly killed its modem business

Intel isn’t mincing words: It places the blame squarely on Qualcomm’s licensing practices as having killed the modem business it spent many years and billions of dollars to build, only to then sell the scraps to Apple after being unable to turn it into a going concern.

Pixpay aims to take on big banks with a focus on teens

Teens as the basis for an upstart banking business? Maybe those teens end up being lucrative eventually, but it does seem like a small market to get started with.

This startup is attracting investment by tracking your food via AI

Foodvisor has raised $4.5 million on the back of 2 million app downloads, based on the concept that people will want to trust deep learning-based algorithms to identify their food and tell them about it. Which, of course, means it’ll have lots of data direct from users about what they’re actually consuming on a daily basis, if all goes to plan.

Will the future of work be ethical?

Extra Crunch’s Greg Epstein kicks off a series with a look at ethics and the future of work, the initial and very extensive anchor piece of which is free for all to read. He dives into more specific perspectives in additional Extra Crunch paywalled content, if this very detailed overview leaves you wanting more.