The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Google is acquiring Fitbit for $2.1 billion Google will pay $7.35 per share for the wearables company — an all-cash deal that values Fitbit at $2.1 billion. While Google has invested plenty in its own in-house…
In January 2014Initially, the company existed as a subsidiary of the newly-formed Alphabet Inc., but in early 2018, Google tightened its grip and integrated it directly into its hardware division. Over the next year and a half, Nest became the face and name of Google’s smart home offering, a division that’s grown quickly as Google Home/Google Nest has become one of the top two players in the U.S. smart home…
Google has reached into parent company Alphabet’s $121 billion cash reserves to spend $2.1 billion on Fitbit, a move into the key consumer health market that places them in more direct competition with rival Apple. For more than a year, Ftibit and Google have partnered on healthcare applications; last April, Fitbit announced that it would work with Google’s application programming interface to connect data with electronic medical records via Google’s…
The Versa didn’t Last year’s Versa Lite was, by all accounts, a misstep. The device was an attempt to capitalize on one of the Versa’s strongest selling points: price. It was a miscalculation, however. The discount wasn’t enough to justify the missing features, and Fitbit’s financials took a hit as things finally appeared to be heading in the right direction. By that account, the Versa 2 arrives just in time…
Programming note: Happy Labor Day! To our U.S.-based readers, happy Labor Day weekend. Extra Crunch will be off on Monday and will resume publishing next Tuesday.
Some of the best real-time insights into Tesla and its global fleet of electric vehicles — outside the confines of its Silicon Valley headquarters — might be through the lens of TezLab, a tiny upstart in Brooklyn. Now, a little more than two years after its founding, TezLab is on the verge of hitting what its founders believe is a tipping point of users, a milestone that could finally trigger…
After weeks of sporting “Coming Soon” screens, the New York City MTA’s OMNY pilot finally launched today. The system augments the city’s MetroCard swipes with new contactless screens that work with contactless prepaid credit and debit cards and a variety of different smart devices. We’ve highlighted the latter already. For starters, the system will work with Apple, Google, Samsung and Fitbit Pay, which means it will be open to a…
The Fitbit Inspire HR can do a lot for a relatively low price.Image: Zlata Ivleva / Mashable Fitbit Inspire HR $99.95 The Good Impressive feature lineup for the price • Easy setup • comfortable to wear • Mobile app integration works seamlessly ⚡ Mashable Score 3.5 📘Learning Curve 2.5 💵 Bang for the Buck 4.5
At one time not long ago, Fitbit was the clear leader in digital fitness trackers. That title began slipping from its grasp, however, after the Apple Watch came into existence four years ago. Now Fitbit is second to Apple in smartwatches, and only the fourth largest shipper of wearables worldwide. Fitbit's plan? Make more-affordable wares to lure in new customers. The company's new Versa Lite smartwatch, a simplified version of…
Fitbit has a new fitness tracker, but it’s one that you can’t buy in stores. The company quietly uncorked the Inspire on Friday, releasing its first product that is available only to corporate employees and health insurance members. The idea is to offer a fully subsidized wearable that helps the company dig deeper into the corporate and business worlds. The new devices are available as a wristband with the option of…