Nuggs, the alternative-meat company founded by serial entrepreneur Ben Pasternak (who previously co-founded the social media app Monkey), has raised $4.1 million and gotten itself a new name and a new CTO as it looks to move beyond chicken nuggets.

Now called Simulate, Pasternak's startup is readying the launch of new products including spicy nuggets, a “chicken burger product” and, eventually, a hot dog, that required a branding change to befit its newly broadened ambitions in the ultra-competitive industry out to reform consumers' carnivorous impulses.

Since Pasternak first began pitching his direct to consumer chicken nugget replacements a bit over [...]

Gone — or at least on hold for a long while — are the days of hanging around a coffee shop, poking around the Internet on the free WiFi while sipping the same coffee for three hours. The entire idea feels kind of alien right now. A little anxiety-inducing, even.

But coffee shops still want to find ways to safely stay in business, and people still want their coffee. With many states limiting orders to pickup/to-go, mobile ordering is seeing a massive uptick across the food industry. That's great for Starbucks and anyone else who already had mobile ordering in place, [...]

Updated with Google's full statement

After reportedly spending a year and a half working on a cloud service meant for China and other countries, Google cancelled the project, called “Isolated Region,” in May due partly to geopolitical and pandemic-related concerns. Bloomberg reports that Isolated Region, shut down in May, would have enabled it to offer cloud services in countries that want to keep and control data within their borders.

According to two Google employees who spoke to Bloomberg, the project was part of a larger initiative called “Sharded Google” to create data and [...]

Ashmeet Sidana, a longtime VC who struck out on his own in 2015 to form Engineering Capital, just closed his third and newest fund with $60 million in capital commitments from a university endowment, a fund of funds, and three foundations.

Sidana — who previously spent nearly nine years with Foundation Capital and received one of his first limited partner agreements afterward from Foundation's legendary founder, Kathryn Gould — says the fund came together despite the pandemic without too much pain.

That's thanks in part to Sidana's track record, including the sale of the cloud monitoring startup SignalFx [...]

The Independence Day weekend was a big one for Quibi, it was time to see how many of their earliest subscribers would convert from free users to paid subscribers.

Early reports indicate that the streaming service held onto some subscribers through that period, but perhaps at a lesser rate than recently launched rival services. Data provided to TechCrunch by Sensor Tower estimates that around 8% of the 910,000 users who signed up for a free trial of Quibi in the app's first three days stuck with the service past the expiration of the three-month free trial period. All-in-all Sensor Tower approximates [...]

Say what?

The enormous challenge ahead.

"There is no quick fix."

Even in mild cases of coronavirus.

The trees have witnessed everything.