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The new Netflix film “The White Tiger” tells the story of Balram, who is born to a poor family in the Indian village of Laxmangarh and escapes by using his intelligence and determination, ultimately becoming a successful entrepreneur in Bangalore. The viewers knows this from the start, as Balram (played by Adarsh Gourav) narrates his life story in an email, apparently written to explain his success to China’s visiting head of state. That narration is one of the best things about the movie, providing plenty of black comedy while also allowing Balram to justify his choices in what — by his own admission — is an increasingly disturbing story. As we explain in the latest episode of the Original Content podcast , “The White Tiger” makes a convincing case for the ruthlessness needed to escape from poverty, while also painting a damning portrait of Balram’s employers, the American-educated Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) and Pinky (Priyanka Chopra Jonas), whose ostensible warmth and compassion only g...

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch , but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning? Sign up here . What a week. What a month . Are you doing all right? It’s okay if you are tired. We all are. That’s why we have weekends. Let’s reflect on what happened this week: Individual traders outraged more professional investors by doing something hilarious, namely taking a trade that made some sense — betting that an atrophying physical retailer was going to continue obsolesce — and inverting it. By going long on GameStop, investors flipped the script on the smart money. Then all heck snapped free, some stocks got blocked on trading services , Congress got mad, billionaires started to front on Twitter like they were the Common Man, some cryptos surged, including Dogecoin of all things, and as we headed into the weekend nothing was tr...

Still figuring out what this newsletter is, I’m torn between aggregation and writing. The inputs vary from blog posts, Twitter threads, and the occasional video. Podcasting seems oddly muzzled by the acceleration of streaming. Blog posts are a misnomer; professional blogs represent the bulk of news and media citations, not usually the single voices of RSS yore. Linear media is bifurcated between quick takes like The Recount and user tweets of streaming cable news. Podcasting meets longer form streaming with live casting on Facebook Live, Twitter (formerly Periscope), YouTube, and nascent LinkedIn live. As I discovered during a Restreamed recording session of the Gang, the Facebook Live version includes realtime captioning. On this version of the show, recorded four days before the Inauguration of the Biden presidency, a familiar mood radiates from the Zoomcast. Anxiety, tinged with doubt that we will escape the grip of the pandemic any time soon, or the blight of Trump-o-nomics at ...

When Robinhood, a startup that promises to make finance accessible for all, temporarily limited trading on GameStop, AMC, and other memestocks, many retail investors were pissed that the fintech darling suddenly didn’t live up to its name. The specific reasons may have been short-term and technical , but the choice looked corrupt to the average person. Here’s why: The presence of a massive hedge fund as a main Robinhood partner and supporter of the short-sellers is exactly what Robinhood users are rallying against. The obvious conflict shows that “democratizing finance” was always somewhat of an ironic tagline. Retail investors are already pouring into competitor apps like Public and Webull , and looking for more shorts to take on. What can other startups learn? Here are some lessons : First, the push for decentralized systems will become more aggressive, positioning startups in the cryptocurrency and overall DeFi space well. On Thursday, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian spoke to ...

Welcome back to This Week in Apps,  the weekly TechCrunch series  that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also  spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone. And in the U.S., app usage surged ahead of the time spent watching live TV. Currently, the average American watches 3.7 hours of live TV per day, but now spends four hours per day on their mobile devices. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re also a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a  combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus. In 2020, investors poured  $73 billion in capital into mobile companies — a figure that’s up 27% year-over-year. This week, we’re taking a look at the biggest news in the world of apps, including ...