The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every Saturday in your inbox.  Hello and welcome back to The Station, a newsletter dedicated to all the present and future ways people and packages move from Point A to Point B. It’s that whacky time of year when the heavens open and earnings fall from the sky, giving us precious insight into publicly traded companies. Over at TechCrunch we closely follow startups; we also keep an eye on publicly traded companies — a list that is growing in this summer of t ..read more

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. After the morning show went out, the Equity crew could not shut up about the Qualtrics-SAP deal, so we had no choice but to jump back into recording mode for an off-the-cuff Equity Shot. As always, Shots are short-form Equity episodes that focus on a single, news topic. Why is SAP spinning Qualtrics out via an IPO? Building off of Danny’s SAP knowledge, Natasha’s curiosity about the future Qualtrics S-1, and my own recent dive into the SAP and Qualtrics nu ..read more

As a result of the pandemic, accelerators have moved operations fully remote to abide by social distancing. The shift has forced well-known programs like 500 Startups, Y Combinator and Techstars to go fully online, while encouraging existing venture capital firms to launch new digital-only fellowships like Cleo Capital and NextView Ventures. Before the pandemic, accelerators could advertise their value by lending desk space once used by Airbnb, Twilio and Brex’s co-founders, plus a glitzy demo day. Now, stripped of their in-person element, the actual value of an accelerator program — and the n ..read more

Sport and fitness tech giant Garmin has confirmed its five-day outage was caused by a ransomware attack. In a brief statement on Monday, the company said it was hit by a cyberattack on July 23 that “encrypted some of our systems.” “As a result, many of our online services were interrupted including website functions, customer support, customer facing applications and company communications,” the statement read. “We immediately began to assess the nature of the attack and started remediation.” Garmin said it had “no indication” that customer data was accessed, lost or stolen. The company said i ..read more

Tech companies are increasingly finding that accessibility isn’t a widget you plug into an otherwise final product, but something that’s integrated from the very beginning of development — but that takes resources few possess. Fable hopes to make disability-inclusive design easier by providing testing and development assistance from disabled folks on-demand and has raised a $1.5M seed round to do it. “The person who experiences this problem is usually the best one to solve it,” Alwar Pillai, co-founder of Fable, told TechCrunch. But that’s rarely how it works with accessibility features. More ..read more

We’re T-minus five and counting, startup fans — counting the days you have left to save up to $300 on passes to Disrupt 2020. The early-bird clock stops ticking on July 31 precisely at 11:59 p.m. PT. Be a savvy saver. Beat the clock, buy your pass and keep that extra cash in your wallet. Disrupt 2020 runs from September 14-18 giving you five magnificent days to meet attendees from around the world, explore new technologies, discover the latest trends, expand your startup knowledge and connect with the people who can help your business grow. Let’s talk about two of the main features of Disrupt ..read more

Stanford’s success in spinning out startup founders is a well-known adage in Silicon Valley, with alumni founding companies like Google, Cisco, Cloudflare, LinkedIn, Youtube, Snapchat, Instagram, and yes, even TechCrunch. And venture capitalists routinely back more founders coming out of the Stanford business program than any other university in the country. One group of Stanford graduate students is well-aware of their favorable odds, and think that they should be able to cash in their classmates, too — not just accredited investors and the super-wealthy. They have put together, Stanford 2020 ..read more

Over the weekend, software giant SAP announced that it will take Qualtrics public, with the German software company retaining a majority stake in the Utah-based “experience management” firm after its forthcoming debut. SAP paid $8 billion in cash for Qualtrics back in 2018, right before the smaller firm was set to go public. Chatting with the CEOs of both companies around the time of the deal, they were pretty pumped about the combination. Since then, SAP has swapped CEOs. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange news ..read more

Analogue has repeatedly proven that it’s the gold standard when it comes to retro gaming, delivering extremely faithful, but modern hardware to play original NES, SNES, Sega cartridges and more. The company revealed its forthcoming Analogue Pocket last October, and now it’s about to kick off pre-orders for the portable classic console, which can play Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance games out of the box, and works with even more classic handheld game systems via adapters. The Analogue Pocket will be available to pre-order for $199.99 on August 3, starting at 8 AM PST (11 AM EST ..read more

Smart assistants are sensitive to their wake words but who among us doesn’t trigger the smart speakers in their house with alarming frequency? Add in some heavily detailed privacy mishaps and a general feeling of distrust and there’s plenty of reason you might want to silence your smart speaker, occasionally. A new device promises to do just that, placing a check on your Amazon Echo’s always-on microphones through ultrasonic jamming. The gadget, dubbed Alexagate, is the latest drop from hype-as-a-service startup MSCHF. Last month, the startup announced a partnership with YouTuber MrBeast and a ..read more