Only Products and Other Stuff

Nearly 20 years after the release of the first e-reader, the category isn’t exactly a hotbed of activity. Amazon has ruled the roost for over a decade now, in spite of the best efforts of companies like Kobo (Rakuten) and what remains of Barnes & Noble’s hardware efforts. This week at MWC, embattled hardware maker Huawei announced that it’s getting in on the action with the MatePad Paper. With a 10.3-inch E Ink display and the ability to take notes with the company’s M-Pencil writing tool, offerings from reMarkable could ultimately be the best comparison point. Reviewing that company’s latest product , Devin noted that the product “remains firmly in its niche” — which has been a bit of a theme with e ink products outside the Kindle universe. Huawei’s hoping to push through with a device aimed at being a little bit of everything. At its heart, it’s a massively sized reader with access to the 2 million or so titles in the Huawei Books store, as well as various other file types, in...

Kyle Vogt, who co-founded Cruise and ran the startup for years following GM’s acquisition in 2016, is back in charge. Vogt made the announcement Monday via a tweet. Some fun news: I have formally accepted the CEO job at @Cruise once again. — Kyle Vogt (@kvogt) February 28, 2022   The formal announcement comes more than three months after Cruise CEO Dan Ammann, a longtime executive at GM who had been tapped as CEO in 2018, suddenly left the company . Vogt, who had been president and CTO, took over as interim CEO after Ammann left. Vogt will keep his CTO title, the company confirmed. GM and Cruise have never provided details about why Ammann left, however his departure was unexpected and came as a surprise to Cruise employees. When Ammann was first named CEO in 2018, the move was pitched as a natural progression for a company aiming to commercialize. Ammann was at the center of GM’s initial investment and acquisition of Cruise. He oversaw GM’s relationship with ...

Food tech company Better Dairy is closer to getting its aged and hard cheeses into the testing phase after securing $22 million in Series A funding. The U.K.-based company, founded in 2019 by Jevan Nagarajah, is still in the R&D phase of developing animal-free cheeses using precision fermentation. We initially got to know Nagarajah and Better Dairy back in 2020 when the company raised £1.6 million in seed funding in a round led by Happiness Capital. At the time, he explained that animal-based dairy farming was “hugely unsustainable,” needing 650 liters of water to produce just 1 liter of milk and utilizing a process that emits the equivalent of over 1.7 billion tonnes of CO 2 into the atmosphere each year. Instead, Better Dairy is using precision fermentation to produce products that are molecularly identical to traditional dairy, Nagarajah said. The process is similar to brewing beer, with the end result being dairy. While other food tech companies are tackling softer chee...

FPL Technologies, the Indian startup that operates OneCard, is set to double its valuation to about $1.5 billion in a new financing round, just a month after it disclosed its previous funding, according to three sources familiar with the matter. Temasek is in advanced stages of talks to lead a new financing round of Pune-headquartered startup, the sources said, requesting anonymity as the deliberation is ongoing and private. The size of the round is over $100 million, two sources said. OneCard declined to comment whereas Temasek did not immediately return a request. The new round follows a $75 million Series C funding that OneCard disclosed last month. The Series C round, led by QED, valued OneCard at about $750 million. Founded by banking veterans, OneCard operates a mobile-first credit card. Its cards come without any joining or annual fee and give customers more control and flexibility over how and where they transact. It also offers a range of personalized rewards and loans t...

After dominating the world of high-end mobile processors for so long, Qualcomm’s got a laptop it would like to sell you. Announced at the tail end of last year as part of the annual Snapdragon summit, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 marks the chipmaker’s latest foray into the world of laptop components. As the name suggests, this marks Qualcomm’s third major foray into the category. It arrives at time when Apple in-house chip production has given way to its own ARM-based laptop chips — to some pretty spectacular performance results. Qualcomm is hoping to do the same, leveraging mobile performance games into a Windows 11 Pro-based laptop. Image Credits: Lenovo As rumors swirl around a Microsoft Surface device built around the platform, Lenovo just used Mobile World Congress to launch its own device, the ThinkPad X13s. The advantages of the platform are apparent at first glance — adhering to the longstanding promises of shifting to ARM architecture in a laptop form factor. Namely, it’s s...

Future Retail, India’s second largest retail chain, is scaling down its operations to reduce losses, it said, the latest casualty in its years-long battle with estranged partner Amazon. The firm, led by Kishore Biyani, said in filings to the stock exchanges that it has been finding it “difficult to finance the working capital needs,” and its losses at store level are “increasing” and of “grave concern.” Future Retail has lost about $593 million in the last four quarters, it said in the filings. The admission follows a local media report that said Reliance Industries – which entered into a now-hotly contested $3.4 billion deal to acquire several operations of Future Retail – was taking over about 200 of Future’s 1,700 stores and absorbing as many as 30,000 workers of the smaller retail giant after brokering deals with landlords. Reliance will rebrand those outlets as its own, Business Standard reported. Reliance Industries had no comment. India’s Future Retail operates over 1,7...

As Ukraine continues to make efforts to mobilize and equip ordinary citizens on the ground to resist Russia’s unprovoked invasion of the country, those who are outside Ukraine who want to help are being asked to get involved in the fight in the virtual world. While the G7 (today with the addition of Japan ) mobilize to shut down Russia’s access to the Swift banking system, the country has been running campaign corralling developers to join an “IT army” tasked with specific cyber challenges. It’s also making specific calls to technology leaders to do their part, too. The “ IT Army of Ukraine “, announced yesterday and already with nearly 184,000 users on its main Telegram channel (and that number is growing – it gained almost 10,000 users in the time I wrote this story), is using that account to name specific projects and call-outs for help to shut down Russian sites, Russian agents and those working in concert with the country, and to mobilize those living in Ukraine around work ...

Reface , an a16z-backed synthetic media app that’s developed out of Ukraine, has added push notifications informing its ~200 million-strong global user-base about Russia’s invasion of the country — urging people to #StandWithUkraine, including by watermarking face-swapped videos created with the app. All videos created in the app are now being watermarked with the Ukrainian flag and the #StandWithUkraine hashtag. On first opening the app after this update, it also displays an image of civilians sheltering in Kyiv, with a caption that describes the picture as “evidence” of Russia attacking Ukraine. The message also calls for Russia to be excluded from the SWIFT international banking payment system — in order to “stop the war”. Reface said another incoming update to the app will urge all users to “Make a statement against war in Ukraine”. It is also pointing users towards resources where they can help Ukraine. [gallery ids="2277190,2277232"] The startup began the anti...

Welcome to my new weekly fintech focused column. I’ll be publishing this every Sunday, so in between posts, be sure to listen to the Equity podcast and hear Alex Wilhelm , Natasha Mascarenhas and me riff on all things startups! And if you want to have this hit your inbox directly once it turns into a newsletter (soon!), sign up here . It’s been really tough concentrating during the latter part of this week due to global events so forgive me if my tone is less upbeat than normal. My heart goes out to all of the people of Ukraine and our TechCrunch readers there. This week, I wrote about a couple of instances in which fintech companies went horizontal with their approach. Pipe, which aims to be the “Nasdaq for revenue,” announced it was expanding into media and entertainment. And corporate spend startup Ramp told TC exclusively it is branching out in the travel space . Truth be told, Pipe’s foray into media and entertainment was a bit of a surprise and it will be interestin...

Step aside, whatever “ Pokémon Café Remix” is — the ninth generation of Pokémon is coming. This morning, a Pokémon Presents broadcast announced “Pokémon Scarlet and Violet,” the latest installment in the main series Pokémon games after “Pokémon Sword and Shield” came out in late 2019. The Nintendo Switch games are expected to be released in late 2022. Check out the extremely dramatic trailer here: From the trailer, the graphics look similar to the recently released (and very fun) “Pokémon Legends: Arceus,” but the footage may not show actual gameplay, so it’s still up in the air if we’ll encounter over-world Pokémon again (that implementation worked in “Arceus,” but let’s not pull a “Pokémon Let’s Go” again, please.) But, the YouTube description of the trailer declares, “Welcome to the open world of Pokémon,” so maybe this game will take a nod from “Arceus” (which isn’t technically an open world game, but it’s the closest thing the Pokémon franchise has to a “Breath of the Wild”...

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. I’m doing an abbreviated newsletter this week as I want to spend most of my energy amplifying the brave journalists on the ground reporting about this scary time. As so many have said — far more eloquently than me — the invasion of Ukraine is a story that impacts all of us, whether we’re on the ground there or not. And it’s hard to celebrate a funding round when scary times are the moment. My brilliant colleagues put together a story on how the tech industry is responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ; I urge you to read it. While the situation is still ongoing, it’s clear that it’s already a tech story. And startups such as Grammarly, Ajax, People AI and Preply, backed by some of the world’s biggest VCs, are scrambling to support employees and operations amid the invasion. What I’m hearing from sources is that startup founders are mainly offer...

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 number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the latest year-end reports . App Annie says global spending across iOS, Google Play and third-party Android app stores in China grew 19% in 2021 to reach $170 billion. Downloads of apps also grew by 5%, reaching 230 billion in 2021 and mobile ad spend grew 23% year-over-year to reach $295 billion. In addition, consumers are spending more time in apps than ever before — even topping the time they spend watching TV, in some cases. The average American watches 3.1 hours of TV per day, for example, but in 2021, they spent 4.1 hours on their mobile device. And they’re not even the world’s heaviest mobile users. In markets like Brazil, Indonesia, and South Korea, users ...