Only Products and Other Stuff

If secondary buyers aren't buying shares at more than a $5 billion valuation, it wouldn't be wise for Reddit to price its IPO above that. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome to TechCrunch Crypto. Here’s the biggest news this week: bitcoin’s price jumped and Coinbase’s app crashed, Telegram rolled out a plan to pay out rewards using toncoin and more. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Polestar secured a $950 million loan from a dozen banks, critical funds needed to keep its EV plans moving forward following Volvo’s decision to pull back its financial support of the electric automaker. Polestar said Wednesday the funds were needed to finance the next stage of its development and covers a large majority of its […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Lizcore, a sport tracking startup out of Barcelona, caught our eye on the 4YFN show floor at MWC this week. It’s done what this climber — frankly — thought impossible: Come up with a way to digitize and upgrade the indoor climbing experience that bouldering addicts might actually get on board with. Bouldering gyms that […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

On the heels of Microsoft’s investment and partnership with French Large Language Model startup Mistral AI, the company continues to work hard to try to dispel the image that it’s blocking competition through its deep partnership (and financial stake) in OpenAI. Today the company launched a new framework it’s calling “AI Access Principles” — an eleven-point […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Caller identity company Truecaller has launched its call recording and transcription for paid users in India, the company’s biggest market. The recording feature will be available to premium users on both Android and iOS, with support for English and Hindi transcriptions. In June 2023, the company introduced call recording for premium users in the U.S., […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

TechCrunch Mobility is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free. Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares and I covered […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As humans spend increasing amounts of time indoors, we lose access to the sun’s natural benefits. Recognition of season affective disorder has grown accordingly. While the actual occurrence of the condition is low (around 5% — or 10 million or so Americans),  it’s led to increasing awareness of the sun’s impact on the production of […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The back of your phone is useless. There. I said it. Sure, the cameras are back that, but what about all of that blank real estate monopolizing 90% of the surface area? Honestly, it needs to start carry its weight around here. A fully functioning screen isn’t the answer, however. That’s a lot more battery […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As a part of a multi-part series, TechCrunch is highlighting women innovators — from academics to policymakers — in the field of AI. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter covering noteworthy happenings in the tech industry. This week, Google launched two new open large language models, Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B, in its continued bid for generative AI dominance. The company, which describes the LLMs as “inspired by Gemini,” its flagship family of GenAI […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

 Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Weekend team, we have something both short and sweet for you: A dig into the Reddit IPO filing that came out just after we recorded our […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Reddit’s long-awaited IPO is nearing, promising to be the largest social media IPO since Pinterest. But in the company’s S-1 filing, Reddit fails to fully address the complications that arose from changes to its developer platform and API pricing, which late last year led to site-wide protests, communities going dark, site stability issues, and traffic […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Google said Thursday it plans to roll out the SoundPod, its portable speaker designed to instantly validate and announce successful payments, to small merchants across India over the coming months. The Google Pay expansion in India, where the company is among the mobile payment market leaders, comes even as the firm winds down some of […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Security experts are warning that a high-risk vulnerability in a widely used remote access tool is “trivial and embarrassingly easy” to exploit, as the software’s developer confirms malicious hackers are actively exploiting the flaw. The maximum severity-rated vulnerability affects ConnectWise ScreenConnect (formerly ConnectWise Control), a popular remote access software that allows managed IT providers and […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by Shan-Lyn Ma, the co-founder and CEO of Zola, an online platform for wedding planning and gift registries. Ma talked about why she decided to launch the business after trying to buy a gift for a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The potential sale of MariaDB to K1 Investment Management for $37 million is a capstone on the failed era of SPAC mergers. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A coalition of international law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the U.K.’s National Crime Agency, have disrupted the operations of the prolific LockBit ransomware gang. LockBit’s dark-web leak site — where the group publicly lists its victims and threatens to leak their stolen data unless a ransom demand is paid — was replaced with […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

If you’ve ever traveled in rural areas in France, you may have realized a French peculiarity. Even in the seemingly less populated towns, there’s a hair salon. French startup Planity has been taking advantage of France’s love affair with hair salons to launch a SaaS product for these businesses in particular. Over time, the company […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

In a role reversal, Xalts, a Singapore fintech startup founded 18 months ago, has acquired Contour Network, a digital trade platform set up by eight major banks including HSBC, Standard Chartered and BNP. Terms of the deal were undisclosed, but the acquisition price was in the high single millions and composed of cash and stock. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

TechTaka, a South Korean online shopping fulfillment startup that provides third-party logistics services for e-commerce sellers, has raised $9.5 million (12.6 billion KRW) in a Series B round of funding from a sole investor, Altos Ventures.  The outfit helps e-commerce sellers manage the supply chain, from warehousing, order packing and shipping, so that TechTaka users […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Over 150 investors, including Singapore’s sovereign fund Temasek and Malaysia’s Khazanah, gathered at Mumbai’s five-star Trident Oberoi hotel on a recent Friday for venture firm Lightspeed India Partners’ “Lift Off” summit. The two-day event aims to spark partnerships by enabling “in a short window, many views, ideas and investments to be shared between nC2 connections […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

TechCrunch Mobility is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free. Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. This week’s news includes a BMW security […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare. Earlier this week, the 19-year-old son of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, was found dead at UC Berkeley of an apparent drug overdose, according to his grandmother, Esther Wojcicki. The  news broke widely yesterday, though Wojcicki posted the news to Facebook several days ago, writing: “Tragedy hit my family yesterday. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech (formerly The Interchange)! This week, we’re looking at a new finance-based dating app, Robinhood’s earnings results and the startup in which PayPal Ventures made its first investment. Let’s dive in! To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important fintech stories delivered to your inbox every Sunday at 7:30 a.m. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter covering noteworthy happenings in the tech industry. This week, OpenAI stunned the blogosphere with the release of Sora, a new AI model that can generate videos in impressively high fidelity. We’ve seen video generators before. But what makes Sora unique is its understanding of time […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Leveraging resources such as virtual data rooms and shared labs makes it easier for biotech startups to grow. This is good news: We need more companies attacking cancer from novel angles. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Epic Games is preparing to return to iOS in Europe, as a result of the EU regulation, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the company has now confirmed. The Fortnite maker says it will offer both the game and the Epic Games Stores on mobile in Europe, it shared in a blog post that looked at […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Well, it turns out it’s not a bug that broke iPhone web apps, also known as Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), in the EU. Following developer complaints and press reports about how PWAs were no longer functional in the EU after installing the most recent iOS betas, Apple has updated its website to explain why. No […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The road to the home robot is one fraught with peril. The number of success stories it’s delivered can be counted on a single hand. The reasons for this massive disconnect are nuanced and complex — much like the insides of our homes. Twenty-years after the first Roomba arrived, the robot vacuum has begun to […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Meta is in hot water after announcing plans to remove politics from its recommendations across Instagram and Threads, its new Twitter-like app for text-based posts. That leaves a window of opportunity for the startup Bluesky, whose CEO Jay Graber recently explained that Meta’s decision is emblematic of the types of problems that could emerge when […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Called Regenerative and Circular Operations, this organizational model aims to be a practical approach to integrating sustainability at the core. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

It may be Valentine’s Day here in the U.S., but the dating app market isn’t looking as promising as it used to. According to a new analysis by app intelligence provider data.ai, global downloads of dating apps saw only tepid growth year-over-year as of this January —  a slight increase of just 1.9% to reach […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The fediverse just got a little bigger today as Flipboard has now launched over 1,000 of its social magazines across the decentralized social web, allowing its curators and publishers to reach new audiences. The news follows the magazine app’s December announcement that it would begin to integrate directly with the fediverse, or the decentralized social […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Motif Analytics, a startup specializing in sequence analytics for growth teams, today announced that it has raised a $5.7 million seed funding round led by Felicis and Amplify Partners. InvestInData angel group also participated. At its core Motif helps product teams find the patterns in how users interact with their tools. Simply seeing metrics on […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Ilara Health, a Kenya-based health-tech enabling private clinics to access diagnostic devices and pharmaceutical products, has secured $4.2 million debt-equity in a pre-Series A round. The funds will be used to scale operations in the East African country, and to deepen health care access to the masses through the rollout of a B2B health and […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Peak XV, the venture capital firm that split from Sequoia Capital last year, is taking its portfolio companies from India, Southeast Asia and Australia on an “immersion” trip to Silicon Valley this week to meet several industry titans, the latest in the venture firm’s broadening offerings and networking flex. About 60 founders, many backed by […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

If you needed more evidence that GenAI is prone to making stuff up, Google’s Gemini chatbot, formerly Bard, thinks that the 2024 Super Bowl already happened. It even has the (fictional) statistics to back it up. Per a Reddit thread, Gemini, powered by Google’s GenAI models of the same name, is answering questions about Super […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

TechCrunch Mobility is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free. Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility – your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. This week was a busy one with […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

To understand what’s happening with seed rounds in 2024, TechCrunch+ spoke with three seasoned investors who offered advice for founders looking to raise. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech (formerly The Interchange)! We’re back after a brief hiatus, and I can tell you that judging by the volume of pitches I received last week, venture investing in the fintech space is definitely picking up. This week, we’re looking at Plaid’s latest step toward an IPO, one BNPL company’s financial results, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter that recaps the last few days in tech. This week, social network Bluesky opened for anyone to join — which feels appropriate here in NYC, given the sunshine and unseasonably warm temperatures we’ve been enjoying. For those more inclined to while away the days […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Oregon may soon become the latest state to pass right-to-repair legislation. Last month, Google lent its support in an open letter, calling Senate Bill 1596 “a compelling model for other states to follow.” The bill, sponsored by a sextet of state senators and representatives, was inspired in part by California SB 244, which Governor Gavin […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Twitter/X alternative Bluesky is gearing up for one of the biggest weekends in social media with the launch of custom feeds prepped for Super Bowl fans. One feed focuses on conversations around the big game itself while the other also includes news about Taylor Swift, who’s expected to attend to cheer on her boyfriend, Kansas […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

We’ve finally had our mittens on Apple’s face-wearable computer. And, what can we say, it’s pretty astonishing. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Papaya Global bought a Super Bowl ad slot with the hope of the commercial driving brand recognition for the software company. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Hackers have begun mass exploiting a third vulnerability affecting Ivanti’s widely used enterprise VPN appliance, new public data shows. Last week, Ivanti said it had discovered two new security flaws — tracked as CVE-2024-21888 and CVE-2024-21893 — affecting Connect Secure, its remote access VPN solution used by thousands of corporations and large organizations worldwide. According […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The NFT space has lost a lot of its sparkle over the past few years, but that hasn’t stopped some founders, investors and projects from trucking along in hopes of another surge. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

After former Fox News TV host Tucker Carlson announced on X he would be interviewing Russian president Vladimir Putin, downloads of the app formerly known as Twitter jumped, sending X to the top of the U.S. App Store overnight. Multiple outlets on Wednesday, including Reuters, the AP, and The New York Times, have confirmed that […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

To write about an Angry Miao keyboard always means to write about the design as much as the actual typing experience. Just look at the AM AFA or AM Hatsu. For the longest time, I’ve wondered what a more restrained offering from the company would look like. The AM 65 Less came close, but the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber says that her job is like being a substitute teacher. It’s not what you’d expect from the head of an experimental, up-and-coming social platform, but it makes sense: there’s a lot of pressure, and a mischievous audience is eager to poke and prod at any crack in your armor until you […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

It’s been hard to avoid news about the Apple Vision Pro, the company’s entry into the virtual reality market, in recent days. It was officially released on Friday to much fanfare, but how will it fare in the enterprise? It’s way too early to say, but the company is doing everything possible to make it […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Intuitive Machines is ready to go to the moon. The company announced Monday that its first lunar lander has completed all final integration milestones and is now encapsulated in SpaceX’s Falcon 9 payload fairing, where it will stay until launch on February 14. The mission launch window opens at 12:57 a.m. EST; should weather or […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. Happy Monday, everyone! © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The recent surprise announcement that Meta will soon be shutting down a Facebook Groups API is throwing some businesses and social media marketers into disarray. On January 23rd, Meta announced the release of its Facebook Graph API v19.0, which included the news that the company would be deprecating its existing Facebook Groups API. The latter, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Naboo, a French company that was created just a couple of years ago, is trying to create a modern online experience for company seminar planning. The startup recently raised an $8 million funding round (€7.5 million) and already processes more than $1.5 million in transaction volume per month. On paper, Naboo is quite simple. It’s […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Shares of Paytm plunged 10% on Monday, the third consecutive session of declines, touching an all-time low of 438.35 Indian rupees (or $5.28) after the RBI’s clampdown last week looks to have had a more extensive impact than previously anticipated. The trading was halted after Paytm’s shares fell 10%, the artificial limit put on its […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

TechCrunch Mobility is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free. Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility – your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. This week, read about autonomous vehicle company […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A survey of TechCrunch readers reveals that while the spot ETFs may boost bitcoin's price, they may not be attracting many people who don't own bitcoin. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Last week, at a StrictlyVC event in San Francisco, we sat down with Mamoon Hamid and Ilya Fushman, two longtime VCs whose paths first crossed as children in Frankfurt, Germany, and who were brought in to reboot the storied venture firm Kleiner Perkins roughly six years ago. They’ve seemingly accomplished their mission to burnish the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter that recaps the week in tech that was. And, boy, was it a week. Lots happened — let’s dig in. As layoffs in tech picked up, the Vision Pro, Apple’s attempt at an AR headset, launched with hundreds of apps right out the gate. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

"I’m not anti-speculation, but I think it’s a question of priorities... It’s putting the cart before the horse." © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Hello and welcome back to the third edition of the new and improved TechCrunch Crypto newsletter. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

At its WWDC 2023 conference, Apple took the wraps off the Vision Pro, its long-rumored augmented reality (AR) headset. The Vision Pro is one of Apple’s most ambitious products to date — one year in the making and packed with technology, including a new operating system, visionOS, that might just warrant the sky-high price tag. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Snap and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) are recalling the company’s discontinued Pixy drone and telling owners to stop using it or charging the batteries because of a fire hazard. This comes after the safety agency received “four reports of the battery overheating and bulging, resulting in one minor battery fire and one minor […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.