Only Products and Other Stuff

Two mobile operating systems currently comprise nearly 100% of the global smartphone market. Building one is hard, and for most phone makers, there are better uses of resources, especially when Android is right there for the taking. While it’s a potential differentiator, these companies have largely opted to maintain Google’s mobile OS, customized by skins and […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Old ideas like you need $100 million worth of trailing revenue to go public, and $1 million worth of annual recurring revenue to raise a Series A are so old that they are practically perched atop Abe Lincoln’s head.In today’s market, what a startup needs to raise depends on its sector, founder profile, and, yes, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Cyberattacks are inevitable, but disasters are avoidable.Listen as experienced security defenders Heather Gantt-Evans, CISO of Marqeta, and Darren Gruber, MongoDB’s Technical Advisor in the Office of Security and Trust, discuss what you need to know to get ahead of cyberattackers before they strike. Subscribe for more on YouTube: https://tcrn.ch/youtube Follow TechCrunch on Instagram: https://ift.tt/z8VljWs TikTok: […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Fresh off a $1 billion funding round, Wiz has shot to fame as one of the fastest-growing, impactful cloud security startups ever. And one of the most sought after: earlier this year it rebuffed a $23 billion M&A offer from Google. Watch and learn to Wiz’s CEO Assaf Rappaport talk about his journey as a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Indian fintech startup Slice has completed its merger with North East Small Finance Bank, marking a rare instance of a startup successfully entering India’s tightly regulated banking sector. The merger, first proposed last year, transforms the Bengaluru-based startup into a banking entity, following months of regulatory scrutiny that has reshaped India’s fintech landscape. Slice, which […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The popularity of an Instagram video can affect its actual video quality: According to Adam Mosseri (the Meta executive who leads Instagram and Threads), videos that are more popular get shown in higher quality, while less popular videos get shown in lower quality. In a video (via The Verge), Mosseri said Instagram tries to show […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The Mac mini will be getting an upgrade this week, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The mini is Apple’s desktop computer (really just a small gray box) positioned between the consumer iMac and the company’s professional-grade desktops. The new mini is reportedly getting smaller — nearly the size of an Apple TV set-top box. It […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

While many venture investors, and likely their LPs, were hoping IPOs were going to come back in 2024, that hasn’t happened and isn’t likely to in the next two months. NASDAQ CEO Adena Friedman isn’t surprised. Friedman said at Axios’s BFD event on Tuesday that while on paper the public markets have been experiencing a spectacular year […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Software engineers, developers, and academic researchers have serious concerns about transcriptions from OpenAI’s Whisper, according to a report in the Associated Press. While there’s been no shortage of discussion around generative AI’s tendency to hallucinate — basically, to make stuff up — it’s a bit surprising that this is an issue in transcription, where you’d […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A federal jury ruled Friday that Masimo smartwatches infringed Apple patents, but Apple isn’t getting a big payday. Bloomberg Law reports that the company was only seeking the statutory minimum of $250, and that’s all it was awarded. Apple’s attorney John Desmarais reportedly told jurors, “We’re not here for the money.” Instead, he said the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

OpenAI says that it doesn’t intend to release an AI model code-named Orion this year, countering recent reporting on the company’s product roadmap. “We don’t have plans to release a model code-named Orion this year,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch via email. “We do plan to release a lot of other great technology.” The Verge reported […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Electric motorcycle company Zero is in the process of closing a new funding round for a little bit more than $120 million, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing shows that Zero has sold around $100 million of the equity round so far from two undisclosed investors. The company […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Police surveillance startup Flock Safety announced that it had bought drone software startup Aerodome for over $300 million. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

OpenAI has hired its first chief economist: Aaron Chatterji, formerly the chief economist at the Commerce Department under President Joe Biden and a senior economist in President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. Chatterji, who’s also a professor of business and public policy at Duke, will study AI’s economic impacts at OpenAI, leading research into how […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As competition from newcomers like Bluesky and Threads increases, X on Monday launched a “Radar” trend analysis tool that aims to offer subscribers real-time insights into emerging trends and conversations on the platform. The tool, previously known as Insights, was initially targeted at Verified Organizations (businesses), allowing marketers to track topics and trends on the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A fledgling startup is setting out to become one of Europe’s first “AI compute” hyperscalers, with renewable energy playing a pivotal part in its pitch to prospective customers. The AI goldrush has spurred unprecedented demand for “compute,” which refers to the processing power, infrastructure and resources needed for tasks such as running algorithms, executing machine […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

AI search engine Perplexity is in fundraising talks and hopes to raise around $500 million at an $8 billion valuation, according to the Wall Street Journal. If a deal happens with those terms, it would more than double Perplexity’s valuation from its $3 billion valuation when it raised from SoftBank over the summer. The WSJ […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

This is part of TechCrunch’s ongoing Women in AI series, which seeks to give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved time in the spotlight. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The funnest car I ever drove was the original Tesla Roadster. This was in 2011, back when Elon Musk’s EV company was courting press instead of denigrating us, and they offered me a test drive. I took the car up I-280 — a beautiful, mostly deserted highway with perfectly banked curves that seemed designed for Silicon […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Penguin Random House, the world’s largest trade publisher, will be adding language to the copyright pages of its books to prohibit the use of those books to train AI. The Bookseller reports that new books and reprints of older titles from the publisher will now include the statement, “No part of this book may be […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week brought us some exciting fundraising news from around the world, and even some exits. But if you are looking for tech IPOs, you will have […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Thursday that Prabhakar Raghavan, the executive in charge of the company’s search engine and ads products, is leaving his role. Longtime Google executive Nick Fox will replace Raghavan, who will now take on the role of chief technologist. “Prabhakar has decided it’s time to make a big leap in […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Elias Torres has achieved a lot for somebody who immigrated to the US from Nicaragua at 17 without knowing any English. He served as a VP of engineering at HubSpot before co-founding Drift, a company that sold to Vista Equity for about $1.2 billion in 2021. “It’s very rare to get this far, but I’m […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Fisker’s plan to liquidate its assets has been accepted by the bankruptcy court in Delaware. And with it, the issue of who should pay for labor costs associated with a pair of recalls on the bankrupt EV startup’s SUVs is finally settled. Fisker has also reached a deal with American Lease, the buyer of its […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

MAB Robotics Tuesday showcased the latest trick from its Honey Badger robot. In a video, the quadruped is seen running along the bottom of a pool. Legs don’t generally make more sense than propellers or other more standard methods of underwater robot locomotion, but the video demonstrates a sense of robustness and dynamism not often […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Alert management for developers and ops teams may seem like a solved problem. Notifying an on-call engineer isn’t exactly difficult anymore, after all. But the real question has become when to alert the right person and how to help them when a service goes down, for example. Many are turning to AI to solve some […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

With the deal, Google joins Microsoft and Amazon in turning to nuclear power to satiate its thirst for electricity. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Josh Buckley, the former CEO of Product Hunt, is aiming to raise a fourth $250 million fund for his venture capital firm, Buckley Ventures, according to a regulatory filing. Buckley’s ambitions for this fund are significantly lower than for his previous one. He sought to raise a $500 million third fund in February, 2022, right […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Table Space is targeting a valuation of $2.5 billion or higher for an India IPO planned planned for 2025. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

If you’re starting a fintech company, there’s a new, small early-stage fund looking for investment opportunities. Founded by Anthony Danon (pictured above), Rerail could be called a micro-fund, a solo GP fund, or an angel fund. Danon has been an investor for the past 10 years. He started his career with Anthemis Group in London […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

One of the most attention-grabbing aspects of “Roadrunner,” the Morgan Neville-directed documentary about Anthony Bourdain, was Neville’s use of generative AI to replicate Bourdain’s voice. Looking back now, Neville told Wired that he saw this as a “fun” way to “keep [Bourdain’s] voice going in the film.” But his approach drew intense criticism — while […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

When you think of brain stimulating medtech, startups building wearables as therapeutics probably aren’t the first thing that springs to mind. Such tech is still flying fairly under the radar — perhaps, in part, because these sorts of companies have raised a fraction of the investment that’s been ploughed into invasive technologies for targeting treatments […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

AI pioneer Yann LeCun doesn’t think artificial intelligence is actually on the verge of becoming intelligent. LeCun — a professor at New York University, senior researcher at Meta, and winner of the prestigious A.M. Turning Award — has been open about his skepticism before, for example tweeting that before we worry about controlling super-intelligent AI, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The dispute between WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and hosting provider WP Engine continues, with Mullenweg announcing that WordPress is “forking” a plugin developed by WP Engine. Specifically, Advanced Custom Fields — a plugin making it easier for WordPress users to customize their edit screens — is being taken out of WP Engine’s hands and updated […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, we’re taking a closer look at Tesla’s Cybercab and Robovan reveals, the “complete disarray” at Fisker HQ, and a horrifying side effect of living in our modern world: AI summaries of your breakup texts. Let’s do this. Tesla finally revealed its Cybercab robotaxi. Unveiled at the company’s […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Khosla Ventures has raised $405 million for OpenAI, according to a regulatory filing. Based on the filing alone, Khosla’s stake in the ChatGPT maker appears to be at least 6% of the $6.6 billion round the company closed last week. But that doesn’t mean Khosla has put substantial or any capital into the round. The […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As hurricanes batter the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States, many people’s livelihoods are on hold and they’re struggling to make ends meet. The FCC just decided that anyone affected by a natural disaster can get a break on broadband and mobile service; it’s not much, but every little bit counts. The Lifeline […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. It was once again the private market that generated the most funding-related news in the startup world this week, both for companies and for funds. But it […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Arne Schepker, the CEO of the popular Berlin-based language learning platform Babbel, is stepping down, and the company’s co-founder and former CEO Markus Witte is stepping back in to lead the company “into a new phase while searching for Arne’s successor with patience,” the company said. This new phase, unsurprisingly, will involve AI. Witte will not […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Three Amazon executives in charge of developing new technologies for checking out of physical stores – including Just Walk Out, Dash Carts, and Amazon One – are leaving or have left the division, TechCrunch has learned. In addition, a former high-ranking advertising executive at Amazon, Colleen Aubrey, was recently put in charge of Just Walk […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

After the criminal implosion of the crypto exchange FTX, many of the company’s executives have been found guilty on various counts of fraud or conspiracy to commit such acts. Ryan Salame, the former co-CEO of FTX Digital Markets, is starting his seven-and-a-half-year fraud sentence today, but not before posting an all-time absurd LinkedIn post (and […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Interlagos, the venture capital firm started by former senior SpaceX leaders, is looking to raise $550 million for its first venture fund, according to regulatory filings and a confidential deck sent to prospective LPs and viewed by TechCrunch.  The existence of the firm was first reported by TechCrunch in April, but almost nothing has been […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Shield AI cofounder Brandon Tseng has raised over $1 billion to create AI pilots. Here's what he's learned in Ukraine and the future of AI-powered weapons. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Tesla is gearing up to reveal its Robotaxi this Thursday, and everyone wants to know what it will look like, whether Tesla will unveil a commercialization strategy, and what outrageous timelines Elon Musk might announce to bump Tesla’s stock.  The “We, Robot” event will take place at 7 p.m. PT at Warner Bros. Discovery’s movie […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Even a category as hot as robotics is not immune from macroeconomic trends. According to figures from automation advocacy group, A3, the North American robotics market declined in the first half of 2024, both in terms of sales and revenue. The number of industrial robotics ordered in H1 declined 7.5% year-over-year to 15,705. Revenue dipped […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple said the new macOS release "improves compatibility with third-party security software," after the first operating systems release broke several cybersecurity tools. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Flutterwave CEO GB discusses the company's recent product and administration changes and their implications for the company as it scales. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Indian electric vehicle maker Ola Electric’s customers aren’t happy with its service and scooters, and it’s affecting the company’s stock and market share. The company’s shares fell by as much as 9.1% on Monday to ₹89.14, sending its market cap below $4.75 billion for the first time since its IPO in August. The company’s shares […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Klarna, the Stockholm-based buy-now-pay-later outfit that’s barreling toward an IPO, isn’t done shaking up its board. According to the FT,  seven directors just agreed to oust investor Mikael Walther from Klarna’s eight-person board, nearly eight years after he joined it. Walther is a confidante of Klarna co-founder Victor Jacobsson, who remains a major shareholder and, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

StrictlyVC is hosting its first event inside TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, and if you’re an investor keen to mingle with your peers, you won’t want to miss this opportunity. The StrictlyVC series — which brings the people and stories dominating the headlines straight to an audience of largely VCs, LPs, founders, and operators — is coming […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The next generation of New York City investors are already making their mark in the Big Apple.  They come from big-name venture firms like Female Founders Fund and Lerer Hippeau and smaller ones like Chai Ventures. They work in areas like growth, consumer, and health. They canoe, hike, and play pickleball on the weekends. We […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Will generative AI tools help people build better websites, or will they just fill the web with spam? With the recent launch of Design Intelligence, a new website builder full of generative AI tools, Squarespace is betting on the former. I spoke with chief product officer Paul Gubbay about Design Intelligence and Squarespace’s broader AI […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Customers of genetic data outfit 23andMe may be at greater risk than they realize, suggests a New York Times story that argues the company’s woes could be short-lived compared to the possible danger facing those roughly 15 million people if 23andMe can’t continue as a going concern. Certainly, with each passing day, the hope of […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, we’re diving into OpenAI’s $6.6 billion fundraising round, the fifth Cybertruck recall in less than a year, and a neat project that’s Shazam-ing songs heard on a San Francisco street. Let’s get into it. OpenAI closed the largest VC round of all time this week. The startup […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Bankrupt EV startup Fisker is under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, according to a new filing from the financial regulator. The SEC says in the filing it has sent multiple subpoenas to Fisker as part of the investigation, and that it may send more. The agency does not say what the investigation […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Initialized Capital is restructuring its team to “meet the moment” in the venture market, according to a blog post from the firm’s managing partner Brett Gibson. The San Francisco-based venture capital firm, originally founded by Alexis Ohanian, Garry Tan, and Harjeet Taggar, announced yesterday that it let multiple people go and specifically named Jennifer Wolf, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

This glossary includes some of the most common terms and expressions we use in our articles, and explanations of how — and why — we use them. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A group of major medical institutions specializing in cancer care have formed a partnership to better take advantage of AI’s potential to advance the space. With $40 million of cash and resources from big tech backers, the Cancer AI Alliance (CAIA) could be a huge step forward in precision medicine. The members of the alliance […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware has left a lot of customers uneasy (and with rising bills). For the longest time, VMware was the de facto standard for enterprise virtualization. Now, a lot of businesses are looking for alternatives, and with that, the OpenStack project for managing cloud infrastructure (and one of the world’s largest open source […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A complete list of all the known layoffs in tech, from Big Tech to startups, broken down by month throughout 2024. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced on Tuesday that users who have connected their accounts to the fediverse, also known as the open social web, can now see who follows them and likes their posts from other fediverse servers, such as Mastodon and Pixelfed.  The company said users will now have up to 15 minutes to make […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.