Only Products and Other Stuff

A New York Times investigation found that dozens of potential pedophiles have prolifically exploited the child influencer industry. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

On December 27, a Waymo robotaxi and a Serve Robotics sidewalk delivery robot collided at a Los Angeles intersection, according to a video that’s circulating on social media. The footage shows a Serve bot crossing a street in West Hollywood at night and trying to get onto the sidewalk. It reached the curb, backed up […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The data was found exposed on an Amazon cloud server, and contained precise location data on thousands of vehicles. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The chipmaking giant Nvidia is leaning more heavily into robotics in 2025. More specifically, it’s launching a new generation of compact computers for humanoid robots, called Jetson Thor, in the first half of the new year, confims the Financial Times. The move, which was expected, is part of an evolving, years-long strategy. Back in March, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The proliferation of data centers aiming to meet the computational needs of AI could be bad news for the US power grid, according to a new report in Bloomberg. Using the 1 million residential sensors tracked by Whisker Labs, along with market intelligence data from DC Byte, Bloomberg found that more than half of the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Three crypto industry groups — the DeFi Education Fund, the Blockchain Association, and the Texas Blockchain Council — are suing the Internal Revenue Service to block new regulations that require decentralized finance (DeFi) entities to report customer information. The IRS has been finalizing crypto tax regulations as part of the Biden Administration’s Infrastructure Investment and […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Africa’s tech ecosystem just got a boost of attention, with South Africa’s TymeBank and Nigeria’s Moniepoint both raising funds in recent weeks at valuations of over $1 billion and joining the coveted unicorn pantheon. But those valuations don’t just reflect investor confidence. They signal the success they’ve had in taking disruptive fintech models originally developed […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

It has been a busy year in the private equity realm, with countless big-money acquisitions unfolding. The take-private space specifically has seen some sizable transactions, with private equity firms spearheading more than a dozen billion-dollar deals for public tech companies. London-headquartered Permira was a key protagonist, joining Blackstone to acquire European online classifieds group Adevinta […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly told Google employees that 2025 will be a “critical” year for the company. CNBC reports that it obtained audio from a December 18 strategy meeting where Pichai and other executives put on ugly holiday sweaters and laid out their priorities for the coming year. “I think 2025 will be critical,” Pichai […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Lyft is suing the city of San Francisco, claiming the city unfairly charged the rideshare company over $100 million in taxes. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

LG may have the earliest big press conference of CES, but the Korean electronics giant still can’t help announcing a bunch of products ahead of the show. As ever, the pile of news is a mixed bag with a few interesting additions. These plant lamps undoubtedly qualify as the latter. Details on the products — […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

ChatGPT's new search feature can be told to generate entirely positive product summaries thanks to hidden code, new research finds. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

ChatGPT, Sora, and OpenAI’s developer-facing API went down Thursday for an hour and counting. OpenAI says it started experiencing a major outage at 11 a.m. PT, and the services still appear to be down at the time of publishing this article, around 12:40 p.m. PT. Frequent users of ChatGPT may recall that the service went […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

DeepSeek V3 can handle a range of text-based workloads and tasks, like coding, translating, and writing essays and emails from a descriptive prompt. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Elon Musk’s jets took over 355 flights this year, with 31 of those flights heading to or from near Mar-a-Lago.  © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Blaming victims, months of silence, and suing security researchers all featured in cybersecurity in 2024. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Indian online pharmacy PharmEasy’s valuation now stands at about $456 million, according to disclosures from its investor Janus Henderson, a 92% drop from its peak valuation of $5.6 billion. The British American global asset firm’s Global Research Fund values its holding of 12.9 million shares in PharmEasy at $766,043, according to its latest filing for […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Social network Bluesky said on Christmas day that it launched trending topics feature in beta. The trending topics are available on both desktop and mobile apps of the social network. On the desktop, you can see trending topics on the right sidebar, and on the mobile apps, you can tap on the search button to […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

AMD has its work cut out for it at CES 2025. Competitor Nvidia has been sucking the oxygen out of every room it graces, as the chipmaker remains at the forefront of the AI boom. So, how will AMD compete with Nvidia’s reported RTX 5000 announcement? The company should show of its own next-gen GPU. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Sharing security advice can go a long way in protecting your loved ones from the most common and damaging online threats. © 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.

A year after Onyx Motorbikes owner James Khatiblou died suddenly, leaving customers with unfulfilled orders and millions in unpaid debts, the brand has been revived by its original founder. “I’m excited to announce I have resurrected my original brand Onyx with incredible backers!” founder Tim Seward wrote in a LinkedIn post on Monday. “Onyx is […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

So far in life, I haven’t needed be a “mesh guy.” A well chosen and carefully placed Wi-Fi router has worked fine in our modest abodes, but one particular situation has resisted simple solutions until Eero put out a device in November seemingly made exactly for the purpose. This won’t be a thorough examination of […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Two big defense tech players, Palantir and Anduril, are talking to tech companies including SpaceX, OpenAI, Saronic, and Scale AI about forming a consortium to bid on Pentagon contracts, according to a report in the Financial Times. The goal, the FT says, is to challenge the dominance of “prime” defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

With a US TikTok ban scheduled to take effect in less than a month, President-elect Donald Trump said Sunday that he’d like to keep the app around, according to Reuters. “We’re going to have to start thinking because, you know, we did go on TikTok, and we had a great response with billions of views, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Autonomous vehicle technology and electrification startups were once the darlings of the VC and corporate world. The two technologies promised billions of dollars in revenue — and a new pathway for automakers to make money beyond building and selling cars.  Those VC-money-printing days have been over for AVs for a while now, with a few […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

There’s been a lot of reporting in recent months around Apple’s efforts to expand its footprint in customers’ homes with in-development products like a wall-mounted smart home hub. According to a new report in Bloomberg, that strategy could also include a smart doorbell. This doorbell would use Apple’s FaceID technology to scan people’s faces as […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

LLM models are already capable of diagnosing scientific outputs, but, until now, had “no physical agency to actually perform" experiments. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, we’re looking at OpenAI’s last — and biggest — announcement from its “12 Days of OpenAI” event; Apple’s potential entrance into the foldable market; and why Databricks is choosing to wait to go public. Let’s get into it. P.S. We’re off for the holidays! Week in Review […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to supercharge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth with 300 million weekly active users. 2024 has been a big year for OpenAI, from its […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Google said Friday that the company is expanding Gemini’s latest in-depth research mode to 40 more languages. The company launched the in-depth research mode earlier this month, allowing Google One AI premium plan users to unlock an AI-powered research assistant of sorts. The in-depth function works in a multi-step method, from creating a research plan […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Real estate venture firm Fifth Wall is raising a new $500 million fund called Fifth Wall React, according to a regulatory filing. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A new app called Tapestry promising to unify social media, news, and RSS in one place, is nearing completion. Designed by Iconfactory, the same team that created the third-party Twitter client Twitterific back in the day, Tapestry was unveiled at the beginning of the year as a tool that could better organize today’s fragmented online […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Odyssey, a startup founded by self-driving pioneers Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke, is developing an AI-powered tool that can transform text or an image into a 3D rendering. The tool, dubbed Explorer, is similar in some ways to the so-called world models recently demoed by DeepMind, World Labs, and Israeli upstart Decart. Given a caption like “a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Grubhub will pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission and Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul over unlawful practices, including misleading customers about delivery costs, deceiving drivers about potential earnings, and listing restaurants on its platform without their permission. The agencies claim that Grubhub hid the true cost of its delivery […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Earlier this year, IVP general partner Tom Loverro, proclaimed that the post-pandemic downturn is over, and companies that made it this far should prioritize growth over cost-cutting. Yet, the companies still struggling to raise their next round of financing at a higher valuation or survive altogether could still be in the thousands, according to Brian […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Bridgy Fed, which is working to connect the social network Bluesky with the wider fediverse (aka the open social web), which includes sites like Mastodon and others, will be the first app incubated within a new nonprofit called A New Social. The organization, announced Tuesday, aims to bring together developers, researchers, startups, and industry leaders […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Instagram has quietly rolled out the ability for users to schedule direct messages. The Meta-owned social network confirmed to TechCrunch on Monday that the new feature is rolling out to all users globally. The option to schedule DMs will be especially useful for creators and brands that want to schedule outreach messages at optimal times. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The list includes Elon Musk’s xAI, which is already valued at a staggering $24 billion, as well as a good number of other AI startups. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A speaker at the annual NeurIPS AI conference has drawn criticism — not for her opinions about AI, but the way she referred to a Chinese student. During her keynote presentation on “How to optimize what matters most,” MIT Media Lab Professor Rosalind Picard (pictured above) included a slide quoting an excuse given by a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Regardless of how they're defined, the agents are for helping complete tasks in an automated way with as little human interaction as possible. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The next big upgrade to Apple’s mobile devices could be foldability, according to multiple reports published Sunday. According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple is aiming to launch two foldable devices in the next few years. There’s a larger model with a 19-inch screen that could compete with desktop monitors, as well as a smaller […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

State officials said hundreds of thousands of Rhode Island residents could be affected by a cyberattack on the state’s online portal for social services, with a “high probability” that  personally identifiable information was breached. According to an update from Governor Dan McKee’s office, the attack targeted RIBridges, which Rhode Island residents use to apply for […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, we’re looking at GM’s decision to pull out of the robotaxi business, Google alluding to the existence of multiple universes, and how you can make some serious cash by getting an AI bot to fall in love with you. Let’s get into it. General Motors will no […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

World models, also known as world simulators, are being touted by some as the next big thing in AI. AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs has raised $230 million to build “large world models,” and DeepMind hired one of the creators of OpenAI’s video generator, Sora, to work on “world simulators.” (Sora was released on […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The Trump transition team wants to end a federal rule requiring automakers to report crashes when advanced driver-assistance or autonomous driving technology is engaged, Reuters reports. Federal safety agencies would lose the ability to investigate and regulate the safety of vehicles with automated-driving systems should the rule — which went into effect in 2021 — […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

OpenAI is in the holiday spirit, it seems. The ChatGPT series of reveals, called “12 Days of OpenAI,” will be streamed live at 10 a.m. PT each weekday through December 23. So far, we’ve seen the launch of ChatGPT Pro, OpenAI’s $200 per month subscription plan, the full version of its “reasoning” o1 model, the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A deep learning scientist whose last startup was acquired by Snap to build its My AI chatbot has raised seed funding for his latest venture: a platform for building and operating real-time, video-based conversational AI agents.  eSelf, as the startup is known, is today coming out of stealth with $4.5 million in its coffers to […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The future of audiobooks and AI’s impact on the publishing industry were points of discussion for HarperCollins, whose CEO, Brian Murray, spoke at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference on Tuesday. During the event, the exec praised Spotify’s entry into the audiobooks market and detailed its future growth plans in the space. He also […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Google announced its latest quantum chip, Willow. But what really caught the industry's attention was a wild claim tucked into the blog post. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The U.S. sanctioned a Chinese cybersecurity company and one of its employees for exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Sophos firewalls to target U.S. organizations. On Tuesday, the U.S. Treasury Department said Guan Tianfeng, an employee of Sichuan Silence, used the vulnerability to compromise approximately 81,000 firewalls in April 2020. The hacking campaign, detailed by Sophos […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Ai Pin maker Humane demoed CosmOS, a new operating system aimed at (potentially) improving all the tech devices in your life — from your car’s entertainment system to your smart speaker, TV, and Android phone. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Sora, OpenAI’s video generator, is launching today — at least for some users. YouTuber Marques Brownlee revealed the news in a video published to his channel Monday morning. Brownlee got early access to Sora, and gave his initial impressions in a 15-minute review. Sora lives on Sora.com, Brownlee said, the homepage for which shows a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Single-board computer maker Raspberry Pi is updating its cute little computer-meet-keyboard device with better specifications. Named the Raspberry Pi 500, this successor to the Raspberry Pi 400 is as powerful as the current flagship Raspberry Pi, the Raspberry Pi 5. It’s available to buy now from Raspberry Pi resellers. The Raspberry Pi 500 is the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

In winter 2025, a comparative literature class at UCLA will feature a textbook, homework assignments, and TA resources generated by AI. The class in question is a survey of literature from the Middle Ages to the 17th century, while the materials are generated by Kudu — an “evolved” textbook platform founded by Alexander Kusenko, a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple is being sued over its decision not to implement a system that would have scanned iCloud photos for child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The lawsuit argues that by not doing more to prevent the spread of this material, it’s forcing victims to relive their trauma, according to The New York Times. The suit describes […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Famm, the discovery platform for queer-owned brands, was created by BIPOC queer married couple Cat Perez and Marianna Di Regolo to help users find LGBTQ-owned businesses. Now it’s launching a new social networking app for LGBTQ+ professionals and business owners to connect and collaborate.  Famm Connect, now available on iOS and Android devices, includes common […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Google’s DeepMind team unveiled an AI model for weather prediction this week called GenCast. In a paper published in Nature, DeepMind researchers said they found that GenCast outperforms the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts’ ENS — apparently the world’s top operational forecasting system. And in a blog post, the DeepMind team offered a more […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced Friday that it was placing Google’s payment arm under federal supervision. In response, Google filed a lawsuit seeking to block the move. Such supervision would subject Google to the same inspections that the bureau conducts with major banks and other financial institutions for potential violations of the law. The […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Consumer Reports has put out its annual automaker reliability list, and the top spot is relatively unsurprising: Subaru. What may come as a surprise to some is that Rivian’s EVs are dead last, especially considering the company topped a different Consumer Reports survey from earlier this year about the “most loved” auto brands. The consumer […] © 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. The week after Thanksgiving is usually rich in announcements, and this year was no exception. Blame it on the holiday season, but we would even go as […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

An Israeli startup specializing in penetrating IoT devices says it's hiring to "support new business growth" in the US government market. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Getting into the holiday spirit but still stuck at work? A cute new macOS called Festivitas can help you decorate your Mac computer screen with twinkling, holiday lights that are strung up from your menu bar and illuminate your dock. This whimsical holiday treat was dreamed up by software developer Simon B. Støvring, the maker […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Threads is testing the ability for users to see how well their individual posts performed on the social network. Up until now, Threads’ “Insights” feature only showed you aggregated metrics for all of your posts. Now, the feature can show you metrics for each post. If you’re in the test, you can sort posts by […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Senators Ron Wyden and Eric Schmitt are demanding the Department of Defense to do more to secure its telecommunications. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

At its re:Invent conference, Amazon’s AWS cloud computing unit today announced Amazon Aurora DSQL, a new serverless, distributed SQL database that promises high availability (99.999% for multi-region availability), strong consistency, PostgreSQL compatibility, and, the company says, “4x faster reads and writes compared to other popular distributed SQL databases.” AWS argues that Aurora DSQL will offer […] © 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.

The former head of Poland’s internal security agency Piotr Pogonowski was forced to appear in front of a parliamentary committee investigating the alleged abuse of Pegasus spyware in the country. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Slowly but surely, Amazon’s AWS cloud computing unit has become a major player in the call/contact center space with its Amazon Connect cloud-based (and AI-centric) contact center service, which launched back in 2017. Today, companies like Air Canada, Dish Network and U.S. Bank use the platform for their customer service needs. At its annual re:Invent […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As promised, startup accelerator Y Combinator’s imminent Demo Day will be happening in person. In fact, YC seems to have kicked off the IRL return of Demo Day at the end of the long Thanksgiving weekend, with an in-person Alumni Demo Day on Sunday for the Fall 2024 class of startups.  Squad founder (and later […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A new app called Death Clock predicts the date of its users’ deaths and offers tips on how to push that date back. TechCrunch wrote about an iPod Death Clock app way back in 2006 — but developer Brett Franson told Bloomberg that with an AI trained on more than 1,200 life expectancy studies, his […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Fidelity marked up the value of its holdings in Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) by 32.37% in October, according to a report in Axios. Even with this markup, Fidelity still values the company at 72 percent less than the $44 billion that Musk purchased it for in 2022. Axios reports that this move is probably […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The Apple Watch helps people track their health and fitness, but it can also be a great tool to help people stay productive and get work done. This is especially true for people who gets easily distracted by their phone. Although the Apple Watch comes with simple built-in productivity apps like Reminders and Calendar, it’s […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.