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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 . 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. Today’s consumers now spend 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 surpassed five hours pe...

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. Sequoia takes things seriously. The storied venture firm is known to react to macro-economic events with grand memos aimed at portfolio companies, and sometimes the entrepreneurship scene at large. Most recently, Sequoia created a 52-slide deck, first reported by The Information, titled Adapting to Endure; the document reads like a follow-up course to its infamously ill-timed “Coronavirus: The Black Swan of 2020” memo of March 2020. The firm is not always right in its prognostications — which is maybe why it stuck to internal musings instead of a Medium post this time — but it does do a service in providing a snapshot of how one of the most weathered, and successful, firms of all time thinks about a looming downturn. “Our intention in gathering today is not to be a beacon of gloom,” the deck reads. “But we also believe that winning in the years ah...

Welcome to the second episode of The TechCrunch Podcast, our weekly news show bringing you all the top stories in tech. This week, we sat down with TC writers Natasha Mascarenhas, Anita Ramaswamy and Devin Coldewey to talk about the continued, troubling trend of layoffs in tech; Adam Neumann’s new crypto carbon credit startup (?!); and the one-upmanship among AI image generation technologies happening between OpenAI and Google. Listen below, and subscribe in iTunes or Spotify to get new episodes delivered weekly on Saturdays! Articles from the episode: A third straight week of tech layoffs in the books Latch, a proptech meets SaaS play, conducts two consecutive weeks of layoffs Adam Neumann’s blockchain-based redemption story now sponsored by a16z OpenAI: Look at our awesome image generator! Google: Hold my Shiba Inu Other news from the week:  It’s official: Broadcom to acquire VMware in massive $61B deal Jack Dorsey steps down from Twitter’s board Twitter investors...

Elon Musk announced in a tweet on Friday that Starlink, the satellite internet service launched by SpaceX, his space exploration company, has been approved in Nigeria and Mozambique. This news is coming three days after Musk answered a tweet about the service launch in Africa. “Yes, first countries in Africa to be announced coming soon,” he tweeted. “Starlink will serve everywhere on Earth that we’re legally allowed to serve.” Starlink operates in more than 30 countries where it is legally approved, in essence, where it has required licences to provide internet services. Its launch in Africa, particularly in Nigeria, has been in the works since 2021. Last May, SpaceX sent some representatives to the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the country’s telecommunications regulator, to discuss the possibility of obtaining a license to operate Starlink in Nigeria. According to reports from local press, Nairametrics , the NCC has approved this license, corroborating Musk’s tweet ...

Eric Landau Contributor Before Eric Landau co-founded Encord , he spent nearly a decade at DRW, where he was lead quantitative researcher on a global equity delta one desk and put thousands of models into production. He holds an S.M. in Applied Physics from Harvard University, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and a B.S. in Physics from Stanford University. In 2015, the launch of YOLO — a high-performing computer vision model that could produce predictions for real-time object detection — started an avalanche of progress that sped up computer vision’s jump from research to market. It’s since been an exciting time for startups as entrepreneurs continue to discover use cases for computer vision in everything from retail and agriculture to construction. With lower computing costs, greater model accuracy and rapid proliferation of raw data, an increasing number of startups are turning to computer vision to find solutions to problems. However, before founders begin building AI ...

Bacterial secretions might dye your future wardrobe, and that’d be an improvement. That’s because textiles usually get their hues from toxic chemicals, and the resulting wastewater — laden with dyes, acids and formaldehyde — destroys rivers, such as those surrounding Dhaka , the capital city of Bangladesh. Wastewater treatment, when it happens, is just one of the energy-intensive (read: carbon-spewing) processes that make fast fashion possible. The environmental crises linked to textiles have given rise to several firms that aim to reimagine dyeing altogether. One such company, Colorifix , just got a boost via a $22.6 million (£18 million) Series B round, led by Swedish fashion giant H&M . Colorifix stands out for its progress in using microbes (such as E. coli) to naturally deposit dyes directly onto fabrics. Its microorganisms are engineered to produce specific colors and then brewed in vats like beer. A third-party life cycle analysis (paid for by Colorifix) found its dyes u...

Want to bring inflation to heel? There’s no single, simple fix, of course, or we would have done it already. But a good place to start would be weaning the economy off gasoline and diesel. Prices for fossil fuels are through the roof. Gas prices are up over 75% since last year, and diesel is up 55%, according to AAA . There are myriad reasons why — Putin’s war in Ukraine, an unexpected surge in demand following early pandemic shutdowns, an East Coast refinery that literally exploded a few years ago and so on. The recent surge shows the folly of tying the transportation sector — which accounts for 6% to 12% of GDP in developed countries — to highly volatile consumables that are broadly bought on a spot-price basis. TechCrunch+ is having a Memorial Day sale. You can save 50% on annual subscriptions  for a limited time. Diesel prices alone are driving about 17% of the inflation we’re seeing today, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. Inflation in the...