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Al Yankovic, the 62-year-old parody artist known as Weird Al, is getting his own equally weird biopic this fall. The trailer for “WEIRD: The Al Yankovic Story” gives a first look at the movie, exploring the wacky world of Weird Al, his hilarious cover songs and his Polka obsession. “WEIRD: The Al Yankovic Story” premieres on The Roku Channel on November 4. The film will arguably be Roku’s biggest-ever original film, with well-known stars like Daniel Radcliffe playing Weird Al, Rainn Wilson as Dr. Demento, Evan Rachel Wood as Madonna and Quinta Brunson as Oprah Winfrey. “WEIRD: The Al Yankovic Story” will be an ambitious move for the streamer. The Roku Channel has been eager to expand its original programming slate, and the upcoming Al Yankovic biopic will likely be a hit for the free streaming service. Weird Al is a highly successful musician, having sold over 12 million albums and won five Grammy Awards. When looking at Roku’s growth, the streaming service needs to pick up the p...

Waymo, the autonomous vehicle developer under Alphabet, is opening up its driverless robotaxi service in downtown Phoenix to vetted local residents. People who have been accepted to Waymo’s “trusted tester” program are eligible to hail a driverless ride — meaning no human safety operator is behind the wheel — in a Jaguar I-Pace EV in downtown Phoenix. Waymo has branded these as “rider only” trips to denote that a human safety operator is not in the vehicle. Trusted testers sign non-disclosure agreements and cannot share their experiences on social media or with journalists. In May, Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov said on stage at TC Sessions: Mobility that the company had started allowing employees to hail a driverless ride — sans human operator — in the downtown Phoenix area. Opening it up to trusted testers is the next step before a wider public release. Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego posted a message (along with a video) on Twitter and Instagram marking the occasion. I had the opportu...

Meta and an e-commerce venture between India’s Reliance Retail and Jio Platforms are bringing JioMart grocery shopping to WhatsApp in what they said was the global-first end-to-end shopping experience on the popular instant messaging platform. The launch follows Meta and JioMart beginning to test an integration with select users two years ago . Customers in India will be able to browse JioMart’s entire grocery catalog on WhatsApp, add items to cart, make the payments via local payments rail UPI without ever leaving the instant messaging service, the companies said. “Excited to launch our partnership with JioMart in India. This is our first-ever end-to-end shopping experience on WhatsApp — people can now buy groceries from JioMart right in a chat. Business messaging is an area with real momentum and chat-based experiences like this will be the go-to way people and businesses communicate in the years to come,” Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, said in a statement. Meta is a significant mi...

Reliance Jio Infocomm, India’s top telecom mobile operator, will launch its 5G services in key cities this Diwali in October, the company announced at its annual general meeting Monday. The company, which has amassed over 421 million subscribers, said it will extend its 5G network to “every town” in India by the end of 2023. Reliance Industries’ Mukesh Ambani said Jio has built a standalone 5G architecture and will be using career aggregation technology to deliver high-speed internet services. The company also plans to launch the AirFiber, a wireless plug-and-play 5G hotspot that doesn’t require fiber cables to reach homes, it said. “Jio has developed a JioAirFiber Home Gateway, which is a wireless, simple, single-device solution to have a Wi-Fi hotspot in a home, connected to ultra-high-speed internet using True 5G. With single device JioAirFiber, it will be real easy to quickly connect any home or office to Gigabit-speed Internet. With the simplicity of JioAirFiber, hundreds of mil...

In 2015, the emergence of fintechs such as Flutterwave and Paystack changed the game for online businesses in Africa by making it easier to integrate payments into customer interfaces without building those features from the ground up or merging with tacky foreign software. Amplify was another payment platform that launched during that period. However, it differentiated itself by committing to payments on social media platforms, which Nigerian digital bank Carbon was interested in when it acquired the startup in 2019 . At the time, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, Segun Adeyemi , said that he was taking a break and would “likely start another company” later. While he worked as a Nigeria country manager for JUMO, a South African fintech that offers credit infrastructure to large mobile money operators across Africa, Adeyemi quit last year to launch Anchor , another fintech where he is also chief executive, this February. The new company is akin to Amplify in terms of infrastructural ...

We review a lot of headphones and earbuds here at TechCrunch, and most of them compete for the low- or mid-range of the earbud market. With price points ranging from $75 through $300 or so, they’re often awfully same-ish. The feature set is not dissimilar. They sound different, yes, but not by so much that you’d feel like your life would be ruined if you’d picked one set over the other. It’s a rare moment, then, that I get a piece of equipment shipped to me that breaks the mold. That’s precisely what happened with Angry Miao ‘s Cyberblade headphones. The base station (yes, there’s a base station) feels like it was carved out of steel and glass. The whole setup weighs in at a whopping 370 grams — that’s 13 ounces. It’s also rare that a company refuses to tell me what their price point is. Like much of Angry Miao’s line, this is a product that appears to be aimed at gamers — from the multicolor LED feast for your eyes, to the ludicrously fancy base station, to the carrying case for the ...

Netflix’s upcoming ad-supported plan could cost anywhere from $7 to $9 per month according to a Bloomberg report published over the weekend. For comparison, the streaming service offers a basic single-screen plan in the U.S. for $9.99 per month, while its most popular plan, which offers full HD streaming on two screens, costs $15.99 per month. The Bloomberg report noted that Netflix plans to show roughly four minutes of commercials for an hour of programming, which is on par or less than its competitors . It also said that the company might show ads before and during a show, but won’t show anything after an episode ends. In April, the streaming giant said it plans to offer its ad-supported plan next year. But since then multiple reports have remarked that the firm might launch this plan by the end of the year. The new report says Netflix might launch its ad-fueled tier in at least half a dozen markets in the last quarter of the calendar year. During its recent earnings call, Netf...