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Asus is stretching the boundaries of what’s possible with thin and light portable PCs, and the 2023 Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED sets a high bar for what’s possible in an ultraportable. The computer weighs in at just 2.2 lbs, and it’s only 0.39 inches thick — small enough that it’s a negligible addition to any backpack or travel bag, while offering a lot of power to help satisfy the workload requirements of a vast majority of people. Basics The Zenbook S 13 OLED for this year resembles the one that Asus released in 2022, but comes with enough significant differences that they’re really fairly distinct machines. The biggest difference is arguably the processor, since the 2023 version uses a 13th Gen Intel Core i7 processor and last year’s version sports an AMD Ryzen 7 6800 CPU. The other major difference comes in the case, which has a slimmer bottom half, which necessitated a keyboard switch. The display on the 2023 version also doesn’t support pen or touch input, whereas the Ryzen-powered...

One of the main reasons we have yet to see a meaningful recovery in late-stage deal activity is the lack of consensus around how startups should be valued. No one wants to pay 2021 prices, but gauging what startups are worth now isn’t easy. However, there are signs that folks are coming to an agreement. Last week, Forge Global, a private securities marketplace, released data that shows the average difference between what secondary sellers were looking to sell for and what buyers were looking to buy shares for — also known as the bid/ask spread — had decreased to 17%. This is the lowest percentage in a year, showing that buyers and sellers are starting to get on the same page regarding price. There are signs that it will be a hot secondaries summer by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch

Welcome back to  The Interchange ! If you want this in your inbox, sign up  here . We’re back after a brief hiatus, with lots of fintech news, including Robinhood’s latest acquisition, Plaid’s newest product and a ChatGPT-powered AI tool that aims to help you save money on bills. Robinhood’s motives When Robinhood announced on June 22 that it was acquiring credit card startup X1 for $95 million , it caused all sorts of chatter in the fintech world. Why would Robinhood want to buy a credit card startup? Did it get a good deal, considering that X1 has raised only $62 million over its lifetime? Did its investors get a good deal or just a return on their investment? Why X1 in particular over the many other credit card startups out there? Let’s talk about that last point first. When we talked to X1 in December at the time of its last fundraise , founder and CEO Deepak Rao told us the company was launching a new trading platform that would give its cardholders the ability ...

Hello, lovelies, and welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter that recaps the week in tech. For many folks, this workweek was a day shorter, thanks to the Juneteenth observance on Monday. But plenty happened. We’ve got coverage on the OceanGate tragedy, and we’ve continued to closely track the Reddit API controversy — which shows no signs of abating. Elsewhere, TC has a full review of the new Google Pixel Tablet (spoiler alert: the bundled dock is a major highlight), and we have the skinny on Microsoft’s quantum plans and more. If you haven’t already, sign up here to get WiR in your inbox every Saturday. Then read on for the week’s digest. Most read OceanGate fired a whistleblower: The director of marine operations at OceanGate, the company whose submersible went missing Sunday on an expedition to the Titanic in the North Atlantic, was fired after raising concerns about its first-of-a-kind carbon fiber hull and other systems before its maiden voyage, ac...

Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday afternoon. This week, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the implications of artificial intelligence. One of the most fragile parts of the puzzle is the training data. We already know that you can see if your images were used to train the datasets and that a lot of the training datasets out there are . . . spurious at best. Some startups are trying to build datasets trained exclusively on licensed data , and human artists are pretty grumpy when big-name studios use AI to generate art . An interesting curveball is realizing that even evaluating training data may be challenging, as researchers discover that Mechanical Turk workers — who are, in theory, human workers doing tasks that machines can’t do — are reportedly using AI tools themselves. That’s fine for some tasks, but not great if the text they are generating is meant to be used as the rubric that AI-generating text tools are measured against. ...

Most founders won’t realize that they’re on the wrong track until it’s too late. That’s because failure is something many entrepreneurs can only perceive in hindsight: The day-to-day work of building a startup requires a high degree of confidence — and for some, denial. Quoting the movie “Grosse Pointe Blank,” perhaps this column by Haje Jan Kamps will be “a swift, spiritual kick to the head that alters your reality forever.” Full TechCrunch+ articles are only available to members Use discount code TCPLUSROUNDUP to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription In his experience, there are three reasons why some startups will never get a thumbs-up from an investor: the market is too small; the team is not good enough; the plan doesn’t make sense. These are all major problems, but here’s the good news: These are only existential issues for ego-driven founders. People who can accept they don’t have all the answers are able to pivot to success. On the other hand, those who ...

Harry Nelis Contributor Share on Twitter Harry Nelis is a partner at Accel , a global venture firm that has partnered with companies from inception through all phases of private company growth for the last 40 years. More posts by this contributor To become a public company, start operating like one early on Talent is the cornerstone of any successful tech ecosystem. In the last two decades, we’ve seen a wealth of strong founders and operators emerge across Europe and Israel, building innovative products and category-defining, unicorn companies that are competing on the global stage. This in turn has encouraged employees from some of Europe’s biggest tech success stories to take their experience working at a unicorn, use it to found the next generation of startups and win venture backing. As a result, we’re now seeing a spinning flywheel effect, in which unicorn pedigree and know-how is trickling down and fueling the next wave of ambitious entrepreneurs similar to wha...