No one likes standing in line. I was reminded of just how awful the experience can be last Saturday, while being herded like cattle through a two-hour queue for a nightclub in unseasonably cold weather. I’d not soon repeat the experience. Fortunately, there’s a startup for that. LineLeap, backed by Y Combinator, lets people pay
Month: September 2024
TechCrunch demoed an incomplete version of Apple’s forthcoming Hearing Test app following Apple’s “Glowtime” event on Monday. The test shares key similarities with its clinical predecessors, prompting people to tap the display when they first hear gradually rising tones of different frequencies. Hearing Test will be built into iOS 18, though Apple is currently awaiting
The home of the Golden State Warriors was packed on Tuesday evening this week, but it wasn’t to watch Steph Curry. Thousands of fans gathered at the Chase Center in downtown San Francisco to watch one of Silicon Valley’s biggest ballers, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, sit down for a conversation with the hosts of the
Stefanos Loukakos, formerly a director at Meta’s business-focused Messenger division and, briefly, the tech giant’s blockchain org, noticed several years ago that online retailers were struggling to connect with potential shoppers. The problem, in his opinion, was that their marketing campaigns weren’t tailored enough. Merchants were sending generic social media, text, and email blasts that failed to
After multiple rounds of layoffs in 2022 and 2023, Nuro is pivoting its business strategy to focus more on the startup’s core autonomous driving technology instead of owning and operating a fleet of low-speed, on-road delivery bots. The company said on Wednesday it would start licensing its autonomous vehicle technology to automakers and mobility providers,
A U.K. startup wants to do for utilities what neobanks have been doing for the financial sector for more than a decade: disrupt an age-old industry using technology, streamline it and cut out the middlemen. London-based Tem has built a marketplace and platform to connect businesses directly to renewable energy sources, and it is working
According to a recent FCC filing, the Oura Ring 4 is likely to launch any day now. In the meantime, however, the health hardware maker has another key bit of news to share. Oura announced Wednesday that it has acquired Veri, the Helsinki-based startup behind the metabolic health product of the same name. The announcement
Cities spend hundreds of millions each year on paratransit services, or public rides for disabled residents, yet those services remain limited and unpredictable. Wheelchair users often face late pickups, hindering them from getting to work or medical appointments on time. As populations age, the strain on these services and city budgets continues to grow. Vancouver-based
Hormones play a massive role in when and how easily women can get pregnant, but research and resources in this area are lacking. Mira is looking to change that. Mira is an at-home, palm-sized hormone testing device women use to test their urine for their hormone levels. Mira’s corresponding app deciphers their results and spots
Beats’ expansion into iPhone 16 cases is surprising, if not entirely unexpected. After all, Apple acquired the headphone maker 10 years ago last May. The deal was — as many expected — largely centered around the transformation of the Beats Music streaming service into an Apple-branded offering. Beyond that, however, Apple seems have mostly let
It’s not every day that you hear about a large funding round for a French startup in the current funding environment. But Neat, a Paris-based insurtech startup, has managed to raise €50 million (around $55 million at current exchange rates). There is some fine print however. In addition to the traditional equity-for-cash financial transaction, a
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) affects more than 366 million adults in the U.S. alone, according to a 2020 study, but beyond medicating with stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin, there are few alternatives for people who suffer from the disorder. Therapy, education, and lifestyle changes are usually also advised, but those avenues can prove difficult
For all of the new health features Apple talked up at Monday’s iPhone 16 event, a familiar one was M.I.A. The blood oxygen feature, introduced with the Series 6 device, will not be present on Series 10 models sold in the U.S. The rest of the world will be able to access the tech on
The Internet Archive’s online lending library recently suffered a big defeat in court. The organization is best known for operating the Wayback Machine, which stores old versions of web pages, a task that’s felt increasingly important as more of the web disappears. But the Archive also operated a digital lending library, called the Open Library,
A love of food — and, well, cheese — has landed German fermentation startup Formo‘s co-founder Roman Plewka and its team a hefty $61 million Series B round to keep scaling production of their climate-friendly, animal-free cheese. The Berlin-based startup’s first products use a base of Koji protein, a type of fungal microorganism that’s been
Can AI ever fully replace translators? Not likely. AI translations tend to lack the lexical richness of their human-translated counterparts, mainly because AI models make choices based on probability — not lived experience. Certainly, AI can produce “accurate” translations, but the translations lack the spice of life, like a textbook version of the source text.
What will it take for a startup to make a dent in climate change? The most promising candidates tend to be hardware startups that have spent years developing and proving their technologies, according to a new report. Oh, and it helps to specialize in energy or raw materials. The report, published by Congruent Ventures and
Apple is adding a dedicated touch-sensitive camera button to the iPhone 16 series, the company announced during its “Glowtime” event. The button is covered by a smooth texture sapphire crystal and a stainless steel rim. Pressing the button for the first time will open the camera app. You press it to take a photo and
Apple’s Voice Memos app for iPhone will soon let you layer vocals on top of previously recorded music or an instrument track, the company revealed at its Apple Event 2024 on Monday. It also unveiled new iPhones, Apple Watch models and more. When the upgraded Voice Memos app rolls out, you’ll be able to sing
While artificial intelligence (AI) promises to transform all manner of industries, the biggest game-changing breakthroughs in this new era of data-infused machine intelligence arguably lies in the field of drug discovery. By analyzing vast amounts of biological data, AI can help researchers predict how different chemical compounds will interact with specific targets in the body,
While living in the U.S., the Trivedi family was looking for a solution to follow a ritual practice of worshiping at one of India’s Jyotirlingas — a holy representation of the Hindu god Shiva. After searching on YouTube for ways to offer flowers and other items ceremonially at the Indian temple one Sunday in 2023,
Apple announced the iPhone 16 series of phones on Monday at its “It’s Glowtime” event. All the iPhones now have an action button and a dedicated camera button. iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max Differential specs Display: iPhone 16 Pro: 6.3-inch Super Retina display iPhone 16 Pro Max: 6.9-inch Super Retina display Size
The newspaper business has been in the middle of a long and slow decline thanks to the rise of the internet. Now some new research out of the U.K. lays bare how TV news is facing a similar fate. Online platforms have now overtaken TV for the first time as the most popular resource for
Steve Brotman started Alpha Partners in 2014 with a novel idea at the time: investing alongside early-stage VCs to help preserve their ownership in promising companies as they transition to later funding rounds. Alpha’s first fund was a mere $10 million. But as startups started staying private for longer, the VC industry invented various mechanisms
For some, AI fatigue is real — but clearly venture investors haven’t grown tired of the category. In the first half of 2024 alone, more than $35.5 billion was invested into AI startups globally, recent Crunchbase data found. Five of the six venture rounds of more than $1 billion raised in the first half of
Last year, Apple couldn’t say enough about the reduced climate impact of its products, going so far as hiring Octavia Spencer to play Mother Earth in a highly produced, five-minute promo spot. This year? Apple spent just a few minutes on the subject, total. That’s not to say the company is backsliding on its prior
Apple giveth and taketh away — particularly when it comes to ports and buttons. The company has long taken a “less is more” approach to any detail that might disrupt its devices’ feng shui. The company is feeling a lot more bullish about buttons these days. After introducing the Action Button on the Apple Watch
Audible, Amazon’s audiobook business, on Monday announced that it’ll use AI trained on professional narrators’ voices to generate new audiobook recordings. A select, U.S.-based cohort of audiobook narrators will be invited to train AI on their voices starting this week, Audible said. The trained AI will be used to make recordings, and narrators will have
The SMB-focused bookkeeping, accounting and finance startup finally has raised $50 million in a Series B round of funding and secured a $150 million credit line, TechCrunch is the first to report. The financing comes just seven months after the fintech company announced it had raised $10 million in funding, and brings Miami-based finally’s total
Companies’ data architecture today looks nothing like it did 20 years ago, but monitoring and tracing tools haven’t followed suit, making it difficult for engineering teams to identify the root cause of errors and latency issues. Israeli developer Eden Federman thinks the solution is distributed tracing, a more advanced observability method, but he found adoption