Twitter has apparently pulled its Spaces group audio feature, at least temporarily, after Elon Musk joined a group conversation that included journalists that had been banned from the platform. The latest drama comes after Twitter suspended several prominent journalists who had covered an earlier story about the Elon Jet Twitter account that was banned for
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It depends on how integral you are to the CIO’s plans Ron Miller 15 hours Although we’re in a period of economic uncertainty, I come bearing good news: All signs point to IT spending going up in 2023. By all rights, that should be outstanding tidings for startups. It’s not all rosy, however, because in
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Fridaaaaaaaay! Today we particularly enjoyed the Equity podcast team’s 2023 predictions on the future of building, crypto, and AI. Meanwhile, good luck to Alex (who mostly looks after TechCrunch+ these days, but
“Black Adam” is now streaming on HBO Max, giving more fans a chance to watch the DC antihero movie starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. “Black Adam” premiered in theaters on October 21. It centers around Teth-Adam (Johnson), a superhuman from ancient Kahndaq who used his godly powers for vengeance and was then quickly imprisoned. After
It seems like a lot of startups are born from an idea someone had while in college. But what if, instead of being honed years later at an accelerator, that initial idea was supported on campus while the dreamer was still enrolled? For example, David Lin started food delivery service Duffl two years ago while
Despite shrinking investment into startups in 2022, venture capital funds of all sizes are still being raised. However, not many of these are led by solo general partners (GPs), and although that trend is on the rise, even fewer are led by women or people who don’t come from venture capital. The above makes Nichole
The market for lab-grown meat, also called cultivated or cell-cultured meat, is expected to reach $1.99 billion by 2035, growing at an annual rate of 21.4%. Beef is poised to be the dominant segment. The market got a boost last month when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave what amounts to a safety blessing
European Union lawmakers have wasted no time warning Twitter-owner Elon Musk over “arbitrary suspension of journalists” following reports late yesterday that a number of reporters who had recently written about Musk had had their Twitter accounts suspended without warning. Věra Jourová, an EU vice-president for values and transparency, took to Twitter this morning to tweet the
Amazon announced today that it signed a deal with Games Workshop (GAW), giving it IP rights to the “Warhammer 40,000” universe, a massively popular tabletop miniature wargame. This is the first deal of its kind for Amazon, the company claims. “Warhammer 40,000” takes place in the distant future, where humanity is threatened by aliens and
Dec.18 — Microsoft Corp. is working on in-house processor designs for use in server computers that run the company’s cloud services, adding to an industrywide effort to reduce reliance on Intel Corp.’s chip technology. Details from “Bloomberg Markets: The Close.”
Silicon Valley law firm Cooley recently reported that it “handled 298 disclosable venture capital financings for Q3 2022, representing $8.1 billion of invested capital, continuing a downward trend for both metrics and representing the lowest for both since Q4 2019.” The firm said that deal volume, dollar volume and deal size for financings of life
Fashion startup Virgio, co-founded by Amar Nagaram, former chief executive of Myntra, has raised $37 million in a new financing round as the young firm looks to build “a global fashion brand” from the South Asian market. Prosus Ventures, Alpha Wave and Accel co-led Virgio’s Series A funding, valuing the one-year-old startup at $161 million
Sun King, a provider of off-grid solar energy products in Africa and Asia, has secured a $70 million equity investment led by LeapFrog Investments. It’s an extension of the $260 million Series D round the solar company announced this April, which was led by BeyondNetZero, the climate investing venture of General Atlantic and M&G Investments’
Today, banks and fintech startups tend not to provide products dedicated to families, specifically, and this has appeared as something of a gap in the market. Meanwhile the general lack of financial education and financial literacy means families are missing out on securing financial prosperity for their families. GoHenry (which raised $121.2M), which bills itself as “smart banking
After reports circulated that “Westworld,” among other titles, would soon be pulled off HBO Max, the company sent out an announcement via email yesterday confirming the sad news. Westworld isn’t the only show to get the axe. More than a dozen shows will leave the streaming service in the coming days, including “The Nevers,” “Raised
Even after billions of venture capital raised and invested into the digital health space, it’s still difficult to access quality healthcare. And while that may raise questions as to whether a scrappy startup has a fighting chance at fixing things, to entrepreneur Akili Hinson, it just means that Juno needs to be even smarter about
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. The TC crew are a bunch of bookworms. Alex collected the top reads from 2022. Haje’s favorite was “A Deadly Education” (Naomi Novik’s first book in the Scholomance trilogy), which incidentally was
Elon Musk’s plan to “operate as a giant distributed utility” is creeping toward reality. Tesla first piloted a “virtual power plant” in California, inviting Powerwall home battery owners to sell electricity back to the grid at peak times to mitigate brownouts. Soon after, the automaker expanded the effort into Australia and Japan, and next it’s
The trillion-dollar construction industry is often tarred with the inefficiency brush, accused of failing to move with the times and ignoring digitization in favor of legacy tools. But there is plenty of evidence that things are changing, with countless startups raising large sums of cash to help the construction industry modernize. Venture capital (VC) funding in
AI-generated music is already an innovative enough concept, but Riffusion takes it to another level with a clever, weird approach that produces weird and compelling music using not audio but images of audio. Sounds strange, is strange. But if it works, it works. And it does work! Kind of. Diffusion is a machine learning technique
Dakotah Rice spent years working in the investment banking industry at firms such as Goldman Sachs, Carlyle and Coatue. One thing that stood out to him was how only a small group of select people and firms could invest in venture capital and private equity funds. The barrier of entry is high, as minimums to
Aztec Network, a privacy layer for web3, has raised $100 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the startup’s co-founders Zac Williamson and Joe Andrews exclusively told TechCrunch. “At a high level, Aztec is an encrypted version of Ethereum,” Andrews said. “Normally on Ethereum everything is public, but we are making
Agriculture produces what might be some of the hardest planet-warming carbon emissions to eliminate. People need to eat, and right now, the way we make food generates a lot of greenhouse gases — about a third of the total created by human activity. There are some simple ways to reduce it, like eating less meat,
Microsoft will begin a phased rollout of an expanded data localization offering in the European Union on January 1, it said today. The EU Data Boundary for the Microsoft Cloud, as it’s branding the provision for local storage and processing of cloud services’ customer data, is intended to respond to a regional rise in demand
With nearly a third of the global music-streaming market share, Spotify needs little in the way of introduction. Some 456 million people consume music, podcasts and audiobooks through Spotify each month, 42% of which pay a monthly fee while the rest are subjected to advertisements. Indeed, ads and subscriptions have been the cornerstone of Spotify’s
Apple user have to pay more for Twitter’s new verification checkmarks
Kenya-based MyHealth Africa, an integrated healthcare platform changing how people access medical services, by connecting patients with local and international health specialists and hospitals, is growing its reach in Africa, and plans to further expand in Middle East and South Asia next year. The growth plan comes against the backdrop of $1 million seed funding
In countries where English is not a main language, listed companies not only have to deal with financial disclosure regulations, but make sure their investor materials are available in English for global backers. WritePath make the process faster and scalable by combining its AI tech with human translators. The Taipei-based startup’s clients include Foxconn, ASUS,
It’s official: A U.S. Department of Energy lab produced a controlled nuclear fusion reaction that released more energy than it consumed. On December 5, just after 1:03 a.m. PT, 192 lasers at the National Ignition Facility converged on a small gold cylinder that contained a tiny bead of fuel composed of two isotopes of hydrogen,
Fintech startup Checkout.com was in the news this morning because the Financial Times reported that the payment company had slashed its internal valuation to $11 billion. And it’s a huge drop compared to the $40 billion valuation that the company reached a little less than a year ago. But that doesn’t necessarily mean what you