It looks like Miko’s participation in the Disney Accelerator is paying off in a big way, as the company is bringing Disney and Pixar characters to its Miko 3 robot for kids. The company launched its Disney collaboration today, available to customers in more than 140 countries. The funky little robot can play animated story
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Earlier this year, reports emerged that YouTube would soon add a dedicated podcasts homepage — a signal the company was getting more serious about its investments in podcasts and the potential ad revenue they could deliver. Today, YouTube confirmed to TechCrunch the new podcasts destination is now live for U.S. users, after the URL was
An Indian upstart, co-founded by a group of journalists, that seeks to disrupt how people follow news and what they consume has raised funds as it prepares to accelerate its growth and broaden its offering. The Signal is aiming to serve a need for the modern pace of life where everybody is busy, said Dinesh
Socar, South Korea’s largest car-sharing startup, tumbled in its Seoul stock market debut Monday even after pricing shares below the bottom end of a marketed range. Shares of Socar rose 1.25% from its IPO price of 28,000 won ($21.10) in the initial minutes of the debut, before tumbling to 26,300 won and giving the firm
Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia disclosed 15 early-stage startups it has selected for the seventh cohort of its accelerator program Surge, pushing ahead with new investments even as the deal activity has considerably slowed in the region. Since its launch in March 2019, the accelerator has helped its participating startups collectively raise over $1.7
A nonexhaustive list of why Marc Andreessen and Adam Neumann have misread America’s housing problems When Marc Andreessen announced that he was sinking $350 million of a16z investors’ money into a new venture by WeWork co-founder and former CEO Adam Neumann, plenty of jaws dropped. For one, there was the massive sum and equally massive
Tesla will increase the price of its “full self-driving” beta software, the automaker’s advanced driver assistance system (ADAS), in North America to $15,000 on September 5, CEO Elon Musk tweeted Sunday. The celebrity executive said the current price of $12,000 will be honored for orders made before September 5, but delivered later. Musk also tweeted
YouTube removed two videos from its platform showing Tesla drivers using their own children to conduct vehicle safety tests. The tests were meant to prove that Tesla’s Autopilot and “full self-driving” (FSD) beta software — the automaker’s advanced driver assistance systems which have automated driving features but do not enable the cars to drive themselves
Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous
In its five years as a standalone automaker, Polestar has placed into production two vehicles and announced the delivery schedule of four additional vehicles. The latest, the Polestar 6, is an electric roadster that’s due to hit the road in 2026. It’s an impressive pace for a new company. While some of that success can
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. Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by
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. It’s been a week of people trying to make sense of what’s happening in tech. If you’ve been compartmentalizing: Cheers! Now let me walk you through what’s been going on. On Monday,
Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Reading recently about Germany’s €30 billion plan for its startups, I was intrigued. Did the country start to envy La French Tech? Is it
Hello hello! We’re back with another edition of Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly recap the top stories to hit TechCrunch across the last seven days. Want it in your inbox? Sign up here. other stuff a16z backs WeWork founder’s new thing: When a company implodes hard enough that it inspires a miniseries,
It’s been a week of people trying to make sense of what’s happening in tech. If you’ve been compartmentalizing: Cheers! Now let me walk you through what’s been going on. On Monday, WeWork founder Adam Neumann raised a seed round from Andreessen Horowitz for a new real estate company, reportedly at an over $1 billion
It was the world’s largest gathering of internet celebrities. As I waited to meet Twitch streamer Code Miko in a hotel lobby at VidCon, I spotted an Instagram-famous husky, a fan favorite contestant from Netflix’s “The Circle,” and a controversial beauty blogger. But when a fashionable Korean American woman approached me, I realized I was
Vetster, a veterinary telehealth service which has raised $40 million, is launching in the U.K. following expansion in the U.S. Vetster connects licensed veterinarians with pet owners via video, voice and online chat. It hopes to fill a yawning gap in provision. In the U.K. one in two veterinary clinics are overbooked and unable to
DoorDash is ending its partnership with Walmart after more than four years of delivering the retail giant’s products to customers. The news was first reported by Business Insider. Sources familiar with the matter told Insider that DoorDash decided to end its partnership with Walmart because it was no longer mutually beneficial and because the delivery
Last month, Andreessen Horowitz — one of venture capital’s largest and most prominent players — announced that its “headquarters will be in the cloud” going forward. Founded in 2009 in Menlo Park, California, the firm — also known as a16z — has for years been a symbol of Silicon Valley investing. Its new philosophy in
Wayfair, the online home goods retailer, announced today it was laying off close to 900 employees as a way to reprioritize investment needs and meet the company’s current needs. This comes after the company announced a hiring freeze back in May. The layoffs represent close to 5% of the company’s global workforce and 10% of
Netflix’s ad-supported tier may not run commercials during kids’ programs, a decision that its rival Disney+ made in May. As reported by Bloomberg, Netflix told partners that kids’ programming would stay commercial-free. Sources also told the outlet that original movies would initially stay ad-free, likely to appease filmmakers who don’t want their high-budget releases ruined
Google is bringing its Workspace Individual subscription plan to Europe, a little more than a year after first introducing the service to other markets. Workspace is Google’s productivity and collaboration software suite formerly known as G Suite, constituting Gmail, Meet, Drive, Docs, Tasks, Forms, among other key applications. While many of these apps are available
According to earlier reports this week, Adam Neumann, the famed, controversial cofounder of WeWork, is in the process of creating a vast network of residential real estate properties that — we’re guessing — can be rented on a highly flexible basis to people who don’t want to be confined to one location or lease but
“Venture capital” is semantically equivalent to “dangerous money,” which is part of its mystique. Essentially, VC is a high-stakes extreme sport in which top players can accumulate startling amounts of wealth and power. And sometimes, a massive pile of investor cash burns so brightly, it gets picked up on satellites. But where does all that
Stripe has laid off some of the employees who support TaxJar, a tax compliance startup that it acquired last year, TechCrunch has learned from multiple sources and firsthand documentation. The layoffs — conducted over the last month — are related to Stripe’s decision to wind down TaxJar-focused go-to-market efforts in late July. Sources estimate the
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. Fridayyyyyy. If you’re following the ups and downs of the crypto industry, you won’t want to miss this Twitter Space on Monday at 12:00 p.m. PDT/3:00 p.m. EDT. Senior crypto reporter Anita
John Carmack, the game developer who co-founded id Software and served as Oculus’s CTO, is working on a new venture — and has already attracted capital from some big names. Carmack said Friday his new artificial general intelligence startup, called Keen Technologies, has raised $20 million in a financing round from former GitHub CEO Nat
European food ordering and delivery giant Just Eat Takeaway has revealed that it’s selling its stake in Brazil’s iFood for up to €1.8 billion ($1.8 billion) to Prosus. The initial deal will amount to €1.5 billion in cash, plus another €300 million depending on the performance of iFood over the next 12 months. News of the
One doubts Samsung’s convictions at their own peril. The company will be the first to point to the O.G. Note phablet as the ultimate expression of this phenomenon. The line may be gone, having been absorbed into the flagship Galaxy S product, but its influence on the industry is still being felt a decade after
To mark the expansion of Meta’s bland virtual reality platform, Horizon Worlds, into France and Spain, Mark Zuckerberg recently shared a selfie. The graphic, featuring the boyish CEO in front of a low-res model of the Eiffel tower, quickly struck a nerve, sparking sneers, jeers and sighs from quippy social media users. And honestly, can