Jumping into a flatpacked, chipboard room wasn’t my usual experience of the U.K.’s legendary Glastonbury Music Festival. But here I was, doing my best to dance around and test out this crazy new way of putting myself into the so-called Metaverse. It turned out to be a legit experience, as Bristol, U.K.-based startup Condense, showed
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Fresh fish isn’t really that fresh — even straight off the boat. The way they’re caught and killed is not only inhumane but detrimental to the resulting meat. There’s a far superior alternative, but it’s time-consuming and manual — but Shinkei Systems has figured out a way to automate it, even on the deck of
YouTube wants to quickly ramp up the number of short-form “Shorts” videos available on its platform in order to better compete with TikTok. To aid with this effort, the company is today rolling out a new creator tool that turns existing YouTube videos into Shorts in a matter of moments. The update, now available on
Summer Health CEO and Co-Founder Ellen DaSilva joins Emily Chang to discuss how her message-first platform for parents got the backing of Sequoia Capital, Lux Capital, Chelsea Clinton’s Metrodora Ventures and others. Plus, her views on the general state of American health care, and the digital healthtech scene in a post-Roe world.
Fly.io co-founder and CEO Kurt Mackey says that developers don’t really understand the term edge computing. They just know they want to run their applications closer to the user to make them more responsive. He believes that the traditional way of doing this with a content delivery network (CDN) is a flawed approach, and he
The idea of corporate gifting to maintain client relationships isn’t a novel concept. In fact, there’s a cottage industry of “gifting-as-a-service” startups that promise to streamline the task, ranging from companies such as Reachdesk and &Open to Sendoso and Goody. Vendors claim their industry is a profitable one (worth an estimated $258 billion) because the
Frugal founders and savvy shoppers take heed. TechCrunch Disrupt, which takes place in person on October 18–20 — and online October 21 — can be a serious boon to your business. But our early-bird pricing disappears in a cloud of ruffled feathers on Friday, July 29 at 11:59 p.m. PT. You have just 48 hours
Facebook users were yesterday unable to engage in discussions or see comments on popular pages, sending confusion to some consumers, who thought they had been censored. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, told TechCrunch that a technical issue had caused the glitch that temporarily concealed comments on the page posts of verified accounts. Facebook said it had
Remember Natural Language Processing? NLP arose several years ago but it was only in 2018 that AI researchers proved it was possible to train a neural network once on a large amount of data and use it again and again for different tasks. In 2019 GPT-2 from Open AI, and T5 by Google appeared, showing
Snapchat has launched a new in-app game called Ghost Phone designed to showcase the company’s AR technology by allowing players to discover the secrets of an abandoned phone and hunt supernatural beings around them. To launch the game, users can either head to Snapchat’s Lens Explorer and find the Lens called Ghost Phone, tap 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. Hello, Daily Crunchers! Personal story time: I came to the U.S. on an IR1 visa — also known as a “green card” — after having been married to an American for more
Switchboard, a collaboration app that combines features of videoconferencing and digital whiteboarding, today announced that it raised $25 million in a Series A round that values the company at $200 million post-money. Icon Ventures led the tranche with participation from Sequoia, XYZ, and Spark Capital, bringing Switchboard’s total raised to $38.4 million. Co-founder and CEO
Sequoia, the world’s most influential venture fund, has made its maiden investment in Pakistan, joining a growing list of high profile investors who have backed young firms in the South Asian market in the past one year. Islamabad-headquartered startup Dbank said on Thursday it has raised $17.6 million in a seed round, the largest in
Autonomous vehicle company Pony.ai is forming a strategic joint venture with Sany Heavy Truck, a subsidiary of Chinese heavy equipment manufacturer Sany Heavy Industry, to create an autonomous truck brand. The plan is to combine Pony.ai’s “virtual driver” with Sany’s technical prowess in building heavy-duty trucks to build automotive-grade self-driving trucks with Level 4 autonomy,
Today, the National Football League launched its streaming service NFL+ which has been officially priced at $4.99 per month or $39.99 per year. However, with this launch, the outgoing NFL Game Pass will no longer be offered in the United States. The NFL+ subscription will include all live out-of-market preseason games, live local and primetime
Ax Sharma Contributor Ax Sharma is a security researcher and reporter. His areas of interest include open source software security, malware analysis, data breaches and scam investigations. If combating attacks and hijackings of legitimate software on open source registries like npm weren’t challenging enough, app makers are increasingly experiencing the consequences of software self-sabotage. A
The fintech sector has had its ups and downs as of late, with Klarna experiencing hefty valuation cuts, Fast shutting down and Robinhood and Better conducting mass layoffs. Despite the market turbulence, investors remain bullish on the potential value that financial technology startups can bring worldwide. To understand how fintech startups are preparing to weather
Facebook is trying to be TikTok, but now, Twitter is bringing us back a little bit of Facebook (or LiveJournal or Myspace). Some users are reporting that they can now post Twitter statuses, which lets them tag posts like they’re retro MySpace moods. Some of these statuses include “Spoiler alert,” “Shower thoughts,” “Picture of the
Apple has released the fourth developer beta for iOS 16 on Wednesday, bringing limits to the ability to edit and delete iMessages. Most notably, the company is adding an edit history log that will give the person you’re messaging the ability to see any edits you’ve made. Prior to the introduction of an edit history
With the after-effect of the pandemic set to play out for years, VCs specializing in health, wellness and general ‘joy’ would appear to have rising fortunes. Funds such as Able Partners and Joyance have appeared in recent years to invest in startups that make people’s lives healthier, or at least more fun. In Europe this
About a year ago, Keychron launched its Q-series of custom mechanical keyboards that now spans the gamut from small 60% boards to full-size options, with everything in between. Whatever your preference, Keychron clearly wants to be in the running for your money. Now, the company is launching the Q8, a rare 65% Alice-style board with
Google is again delaying plans to phase out Chrome’s use of third-party cookies — the files websites use to remember preferences and track online activity. In a blog post, Anthony Chavez, Google’s VP of Privacy Sandbox, said that the company is now targeting the “second half of 2024” as the timeframe for adopting an alternative
Our foodchains are notorious for being not-exactly-amazing for the amount of carbon they crank into the atmosphere. Root Global just raised a round of funding in a bid to become what it calls the ‘carbon OS’ for the food industry. It builds software to help companies up and down the food value chain get to
Shypyard, a startup developing business planning products and services for brands and direct-to-consumer merchants, closed on $3 million in seed funding. The round was led by Gradient Ventures with participation from Liquid 2 Ventures, Position Ventures and a group of angel investors that includes current and former executives and founders at Shopify, BigCommerce and SnapCommerce.
Microsoft announced its fourth-quarter results Tuesday, missing Wall Street’s expectations. The company reported it had $51.9 billion in sales for the quarter that ended June 30, an increase of 12% year-over-year. Analysts were expecting around $52.5 billion. Net income inched up 2% to $16.74 billion. This is considered the slowest revenue growth for Microsoft since 2020.
Debt gets a bad rap. That’s partly because it’s associated with higher risk. For startups, a few missed payments could force them to shutter, depending on the terms of their loan agreements. But despite its reputation, debt isn’t an act of desperation during down times. As my colleague Alex Wilhelm notes, for companies that have
As regulation, platform dynamics and consumer choice continue to eat into the adtech stalwart known as cookies, it’s leaving a gap in the market for advertising solutions that can work well without relying on cookie functionality. Today, an adtech out of Spain that’s doing just this has raised a big round of funding to double
A new report detailing the cost of mobile data in different markets across the world, bears the evidence of why internet use in most of Africa remains low despite the growing broadband internet coverage. The Worldwide Mobile Pricing 2022 report, which surveyed 233 countries, shows that five of the 10 most expensive countries to buy
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. What is up, you delightful beings. Today, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Instagram. Devin wrote about how the platform just keeps getting worse with dark patterns lifted from TikTok,
The pandemic normalized delivery in the U.S. But even before the health crises struck, delivery sales at restaurants alone were increasing at a rate of 7% to 8% per year, roughly twice that of sales across the entire restaurant industry, according to McKinsey. The trouble is, delivery can be a nightmare from the restaurant and