Italy’s competition watchdog has opened an investigation into Google over concerns it has abused a dominant position by hindering data portability rights which are afforded to individuals under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The procedure follows a complaint made to the authority by the operator of a direct marketing platform called Weople.
admin
Thanks to the pandemic, teams are more distributed than ever. For some companies, that’s led to a disconnect between lower-level employees and leadership, the latter of whom are generally skeptical of remote work. According to a survey from GoodHire, 75% of managers want workers in the office, citing the potential lack of focus and loss
Nuro, the autonomous vehicle delivery startup that is valued at more than $8.6 billion, is closing its Phoenix facility as it shifts its commercial strategy away from the desert metropolis and toward the San Francisco Bay Area and Houston. Nuro told employees that the Phoenix Depot location would be closed by October 1, according to
You might think given the chatter in the startup world that venture capitalists are short on funds — after all, we’re hearing about young tech companies finding themselves marooned between stages, hitting up investors with smaller capital pools than prior backers and turning to equity crowdfunding to keep their cash balances healthy. And yet new data
Meta today released its first annual human rights report, which — in the company’s words — includes “insights and actions from [Meta’s] human rights due diligence on products, countries, and responses to emerging crises.” The 83-page report, covering the years 2020 and 2021, strikes a largely self-congratulatory tone, defending Meta’s misinformation strategy while failing to
Lithium-ion batteries are one of the driving forces behind the transition away from fossil fuels, but the rechargeable battery that started it all — lead-acid — has received very little attention. Invented over 160 years ago, lead-acid batteries have been upgraded a few times, but today’s cells are largely unchanged from those sold in 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. Oh hey, and welcome to Thursday! It’s been another intense day with a lot of news happening. We’ve picked the cream of the crop for you. Oh! And if you want to
Systemiq Capital, a backer of early-stage climate tech startups, says it has secured $70 million to kick off its second fund. The London-based VC aims to raise as much as $130 million more; that would mark quite a step up for the firm, which says it has funneled $30 million into 19 startups since 2018.
India has proposed to introduce a right to repair law, aiming to provide consumers the ability to have their devices repaired by third parties to fight the growing “culture of planned obsolescence” in a move that follows similar deliberations in the U.S. and the UK. The Indian Department of Consumer Affairs said Wednesday that it
A major shift in the U.S. app economy has just taken place. In the second quarter of this year, U.S. consumer spending in non-game mobile apps surpassed spending in mobile games for the first time in May 2022 and the trend continued in June. This drove the total revenue generated by non-game apps higher for
Sep.26 — Tesla Inc. shares climbed the most since July after Elon Musk said in an email to employees that the carmaker has a chance to top the vehicle-delivery record it set in the second quarter. Bloomberg’s Craig Trudell has more on “Bloomberg Markets: The Close.”
When Andrew Hines started Canvas Medical in 2015 he couldn’t have predicted that telehealth would go from niche to norm or that a pandemic would inspire entrepreneurs to launch a new fleet of digital health startups that needed fresh infrastructure. He just knew he wanted to build software for physicians like his wife, who wasted
Hivery, a startup that bills itself as an “optimization platform” for retailers, today announced that it raised $30 million in a Series B round led by Tiger Global, the embattled private equity firm, with participation from Blackbird Ventures, AS1 Growth Partners and OneVentures. CEO Jason Hosking told TechCrunch via email that the proceeds will fuel
Large-scale machine learning models are at the heart of headline-grabbing technologies like OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 and Google’s LaMDA. They’re impressive, to be sure, capable of generating images and text convincing enough to pass for a human’s work. But developing the models took an enormous amount of time and compute power — not to mention cash.
Powin, an energy storage technology developer, said today it has raised $135 million in funding led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, with participation from existing investors Trilantic Energy Partners North America and Energy Impact Partners (EIP). The investment comes on the back of the recent funding from Samsung Venture Investment and a strategic partnership
In an apparent effort to compete with creator subscription services like Patreon, Instagram began an alpha test of a subscriber feature in January. Today, Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri announced an expansion of the test features, along with some updates around how the last six months of development have gone. When the feature began testing
A major populist but controversial piece of UK legislation to regulate Internet content through a child safety-focused frame is on pause until the fall when the government expects to elect a new prime minister, following the resignation of Boris Johnson as Conservative Party leader last week. PoliticsHome reported yesterday that the Online Safety Bill would
There’s a growing appetite for alternative search engines. At least, that’s the crux of the argument Richard Socher, the former chief scientist at Salesforce, likes to make. In 2020, Socher co-founded You, a search engine that uses AI to understand search queries, rank the results and parse the queries into different languages (including programming languages).
From Bitcoin’s valuation getting pummeled to data breaches at Axie Infinity and layoffs at huge exchanges, crypto isn’t exactly having its best moment. But in many countries in Latin America, where much of the population craves a better financial future, investors are still bullish about crypto’s transformative power. To understand how Latin American startups are
The founders of New Zealand-based Carepatron, a healthcare platform used by providers and patients, say they are passionate about solo practitioners and small health teams. With that in mind, they built Carepatron, which helps reduce the amount of administrative work that practices need to perform and also automatically reminds patients about appointments to reduce no-shows.
After flagging concerns over the financial risks associated with non-fungible tokens, some of China’s authorities are putting forward guidance on how to best make use of the novel technology. The government of Shanghai says it supports “leading companies to explore building NFT exchanges,” according to the city’s 14th Five Year Plan on the digital economy
Kindly His’ at home semen test kit Hormonal healthcare can be intimidating, since it touches on the most intimate parts of our lives. Kindly Health wants to make it accessible to more people, with a combination of at-home diagnostic tests (including semen tests and tests for polycystic ovary syndrome), telehealth consultations and supplements. The Bangalore-based
Clearview AI has been hit with another sanction for breaching European privacy rules. The Athens-based Hellenic data protection authority has fined the controversial facial recognition firm €20 million and banned it from collecting and processing the personal data of people living in Greece. It has also ordered it to delete any data on Greek citizens
ChowNow, a startup that builds branded online ordering systems for restaurants, today announced layoffs internally, TechCrunch has learned. According to several sources who spoke to this reporter on the condition of anonymity, around 100 people were affected across teams including onboarding, operations, and sales. “We, like every company, plan our annual budgets far ahead of
It seems like every time a demo day ends, there’s a new one waiting around the corner – and as you know, TechCrunch is no stranger to covering them. Oftentimes these events are filled with traditional seed-stage tech companies based in Silicon Valley. But today, we’re highlighting the demo day for a new wave of
The web3 bandwagon really took off in 2021 and 2022 as entrepreneurs and investors both sought to make their mark in the nascent industry. But Latin America stood out thanks to its comparatively high crypto adoption: According to Kim Grauer, head of research at Chainalysis, Latin America has consistently captured between 8% and 10% of
In the midst of absolutely no internal chaos whatsoever, Twitter’s accessibility team launched a much-requested feature test. Ten percent of users, who make up the test group, will be served reminders to add image descriptions to their photo uploads. Image descriptions, or alt text, are exactly what they sound like: descriptions of what appears in
Biofuels are the sirens of renewable energy, luring startups with enchanting promises of enormous markets, from aviation to trucking and shipping. Companies just can’t help throwing themselves at the problem, and more than a few have been dashed to pieces in the process. One new startup, though, hopes it’s Ulysses in this tale, able to
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. Goodness! Have a scroll through the TechChrunch homepage today — it’s like drinking from a fire hose here the past couple of days! There’s so much news that it’s legitimately hard to
It has been a busy few months for Atomico, the European venture capital (VC) juggernaut founded by Skype co-creator Niklas Zennström some 16 years ago. After promoting three investors to partner back in April, it then brought in former Revolut and Uber executive Don Hoang as partner a month later. To cap off this frenzy,