Sonos went a bit further downmarket recently with the Ray, a smaller and cheaper soundbar than the Beam, itself a smaller, cheaper soundbar than the Arc. But while the Ray performs well, it doesn’t quite earn its premium and leaves one feeling that they should have just gone for something bigger. No one should have
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A game studio, HiDef, announced today that it is teaming up with camera company Snap Inc. to develop an off-platform Bitmoji-based dance and music social game. The game will leverage Snap’s augmented reality tech as well as Bitmoji, the personalized cartoon avatar maker. Bitmoji joined the Snap family over five years ago, and today over
Lagos and San Francisco-based Klasha has received an additional $2.1 million to complete its $4.5 million seed round. The startup, which provides multiple products for the cross-border commerce space in Africa, raised this new financing from a group of international investors co-led by American Express (AMEX) Ventures, the strategic investment group of American Express. This
Last year saw a huge funding boom for Southeast Asian consumer investment apps and if Pintu’s funding announcement today is anything to go by, that looks set to continue. The cryptocurrency-focused app has raised a $113 million Series B from Intudo Ventures, Lightspeed, Northstart Group and Pantera Capital. Launched in April 2020, Pintu bills itself
As Elon Musk tries to squirm out of his commitment to buy Twitter, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is running interference for the newly minted Texan. Paxton just announced that his office is investigating how Twitter may be “misleading Texans” about the number of automated bots on its platform. “It matters not only for regular
Solid Power’s new pilot line is a groundbreaking moment in the march toward solid-state batteries for electric vehicles. But don’t count on a revolution in lithium-ion battery chemistry happening on the line itself. That’s by design. The new facility, unlike the company’s previous pre-pilot line, will be “highly inflexible,” said Doug Campbell, Solid Power’s CEO.
Opal, a platform that decentralizes access management for enterprise customers, today announced that it raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Greylock. CEO Stephen Cobbe says that the proceeds will be put toward product development and expanding the size of Opal’s 25-person team. It’s Cobbe’s assertion that companies give out too
Apple surprised WWDC keynote watchers with the release of a new, fully redesigned MacBook Air. The MacBook Air, Apple’s most popular notebook computer, last got a significant physical overhaul in 2018. The new MacBook Air borrows design cues from both Apple’s latest iMac line, as well as the new MacBook Pros that were released in
Today at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple unveiled a slew of upgrades headed to iPad devices in iPadOS 16, the latest version of the company’s tablet-focused operating system. A redesigned multitasking interface — dubbed Stage Manager — makes it simpler to see which apps are open and switch between tasks, while new tools offer
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. Today is Monday, June 6, 2022, and in case you didn’t know, it is also Apple’s WWDC conference, which is what Haje and our other colleagues are focused on today, so you
Perhaps it’s the end of an era now that Sheryl Sandberg announced she will leave Meta. However, to Kelly Graziadei and Joanna Lee Shevelenko, general partners at f7 Ventures, an early-stage venture firm, they are carrying forward the influence Sandberg had on them during their time at Facebook in their new endeavor. All of f7
India is proposing to create an appeals panel with the veto power to reverse content moderation decisions of social media firms, it said Monday evening, republishing the draft changes to the IT rules after quietly withdrawing it last week. If enacted, it would be the first time globally that a nation creates an appeals panel
Solid Power, a solid-state battery company, today unveiled a pilot production line for EV-sized cells that will be sent to automotive partners for testing. The move represents another step in the steady march toward solid-state lithium-ion batteries, which promise to bring unprecedented range and safety to electric vehicles. “We validated that we can use industry-standard
Agrotools, a Brazilian-based technology and intelligence company for agribusiness, raised $21 million (BRL 100 million) to value the company at around $94 million, according to the company. Investors in the round include Horácio Lafer Piva (Klabin), Pedro Paulo Campos (JP Morgan, Pátria and Arsenal), Fátima Marques (Hay Group/Korn Ferry), Paulo Hegler (Toledo), Olivier Murguet (Nissan-Renault),
The appropriately named endurance (so: running, triathlon, cycling, etc.) events marketplace Let’s Do This (a YC alumni) appeared a couple of years ago listing all kinds of endurance activities globally and attracting the backing of stars such as Usain Bolt and Serena Williams, alongside more standard venture investors such as EQT. Founded by Alex Rose
Apple is improving its webcam on the shiny new M2 MacBooks, but for those of us still chugging along on our existing MacBooks, we’ll be able to use our iPhones as webcams ( … if we don’t want to sneak a look at our phone during a Zoom meeting). Later this year, Apple will begin
At a developer briefing following Apple’s keynote address at its Worldwide Developer Conference this afternoon, the company went into more detail about the different types of widgets developers can now build for the iOS 16 Lock Screen. Inspired by the Apple Watch’s complications, Apple said these new widgets can help developers leverage key information from
Curtis Townshend Contributor More posts by this contributor Are early-stage funding rounds out of control? Companies are valued based on metrics. Those with better metrics are valued higher, and those with worse metrics are valued lower. None of this is controversial, but it’s also not helpful for getting started — metrics alone don’t help you
Unicorns, Tiger, and bear markets! Oh my! Alex Wilhelm 7 hours Unicorn traffic jam, meet unicorn glut. Private-market tech companies worth $1 billion or more have long been an indicator of investor enthusiasm. The number of so-called unicorns minted in a particular period was a workable indicator of how hot the venture capital market was
In a fresh SEC filing this morning, Twitter shared a letter it received from Elon Musk’s legal team indicating displeasure with the company’s offered information regarding the level of “spam and fake accounts” on its service. This is the same concern that the technology entrepreneur has posted about extensively since his deal to buy the
It’s the belief of some analysts that the market for robotic process automation, which leverages AI to automate certain software tasks, is headed toward consolidation. A recent Forrester Research report predicts that the segment will start to flatten as soon as 2023 as companies shift to broader automation solutions. There’s evidence to support this. UiPath,
For years, Africa’s credit infrastructure has lagged behind the rest of the world due to low credit coverage from its bureaus. Per a World Bank report, only 11% of Africa’s population have their credit information recorded by private credit bureaus. And for those who are banked, only 17% have accessed loans. Thus, there’s a real
Wedbush Securities Managing Director of Equity Research Michael Pachter joins Taylor Riggs to discuss Amazon’s 20-for-1 stock split and why investors care so much about it, and the departure of Amazon’s consumer chief Dave Clark.
The United States is perhaps one of the best countries to start an urban air mobility company. You only have to look at how fast well-funded startups like Joby Aviation, Wisk Aero and Lillium are building and testing electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, aircraft. However, South Korea, which lacks the venture capital, entrepreneurial
Welcome to The Interchange, a take on this week’s fintech news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. Buy now, pay later has become nearly ubiquitous here in the U.S. As such, companies that offer that technology to merchants are unsurprisingly growing more competitive with each other. Case in point. This past
The 2022 startup market might feel like a slowly unfolding train wreck, but there’s good news to be found — provided you are willing to take a longer-term perspective. Sure, startup layoffs are spiking, venture capital is slowing, and the stock market is a hot mess. Underneath each drumbeat of negativity, however, there’s more positivity
What public cloud software companies get rewarded for has changed, report shows Alex Wilhelm Anna Heim 3 days Rational or not, public markets are where consensus gets formed on how much listed companies are worth, impacting the value of private companies in the process. But in a downturn, such as the one everyone suddenly agreed
After a month that saw nearly 16,000 tech workers lose their jobs, June is off to a similar tumultuous start. Startups across all sectors, from healthcare to enterprise SaaS to crypto, are laying off portions of staff and citing, seemingly, from the same notes: it’s a tough market, a time of uncertainty, and a correction
When LaunchNotes founders, Jake Brereton and Tyler Davis were working together at Atlassian, they noticed that it was often difficult to communicate changes from the development teams to product teams and other internal and external audiences. The company had a couple of big announcements today around funding and a new platform approach. The internal teams
Hello all! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we recap some of the top stories to cross TechCrunch over the last 7 days. If you want it in your inbox every Saturday, sign up here. The most read story this week was about, get this: a DeLorean. As in the Back to