After weeks of anticipation, some Spotify users are left underwhelmed by the streamer’s personalized year-in-review feature, Spotify Wrapped — with many even going so far as to call it “boring” or a “flop.” Chief among the complaints are that Spotify prioritized the inclusion of an AI podcast for Wrapped over the other, clever and creative
A new company is emerging from stealth today with backing from Google’s AI-focused venture fund to help businesses compile their open-source AI infrastructure and reduce their engineering overheads. Cake integrates and secures more than 100 components for enterprises, including data source adapters (e.g. Apache Hadoop), data ingestion (e.g. Apache Kafka), data labelling (e.g. Label Studio),
Cyberattacks are on the rise, and the victims are high-profile. According to a KPMG survey, close to half of companies with $1 billion or more in annual revenue recently suffered a security breach. Surprisingly, an overabundance of security tools may be contributing to the problem. In a separate poll, 43% of businesses said their teams
Fighting wildfire is a lot like waging war. There are foot soldiers and paratrooper-like smokejumpers, air support from airtankers, and mobile centers that can direct firefighter movements in the field. “It’s a battlefield,” Gadi Benjamini, co-founder and CEO of FireDome, told TechCrunch. “It changes, it’s dynamic, it’s unexpected.” But what firefighters have been missing is
Spotify Wrapped, the streamer’s highly anticipated annual listening recap, has arrived. In addition to its usual personalized summary detailing your favorite artists, songs, podcasts, and more, the company this year is introducing two new features, including most notably, an AI-powered podcast of your 2024 Wrapped created with Google’s AI summarization tool, NotebookLM. Spotify is also
Marketplaces for software and services based on reviews are starting to reach their sell-by date. The user-generated reviews on sites like G2 and Capterra (one of Gartner’s three software directories) have often been accused of being paid for by software vendors. In fact, 8 out 9 of the reviews on the first page of G2’s
Space startup SpinLaunch is fundraising again, though a source tells TechCrunch that it was exploring raising a significantly more ambitious sum earlier this year. The company has closed an $11.5 million round out of a planned $25 million, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. SpinLaunch confirmed funding to TechCrunch, but
The Department of Energy (DOE) appears to be on a loan-approval spree in the lead-up to President-Elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, and the winners are all companies manufacturing clean energy solutions on U.S. soil. Trump has promised to cancel any unspent federal dollars under President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, a bipartisan climate law that allocated
“I’m trying to find holiday gifts for my sisters. I open a bunch of tabs, I want my wife’s advice.” That’s Browser Company CEO, Josh Miller, in his company’s latest ad for its new AI browser, Dia. Consulting your spouse to find gifts for your siblings is a pure — and dare I say, sweet
Fashion resale marketplace ThredUp has divested its European business to focus on its core domestic U.S. market. ThredUp expanded into Europe in 2021 with the acquisition of Remix, a Bulgarian startup that operates across a handful of central and eastern European markets. Back in May, ThredUp announced a new general manager, Florin Filote, to lead
Clarifai, once known as the young computer vision startup working with the Pentagon on its controversial Project Maven, has distanced itself from its early years of espousing questionable ideas on AI ethics, its interest in building autonomous weapons — years before Silicon Valley warmed up to defense tech — and its potential cyberbreach from Russia.
AI’s surging power demand has put several big tech firms at risk of blowing through their climate commitments. But Amazon has partnered with Orbital, an AI startup, to test a new material that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere — and they’re using an AWS datacenter as a first site. One of carbon capture’s biggest
When Valve released the Steam Deck, PC manufacturers realized there could be a new market for small, handheld computers that are capable of running games. Lenovo released the Legion Go and Asus released the ROG Ally. Windows Central managed to get hold of the first official renders of Lenovo’s upcoming gaming handheld, the Legion Go
Walmart just closed its acquisition of popular television maker Vizio in an effort to boost its advertising business. The acquisition was initially reported back in February; however, it took a few months to complete due to the waiting period under federal regulations. The all-cash deal is valued at $2.3 billion. With this strategic move, Walmart
Cancer incidence is on the rise, particularly among younger adults, but most new drug compounds fail to progress through clinical trials. According to French entrepreneur Fanny Jaulin (on the right in the picture above), the problem lies with clinical trial design. “Just because a drug isn’t successful in clinical trials doesn’t mean it’s not a
General Motors is selling its stake in the nearly completed Ultium Cells battery cell plant in Lansing, Michigan, to its joint venture partner LG Energy Solution (LGES). GM’s step back from the factory comes amid weakening electric vehicle demand and the potential rollback of Biden administration incentives to produce clean energy domestically. GM and LGES
AI hardware startup Tenstorrent raised nearly $700 million in new funding. Tenstorrent raised a $693 million Series D round that values the company at more than $2.6 billion, Bloomberg first reported. The round was led by Samsung Securities and AFW Partners. Other investors including Hyundai and Jeff Bezos’s Bezos Expeditions, among others. The Toronto-based company
World Labs, the startup founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, has unveiled its first project: an AI system that can generate video game-like, 3D scenes from a single image. Lots of AI systems can turn a photo into 3D models and environments. But World Labs’ scenes are unique in that they’re interactive — and modifiable.
A new app called Death Clock predicts the date of its users’ deaths and offers tips on how to push that date back. TechCrunch wrote about an iPod Death Clock app way back in 2006 — but developer Brett Franson told Bloomberg that with an AI trained on more than 1,200 life expectancy studies, his
As promised, startup accelerator Y Combinator’s imminent Demo Day will be happening in person. In fact, YC seems to have kicked off the IRL return of Demo Day at the end of the long Thanksgiving weekend, with an in-person Alumni Demo Day on Sunday for the Fall 2024 class of startups. Squad founder (and later
Attorneys for tech billionaire Elon Musk have filed for a preliminary injunction against OpenAI, several of its co-founders, and its investor and close collaborator, Microsoft, to prevent OpenAI and other named defendants from engaging in what Musk’s counsel claims is anticompetitive behavior. The motion for an injunction, which was filed late on Friday in the
As more celebrities and popular influencers join Bluesky, the fast-growing social media service has been facing more concerns around impersonation and verified identity. The Bluesky Safety team posted Friday that the company has updated its impersonation policy to be “more aggressive,” adding that “impersonation and handle-squatting accounts will be removed.” The company said it should
On a September morning in 2024, two Jonathan Cohens — one from the Rockaways in Queens, the other from London — stood in an empty 15,000-square-foot parking garage near Hudson Yards in New York City. As they walked over chipped yellow lines, they explained how the space would help Joco, their shared e-bike startup for
As one of the most decorated track cyclists of all time, Sir Chris Hoy might not seem an obvious candidate to back the burgeoning electric bike movement. The common refrain, after all, is that e-bikes aren’t real bikes. However, the six-time Olympic gold medalist has done exactly that, investing in a fledgling U.K. startup that
President-elect Donald Trump made no secret during his campaigning that he doesn’t think the U.S. should take an aggressive stance on climate change. From leading chants of “drill, baby, drill” to frequently criticizing everything from wind turbines to electric vehicles, he appears poised to cast a shadow over the climate tech sector for the next
The momentum of Thanksgiving — which saw consumers spend a record $33.6 billion spent globally online on the day — looks like it continued into Black Friday, with a bang. Adobe said that in the U.S., consumers made a record-breaking $10.8 billion of purchases, up 10.2% on last year. Meanwhile, Salesforce is giving a much
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. With only so many days left in the year, there was plenty of startup news to round up since last Friday, despite a short workweek in the
A group of Canadian news and media companies filed a lawsuit Friday against OpenAI, alleging that the ChatGPT maker has infringed their copyrights and unjustly enriched itself at their expense. The companies behind the lawsuit include the Toronto Star, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Globe and Mail, and others who seek to win monetary damages
Poor literacy skills have plagued the deaf and hard of hearing community for decades. The median literacy rates of deaf high school graduates have languished at a fourth-grade level since the turn of the 20th century, according to the National Center for Special Education Research. Bringing STEM concepts into the mix — the vocabulary for
Indoor climbing is a tricky sport to track. That’s why Spanish startup Lizcore caught TechCrunch’s eye at MWC earlier this year. The team of two co-founders — led by CEO Edgar Casanovas Lorente, a climbing instructor and guide turned entrepreneur — were showing off hardware they hope will see climbing gyms ushering in the kind of social gamification
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