timef 02/26/2025

At an event in NYC on Wednesday, Amazon announced an upgraded Alexa experience powered by generative AI. Onstage, Amazon’s devices and services chief Panos Panay called it a “complete architecture” of the AI assistant. “[W]hile the vision of Alexa has been ambitious and remains incredibly compelling, until right this moment, right this moment, we have […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

YouTube continues to assert its dominance in the podcasting space, presenting significant competition to both Spotify and Apple Podcasts. In an announcement on Wednesday, the platform revealed it has surpassed 1 billion monthly active podcast viewers.  This milestone highlights YouTube’s popularity in the podcast industry and emphasizes consumer preference for video-first formats. Last year, YouTube […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Microsoft says that it has completed a multi-year project to allow Europe-based customers using its cloud services to store and process data in the EU. The project, the EU Data Boundary for the Microsoft Cloud, began in January 2023, went on for two more years, and finally wrapped up this February, Microsoft said. With its […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Google announced on Wednesday that it’s updating its “Results about you” tool to make it easier for users to protect and remove their personal information from Search results. The company says it’s improved the sign-up process and simplified requesting removals directly from Google Search. The tool can be used to proactively monitor and delete things […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Tick-tock! The last three days to save up to $1,130 to TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 are winding down! Get your tickets today for massive savings on Disrupt 2025 individual passes and up to 30% on group tickets. These offers end February 28 at 11:59 p.m. PT, so don’t miss out on major savings of the year. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The hub of AI awaits — don’t miss out! You have 5 more days to secure your spot at TechCrunch Sessions: AI with savings of up to $325. This offer ends on March 3 at 11:59 p.m. PT. As AI continues to be the biggest topic of conversation in the tech world, TechCrunch has you […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple will be able to resume its iPhone 16 smartphone sales in Indonesia after the two sides came to an agreement, the Industry Ministry said during a press conference Wednesday, per a Reuters report. The ban was lifted five months after Indonesia blocked the U.S. iPhone maker from selling its iPhone 16 phones in Indonesia […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Lock screen platform Glance announced today that it is launching a new generative AI-based shopping experience. It will suggest different outfits on a user’s personalized avatar. The company is partnering with Google to use the company’s Gemini models and Vertex AI to deploy the experience. Separately, the company also got fresh backing from Google — […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

There’s no sure-fire approach to sales enablement, the process of providing a sales team with the resources it needs to close deals. Some teams are deficient on the prospecting side — that is, identifying and contacting potential customers. Others require help getting deals over the finish line. To meet these diverse wants, founders Matt Millen […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Despite employers requiring their employees to complete yearly cybersecurity training courses, human-driven cybersecurity breaches still happen. The problem could even get substantially worse as generative AI increases the scale and personalization of social engineering campaigns. Anagram, formerly known as Cipher, is taking a new approach to employee cybersecurity training that the company hopes can keep […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Birdgetown Research has raised $19 million in a round co-led by Accel and Lightspeed to deploy AI agents for business decisions and M&A deals. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Framework, the company that is better known for its modular, repairable laptops, just released its first desktop computer. It’s a small desktop PC that punches above its weight. The most interesting part is what’s inside the device. Framework is one of the first companies to use AMD’s recently announced Strix Halo architecture, also known as […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Regions like the U.S. and Europe have been doubling down on rebuilding their industrial muscle, after decades of closing down factories and outsourcing the work to countries like China. To that end, a fast-growing Polish startup called Nomagic, which builds robots — specifically robotic arms — for logistics operations, is announcing $44 million in funding, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Since its launch in 2018 as a ride-hailing service in Togo, Gozem has steadily expanded across French-speaking West Africa, integrating a wide range of services as it sought to become a super-app. The company now offers ride-hailing, commerce, vehicle financing, and digital banking across Togo, Benin, Gabon, and Cameroon. Now, in a bid to scale […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Genea gets a court injunction after ransomware gang Termite claims to have leaked patient information © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Data exposed even briefly can live on in generative AI chatbots long after the data is made private. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Voice AI company ElevenLabs is now letting authors publish AI-generated audiobooks on its own Reader app, TechCrunch has learned and the company confirmed. The announcement comes days after the company partnered with Spotify for AI-narrated audiobooks. ElevenLabs, which raised a $180 million mega-round last month, started inviting authors to try out their publishing program through […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Proxima Fusion, a two-year-old, German nuclear fusion startup, has published plans for a working fusion power plant in a peer-reviewed journal, in what is being touted as a step-change in the race to generate limitless energy. Today’s nuclear fission reactors create radioactive waste, whereas nuclear fusion releases vast amounts of energy, with zero carbon emissions and […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Anthropic, one of the world’s largest AI vendors, has a powerful family of generative AI models called Claude. These models can perform a range of tasks, from captioning images and writing emails to solving math and coding challenges. With Anthropic’s model ecosystem growing so quickly, it can be tough to keep track of which Claude […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

OpenAI offers an array of plans for ChatGPT, both paid and free. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

YC deleted a controversial demo video from one of its startups, which monitors factory workers with AI cameras. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Anthropic’s newest flagship AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, cost “a few tens of millions of dollars” to train using less than 10^26 FLOPs of computing power. That’s according to Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, who in an X post on Monday relayed a clarification he’d received from Anthropic’s PR. “I was contacted by Anthropic who told me […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Perplexity, the developer of an AI-powered search engine, is raising a $50 million seed and pre-seed investment fund, CNBC reported. Although the majority of the capital is coming from limited partners, Perplexity is using some of the capital it raised for the company’s growth to anchor the fund.  Perplexity has reportedly raised $500 million at […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Meet the DOGE staffers and senior advisors in Elon Musk's inner circle, and how they got there. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Amy Gleason is named as the acting administrator of DOGE, amid ambiguity over Elon Musk's role. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

On Tuesday afternoon, Anthropic launched Claude Plays Pokémon on Twitch, a live stream of Anthropic’s newest AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, playing a game of Pokémon Red. It’s become a fascinating experiment of sorts, showcasing the capabilities of today’s AI tech and people’s reactions to them. AI researchers have used all sorts of video games, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Lucid Motors is changing CEOs for the first time in nearly six years. The company announced Tuesday that Peter Rawlinson is stepping down from the CEO and CTO roles that he’s held since before the company went public. Lucid appointed its chief operating officer Marc Winterhoff as its interim CEO. Rawlinson will serve as “strategic […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apptronik, an Austin-based maker of humanoid robots, on Tuesday announced a new pilot partnership with American supply chain/manufacturing stalwart, Jabil. The deal arrives two weeks after Apptronik announced a $350 million Series A financing round aimed at scaling up production of its Apollo robot. The Jabil deal is the second major pilot announced by Apptronik. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

OpenAI announced on Tuesday that it’s rolling out deep research, its web browsing agent that creates thorough research reports, to all paying ChatGPT users. ChatGPT Plus, Team, Enterprise, and Edu subscribers will get 10 deep research queries per month. OpenAI’s Deep research was previously only available to ChatGPT Pro users, the company’s $200-a-month tier; they […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A new Mac app called Framous launched on Tuesday, giving you the ability to add device frames around screenshots to make them look more professional.  The helpful new tool can aid app developers, graphic designers, and even journalists who need to add an iPhone or Mac frame—also known as a mockup or template—to photos. This […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple shareholders rejected an anti-DEI proposal at its investor meeting Tuesday. The proposal was brought by a conservative group called the National Center for Public Policy Research (NPPR). It asked Apple to end its DEI activities. Boards typically ask shareholders to reject shareholder proposals, and this was one of four such shareholder proposals. This proposal […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

OpenAI says that it won’t bring the AI model powering deep research, its in-depth research tool, to its developer API while it figures out how to better assess the risks of AI convincing people to act on or change their beliefs. In an OpenAI whitepaper published Wednesday, the company wrote that it’s in the process […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Automattic-owned blogging site and social platform Tumblr has financially backed Tapestry, the newly launched app designed to organize feeds from across the open web, including RSS, Mastodon, Bluesky, and others. Launched as a Kickstarter project in January 2024, Tapestry went on to raise over $177,000 via crowdfunding for its app, which opened up to the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Poe, Quora’s platform that brings together a number of AI models under one roof, has launched a new capability that lets users build visual interfaces — apps, essentially — on top of any combination of models. Called Poe Apps, the feature allows Poe users to describe the app they want to create in the new […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Fintech Brex expects its annual net revenue to reach $500 million in 2025, according to a person familiar with the company’s operations as cited by Bloomberg and The Information. While the startup did not comment on the specific revenue projection, it did share that Brex has seen “3x overall revenue growth” year-over-year. It also told […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Hi there, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular fintech newsletter. We’re going on hiatus for a bit, but you can still find our must-see fintech coverage, including my columns and our daily analysis and breaking news stories, at TechCrunch.com. If you want those stories and much more in your inbox every day, sign up for our daily […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Bluesky is getting added to the Opera web browser. On Tuesday, the Norway-based software maker announced the addition of the new social network alongside Slack and Discord, which will all be integrated into the browser’s sidebar alongside other messaging and communication services. Opera users have been able to customize their browsers with shortcuts to messaging […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Using generative AI to create software has been possibly the largest use case since it first appeared a couple years ago. But platforms like Cursor and Copilot are mostly confined to a world inhabited by trained engineers.  Lovable, a Swedish AI startup, reached the front page of both Product Hunt and Hacker News last year […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Amazon is hosting an Alexa-focused press event in NYC on Wednesday. Considering the company hasn’t held a major device presser in nearly two years — the last one was September 2023 — we’re expecting some splashy announcements. The event will not be live streamed. However, TechCrunch will be reporting on the ground. The festivities, emceed […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

When goods enter the U.S., they have to be declared to U.S. customs so the importer can be charged the proper taxes. That applies to everything from a consumer ordering clothes from a brand based overseas to every single item on a massive container ship. When it comes to commercial importing, filling out the necessary […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Canadian biotech startup Afynia Laboratories, a spin-out from McMaster University in Ontario, has picked up $5 million in seed funding to commercialize a blood test for endometriosis — a medical condition that can afflict people with a uterus, causing problems like chronic pelvic pain and fertility issues. Endometriosis affects nearly 200 million people worldwide. Getting […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Clicks is bringing its BlackBerry-style physical keyboard case to Android. The company on Tuesday announced the launch of three new products aimed at Android users, including Clicks keyboards for the Google Pixel, Motorola Razr+, and Samsung Galaxy. The cases are available for pre-order starting today and will initially be offered at lower price points than […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

YouTube announced it’s making changes to mid-roll ads to improve the viewing experience for users while also helping creators potentially earn more revenue. Starting May 12, the Google-owned platform is going to show fewer ads during moments that feel interruptive or may cause viewers to abandon the video — like in the middle of a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.