timef 02/27/2025

In a bid to take on YouTube, TikTok is revamping its desktop platform with the addition of several new features. The company announced on Thursday that its web-based experience features a new modular layout, refreshed For You feed, a new Explore tab, immersive full-screen LIVE gaming streaming, and a floating player. The social network’s new […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

For two decades, TechCrunch has provided a front row view to the future of technology, shaping conversations that matter and spotlighting the next big things before they break — both on the page and in person at our world-renowned events.  This year, as we celebrate our 20th anniversary, we’re launching our most ambitious events calendar […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

eBay announced on Thursday that it has updated its platform to help buyers find fast-shipping items and local listings, thanks to changes to Search item cards and additional usage of AI. The company is making it easier to identify items with fast delivery, as search item cards now display delivery range estimates for all fast […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The U.S. government law enforcement agency said a North Korean government hacking group it calls TraderTraitor was behind the massive hack of Bybit. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Don’t let the world of AI pass you by. You have just four days left to secure your spot at TechCrunch Sessions: AI and get savings of up to $325. But make sure to act fast — this offer ends on March 2 at 11:59 p.m. PT. There’s never been a better time to network […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Clock’s ticking! You’ve got just 48 hours left to lock in your spot at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 and save up to $1,130 on individual ticket types or 30% on group tickets. Don’t wait — secure your pass now before prices go up on February 28 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Disrupt 2025 takes place on October […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Fintech has fragmented into increasingly specialized, cucumber-sliced micro-services, ranging from embedded buy-now-pay-later loans to specialized neo banks to yet more payment processing systems. What opportunities remain for innovators in such a fragmented landscape? One U.K. startup, Just Move In, zoomed out and realised that the home had been overlooked by everyone in the industry. And […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Digital payments platform Stripe has yet to lay out plans to go public, but in the meantime the company has thrown past and present employees a line for some liquidity. The company on Thursday confirmed a tender offer where investors will buy up shares from those employees at a valuation of $91.5 billion. Stripe said […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

IBM has finalized its multi-billion dollar HashiCorp acquisition, two days after the U.K.’s antitrust regulator gave the deal its blessing. Today’s announcement comes 10 months after IBM announced plans to pay $6.4 billion for HashiCorp, an enterprise software company best known for Terraform, an “infrastructure as code” tool for provisioning and managing infrastructure across clouds. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has introduced Ocelot, its first quantum computing chip. The news brings it into line with its big cloud rivals Microsoft and Google, which have also unveiled their own quantum chips in recent months, respectively Majorana and Willow. The cloud computing giant has long been investing in the quantum computing space, starting […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A four-year-old Swiss startup has raised a sizable chunk of change to capitalize on the burgeoning “agentic AI” movement. Unique said on Thursday that it has raised $30 million in a Series A funding round that was led by London-based VC firm DN Capital and CommerzVentures, the investment offshoot of Germany’s Commerzbank. “Agentic AI” is […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The automated logic behind many financial decisions — for example, decisions that determine whether a client is approved for a credit line — is hard-coded. Often, it’s not easily changed. If a head of credit at a bank wanted to adjust the bank’s lending criteria, for example, they’d likely have to raise a ticket with […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Meta is mulling launching a standalone app for short-form videos, The Information reported, citing an anonymous source who heard Instagram head Adam Mosseri talking about the project to staff. The project is reportedly code-named Project Ray that aims to improve recommendations for new users and existing users in the U.S., and feature more three-minute videos, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Gemini is Google’s long-promised, next-gen generative AI model family. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple delivered its latest budget handset, the $599 iPhone 16e, without pomp. There was no big event in person, nor was there one online. No journalists scrambled through hoards of colleagues to snap photos of the phone. Instead, CEO Tim Cook tweeted out that new hardware was on the way, days before Apple announced the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Being somewhat later than Europe in adopting the idea of parcel delivery, much of Asia built its delivery infrastructure around e-commerce, effectively ‘Uberising’ how deliveries worked down to the last mile. Think DoorDash but for parcels, not food. This is what the founders of Europe’s Relay realized and decided to bring to the region — […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Data storage and resilience company Lonestar and semiconductor and storage company Phison launched a data center infrastructure on a SpaceX rocket on Wednesday that’s headed to the moon. The companies are sending Phison’s Pascari storage — solid state drives (SSDs) built for data centers —packed with Lonestar’s clients’ data on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Commercetools — a “headless commerce” platform that provides APIs to companies building online storefronts — saw a major boost in its business just a few years ago, raising money at whopping $1.9 billion valuation as the world went shopping online in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, and businesses rushed to improve their e-commerce operations. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The boom in ecommerce post-pandemic meant shops moved online. However, some merchants ended up with dozens of separate app providers to accommodate everything from supply chains, inventory, and marketing. The founders of Shop Circle realized this and either built or bought many such apps. The company has now raised $60 million in a Series B […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is more bullish about Nvidia's sales than ever, despite a market panic last month induced by China's DeepSeek. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Meta’s Oversight Board, the company’s independent group created to help with sensitive policy decisions, is preparing to weigh in on CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent changes to how Facebook, Instagram, and Threads handle hate speech, Engadget reported. Zuckerberg announced an overhaul of its content moderation policies in January, shortly before the inauguration of U.S. President Donald […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Amazon shared an impressive vision of an “agentic” future on Wednesday — one in which the company’s improved Alexa, Alexa+, handles countless mundane tasks, from booking restaurants to finding appliance repairmen. If Amazon can deliver, it could be the first out to the gate with a comprehensive, consumer-focused agent tool. The company hopes to marry […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

In a newly issued executive order (EO), the Trump Administration has instructed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Elon Musk-advised initiative to reduce federal spending, to create a “centralized technological system” in every agency to record contract and grant awards. As part of the ramp-up of these systems, agency employees who approved individual contract […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Former North Carolina Congressman Patrick McHenry announced Wednesday that he landed a job with VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. He will be a Senior Advisor. His post on X said little about what the job entails, except to be advocating for startups (which a16z likes to call “little tech”) with policymakers. A16z did not immediately respond […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Millie, a California-based maternity clinic, founded by Anu Sharma, announced the raise of a $12 million Series A by investors including RH Capital, TMV, and Melinda French Gates’ Pivotal Ventures.  Sharma was inspired to launch the company after the birth of her daughter in 2019. She faced pregnancy complications and, as the child of a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Avride sidewalk bots will start delivering restaurant orders and groceries in central Tokyo this week through a partnership with e-commerce giant Rakuten, the latest commercial expansion by the Yandex spinout into Northeast Asia. The Austin-based autonomous vehicle startup is one of four projects under Nebius Group, a Netherlands-based company formerly called Yandex NV that sold […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Not every app or service wants to monetize your personal data. Here are some of our favorite alternatives to popular apps. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Companies around America have started cutting DEI programs and eliminating DEI commitments from public documents in response to legal and political threats from the Trump administration. Just a few weeks ago, Attorney General Pam Bondi instructed the Department of Justice to “investigate, eliminate, and penalize,” DEI programs deemed illegal in private sector companies that receive […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Inception, a new Palo Alto-based company started by Stanford computer science professor Stefano Ermon, claims to have developed a novel AI model based on “diffusion” technology. Inception calls it a diffusion-based large language model, or a “DLM” for short. The generative AI models receiving the most attention now can be broadly divided into two types: […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Bybit has already paid more than $4 million to bounty hunters who helped trace and freeze some of the stolen funds. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

ElevenLabs, an AI startup that just raised a $180 million mega funding round, has been primarily known for its audio generation prowess. The company took a step in another technological direction by launching its first standalone speech-to-text model called Scribe. The startup, valued at $3.3 billion, has aided many other companies in providing speech-to-text services […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Google announced on Wednesday that it has received FDA clearance for the Pixel Watch 3’s “Loss of Pulse Detection” feature and will be launching it in the U.S. at the end of March. The feature can detect when a user’s heart stops beating due to an event like primary cardiac arrest, respiratory or circulatory failure, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Dating app Hinge launched a new feature called “Match Note” on Wednesday, allowing users to privately share information with matches that they haven’t shared publicly on their profile.  Users can add a Match Note by going to their profile, similar to how they can add a text prompt. The note is always visible to new […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

At Amazon’s annual Devices & Services event on Wednesday, the company introduced Alexa+, an enhanced version of its voice assistant, now powered by generative AI.  During the demonstration, Amazon showcased how users can share documents with Alexa+, allowing it to recall important details and answer questions about those documents. Mara Segal, director of Alexa, provided […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Amazon is not giving up on making its Alexa a virtual shopping assistant, On Wednesday, the company announced that Alexa+, its revamped Alexa experience, will be able to help consumers grocery shop from home using more natural conversations and requests. The feature will work with Amazon Fresh or any other grocery partner working with Amazon, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Amazon is not giving up on making its Alexa a virtual shopping assistant, On Wednesday, the company announced that Alexa+, its revamped Alexa experience, will be able to help consumers grocery shop from home using more natural conversations and requests. The feature will work with Amazon Fresh or any other grocery partner working with Amazon, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Amazon’s new and improved Alexa experience, Alexa+, starts at $19.99, or free for Amazon Prime subscribers. Amazon says that it will roll out in early access beginning next month, and then will come to a wider group of users in waves over the subsequent months. As part of the launch of Alexa+, Amazon is debuting […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Amazon’s new and improved Alexa experience, Alexa+, starts at $19.99, or free for Amazon Prime subscribers. It’ll roll out in early access beginning next month in the U.S., and then will come to a wider group of users in waves over the subsequent months, Amazon said. Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 devices will […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As part of the reveal of Amazon’s new AI-powered Alexa+ assistant, the tech giant announced that it’s launching two new features designed for kids called “Explore with Alexa” and “Stories with Alexa.” The features, which leverage Alexa’s new AI capabilities, will be available to Amazon Kids+ subscribers. The company demonstrated the new features at a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Amazon says that the new and improved Alexa unveiled on Wednesday, Alexa+, is powered by a “model agnostic” system that’s always using the “best” AI model for any given task. Onstage at a press event in NYC, Amazon VP Daniel Rausch said that Alexa+ draws on Bedrock, Amazon’s cloud platform designed to let organizations experiment […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A new startup wants to help developers create customized, contextual coding assistants that can connect with any model and integrate seamlessly with their development environments. Founded in June 2023 by CEO Ty Dunn and CTO Nate Sesti (pictured above), Y Combinator alum Continue has already garnered some 23,000 stars on GitHub and 11,000 Discord community […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

TechCrunch Sessions: AI, taking place on June 5 at Zellerbach Hall in UC Berkeley, will feature a panel discussing how startups can compete against established rivals in the AI industry. The panel, “How to Launch a Product Against Entrenched Incumbents,” will look at ways small companies are managing to stay relevant in a fast-paced and […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Capim, a startup offering Brazilians the option to buy now, pay later (BNPL) for dental services, has raised $26.7 million in Series A funding, it tells TechCrunch exclusively. Founded in July 2021 by Marcelo Lutz and Roberto Biselli, who serve as co-CEOs, Sao Paulo-based Capim describes itself as a vertical SaaS company specializing in the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As part of the new Alexa+ experience Amazon introduced on Wednesday, the smart assistant will gain the ability to navigate through movies on Prime Video on your behalf. Thanks to integrations between Alexa, Prime Video, and Fire TV, Alexa+, as the upgraded assistant is called, will be able to “jump to a scene” in a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As part of the new Alexa+ experience Amazon introduced on Wednesday, the smart assistant will gain the ability to navigate through movies on Prime Video on your behalf. Thanks to integrations between Alexa, Prime Video, and Fire TV, Alexa+, as the upgraded assistant is called, will be able to “jump to a scene” in a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Security researchers found evidence that Cellebrite was used by Serbian police to hack into the cellphones of a local journalist and an activist. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.