timef 03/19/2025

PSEA says it "took steps to ensure" its stolen data was deleted, suggesting a ransom demand was paid © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The European Union has sent Apple preliminary instructions on how it expects the iPhone maker to comply with interoperability provisions in the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), its flagship market contestability reform. According to the Commission, device manufacturers and app developers should be able to access nine iOS connectivity features that were restricted to Apple’s […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Max announced on Wednesday that the HBO series “The Last of Us” will be available to stream in American Sign Language (ASL). Season 2 premieres on April 13. Notably, this is the first time HBO’s original content will be accessible for streaming in ASL on the service, representing a step towards inclusivity for deaf and […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

AI startup Hugging Face has released a new app for iOS that only does one thing: uses offline, local AI to describe what’s in view of your iPhone’s camera. The app, called HuggingSnap, taps Hugging Face’s in-house vision model, smolvlm2, to analyze what your phone sees in real-time without sending data off to the cloud. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

During a recent dinner with business leaders in San Francisco, a comment I made cast a chill over the room. I hadn’t asked my dining companions anything I considered to be extremely faux pas: simply whether they thought today’s AI could someday achieve human-like intelligence (i.e. AGI) or beyond. It’s a more controversial topic than […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Former NSA deputy director George Barnes has made his first investment as a venture capitalist for his new job at the VC incubation studio Red Cell Partners. It’s a $3 million seed deal in an open source cybersecurity startup called Hunted Labs, he told TechCrunch exclusively. Barnes spent his entire 35-year career at the spy agency, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

After hitting record lows at the start of the pandemic, mortgage rates began to climb in 2022 and haven’t come down significantly since.  With 30-year mortgage rates hovering at over 6.5% today (they were as low as 2.49% in 2020!), buying a home is simply not that attainable for many people. One Denver-based startup is […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Google has officially unveiled the Pixel 9a smartphone, its new midrange phone that will retail for $499. The A-series smartphone’s biggest change is its appearance, as the latest model ditches the camera bar on the back of the phone. The smartphone is getting a chip upgrade, as the new model features Google’s Tensor G4 processor, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Zoox, Amazon’s autonomous driving unit, has issued a voluntary recall for 258 vehicles due to issues with its autonomous driving system that could cause unexpected hard breaking. The recall follows a preliminary investigation from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) last May after the agency received two reports of incidents in which motorcyclists collided […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Mobile networks continue to be a major target for cybersecurity breaches, and Chinese hacking group Salt Typhoon‘s persistent attacks on multiple carriers are only the latest known examples.  The mobile carrier startup Cape is taking a novel approach to addressing the problem: it has built a service it says can provide a more secure, private […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

TechCrunch Sessions: AI is nearly upon us, and you have the power to decide who you want to see lead a dynamic breakout session. We have whittled speaker applications down to six incredible finalists to take the stage on June 5 in Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley. Who do you want to see share their […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Google announced on Wednesday that kids with Android phones can now tap to pay at stores using Google Wallet in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Spain, and Poland. Parents and guardians in these countries can now allow their children to access digital payments on their Android devices with supervision. Kids can also use Google […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Booking an ad campaign with social media influencers is currently not exactly easy. For starters, influencers’ approaches to marketing can be unconventional, and there’s no standard way to engage with them. On the other side, marketing agencies that employ hosts of people to book and track brand campaigns are limited by how many influencers they […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The Citizen Lab said it believes several governments may be customers of spyware maker Paragon Solutions. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Nearly 10 years after filing to go public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and Toronto Stock Exchange, Canadian e-commerce platform Shopify has announced that it’s transitioning its U.S. listing to the Nasdaq. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Wednesday, Shopify said it is removing its Class A shares […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

There’s a controversy brewing over “AI-generated” studies submitted to this year’s ICLR, a long-running academic conference focused on AI. At least three AI labs — Sakana, Intology, and Autoscience — claim to have used AI to generate studies that were accepted to ICLR workshops. At conferences like ICLR, workshop organizers typically review studies for publication […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Prezent has raised $20 million in an all-equity funding to build specialized presentation models and expand its footprint into new markets. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The U.S. crossed the 100 million paid subscriber mark for music streaming services for the first time ever last year, as per a new report by the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA). The subscriber number was up from 96.8 million in 2023, with year-on-year growth of roughly 3%. RIAA’s report said that these numbers […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Aletiq has raised a €6 million funding round led by Point Nine a few months ago (around $6.5 million at current exchange rates). The French startup is announcing the founding round today. Aletiq has been developing product lifecycle management (PLM) software for manufacturing industrial companies working in aerospace, automotive, electronics, luxury and more. When you […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

While Rippling and Deel duke it out in the field and in the courtroom alleging illegal sales and marketing tactics, here’s another way to boost business growth: pick up a massive sum of cash to expand your operations in those areas. Factorial, the Barcelona-based “unicorn” startup that provides an all-in-one HR platform in the cloud […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A complete list of all the known layoffs in tech, from Big Tech to startups, broken down by month throughout 2024. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

President Trump fired the two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday, setting up a challenge to a 1935 Supreme Court precedent prohibiting the firing of FTC commissioners for reasons other than “good cause.” The White House terminated commissioners Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya earlier Tuesday, The New York Times reported. In […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Nvidia is collaborating with Disney Research and Google DeepMind to develop Newton, a physics engine to simulate robotic movements in real-world settings, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced at GTC 2025 on Tuesday. Disney will be among the first to use Newton to power its next-generation entertainment robots, like the Star Wars-inspired BDX droids — one […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

On Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance said that the Trump administration’s support of AI and tech innovations should benefit both populists and those investing and leading tech companies.  “I think there’s too much fear that AI will simply replace jobs rather than augmenting so many of the things that we do now,” said Vance at […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Elon Musk’s role overseeing the Department of Government Efficiency is likely a violation of the United States constitution’s appointments clause, a federal judge wrote Tuesday. Theodore Chuang, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, wrote in an opinion there is more than enough evidence — mostly from statements made by […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Critical Venture Partners is betting that young founders plucked fresh from universities can solve some of the world’s most intractable problems. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Sunita “Suni” Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore have returned to Earth after a nine-month stay on the International Space Station — a trip that lasted far longer than originally planned thanks to leaks and thruster problems on the Boeing Starliner spacecraft they used to get there. Williams and Wilmore splashed down in the Gulf of […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Tesla received a permit Tuesday from the California Public Utilities Commission to operate a transportation service in the state, the beginning of a long regulatory road that could eventually lead to the company getting the OK to operate a robotaxi service there. The permit, which Tesla applied for in November 2024, doesn’t cover autonomous vehicle […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote Tuesday at the company’s GTC 2025 conference stuck with tradition and was chock full of announcements. But the company also snuck in a little history lesson. During the automotive portion of his speech, Huang referred to AlexNet, a neural network architecture that gained widespread attention in 2012 when it won […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Nvidia at GTC 2025 announced a new lineup of “AI personal supercomputers” powered by the company’s Grace Blackwell chip platform. Jensen Huang, the semiconductor company’s founder and CEO, unveiled the two new machines, DGX Spark (previously called Project Digits) and DGX Station, during his keynote on Tuesday. The computers will allow users to prototype, fine-tune, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The FTC has removed over 300 blog posts published during the agency’s leadership under former chair Lina Khan, Wired reports. These include posts that are critical of companies like Amazon and Microsoft for their handling of customer data. The FTC did not respond to a request for comment. As FTC chair during the Biden years, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

General Motors is turning to Nvidia to help bring AI to the physical world in an expanded collaboration designed to touch every aspect of the automaker’s business, including factories, robots, and self-driving cars.  Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang, who announced the partnership Tuesday during his keynote at the company’s GTC conference in San Jose, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Nvidia is releasing what it’s calling an AI foundation model for humanoid robotics. Announced at GTC 2025 in San Jose, the model, dubbed Groot N1, is a “generalist” model, trained on both synthetic and real data. Nvidia claims that Groot N1 features a “dual system architecture” for “thinking fast and slow,” inspired by human cognitive […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Nvidia is releasing what it’s calling an AI foundation model for humanoid robotics. Announced at GTC 2025 in San Jose, the model, dubbed Groot N1, is a “generalist” model, trained on both synthetic and real data. Nvidia claims that Groot N1 features a “dual system architecture” for “thinking fast and slow,” inspired by human cognitive […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Tuesday’s big news that Google is acquiring security startup Wiz for a record-breaking $32 billion comes with a very big qualifier. Google says it will position Wiz as a “multicloud” offering, meaning Wiz will not be a Google-only shop.  The reality is that Google had no choice but to do this, and a closer look […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

On stage at Nvidia GTC 2025 in San Jose, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced a slew of new GPUs coming down the company’s product pipeline in the next several months. Perhaps the most significant was Vera Rubin. Vera Rubin, which is set to be released in the second half of 2026, will feature up to […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The most problem-free EV charging networks in the U.S. right now are the ones built by Tesla and Rivian, according to a new survey from Consumer Reports. The publication surveyed 1,230 owners on their EV charging experiences between March 2024 and February 2024, and just 4% of the respondents said they experienced problems at Tesla’s […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Maju Kuruvilla, who left the CEO role of controversial one-click checkout startup Bolt last year, is back. He’s launching his own startup, focused on a different problem for online shoppers: what he calls “check-in.” When you click on an ad for something like a t-shirt, the experience afterwards can feel a little clunky. The website […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

It looks like a Pebble, it works like a Pebble, but don’t call it a Pebble. Eric Migicovsky, the original creator of the Pebble smartwatch, just unveiled two new smartwatches — the Core 2 Duo and the Core Time 2. Those spiritual successors to the Pebble smartwatches are available for pre-orders for $149 and $225 […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Stability AI has released a new AI model, Stable Virtual Camera, that the company says can transform 2D images into “immersive” videos with realistic depth and perspective. Virtual cameras are tools often used in digital filmmaking and 3D animation to capture and navigate scenes in real-time. With Stable Virtual Camera, Stability sought to add generative […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

GTC, Nvidia’s biggest conference of the year, returns this week, with the biggest announcements probably coming Tuesday. If you can’t make it in person, don’t sweat it. TechCrunch will be on the ground covering the major developments, and we’ve made it easy for you to follow along. Many of the biggest presentations, talks, and panels […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and Google seems to agree. On Tuesday, the company added a feature to its AI-powered Gemini chatbot that the company is calling Canvas. Similar in concept to OpenAI’s identically-named Canvas tool for ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Artifacts, Canvas provides Gemini users with an interactive space where they […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Federal court rules U.S. cybersecurity agency must re-hire over 100 former employees © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The new fund aims to restore nature to reverse biodiversity loss and emissions from land use. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.