TechCrunch Industry News

EV startup Canoo has been hit with two new lawsuits from suppliers linked to the drivetrains that power its electric vehicles, just weeks after the company kicked off a major reorganization that included the departure of its chief technology officer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For years, Silicon Valley and Wall Street have questioned Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to invest tens of billions of dollars into Reality Labs. This week, Meta’s wearables division unveiled a prototype of its Orion smart glasses, a form factor the company believes one day could replace the iPhone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A new Dealroom report shows that VC investment in defense-related tech is outpacing any other type of investment across NATO member states and allies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A new female-founded dating app called After is launching in Austin, Texas on Thursday with the mission of tackling ghosting and holding people accountable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The promise of blockchain to change the world hasn’t materialized. For the most part, the technology has instead enabled people to speculate on a new asset class. A big hurdle to realizing blockchain’s full potential, web3 proponents argue, is that decentralized services are incredibly hard to build. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The brouhaha in the WordPress community looks likely to escalate into a legal battle around trademarks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rivian has revealed the first $10 million worth of grants from the Rivian Foundation, just three years after promising to make the “natural world” a “stakeholder in our success.” The company launched a website for the foundation on Monday that details 41 grantees who will collectively receive just north of $10 million in funding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Companies are eyeing nuclear power as a way to reconcile their breakneck data center growth with their commitments to hit net zero carbon emissions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A tough market seems to have put an end to Pure's ambitions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The IPO market has not roared back in 2024 as many investors hoped it would — not yet, at least. Elevated interest rates (this week’s 50 bps rate cut notwithstanding) and uncertainty related to the U.S. election have prompted many companies to stay private and wait for better market conditions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

California’s newest law could land social media users who post, or repost, AI deepfakes that deceive voters about upcoming elections in legal trouble. Governor Gavin Newsom suggests that AB 2839, which went into effect immediately after he signed it on Tuesday, could be used to reel in Elon Musk’s retweets, among others who spread deceptive messages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The team points to glass’ optical properties and its “infinite recyclability” as reasons for turning to the material; Also, test subjects were required to move a 30-pound kettlebell up and down a flight of stairs; a New York Times article Thursday highlighted a lucrative side hustle that is emblematic of the times we live in: gaming algorithms to earn money. In this case, folks figured out they could maximize the payout from Lyft’s Citibike “bike angels” program by taking advantage of a company algorithm used to meet its supply-and-demand needs; Indian filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma is ditching human musicians for artificial intelligence, saying he’ll use only AI-generated tunes in future projects, a move that underscores AI’s growing reach in creative industries; Cruise is returning to the streets of Sunnyvale and Mountain View for the first time since it paused operations in the Bay Area after a robotaxi struck a pedestrian in October 2023. The company said Thursday that it will put “several” vehicles driven by humans in the two cities that will initially perform mapping. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Like its rival, Google, Amazon has launched an AI-powered video generator — but it’s only for advertisers at the moment, and somewhat limited in what it can do. Today at its Accelerate conference, Amazon unveiled Video generator, which turns a single product image into a few-seconds-long video clip after a few minutes of processing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Upchieve, the free, 24/7 online tutoring and college counseling app for low-income students, announced Thursday it’s giving teachers in Title 1 middle schools and high schools a new tool to ensure their students get the academic support they need. The new offering, called “Upchieve for Teachers,” allows teachers to offer 1:1 support to their students. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Tuesday, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed some of America’s toughest laws yet regulating the artificial intelligence sector. Three of these laws crack down on AI deepfakes that could influence elections, while two others prohibit Hollywood studios from creating an AI clone of an actor’s body or voice without their consent. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

23andMe, the personal genomics company, went public in early 2021 via a merger with a blank check company that valued it at $3.5 billion. Then its fortunes began to sink. Fading interest in DNA kits – 23andMe’s main product – was one driver.; Investment powerhouse BlackRock is set to launch a massive AI-focused investment fund, exceeding $30 billion, in collaboration with Microsoft and the Abu Dhabi-backed investment outfit MGX, the FT reported today. According to the outlet, the fund — among Wall Street’s largest — will focus on creating data centers and funding energy infrastructure to support AI; Discord will now offer audio and video calls that even the company won't be able to listen in on; NASA wants to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon, but right now, astronauts have to be in direct line of sight with Earth to phone home. The space agency is looking to change that with its developing Near Space Network; Every month, 400,000 free members upgrade to paid memberships, the company says. According to Patreon, Autopilot improved the rate of free-to-paid membership upgrades by an average of 19% in testing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The head of Slack, Denise Dresser, tells TechCrunch she is shifting the business chat platform into a “work operating system,” specifically by making Slack a hub for AI applications from Salesforce, Adobe, and Anthropic Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Instagram is introducing Teen Accounts to automatically enroll young users into an app experience with built-in protections. The company announced that starting on Tuesday, it will start placing all current and future accounts held by a teenager into a Teen Account. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

IBM today launched the Qiskit Functions Catalog, a new set of services that aims to make programming quantum computers easier by abstracting away many of the complexities of working with these machines. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This latest round of government sanctions land months after Intellexa's founder Tal Dilian was sanctioned for selling the Predator spyware. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

At the MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) on Wednesday night, new technology allowed fans to shop their favorite artist’s styles as they appeared on the screen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Uber riders in Austin and Atlanta will be able to hail a Waymo robotaxi through the app in early 2025 as part of an expanded partnership between the two companies. Waymo’s autonomous vehicles have been available on the Uber app in Phoenix since October 2023; Following the moves of other tech giants, Spotify announced on Friday it’s introducing in-app parental controls in the form of “managed accounts” for listeners under the age of 13. The new feature will initially be offered as a pilot program for parents or guardians on a Family plan in select markets, including Denmark, New Zealand and others; making the AI info label harder to find, it might be easier for users to be deceived by content that was edited with AI, especially as editing tools become more and more advanced; It was a matter of time, but Apple is going to allow third-party app stores on the iPad starting next week, on September 16. This change will occur with the next major release of iPadOS, the operating system specifically designed for the iPad. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

iFixit, everyone’s favorite gadget repair gadfly, is launching a portable soldering iron. The gadget is designed to make component repair more accessible for home users. The timing of the announcement isn’t lost on anyone, dropping the same week as Apple’s “It’s Glowtime” event. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The FDA on Thursday announced that it has granted what it calls “the first over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aid software device, Hearing Aid Feature.”; DeepMind employed a new learning platform, ALOHA Unleashed, paired with its simulation program, DemoStart, to teach robots by watching humans; Google Wallet will test a feature that turns your US passport into a digital ID; The White House has announced that several major AI vendors, including OpenAI and Microsoft, have committed to taking steps to combat nonconsensual deepfakes and child sexual abuse material. Adobe, Cohere, Microsoft, OpenAI and data provider Common Crawl said that they’ll “responsibly” source and safeguard the datasets they create and use to train AI from image-based Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

SpaceX has put on its most public and aggressive offensive against regulators to date, with a blog post published Tuesday urging more expeditious launch licensing — lest the country lose its place as the leader in the global space race. Orbital launch is a tightly regulated industry governed chiefly by the Federal Aviation Administration, though Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A group of Democratic senators is urging the FTC and Justice Department to investigate whether AI tools that summarize and regurgitate online content like news and recipes may amount to anti-competitive practices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Apple Intelligence, the iPhone maker’s new set of AI capabilities arriving in iOS 18, is laying the groundwork for a new way to use apps. Today, the dated App Store model is under constant regulatory attack. Meanwhile, users can accomplish a lot of tasks with fairly simple questions to an AI assistant like ChatGPT. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bumble is increasing its investments in AI and branching out with new features to stay relevant amid a generational shift in dating behavior among younger users. During Goldman Sachs’ annual technology conference on Monday, Bumble CEO Lidiane Jones unveiled more details about the app’s upcoming AI capabilities, including a photo selection tool as well as features to help with conversations and profile creation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When Apple unveiled its AI plans at WWDC in June, analysts suggested the feature could put the iPhone 16 on track for another “supercycle.” Like the addition of 5G before it, industry watchers believed that Apple Intelligence’s arrival might convince holdouts to bite the bullet and upgrade their device. Also, Bluesky keeps growing: The company announced that as of Friday morning, it had added 3 million new users, bringing its total user count to more than 9 million. In other words, the social platform’s user base has grown by around 50 percent in the week or so since a Brazilian court banned X (formerly Twitter). And the car rental giant says personal information, credit card information, and driver's license numbers were stolen in the August cyberattack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After a rough couple years, YouTube creators The Try Guys said they’re on-track to reach profitability, with subscriptions to their three-month-old, ad-free service 2nd Try now accounting for 20% of the company’s revenue. Of course, those numbers also mean The Try Guys remain reliant on other revenue streams, including YouTube advertising. Also, Italy-based app company Bending Spoons, which owns Evernote and Meetup, is planning to lay off 75% of the staff of file transfer service WeTransfer, TechCrunch has learned. Bending Spoons acquired the Dutch company in July for an undisclosed amount. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mintlify offers a collection of documentation-authoring tools, including tools that can auto-generate docs from codebases. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Salesforce has acquired Own Company, a provider of data management and protection solutions, for $1.9 billion in cash. In a press release, Salesforce GM Steve Fisher said in a statement that Own “underscores [Salesforce’s] commitment to providing secure, end-to-end solutions that protect our customers’ most valuable data.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cowboy has closed funding of around $5.5 million. With this recent funding round, Cowboy is now valued at €40 million on a pre-money basis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Some major consolidation is afoot in the world of internet communications — and it will have implications for competition and consumer internet access in U.S. On Thursday, Verizon announced that it would gobble up Frontier Communications for $20 billion — more than double Frontier’s market cap at the close of trading the night before; A long-running lawsuit over the Internet Archive’s “emergency” ebook lending practices during the COVID-19 pandemic has ended in a loss for the website and a victory for publishers. The lawsuit concerned the Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library, a program it established at the beginning of the pandemic to allow wider access to some 1.3 million ebooks; These final maneuvers will bring to a close a troubled first crewed mission for the Boeing-made Starliner; The Cosmos Institute, a nonprofit whose founding fellows include Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark and former Defense Department technologist Brendan McCord, has announced a venture program and research initiatives to — in the organization’s words — “cultivate a new generation of technologists and entrepreneurs equipped with deep philosophical thinking to navigate the uncharted territory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The American sports betting market produced $10.9 billion in revenue in 2023 for casinos, sportsbooks and iGaming, according to the American Gambling Association. One of the reasons this industry is so lucrative is because the majority of people who bet on sports lose. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Anthropic is launching a new subscription plan for its AI chatbot, Claude, catered towards enterprise customers that want more administrative controls and increased security. Claude Enterprise will compete with OpenAI’s business-specific solution, ChatGPT Enterprise, released roughly a year ago. Claude Enterprise allows businesses to upload proprietary company knowledge into Anthropic’s AI chatbot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Flexible green methanol, which is made without fossil fuels, could rid carbon pollution from a range of industries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Spotter, the startup that provides financial solutions to content creators, announced Tuesday the launch of its new AI-powered creative suite. Dubbed Spotter Studio, the solution aims to support YouTubers throughout the creative process, such as helping them brainstorm video concepts, generate thumbnail and title ideas, plan projects, organize tasks, and collaborate with their team. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Home robots’ unfulfilled potential is neither because of lack of demand on the part of consumers nor lack of effort from manufacturers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Mac mini will be the next Apple device to say goodbye to USB-A, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Apple customers have probably gotten used to seeing the familiar, rectangular USB-A ports replaced with their thinner USB-C siblings. And while USB-C has its advantages, the transition can sometimes leave users confused and scrambling for adapters; TikTok is introducing a new “Manage Topics” feature that will give you more control over what you see on your For You feed, the company announced on Friday. The new feature is rolling out to users in the U.S. With the new tool, you can tailor your For You feed to show you more; a Brazilian court’s decision to ban X (formerly Twitter) seems to benefiting its rivals, especially Bluesky. The microblogging platform announced late Friday that it was seeing “all-time-highs for activity” with 500,000 new users joining in the previous two days. It’s also number one on the free iPhone app chart in Brazil today; In the latest twist in Bolt’s aggressive fundraising efforts, the fintech company’s CEO appears to have made a veiled threat of legal action against Silverbear Capital, the investment bank whose involvement in the deal remains in some dispute. “We believe there was some internal miscommunication at Silverbear Capital, one of our lead investors; No matter who powerful generative AI becomes, writer Ted Chiang says it will never create true art. Chiang is one of the most admired science fiction authors writing today, best known for the novella “Story Of Your Life” (which was adapted into the movie “Arrival”). But he’s also published terrific pieces for The New Yorker. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jam & Tea Studios is the latest gaming startup implementing generative AI to transform the way players interact with non-playable characters (NPCs) in video games. Traditionally, video game NPCs are directed by predetermined scripts, which can feel repetitive, unrealistic, and boring Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Given everything you’ve already heard about AI, you may not be surprised to learn that Google is among other outfits beginning to use sound signals to predict early signs of disease. How? According to Bloomberg, Google has trained its foundation AI model with 300 million pieces of audio that included coughs, sniffles, and labored breathing; Nvidia and Apple are reportedly in talks to contribute to OpenAI’s next fundraising round — a round that could value the ChatGPT maker at $100 billion. Per its sources, the New York Times says earlier OpenAI investor Thrive Capital would lead the deal should it happen; It seems that the Ministry of Truth has been busy at Tesla. Some sharp-eyed folks, including reporters at Electrek, noticed that Tesla has deleted all of its blog posts prior to 2019; Gmail users on Android devices can now chat directly with Google’s AI assistant, Gemini, about their emails in the Gmail app. Google rolled out the new feature, Gmail Q&A, on Thursday to users who pay for Gemini, according to a blog post, and announced the feature would be coming to iOS devices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Uber is making a strategic investment into Wayve as an extension of the U.K.-born startup’s previously announced $1.05 billion Series C round. The partnership will also see the two companies work with automakers to integrate Wayve’s AI into consumer vehicles that will one day operate on the ride-hail giant’s platform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, could be in talks to raise a massive tranche of cash. The Wall Street Journal reports that OpenAI may be close to closing a fundraising round led by Thrive Capital, a previous investor, that’d value the AI company at over $100 billion; One-click checkout tech company Bolt is still waiting to find out if shareholders will sign off on a proposed funding round with stipulations that founder Ryan Breslow would return as CEO; Apple released the new developer betas for iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS 15.1 Sequoia. With this update, the company is launching new Apple Intelligence features including the ability to remove objects from photos; New Enterprise Associates is getting back into the secondaries game. The Silicon Valley-based VC raised more than $468 million for NEA Secondary Opportunity Fund, according to an SEC filing. The fundraise closed on July 3, according to a source familiar with the matter, but hasn’t received much attention Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

CoinSwitch, a prominent Indian cryptocurrency exchange, is suing rival platform WazirX to recover trapped funds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tinder removed the U.S. military ads, saying the campaign violated the company's policies; Elon Musk’s X has already declared it aims to compete with LinkedIn for job listings and PayPal for payments. Now, it wants to take on the likes of Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams with a video conferencing tool; Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander failed to reach the moon because of a problem with a single valve in the propulsion system, according to a report on the mission released Tuesday. Company leadership said in a press conference that engineers have redesigned the valve and introduced additional redundancy into the propulsion system of its next lander. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meta and Spotify are exploring deeper music integration in Meta’s Instagram app. New findings indicate the companies are testing a feature that would allow users to continuously share what music they’re listening to through Instagram’s Notes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ride-hailing platform Uber has been fined €290 million — around $324 million at current exchanges rates — by the Netherlands’ privacy watchdog for breaching the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Apple will be unveiling new products on September 10, with the announced phones going on sale on September 20, according to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. That lineup will reportedly include the iPhone 16, with larger screens on the Pro models and a new button just for taking pictures.; RealPage, which makes property management software, was sued Friday by the U.S. Justice Department and eight attorneys general for allegedly helping apartment and building managers around the country collude to drive up unit prices; Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of messaging app Telegram, was arrested on Saturday evening at France’s Bourget airport, according to French television network TF1. Neither Telegram nor a spokesperson for France’s national anti-fraud office ONAF immediately responded to a request for comment; Disappearing posts on social networks are handy if you have a habit of deleting them through third-party tools or the context of those posts is short-lived. Earlier this month, Threads said it is testing ephemeral posts only as an internal prototype; Boeing’s Starliner mission is coming back to Earth — empty. After months of data analysis and internal deliberation, NASA leadership announced today that Starliner will be coming back to Earth in September, without a crew. Meanwhile, astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams will remain on-board the International Space Station until February; Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The pellets can be stored in piles or silos, moved around using conveyor belts, and transported via rail cars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices