TechCrunch Industry News

An “ongoing” cyberattack against the Japanese technology giant Olympus was caused by a Russian ransomware group sanctioned by the U.S. government, according to two people with knowledge of the incident. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NASA and Boeing provided an update on the beleaguered Starliner capsule Tuesday, confirming that the earliest the spacecraft will fly will be sometime during the first half of next year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Buried in Biden’s 2021 tax plan are new amendments to the U.S. Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) program, which, if passed, will impact early-stage startup employees, founders and investors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Micromobility companies that aim to turn a profit have to juggle running a tight ship, adhering to constantly shifting local regulations and getting as many riders on vehicles as possible. Boston-based Zoba, a micromobility fleet optimization startup, has developed a platform to help with that. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Apple has unveiled some new MacBook Pro models at a virtual conference today. And the company is timing the release of the next major release of macOS with the new laptop. Mac users will be able to update to macOS Monterey on Monday, October 25. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The pandemic forced the legal profession to cobble together remote work strategies, often through a combination of video conferencing and emails. Founded in Melbourne, Immediation provides a tailor-made solution with digital courtrooms and mediation tools. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

SiriusXM-owned Pandora is partnering with SoundCloud to launch ‘The Lookout by SoundCloud,’ a new station available on Pandora that aims to showcase music from the “hip hop superstars of tomorrow.” Today’s announcement comes as Pandora’s parent company, SiriusXM, recently partnered with SoundCloud to launch a show of the same name on its Hip-Hop Nation channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Clubhouse added a new “music mode” this week, doubling down its commitment to centering social audio in all its permutations. The new music mode will give musicians who play live on the social network their own special set of tools to optimize sound quality and will hit iOS first before rolling out to Android. Clubhouse […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After announcing a deal with Beyond Meat back in February, McDonald’s this morning announced that it is set to start selling plant-based Beyond Meat burgers in select locations next month. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

SumUp, a European-based competitor to Square, PayPal/iZettle and others that provide mobile-powered card readers and other sales technology to merchants and small businesses, has made an acquisition in the U.S. to dig deeper into that market, and to expand the kinds of services that it provides to customers globally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Instagram today announced the launch of a couple of new tools aimed at addressing the needs of Live creators. Now, creators will be able to build up buzz for their upcoming Live by scheduling it up to 90 days in advance, then share the news across Instagram to alert their fans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Embedded finance continues to be a major theme in the world of fintech, with a wide swathe of new financial services companies tapping APIs built by others to power payments and other financial transactions, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After testing last month, Twitter is rolling out a feature to all web users that will let them remove followers without blocking them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google has invested in Bangalore-based Open, becoming the latest high-profile investor to back a neobanking platform. Open said on Tuesday it has raised $100 million in a Series C financing round. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Facebook’s external policy review board will meet with Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee who went public with her concerns about the company last week. Facebook’s Oversight Board announced Monday that it would meet with Haugen “in the coming weeks” after the whistleblower accepted the board’s invitation to speak. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Five months after announcing a deal with two of China’s biggest two-wheel vehicle makers, Gogoro officially launched there today, opening 45 battery swapping stations in Hangzhou. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Experts say an environmental document that needs U.S. Federal Aviation Administration approval before SpaceX can begin testing the world’s largest rockets is missing key details about where its fuel will come from. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company would be moving its headquarters from Palo Alto, California to Austin, Texas, a city that has recently seen a flood of tech companies and remote workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

RoboTire crossed our radar in February of last year, just before much of the world was brought to a complete standstill courtesy of the pandemic. Things were still fairly early stages for the Detroit-based startup, which was founded by former Spark Robotics CEO Victor Darolfi. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rebel Foods, which operates a large network of dark kitchens in nearly a dozen markets, is the latest Indian startup to attain the unicorn status. The Bangalore-based startup said on Thursday it has raised $175 million in its Series F financing round that valued it at $1.4 billion, up from about $800 million last year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

OpenStack, the open-source project that gives large enterprises and public cloud providers the tools to run their own AWS-like private clouds in their data centers, today announced the release of OpenStack 24. Codenamed Xena, the release focuses on polishing many of the system’s sharper edges. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Uber is piloting new app features aimed at making air travel more hassle-free, including the ability to reserve rides from airports, gain access to enhanced curbside pickup, request a ride once you land and order food in advance from airport restaurants for pickup. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Byteboard, a service designed to replace the on-site technical interview part of a company’s hiring process with a web-based alternative, will be spinning out of Google, TechCrunch learned and Google confirmed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A pair of new e-readers from Kobo iterate on the company’s high-end options, adding Bluetooth audiobook and stylus support to the now familiar asymmetrical design of its larger devices. The Sage and Libra 2 also gain a new charging cover so you only have to plug the device in every few months rather than every […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dapper Labs, the NFT startup behind NBA Top Shot which was recently valued above $7.5 billion, made an interesting acquisition this morning, telling Decrypt that they have purchased virtual influencer startup Brud and will be bringing the entire 32-person team aboard. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

FoodTech is booming in Europe has grown exponentially. In 2020, €3 billion went into European FoodTech companies (State of European Tech Report, March 2021), and the pandemic has accelerated demand as consumers have shifted to grocery delivery. The industry has also been affected by the rise of direct-to-consumer food brands. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jeff Bezos just can’t get away from labor issues. The beleaguered billionaire, who has faced repeated and persistent criticism over working conditions at the company he formerly led, Amazon, is now facing allegations of a hostile work environment at his space company Blue Origin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The future of office work, post-COVID-19, is driving plenty of startup activity. Not just around core business needs like comms (Zoom, Slack et al) — but entrepreneurs are also competing to come up with the perfect tool to recreate the social serendipity of office life in order to make dispersed workers feel a bit more […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Clubhouse announced today that it is unveiling four new features: Clips, Replay, Universal Search, and spatial audio for Android (which already exists on iOS). All of these features will launch today, except for Replay, which will roll out in October. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

No one knows exactly how drone delivery will fit into the future of logistics, but one thing is for sure: the aircraft aren’t going to drop off important payloads directly onto someone’s lawn. Matternet’s Station, an automated landing space and payload control tower, may be the solution, and the flower-like structure has finally made the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

General Motors is rolling out a new end-to-end software platform in vehicles starting in 2023 that executives say will usher in a sweeping set of capabilities including giving drivers access to in-car subscription and using over-the-air updates to offer new apps and services. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The platform is available in across all 50 states and is designed for any type of employee leave, like parental, medical, caregiver or bereavement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amazon is introducing two new services tied to user health and fitness, and its Halo personal health devices. They include Halo Fitness, a new service for interactive home video workouts that looks a lot like Apple Fitness+, and Halo Nutrition, a personalized, guided meal planner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Indian food delivery startup Swiggy is in talks to raise over $500 million in a new financing round that could value it at over $10 billion, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. Atlanta-headquartered Invesco is in talks to lead — or co-lead — the new financing round in the Bangalore-based startup, which counts […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

LinkedIn earlier this month unveiled a new push around creators to bring more original content (and engagement) to its platform, but that’s not the only effort they are making to bring more activity to its networking site. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that LinkedIn is also running a test around events — specifically, paid events. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The company whose tech powered the sensational MyHeritage app that turned classic family photos into lifelike moving portraits is back with a new implementation of its technology: Transforming still photographs into ultra-realistic video, capable of saying whatever you want. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Starting in 2030, California will require all light-duty autonomous vehicles operating in the state to emit zero emissions, thanks to a new bill signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom on Thursday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

China’s central bank said on Friday that all cryptocurrency-related transactions are illegal in the country and they must be banned, citing concerns around national security and social stability. The world’s most populated nation also said that foreign exchanges are banned from providing services to users in the country. In a joint statement, ten Chinese government […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Unagi Scooters has revealed what it claims is the first 'smart scooter' in the Model Eleven. It includes a bunch of intriguing features, such as audible directions, remote kill and an ADAS sensor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sternum, a three-year-old IoT cybersecurity startup based in Tel Aviv, has secured $27 million in Series B funding, led by Spark Capital. Internet of Things devices are more popular than ever, yet cybersecurity remains a looming concern. The number of attacks on IoT devices more than doubled during the first six months of 2021, according to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The world of vertical farming has seen a massive uptick in interest over the past decade, as the world grapples with concerns over resource use, farmable area and exploding population growth. While promising, there are still plenty of question marks surrounding the technology, including the diversity of crops one can grow indoors at scale. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The web version Google Meets can soon detect when someone is underexposed due to bad lighting. Meet will then increase the brightness so it's easier to see yourself and your cohorts on calls. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Igor Bonifacic Contributor Igor Bonifacic is a contributing writer at Engadget. More posts by this contributor Rivian announces membership plan with complementary charging and LTE connectivity Microsoft Office 2021 will be available on October 5th General Motors has spent a lot of time recently talking up the capabilities of its upcoming Ultium battery technology but […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

By the end of this week, potentially thousands of Tesla owners will be testing out the automaker’s newest version of its “Full Self-Driving” beta software, version 10.0.1, on public roads, even as regulators and federal officials investigate the safety of the system after a few high-profile crashes. A new study from the Massachusetts Institute of […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Coinbase efforts to play hardball with the Securities and Exchange Commission didn’t last too long. The cryptocurrency exchange had garnered the ire of the regulatory commission over its plans to launch a crypto lending product, with the SEC sending the company a Wells notice which indicated that the agency would sue Coinbase if they launched. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amazon has launched an investigation into the conduct of its legal representatives in India following a complaint from a whistleblower who alleged that one or more of the company’s reps had bribed government officials, Indian news and analysis outlet the Morning Context reported on Monday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s a big day for the Amazon of the decentralized internet — OpenSea now has an app for iOS and Android. For most companies, having a mobile app is a milestone you’d reach before hitting a $1.5 billion valuation. But like any store — whether you’re selling NFT art or not — there’s a hefty […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In a message posted on an internal employee message board today, Apple said that it was monitoring the legal challenges to what it refers to as the “uniquely restrictive abortion law” that was recently passed in Texas. Apple confirmed the authenticity of the message to TechCrunch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mirantis has been around the block, starting way back as an OpenStack startup, but a few years ago the company began to embrace cloud-native development technologies like containers, microservices and Kubernetes. Today, it announced Mirantis Flow, a fully managed open source set of services designed to help companies manage a cloud-native data center environment, whether […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The high speed wireless optical link technology Alphabet originally developed for its shuttered Loon balloon company is currently being used for another moonshot called Project Taara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices