Over the past couple of years, Nvidia, by far the largest AI chipmaker, has ramped up its investments in startups that propel it deeper into the AI space. According to S&P Global and Crunchbase, the funding and investment database, Nvidia’s startup investments jumped 280% year-over-year from 2022 to 2023, with the company and its VC
Month: February 2024
You may not have a Copilot key on your PC’s keyboard yet, but if you’re a Windows 11 user, you’ll soon be able to use Copilot for a lot more everyday tasks on your desktop. Starting today, Microsoft is adding skills that will allow Copilot to change more Windows 11 settings for you and plugins
Elon Musk’s crusade against the extremism research organization the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) will have its day in court on Thursday. Elon Musk’s X sued the CCDH last year, accusing it of “actively working to assert false and misleading claims about X.” The nonprofit, formed in 2018, conducts research on social media platforms
On the fringes of MWC, the world’s biggest mobile phone show, TechCrunch is getting a demo of a new kind of AI device. The small black box sitting in front of us on a table in a hotel lobby in Barcelona is designed to tap into the generative AI boom — making it another example
The Humane Ai Pin and Rabbit handheld have captured a good bit of press interest for their individual approaches to integrating generative AI with hardware. Humane, in particular, is presenting its wearable as a look at life beyond the smartphone. That naturally prompts the question: What, precisely, is wrong with the smartphone? While it’s true
A controversial move by Meta last year, when it switched to charging users in the Europe Union for an ad-free subscription for access Facebook and/or Instagram unless they agreed to be tracked and profiled so it could keep running its attention-mining microtargeting ad business, has triggered a set of complaints from consumer rights groups. The
Nothing isn’t one to be quiet about new releases. The London-based phone company’s media push largely relies on trickling out information about devices bit by bit. It’s been a solid strategy thus far (if a bit annoying as someone who covers this world), as so many of its announcements have been first-gen products, each generating
Emerging decentralized social network and X rival Bluesky has just landed a notable former Twitter leader as its new Head of Trust and Safety. On Wednesday, the company announced it has appointed Aaron Rodericks, who most recently co-led the Trust and Safety team at Twitter, to this new position. Though typically leaders below the C-Suite
Who wants a free car? If you hurry, you can get $40,000 off a 2023 Toyota Mirai, a fuel-cell vehicle which retails for $52,000. When you factor in the $15,000 in free hydrogen over six years and the available 0% interest loan, Toyota is essentially paying people $3,000 to take the car off its hands.
The TechCrunch team is in Barcelona this week to bring you all the action going on at Mobile World Congress 2024. You already know what we’re expecting, so sit back, relax and stay tuned throughout the week as we bring you the products, announcements and startup news from MWC that you need to know. So
If it wasn’t clear before that Google’s Gemini chatbot was rushed out the door, it is now. Gemini’s since-removed image generator put people of color in Nazi-era uniforms. The chatbot’s commentary continues to tend toward the absurd besides, like equating Hitler’s record with Elon Musk posting memes. On Android, Gemini also breaks Google Assistant’s song
Apple CEO Tim Cook is promising that Apple will “break new ground” on GenAI this year. Cook made the pronouncement during the company’s annual shareholders meeting today, which came in the same week the company reportedly scuttled its multibillion-dollar, decade-long plan to build an EV. Some of the staff on the EV project were reassigned
With so much fresh competition in social apps right now — plus the usual set of social media platforms and messaging giants sucking up attention — it might feel like there’s precious little room to innovate in this slice of the consumer market. But the creators of a new iOS app called Yolk are joining the
It’s not everyday you come across kombucha playing a starring role in potential industrial disruption. But here at 4YFN in MWC we got chatting to Laura Freixas about her PhD research project that’s using a base of the fermented hipster tea to “upcycle” organic waste into filaments. Once processed these biodegradable threads can be knitted
Wearables are coming in an increasing array of shapes, form factors and guises these days as health and fitness tracking proliferates. Here at 4YFN at the MWC tradeshow we spotted a new one: A stick-on patch for tracking athletes’ sweat to monitor salt loss and help them tailor their rehydration strategy. The Spanish startup behind
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, focused on startup and venture capital news that matters. We pull the top stories from the week thus far, and give
Media startup Dailyhunt is in advanced stages of talks to acquire the Bengaluru-headquartered social network Koo, two sources familiar with the matter told me. The potential deal under discussion involves a share-swap agreement and could be finalized within weeks, the sources added, requesting anonymity as the matter is private. The deliberation follows Koo, which has
Lizcore, a sport tracking startup out of Barcelona, caught our eye on the 4YFN show floor at MWC this week. It’s done what this climber — frankly — thought impossible: Come up with a way to digitize and upgrade the indoor climbing experience that bouldering addicts might actually get on board with. Bouldering gyms that
An organization called Newsmast is introducing a new approach to decentralized social media with the launch of an updated version of its Mastodon mobile app that now integrates content from two servers into one interface — a different approach compared with how Mastodon, the open source Twitter/X alternative, typically works. The idea is to offer
A lot has changed at HTC in the decade since a small team broke off to form its mixed reality division. In fact, it’s a fundamentally different business in several meaningful ways. For one thing, you can’t call HTC a phone company any longer. Contrary to popular perception, the Taiwanese corporation does still produce handsets
A number of major AI services performed poorly in a test of their ability to address questions and concerns about voting and elections. The study found that no model can be completely trusted, but it was bad enough that some got things wrong more often than not. The work was performed by Proof News, a
It can cost a fortune in 2024 to find an analogue camera, buy film (and maybe special batteries) for it, and take pictures that then need to be paid to be developed. Yet the experience had a charm and a simplicity to it. For those longing for those old days, a startup called Lapse has
The TechCrunch team is in Barcelona this week to bring you all the action going on at Mobile World Congress 2024. You already know what we’re expecting, so sit back, relax and stay tuned throughout the week as we bring you the products, announcements and startup news from MWC that you need to know. So
GitHub today announced the general availability of Copilot Enterprise, the $39/month version of its code completion tool and developer-centric chatbot for large businesses. Copilot Enterprise includes all of the features of the existing Business plan, including IP indemnity, but extends this with a number of crucial features for larger teams. The highlight here is the
Photoroom, the AI-based photo-editing app out of Paris that has been growing like a weed targeting people doing business online while also attracting a lot of casual users to boot, confirmed it closed its latest funding round: $43 million at a $500 million valuation, according to CEO and co-founder Matthieu Rouif, who co-founded Photoroom with
Instagram is developing a “Friend Map” feature, a Meta spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch on Monday. The opt-in feature, which is similar to Snapchat’s Snap Map, would allow users to see their friends’ locations in real time. The company says the feature is an internal prototype and is not being tested externally. The feature was first
After a brief tease at the end of its big Galaxy S24 event earlier this month, Samsung officially debuted the Galaxy Ring this morning at MWC. The earlier announcement offered little more than an image and confirmation that the hardware giant is entering that emerging corner of the wearable tech space. Following the Unpacked presser,
Everyone has a story in them, as someone famous once said. A startup called Inkitt believes that it can use AI to turn the strongest of these into blockbusters and to build a new “Disney” for the 21st century around that content. Now, it’s raised $37 million in aid of that ambition. The startup’s eponymous
Jeremiah Johnson says he has “an embarrassing amount” of Reddit karma. So, as a longtime moderator of subreddits like r/economics, he was part of a select group of power users who were granted first dibs to buy stock in Reddit as the company prepares to go public. “You would never see Instagram doing something like
Hot on the heels of the successful completion of its grid-connected geothermal power plant in Nevada, Fervo Energy is raising $221 million per SEC documents, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The Houston-based company is one of several enhanced geothermal startups that are racing to tap heat deep in the Earth’s crust. Previous geothermal plants have only
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