Google briefly showed a section on the new Google Messages page claiming that Apple is set to roll out Rich Communication Services (RCS) support for iPhones this fall. This indicates that the iPhone maker is likely to extend RCS support in…
X.ai, Elon Musk’s AI startup, has revealed its latest generative AI model, Grok-1.5. Set to power social network X’s Grok chatbot in the not-to-distant future (“in the coming days,” X.ai writes in a blog post), Grok-1.5 appears to be an…
The bigger concern for Bumble is user fatigue. People aren't downloading dating apps as enthusiastically as they once were, which means less subscription revenue.
A week after finding itself at the business end of a landmark lawsuit from the United States Department of Justice, Apple is staunchly denying any parallels between itself and Microsoft in the 1990s. It’s a comparison into which the U.S.…
Welcome to Elon Musk’s Twitter (now X), where the rules are made up and the check marks don’t matter. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO announced his bid to buy Twitter in April 2022, zealously driven to rid the platform of spam bots and protect…
This morning, Skyflow announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B extension led by Khosla Ventures. The deal is interesting on a number of fronts, including the round’s structure and how Skyflow has been impacted by the growth of…
Two weeks ago, TechCrunch broke the news that LinkedIn was getting into games, helping users “deepen relationships” through puzzle-based interactions. And on Wednesday, TechCrunch reported that the Microsoft-owned social network was…
In the wake of Universal Music Group’s (UMG) public spat with TikTok, which saw the label pulling its full catalog from the video app earlier this year, the company is doubling down on its deal with Spotify. On Thursday, UMG announced an…
Wonderschool, a startup that provides software and support to help individuals and local governments spin up childcare businesses, has acquired EarlyDay, which operates an early childhood educator marketplace. TechCrunch has covered…
Google.org, Google’s charitable wing, is launching a new program to help fund nonprofits developing tech that leverages generative AI. Called Google.org Accelerator: Generative AI, the program is to be funded by $20 million in grants and…
Increasingly, the AI industry is moving toward generative AI models with longer contexts. But models with large context windows tend to be compute-intensive. Ori Goshen, the CEO of AI startup AI21 Labs, asserts that this doesn’t have to be…
Google announced today that it will soon roll out on-device AI-powered features such as recording summaries and smart replies on the Pixel 8. These features will be based on Gemini Nano, a small-sized model Google released last year,…
With TikTok potentially poised for a U.S. ban, YouTube is touting how well its own TikTok competitor, YouTube Shorts, is paying off for creators. The company on Thursday said its short-form video platform now averages over 70 billion daily…
Amazon announced Thursday the launch of its new app for Amazon One, its contactless palm recognition service that allows customers to hover their palm over a device in order to purchase from select places, including over 500 Whole Foods…
Have you noticed the massive gap between consumer and business apps on your phone? While consumer apps are both beautifully designed and easy to use, business apps are simply painful to use. A European startup is developing a suite of B2B…
StealthMole, an AI-powered dark web intelligence startup that specializes in monitoring cyber threats and detecting cybercrime, announced Thursday that it has raised a $7 million Series A funding round. The Singapore-headquartered startup…
LinkedIn is testing a new TikTok-like short-form video feed, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Wednesday. With this new test, LinkedIn joins numerous other popular apps that have launched their own short-form video feeds following…
As we inch toward the summer holidays, Google is announcing a slate of travel updates that place it squarely in the travel planning process and give it a lot more insight into purchasing intent in the travel sector. First up, Google is…
Google is rolling out an update that makes it easier for users to find personalized shopping results, the company announced on Wednesday. The new feature lets users rate different products in order to get style recommendations when…
Enterprises today store and use data across an ever-growing number of applications and locations — making it challenging — if not impossible — to manage and query that data in a holistic way. That spells opportunity for startups building…
Amazon will have to provide information about the ads running on its platform in a publicly accessible online archive after all, following a decision by the European Union’s highest court Wednesday. The ads transparency requirement is…
If you wanted to raise the profile of your major tech company and had $10 million to spend, how would you spend it? On a Super Bowl ad? An F1 sponsorship? You could spend it training a generative AI model. While not marketing in the…
Hardware maker Rabbit has tapped a partnership with ElevenLabs to power voice commands on its devices. Rabbit is set to ship the first set of r1 devices next month after getting a ton of attention at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) at…
When Marissa Mayer co-founded a startup six years ago in Palo Alto, Ca., expectations were sky high for the former Yahoo CEO and early Google employee. When that startup, Sunshine, revealed that its first app centered around subscription…
Following Elon Musk’s xAI’s move to open source its Grok large language model earlier in March, the X owner on Tuesday said that the company formerly known as Twitter will soon offer the Grok chatbot to more paying subscribers. In a post…
It’s election season in the U.S., and Instagram has changed the way that it recommends political content. On both Instagram and the newer X competitor Threads, this change won’t impact what you see from accounts you already follow. But the…
In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers. The goal was to understand users’ behavior and help Facebook compete with Snapchat,…
The snake robot form factor has existed for decades. In addition to the diversity it adds to the world of automation, the design has several pragmatic attributes. The first is redundancy, which allows for the system to keep chugging even…