Category Technology

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. I’m having one of those weeks where I’m just constantly, very…

In a little over a week’s time (February 26-29) around 85,000 or so attendees will descend upon the Fira de Barcelona for Mobile World Congress 2024. Over the past few years, the show has become arguably the most important mobile…

Threads, Meta’s Twitter-like service and competitor to X, may be distancing itself from politics, but that doesn’t mean it won’t try to tackle the misinformation that spreads across social media — particularly in the lead-up to national elections. Following user…

Video game startups weren’t immune to recent market pressures, but the industry heads into 2024 on better footing than some sectors. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. Source: techcrunch.com

Managing a social presence these days can be tough. It’s even tougher for those who are experimenting with the new wave of Twitter-like services, like Mastodon, Nostr and Bluesky, where staying active means a lot of duplicate posts to different…

Few joys in this cold world can match cracking open a new comic on a lazy Sunday morning. Nothing to do, nowhere to be — just you, a mug of coffee and some sequential art. Not much has fundamentally changed…

After disclosing better-than-expected financial results in its fourth quarter earnings report, U.S.-based Coinbase has big plans. The second largest crypto exchange told its investors that intends to lean heavily on its work with the popular USDC stablecoin this year, lever…

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is getting closer to becoming a law, which would make social platforms significantly more responsible for protecting children who use their products. With 62 Senators backing the bill, KOSA seems poised to clear the…

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has denied OpenAI’s attempt to trademark “GPT,” ruling that the term is “merely descriptive” and therefore unable to be registered. It’s a blow to OpenAI’s branding, but don’t expect its competitors to start releasing…

There’s been many attempts at open source AI-powered voice assistants (see Rhasspy, Mycroft and Jasper, to name a few) — all established with the goal of creating privacy-preserving, offline experiences that don’t compromise on functionality. But development’s proven to be…

It’s [checks calendar] a week and a half until Mobile World Congress 2024 [mild panic creeps in], and TechCrunch will be returning to Barcelona once again for the big phone show [soothing memories of tapas past]. The event is always…

It’s easy to lose track of the fact that robotics is as much a software problem as a hardware one. The programming understandably gets overshadowed by the alure of mechatronics, but without the proper software solution, you’ve got little more…

Called Regenerative and Circular Operations, this organizational model aims to be a practical approach to integrating sustainability at the core. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. Source: techcrunch.com

Meta is in hot water after announcing plans to remove politics from its recommendations across Instagram and Threads, its new Twitter-like app for text-based posts. That leaves a window of opportunity for the startup Bluesky, whose CEO Jay Graber recently…

It may be Valentine’s Day here in the U.S., but the dating app market isn’t looking as promising as it used to. According to a new analysis by app intelligence provider data.ai, global downloads of dating apps saw only tepid…

Software testing is hard. Even with the right talent in place, it doesn’t always go as planned — particularly when executed at scale. In a 2020 survey from Electric Cloud, 58% of developers blamed software bugs on test infrastructure and…

Grocery-delivery giant Instacart announced today that it’s laying off around 250 employees, or roughly 7% of its global workforce, as part of a restructuring. Instacart CEO Fidji Simo said in a letter to investors that the layoffs will allow the…

Airbnb is slowly killing the cleaning fee as it aims for more transparent pricing. Since early last year, when the company started showing guests all-inclusive pricing when booking a property, almost 300,000 listings have removed or lowered cleaning fees, Airbnb…

Waymo is voluntarily recalling the software that powers its robotaxi fleet after two vehicles crashed into the same towed pickup truck in Phoenix, Arizona, in December. It’s the company’s first recall. Waymo chief safety officer Mauricio Peña described the crashes…

In November, Airbnb acquired a stealth AI firm launched by Siri’s co-founder, called GamePlanner.AI. The deal valued the secretive startup at around $200 million, according to reports. Though the hosting company didn’t telegraph its plans for GamePlanner at the time,…