To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hot damn, it’s happening: A bunch of the TechCrunch team are on airplanes, aeroplanes and other spellings of flying vessels to come join us in San Francisco for Disrupt. To say that…
Around late-September/early-October each year, I get a Slack message from Greg asking whether I’m interested in writing a gift guide (or two). “Sure,” I say, never anticipating just how much of a slog the next two months are going to be for hardware news/reviews. Putting together a roundup like that has the decided benefit of…
Twitter is developing a feature that has the potential to curb harassment and bullying on the social network. App engineer Jane Manchun Wong discovered that the company is developing a way for users to control who can mention them on Twitter. According to a screenshot posted by Wong, the new controls would give users the…
Instagram, facing scrutiny from safety advocates, started testing a program in the U.S. earlier this year to verify users’ age claiming to be 18 or older. It uses techniques including authentication via running video selfies through an artificial intelligence system. The Meta-owned service is now ready to roll out this program to two key overseas…
Even the largest landfills in Indonesia are at (or nearing) capacity, and the government has set an ambitious target of 30% waste reduction by 2025. Waste4Change is one of the companies that wants to help by increasing rates of recycling and enabling better waste management. The startup, which currently manages more than 8,000 tons of…
Volkswagen is accelerating the pace to automate its electric vehicles for Chinese customers. CARIAD, a wholly owned automotive software company of the German auto behemoth, intends to set up a joint venture with Horizon Robotics, one of China’s most serious auto chip developers, the company said on Thursday. The German automaker plans to deploy around…
As companies deploy more security devices like cameras, access control systems, intercoms and many other tools throughout their organizations, they are often disconnected from traditional IT, and may lack any way of managing the equipment in a systematic way. SecuriThings has built a solution to solve this problem with a platform that helps building operations…
Zen Educate, an online marketplace that algorithmically matches schools with the best available teachers, has raised £19.3 million ($21 million) in a Series A extension round of funding. Founded out of London in 2017, Zen Educate is setting out to supplant the traditional approach to recruiting teachers, a system that typically involves third-party agencies and…
Mori Taheripour teaches negotiations at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has taught undergraduates, MBA students and executive MBA students how to have better business conversations. Taheripour has also coached corporate clients, including on behalf of Goldman Sachs and Major League Baseball, about how to feel more confident and comfortable in…
For the first time in years, it felt like venture capitalists slowed their cadence this summer. In days of yore, such “summer slowdowns” were par for the course, as investors took long holidays in August, leading to a general paucity of VC activity. Then the market went nuts for a few years, and such breaks…
