It was a rough week. There are rarely good weeks for my industry, but this one felt especially dire. Perhaps because it hit close to home. Not that many publications, however, have been through the scale of what iRobot is facing. After a year-and-a-half of waiting, Amazon dropped its bid to purchase the Roomba-maker, citing…
Apple’s Vision Pro headset is set to release for consumers today, but YouTube is not currently building a dedicated app for the device. To fill that void, Christian Selig, the developer who made Apollo for Reddit client, has made a Vision Pro app for YouTube called Juno. The app costs $5 for a one-time purchase and…
Xpeng, Tesla’s challenger from China, has its eye on the international market and plans to use its smart driving software as a selling point. The Guangzhou-based electric vehicle upstart said at an event this week that it will start developing its highway-specific Navigation Guided Pilot (NGP) for global users in 2024, while the international version…
Amazon announced today the launch of an AI-powered shopping assistant it’s calling Rufus that’s been trained on the e-commerce giant’s product catalog as well as information from around the web. The company says the new tool will launch to a subset of U.S. customers in beta, starting today, before expanding to more users in the…
The pace is picking up for the Apple Vison Pro apps ahead of the spatial computing device’s Friday launch as developers ready their apps for the new platform. While just last week, only 150-plus apps had been specifically designed for the Vision Pro so far, according to a third-party analysis of the App Store, Apple…
Planet A Foods, a B2B sustainable ingredients company, announced $15.4 million in Series A funding. The brother-and-sister founding team of Drs. Max and Sara Marquart started the Munich-based company to create a sustainable alternative to cocoa. When TechCrunch initially wrote about the company in 2021, it was going by the name QOA. The idea behind…
Paytm said Thursday that it will cease work with its associate Paytm Payments Bank and accelerate plans to partner with other banks, after India’s central bank barred Paytm Payments Bank from conducting nearly all of its business activities due to supervisory concerns. The Noida-based financial services firm said it expects its loan distribution, insurance distribution…
On Sunday, a user in a well-known hacking forum advertised what they claimed was a cache of stolen data from the rental car giant Europcar. The user claimed to have stolen the personal information of more than 48 million Europcar customers, and said they were “listening to offers” to sell the hacked data. Except, the…
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 startup-focused, Wednesday episode, so today we’re counting down important venture rounds and chatting our way through other startup and VC news. We had…
Google CEO Sudar Pichai said that the company’s Google One cloud storage service is ” just about to cross” 100 million subscribers. Speaking during Alphabet’s Q4 2023 earning call, Pichai added that the company is looking to add more AI-powered features to the Google One service. The search giant first launched Google One in 2018.…
