Elon Musk said Tuesday during an awards ceremony in Germany that Tesla’s European gigafactory will be built in the Berlin area. Musk was onstage to receive a Golden Steering Wheel Award given by BILD. “There’s not enough time tonight to tell all the details,” Musk said during an onstage interview with Volkswagen Group CEO Herbert…
The subscription model is today sustaining a number of businesses, including artists, creators, news publishers, game developers, entertainment providers and more. Now, top publishing platform WordPress.com is making it easier for any creator or web publisher to add a subscription feature to their own website, so they can begin to generate repeat contributions from their…
Meet PacketAI, a French startup that wants to alert you when there’s something wrong with your app or service. The company uses machine learning to parse raw event data and find out if there’s anything wrong. PacketAI can intercept incidents at many different levels. For instance, the service can tell you if your users can’t…
Are those red notification dots on your Facebook home screen driving you crazy? Sick of Facebook Marketplace wasting your screen space? Now you can control what appears in the Facebook app’s navigation bar thanks to a new option called Shortcut Bar Settings. Over the weekend TechCrunch spotted the option to remove certain tabs like Marketplace,…
SpaceX successfully launched its first batch of production Starlink satellites today, sending 60 of the small satellites to their target orbit aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. These 60 satellites follow 60 launched in May, but whereas those, and two launched last year, were for testing purposes, this new batch is the first in a series…
Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. This week, a lawsuit sparked a debate over the deployment of China’s pervasive facial recognition; meanwhile, in some good news, foreigners in China can finally…
More women in India die from cervical cancer than in any other country. This preventable disease kills around 67,000 women in India every year, more than 25% of the 260,000 deaths worldwide. Effective screening and early detection can help reduce its incidence, but part of the challenge — and there are several parts — today…
African on-demand trucking logistics company Lori Systems has raised a Series A round led by Chinese investors Hillhouse Capital and Crystal Stream Capital. Other participating investors included Nigeria and U.S.-based EchoVC, Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen and Nigerian founder Iyinoluwa Aboyeji. Lori Systems is not disclosing the amount of the Series A. DealStreet Asia reported the…
Official word has come down from federal authorities on one potential cause of the mystery illness affecting vape users: Vitamin E acetate, a chemical found in some vaping products that has been demonstrated to linger in the lungs long afterwards. The finding has been called a “breakthrough” but is far from the last word on…
This July, Facebook announced a new division called NPE Team which would build experimental consumer-facing apps, allowing the company to try out new ideas and features to see how people would react. It soon thereafter tapped former Vine GM Jason Toff to join the team as a product manager. The first apps to emerge from…
