Tech News

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app economy in 2023 hit a few snags, as consumer spending last year dropped for the first time by 2% to $167 billion, according to the latest “State

Toward the end of 2022, a number of entrepreneurs — some citing Elon Musk — told me they planned to bring back in-person work culture in the following year to help promote productivity and, in some cases, loyalty. One founder even told me over drinks that they weren’t worried about losing talent — claiming that

Four months after closing its largest fund to date, Kapor Capital wants more. The firm is under new leadership after co-founders Freada and Mitch Kapor stepped back from the outfit, which focuses on funding social impact ventures and founders of color. Now, led by Uriridiakoghene “Ulili” Onovakpuri and Brian Dixon, Kapor Capital is hoping to

The Indian government has ordered Vodafone Idea to convert all the interest it owes to the government into equity in the firm, making it by far the largest shareholder in the troubled telecom giant. Vodafone said it has been ordered to convert capital worth about $2 billion into equity. The company “will take all necessary

Damus, one of the fastest-growing Twitter alternatives, has been pulled from China’s App Store just two days after the app was approved by Apple. The app, which runs atop the Jack Dorsey-backed decentralized social networking protocol Nostr, was removed from the China App Store per request by the country’s top internet watchdog because it “includes

When Salesforce announced it was laying off 10% of its workforce last month, you might have assumed that meant that everyone who was affected was informed at that time. With social media flush with people talking about Salesforce layoffs today, the company says these are part of that original announcement, but some folks are learning

Xpeng, a Chinese electric vehicle upstart, is gearing up to launch its eVTOL into the air as it secures a key regulatory greenlight. Aeroht, owned by Xpeng and Xpeng founder He Xiaopeng, just obtained a special flight permit from the Civil Aviation Administration of China, the country’s counterpart to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. The

Waverly Labs, the company behind wearables focused on translation, has launched an app called Forum that helps users translate and transcribe audio in real-time. The company says the solution is useful for lecturers, auditoriums and theaters. What’s more, it is also compatible with video calling apps like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet. Forum is

Superstrata’s e-bike is a strange specimen — there’s no two ways about it. In some ways that makes sense; the bike’s concept, borne out in seamless 3D-printed carbon fiber, springs from an equally strange premise. We’ll get into that. Talking to Sonny Vu, founder of Superstrata’s parent company Arevo, the bikes were crafted not out

In its fourth-quarter earnings, Spotify announced today its User Choice Billing program has now expanded to over 140 markets worldwide, allowing the streaming music service to reduce the commissions it pays to Google over Play Store purchases associated with its Android app. The User Choice Billing pilot program gives Android users the option to pay

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) found merit to complaints that high-level executives at Apple violated national labor law. This finding comes after the NLRB also found that Apple illegally interfered with labor organizing at retail stores in New York City and Atlanta. These charges were filed by Ashley Gjøvik, a former senior engineer program

Amazon is going to start charging delivery fees for Fresh grocery orders that are under $150, the company said in an email to Prime members. Prior to this change, Amazon offered Prime members free grocery deliveries on orders above $35. The company says the move will keep prices low on its services. With this new

Much hope remains after the crypto winter almost froze the sector: the Luna crash, the bankruptcy of Celsius and the arrest of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried for alleged fraud. Then there was the venture pullback amid an economic downturn. In 2021, web3 startups globally raised a record $29.2 billion. By 2022, that number dipped to $21.5

Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week.

Hey, party people, it’s Kyle, continuing to step in for Greg to write Week in Review as he spends time with his newborn. Dunno about y’all, but it’s been a week. I’m dead tired and thankful it’s over. But because the news never sleeps, I’m rallying with the help of a fourth cup of coffee.

Welcome back to Chain Reaction, a podcast diving deep into stories, backgrounds and the latest news with the biggest names in crypto. For this week’s episode, I sat down with Mo Shaikh, co-founder and CEO of the layer-1 blockchain Aptos. Shaikh is a three-time founder with over a decade of experience in financial services as

The enormous Space Launch System passed its first test with flying colors, NASA’s preliminary analysis concludes, and the rocket and Orion capsule are good to go for their next mission: Artemis II, which will carry a crew to lunar orbit. After numerous delays and enormous cost overruns, some worried that the SLS (nicknamed the “Mega

When payments giant Stripe raised $600 million at a $95 billion valuation in 2021, it made headlines for raising capital at the highest-ever valuation for a privately-held startup. Defending that valuation appears to be proving challenging. The fintech company has reportedly approached investors about raising more capital — at least $2 billion — at a

Baillie Gifford, the Edinburgh-based asset management firm long known to have a penchant for pre-IPO tech companies, has reduced its shares in African e-commerce giant Jumia, per the latest 13G/A filing released by the asset manager. According to the filing, Baillie Gifford disclosed ownership of 18.75 million shares in Jumia, representing 13.69% of the company. In

Comcast-owned streaming service Peacock had its best quarterly result since its 2020 launch, adding five million paying subscribers in its fourth quarter of 2022 to bring the total to 20 million, up from the over 15 million subs in the previous quarter. In Q1 2021, Peacock had 9 million paid users. Peacock gets much of

There was a brief, beautiful moment for a few months in 2021 when it felt like robotic investments might be immune from broader market forces. We all fundamentally and implicitly understood this to not be the case, but it was a nice moment nevertheless. Truth is, there was a bit of insulation in there. There

Working with, microservices-based development environments presents a unique set of testing challenges. Richard North developed an open source solution called Testcontainers in 2015 to help ease this problem for developers. Today, the open source project is used by companies like Uber, Netflix, Spotify and Capital One. North and co-founder Sergei Egorov (who was a co-maintainer

Tesla’s fourth-quarter and full-year 2022 earnings are upon us, and with it expectations from Wall Street for the electric vehicle maker to hit revenue for the quarter of $24.03 billion and adjusted earnings per share to land around $1.13, according to Yahoo Finance data. If Tesla hits that revenue estimate, it’ll mark a record for the

Paris Heymann Contributor For the tech community, the rallying cry in 2022 was about moving from the growth-at-all-costs mindset toward emphasizing profitability. We believe that in turbulent times, startups and scaleups alike need to ensure: They have sufficient runway to ride out a downturn without relying on large amounts of external funding. They are developing

Solar-powered electric vehicle maker Lightyear said it’s halting production on its flagship Lightyear 0, its premium EV with a sticker price of €250,000. Despite only starting production on the vehicle three months ago, Lightyear is restructuring to focus on building a more affordable model, the Lightyear 2 for around €40,000, reports Electrek. The news comes

It’s been a tumultuous time at Salesforce recently, and it’s not getting any quieter soon. The Wall Street Journal reported last night that the company now needs to deal with activist investor Elliott Management. Elliott confirmed that it has taken a multibillion stake in Salesforce, and shared this comment from Jesse Cohn, managing partner at

Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week.

Detailed tactical plans for imminent police raids, confidential police reports with descriptions of alleged crimes and suspects, and a forensic extraction report detailing the contents of a suspect’s phone. These are some of the files in a huge cache of data taken from the internal servers of ODIN Intelligence, a tech company that provides apps

AltspaceVR has had a few close calls over the years, but the company that built virtual social spaces well before “metaverse” was a household word is shuttering for good this time. After announcing that it would close up shop in 2017, Microsoft intervened and the company came under the tech giant’s wing. Now, Microsoft is

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Happy Friday! Join us in wishing Lorenzo a very warm welcome to the team! He’s joining our crack team of cybersecurity reporters, working alongside Zack and Carly. He just published his first