Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior Reporter and Equity co-host Natasha Mascarenhas. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. Sometimes, due to the nature of the startup game, we over index on “the new.” Companies want to build for the pain point you never...
Category: Technology and IT
FlyBe collapse asks questions about the resilience of UK’s transport infrastructure
FlyBe is a smaller, less significant business than when it collapsed for the first time in March 2020, but a second failure in three years raises questions not just for prospective owners, but the connectivity of the UK. Three years ago the failure of what was then Europe’s largest regional airline was blamed on the...
This Week in Apps: Temu’s hot streak, Walmart’s m-commerce & an Apple XR App Store
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...
Where should sales sit in product-led companies?
W elcome to the TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. The adoption of product-led growth is changing how B2B companies conduct their business and leading some of them to reorganize their teams. What...
Google’s new AI turns text into music
Song of the bots. | Illustration: The Verge Google researchers have made an AI that can generate minutes-long musical pieces from text prompts, and can even transform a whistled or hummed melody into other instruments, similar to how systems like DALL-E generate images from written prompts (via TechCrunch). The model is called MusicLM, and while...
The Apple Watch Series 7 with LTE is down to just $329 today
Frankly, you’re not losing out on much if you opt for Apple’s last-gen wearable. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge The Apple Watch remains the go-to smartwatch for iPhone users, but unless you absolutely need some of the new features found on the Apple Watch Series 8, the last-gen Series 7 remains an...
The Amazon Halo Rise would be a neat sleep tracker, if it weren’t for my cat
Amazon’s smart sunrise lamp knows when you’re sleeping but struggles to figure out when you’re awake, especially if you have a needy feline that gets in the way. Continue reading… Source: The Verge
Aptos wants to shake up the blockchain space by creating more economic value, co-founder says
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...
Toyota’s surprise executive shakeup may disappoint investors
Toyota’s president, Akio Toyoda, surprised the automotive world this week by announcing he would resign his position and hand the reins over to Koji Sato, who currently helms the company’s Lexus and Gazoo Racing divisions. But Toyoda isn’t going far. The 66-year-old isn’t retiring outright, but instead retiring to the boardroom, where he’ll take over...
Fifth Wall, focused on real estate tech and managing $3.2B, looks to eat up even more of its market
Brendan Wallace’s ambition is beginning to seem almost limitless. The venture firm that Wallace and cofounder Brad Greiwe launched less than seven years ago already has $3.2 billion in assets under management. But that firm, Fifth Wall, which argues there are massive financial returns at the intersection of real estate and tech, isn’t worried about...