TechCrunch Industry News

The material has 50% more tensile strength than steel with a strength-to-weight ratio that’s ten-times better. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For millions of movie enthusiasts in the ’90s, Moviefone’s 777-FILM number was the go-to source for obtaining showtimes. Now, under new ownership, Moviefone is trying to make a comeback. On Friday, as part of its 35th anniversary celebration, Moviefone announced the relaunch of its mobile app and a new nationally syndicated broadcast TV series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoice...

Microsoft employees aren’t allowed to use DeepSeek due to data security and propaganda concerns, Microsoft vice chairman and president Brad Smith said in a Senate hearing today. “At Microsoft we don’t allow our employees to use the DeepSeek app,” Smith said, referring to DeepSeek’s application service (which is available on both desktop and mobile.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastc...

Much of the world isn’t paying close attention to Greece right now. That may be a mistake. Best known for its stunning islands, sun-soaked cities, and deep historical roots, Greece has been quietly laying the foundation for something far less expected: a modern, resilient tech economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

During his junior year study abroad, Max Morganroth, traveled to 30 countries, primarily flying in business and first class. His jet setting was funded almost entirely by airline points he collected through strategic credit card applications and miles redemptions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rubrik co-founder Soham Mazumdar has a new data startup called Wisdom AI. It offers an agentic data analyst that works with structured, unstructured, even “dirty” data. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Employer.com has acquired MainStreet.com for an undisclosed amount, the latest fintech startup to get snapped up by the workforce management company. In a post on X, Employer.com Chairman and co-founder Jesse Tinsley said the two companies were “merging forces to simplify business back office solutions into one powerhouse platform.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoi...

The Energy Star program's signature yellow labels appear on appliances and electronics for sale throughout the U.S.; Ford is raising the price of the all-electric Mustang Mach-E SUV and popular entry-level Maverick pickup by as much as $2,000 due to the import taxes President Donald Trump is placing on vehicles made in Mexico, according to Reuters. Higher prices could make it harder for traditiona...

Cnaught is a market maker seeking to ease the pain of buying carbon credits for companies without dedicated teams. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While most African digital lenders depend on working capital to fuel growth, MoneyFellows has quietly done what few others have: lend billions of Egyptian pounds with almost no debt or balance sheet exposure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Pinterest is upgrading its visual search feature with a handful of new capabilities. On Monday, the company announced it’s rolling out new functionality to improve its feature that allows users to search using an image instead of text. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

World, the biometric ID company best known for its eyeball-scanning Orb devices, at an event late on Wednesday announced several partnerships aimed at driving sign-ups and demonstrating the applications of its tech. World is partnering with Match Group, the dating app conglomerate, to verify the IDs of Tinder users in Japan. Also, Airbnb started rolling out an AI-powered customer service bot in th...

OpenAI says it’ll make changes to the way it updates the AI models that power ChatGPT, following an incident that caused the platform to become overly sycophantic for many users. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meta made a prediction last year its generative AI products would rake in $2 billion to $3 billion in revenue in 2025, and between $460 billion and $1.4 trillion by 2035, according to court documents unsealed Wednesday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amazon on Thursday released what it claims is the largest, most capable AI model in its Nova family, Nova Premier. Nova Premier, which can process text, images, and videos (but not audio), is available in Amazon Bedrock, the company’s AI model development platform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The crush of traffic going into training and running AI has quickly turned into a major cost and resource headache for organizations. Cast AI is a startup building tools to ease and optimize AI and other workloads with automation — is raising a major round of funding on the back of its strong growth Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

JetBrains, the company behind a range of popular app development tools, has released its first “open” AI model for coding. On Wednesday, JetBrains made Mellum, a code-generating model the company released for its various software development suites last year, openly available on the AI dev platform Hugging Face. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yelp said on Tuesday that it’s working on deploying AI-powered “voice agents” to help service providers and restaurants handle calls, answer basic questions, and accomplish tasks like adding a customer to a restaurant waitlist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Spotify reported on Tuesday that its premium subscriber base grew by 5 million in the first quarter, representing a 12% increase year-over-year. This brings the total to 268 million, marking the second-highest total ever and the highest net addition of paid subs for a first quarter since 2020.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AI-based coding has exploded in popularity on the promise that it will make developers’ jobs faster and easier. But it’s also resulted in something else: a vast increase in lines of code, and thus the likelihood of bugs resulting in crashes or other mishaps. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The world has a trash problem. The amount of stuff we throw away is expected to nearly double, to 3.8 billion metric tons, by 2050. Reducing what we use would go a long way to addressing the issue, but let’s face it, we’re not very good at buying less either. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay Thursday highlighting how little researchers understand about the inner workings of the world’s leading AI models. To address that, Amodei set an ambitious goal for Anthropic to reliably detect most AI model problems by 2027. Amodei acknowledges the challenge ahead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Chess.com reaches a new membership milestone as it nears its 20th birthday. Chess.com, the online chess platform that was founded in 2005 and launched in 2007, has surpassed 200 million members. Of those 200 million members, 1.5 million are paying users. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For years, websites included information about what kind of crawlers were not allowed on their site with a robots.txt file. Adobe, which wants to create a similar standard for images, has added a tool to content credentials with an intention to give them a bit more control over what is used to train AI models. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Volkswagen of America and Uber on Thursday unveiled an ambitious plan to launch a commercial robotaxi service — using autonomous electric VW ID. BUZZ vehicles — in multiple U.S. cities over the next decade. The companies expect to launch a commercial service in Los Angeles, the first city on the list, by late 2026 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices