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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. Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by

Welcome 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. Reading recently about Germany’s €30 billion plan for its startups, I was intrigued. Did the country start to envy La French Tech? Is it

Hello hello! We’re back with another edition of Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly recap the top stories to hit TechCrunch across the last seven days. Want it in your inbox? Sign up here.  other stuff a16z backs WeWork founder’s new thing: When a company implodes hard enough that it inspires a miniseries,

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. It’s been a week of people trying to make sense of what’s happening in tech. If you’ve been compartmentalizing: Cheers! Now let me walk you through what’s been going on. On Monday,

Zūm’s mission is simple — to introduce student transportation that is reliable, efficient, sustainable and transparent. To achieve the feat of modernizing an incredibly outdated, stuck-in-the-mud system, Zūm relies on cloud-based analytics software to create an agile bus routing system with real-time visibility for schools and parents. The startup also uses a diverse fleet that

John Carmack, the game developer who co-founded id Software and served as Oculus’s CTO, is working on a new venture — and has already attracted capital from some big names. Carmack said Friday his new artificial general intelligence startup, called Keen Technologies, has raised $20 million in a financing round from former GitHub CEO Nat

A new company from the creators of the Godot game engine is setting out to grab a piece of the $200 billion global video game market — and to do so, it’s taking a cue from commercial open source software giant Red Hat. Godot, for the uninitiated, is a cross-platform game engine first released under

I have been carrying both of Samsung’s new foldables on my person when I leave the house for the last few days. It’s mostly for testing purposes, of course, but there’s also a fun game I like to play when I see people I know. I pull them both out, stick them in front of

Facebook this year has been struggling to maintain its position among the Top 10 apps on the U.S. App Store, according to an analysis of iPhone App Store data. As younger consumers shift to newer social networking experiences like TikTok and now BeReal, the tech giant’s big blue app has lost traction in the App

Sofy, a startup developing a testing platform for mobile app devs it claims is used by Microsoft, today closed a $7.75 million seed round that brings its total capital raised to $9.5 million. Voyager Capital led the tranche with participation from PSL Ventures, GTMFund and Revolution, providing cash that CEO Syed Hamid says will be

The power grid supply in Africa is erratic and inconsistent, affecting rural and urban households and businesses. For restaurants or neighborhood stores dealing with perishables, frozen foods and beverages, having intermittent electricity inhibits the growth of their businesses. Some of them turn to diesel-fueled generators, which are expensive and toxic, to provide electricity. Companies such

In the U.S., most electric vehicle owners say that public chargers are easy to use. That is, when they actually work. A new J.D. Power survey finds that, while public charging stations are a tad easier to come by these days, faulty chargers are souring the experience and hampering EV adoption. That’s no good, because

Bangalore-based Exponent Energy might have come up with a way to deliver 15-minute rapid charging for electric vehicles. The startup, which just raised a $13 million Series A, relies on a combination of its proprietary battery pack and charging infrastructure to achieve such a feat. Exponent Energy’s business model is geared towards OEMs building commercial

After permanently banning parties and events on all Airbnb listings in June, the company is hardening its anti-party stance by launching new screening tools in the U.S. and Canada. The firm’s “anti-party” tech is an algorithm to identify potential rule-breakers by looking at signals like the history of positive reviews, how long the user has

If you ask me, climate tech investor Contrarian Ventures isn’t so contrarian anymore. The five-year-old firm is targeting $100 million for its second seed-stage fund, and it’s doing so smack in the middle of a climate-tech dealmaking boom. So, if anything, it’s trendy. But when the seed-stage VC — a backer of e-bike maker Zoomo

This is the sort of thing I definitely would have been all over when I still traveled a bunch for work. Twelve South has long been the go-to for MacBook stands and the like, and today the company introduced a clever addition to the family: the collapsible/portable Curve Flex. The stand collapses fully flat so

After testing new in-app podcast recording tools for users in New Zealand, Spotify is now trialing a new audio feature in Vietnam, one that’s designed to encourage users to record voice reactions to playlists. A Reddit user posted screenshots of the feature, showing how they received a prompt to react to a playlist with a

Helbiz started out as a shared micromobility company but has since expanded to include ghost kitchens, media streaming and, most recently, a taxi service. The company reported its second-quarter earnings Monday after the bell. The startup was the first scooter operator to go public via the SPAC route, and many in the industry wish it wasn’t

Jenny Q. Ta Contributor The financial market crash this year has had a unique effect on the web3 industry. Web3 companies are the newest members of the fintech ecosystem, and the current downturn marks the first major “hit” for the industry. Fundraising can be hugely challenging in times like these, and it’s an essential lifeline

There’s no end to digitizing the operations of small and medium businesses (SMBs) in the traditional retail sector across sub-Saharan Africa. In Nigeria alone, this industry, worth more than $200 billion, consists of over 40 million businesses of varying sizes, according to reports. Traditional retail in the country comprises small kiosks and open-air markets selling

If there is ever going to be a national hydrogen economy, we’re going to need to change a few things. One of them is how we produce hydrogen itself, the vast majority of which comes from fossil fuels. SunGreenH2 brings a nanotech-level advance to green hydrogen production, supercharging electrolysis so orders of magnitude more hydrogen

Welcome back to Chain Reaction. Last week, we talked about a hack that gave new, ironic meaning to the word “trustless.” This week, we’ll get into one of the most polarizing aspects of crypto — privacy. If someone forwarded you this message, you can subscribe on TechCrunch’s newsletter page. all mixed up A weekly window

Penfold, a digital pensions platform, has closed a £7m ($8.49m) Series A funding round led by Bridford Group, an investment group. Also participating in the round was Jeremy Coller, Chief Investment Officer and Chairman of Coller Capital. Penfold also raised additional funding via a crowdfund amongst its customer base. The cash will be used to

A day after Samsung announced a pair of foldable devices, Xiaomi launched its second-gen foldable, Mix Fold 2, in China. The new phone sports a 6.56-inch outer display, 8.02-inch inner display and a Leica-powered camera system. The phone is China-only for now for the base price of RMB 8,999 (~$1,335) for a version with 12GB

Amazon’s cash-cow cloud division AWS has launched a new service designed to help companies deploy their own private 5G networks — eventually, at least. AWS first announced AWS Private 5G in early preview late last year, but it’s now officially available to AWS customers starting in its U.S. East (Ohio), U.S. East (N. Virginia), and

As individuals try to manage medical information and understand their conditions, many typically turn to Google or WebMD — neither of which does much to verify or provide the latest information. But Roon plans to change this with a medical education platform for vetted information, sourced strictly from doctors, patients, and caregivers. By curating the

In the video game Katamari Damacy, players control an avatar who rolls a sticky ball that captures anything it touches. The goal is to create a sphere large enough to become a star or moon. E-commerce aggregators work in much the same way by purchasing smaller brands, then optimizing their manufacturing and sales channels to

When Hyundai acquired Boston Dynamics at the end of 2020, there were plenty of open questions. Chief among them was why we should assume this acquisition would be any different than the past few? The 30-year-old bleeding-edge robotics firm had been an uncomfortable fit for its last two owners, Google and SoftBank, but the Korean

VoltStorage’s iron-salt batteries help it land $24 million Series C from Cummins, the diesel engine giant Tim De Chant 8 hours With the impending passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, renewables are about to get a fresh jolt in the U.S. They’re already some of the cheapest sources of electricity to build and run, but

MGM (which is owned by Amazon) is making a viral video show based on footage from Ring security cameras (also owned by Amazon). The syndicated television show, “Ring Nation,” is poised to be a modern-day, surveillance-tinged spin on “America’s Funniest Home Videos” with Wanda Sykes as host. According to a report in Deadline, the show