Tech

Netflix’s flubbed foray into livestreaming was a topic of discussion during the streamer’s first-quarter earnings on Tuesday with co-CEO Greg Peters telling investors how sorry the company was for “disappointing so many people,” and explaining in more detail what had happened. Over the weekend, Netflix had been set to release its first live reunion special

Stability AI, the startup behind the generative AI art tool Stable Diffusion, today open-sourced a suite of text-generating AI models intended to go head to head with systems like OpenAI’s GPT-4. Called StableLM and available in “alpha” on GitHub and Hugging Spaces, a platform for hosting AI models and code, Stability AI says that the

In the Summer of 2020, a mint green coffee cart appeared in Williamsburg’s McCarren park near the Greenpoint entrance — directly across the street from a Starbucks. It was cute, and, at least to me, appeared to be a new independent coffee place. A few months later, when I saw that the cart’s parent company,

Taiwanese two-wheeler battery swapping company Gogoro has a plan to give energy back to Taiwan’s electrical grid and make money while doing it. The company is partnering with Enel X, an energy services provider, to integrate 2,500 of its GoStations in Taiwan into Enel X’s Virtual Power Plant (VPP). A VPP is a collection of

A UK credit card rewards startup aimed at millennials and Gen Z consumers has stumbled upon a combined business model that has now secured it £12.5 million ($15.4m) in an equity round from investors. Yonder is a credit card closest in operation to AMEX or Chase Sapphire in the US, however, it combines that credit

After a nice spike during the first two years of the pandemic, global PC shipments continued to drop for a fourth consecutive quarter. Analyst firm IDC’s latest figure has Q1 down 29% from the same time last year. Canalys paints an even more troubling picture for the industry, with a full 33% drop. A disappointing

Netflix is having issues with the livestream of its “Love is Blind” reunion episode. We always knew the livestream would be messy, as reality show reunions always are — but after an hour delay (and counting), Netflix’s livestream is looking even messier than Zack and Irina’s short-lived relationship. Per Down Detector, more than 10,000 users

Anyone in the U.K. who has tried to book an NHS medical appointment of late will know just how much of an ordeal it can be, with median waiting times for consultant-led elective care (i.e. pre-planned clinical treatment) currently sitting at around 14.6 weeks in England. This has led to a spike in people turning

Sam Chaudhary takes his time. The founder of ClassDojo, an edtech consumer app that focuses on student classrooms, spent eight years building the company before introducing a formal revenue model. All while raising over tens of millions in venture capital from elite Silicon Valley investors and eyeing a big mission: become the brand families can

A slew of new funds indicate potential for dedicated pools for climate startups Annie Njanja 7 hours Venture capital activity around climate tech has been heating up in Africa despite the global VC funding cooldown. The continent’s climate tech startups secured over $860 million in equity funding, largely driven by clean energy technologies, representing 3.5x

A shiny new data transfers deal between the European Union and the United States aimed at fixing costly legal uncertainty over exports of personal data isn’t in place yet but the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee is predicting the incoming EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (DPF) won’t survive a legal challenge — just as its two

India’s smartphone exports have more than doubled, reaching over $11 billion in the fiscal year that ended in March, according to trade data examined by the industry body India Cellular and Electronics Association and government officials, underscoring the South Asian market’s growing ambition to become a global hardware manufacturing hub. Smartphone exports of $11.2 billion

Spotify is closing down Heardle, the Wordle-inspired music guessing game it acquired last July for an undisclosed sum. Similar to Wordle, Heardle offers players six tries to guess a popular song — but instead of typing in different letters to form words, players listen to a song’s intro to guess the artist and title. At

European accelerators are going through an interesting time right now. For instance, TechStars Stockholm was all set to launch and then abruptly shut down. And I think it’s now commonly accepted that most accelerators outside of YCombinator can too be often ‘less than adequate’, to put it diplomatically. Perhaps an exception to this oft-repeated phrase,

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Happy Thursday, Crunchers! If you’ve been to Disrupt before, you’ll remember we had a stage or two or three. This year, we’re going all out, with a bunch of tracks to tickle

Nonprofit Arts Help is launching a $6 million fund to build the world’s first digital climate library to provide public access to the archives of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UNFCCC, which was formed in 1992, has more than 1.7 million paper documents related to the treaty, many of which

As Gen Z turns into their early-to-mid 20s, a new generation of business owners is coming online. Many of these new entrepreneurs do the vast majority of work on their phones. This is especially true in emerging markets like Latin America, where SMEs comprise 99.5% of firms in the region. In Mexico, for instance, 97.4%

Nearly two decades after Apple entered India, the iPhone-maker is ready to open its first set of retail stores in the South Asian market. Apple will open Apple BKC, its Mumbai store, on April 18, and its Delhi outlet Apple Saket on April 20, the company said in a statement Tuesday. Apple has long explored

Marvel Studios released a teaser trailer today for “The Marvels,” featuring three badass female superheroes—Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel and Captain Rambeau. The movie is set to hit theaters on November 10 and sees Brie Larson, Iman Vellani and Teyonah Parris reprise their roles. “The Marvels” is the third movie of the MCU’s Phase Five and

About 10% of startups will fail in their first year. Between years two through five, approximately 70% of companies will go under. But those figures don’t matter when you’re pitching: Investors expect to see a business plan that describes how you plan to reach profitability within 3-5 years. “While it may feel unfamiliar, as a

French startup Graneet is building an all-in-one software-as-a-service product focused on small construction companies. And it has grown quite a lot since I first covered the company as the company has tripled its revenue over the past six months. That’s why the startup raised a €8 million Series A round ($8.7 million at today’s exchange

A new state bill might move the needle for V2G charging Haje Jan Kamps 12 hours If you have solar panels on your roof, it makes sense to add batteries, too, so you have some degree of self-sufficiency should you lose power. In fact, it might be a good idea to have such a storage

When The Exchange wrote about Sweden’s startup scene at the end of last month, we said we’d revisit the Nordics this week. Well, a promise is a promise. But after spending hours watching YC’s Winter 2023 Demo Day pitches this week, we also couldn’t help but try to connect the dots: Are Scandinavian startups making

Apple is gearing up to open its first retail store in India to the public later this month, roughly two decades after the company began selling products and services in the South Asian nation that has grown to become the second largest internet market. The iPhone-maker on Wednesday shared the barricade of its first retail

At the Star Wars Celebration in London, Lucasfilm announced that Star Wars spinoff “The Acolyte” will premiere on Disney Plus in 2024. The series is set at the end of the High Republic era before the events of the main Star Wars films. Amandla Stenberg and Lee Jung-jae will be staring in the leading roles.

It’s that time of the week, folks: Week in Review (WiR) time. If you’re new to WiR, it’s the newsletter where TechCrunch recaps the week in tech that was. We get it — you’re a busy person. We all are. So what better way to catch up on what’s happened than in a summarized, bullet-point

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. I spent quite a bit of time lately looking at the latest in insurtech. What’s great about zooming in on a sector is that

Cows are a significant source of methane emissions, primarily due to their unique digestive system. Milk and beef cows are ruminants, which means they have a specialized stomach chamber (called the rumen), which houses billions of microbes that facilitate the breakdown of fibrous plant material. The process is called “enteric fermentation,” and as these microbes