Tech

Amazon has announced that Fire TV users in the U.S. can now watch tens of thousands of music videos from major and independent labels for free. No downloads, fees or subscriptions are required to watch the music videos. The ad-supported music videos will be available from artists on the Billboard Hot 100, including Taylor Swift,

Amid 2021’s record-breaking funding activity, it wasn’t uncommon to see startups raise rounds composed of numerous small checks from a large number of firms and angel investors. But now that said companies are looking to raise extension financing, they’re realizing that more investors doesn’t always mean more future money. Last year, FOMO was running high,

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. We’ve been working on a series of gift guides over the past month or so. Today, Devin’s guide to gaming headphones is up! If you missed any of our gift guides, here’s

Toyota president Akio Toyoda has made it no secret that he really, really dislikes electric vehicles. This weekend, he offered this latest installment: “People involved in the auto industry are largely a silent majority,” Toyoda told reporters in Thailand, according to The Wall Street Journal. “That silent majority is wondering whether EVs are really OK

The European Commission (EC) has confirmed that it’s proceeding with an antitrust investigation into Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms Inc. (Meta), over the way it ties together its core social network and Marketplace classified ads service. The Commission’s Statement of Objections also points to “unfair trading conditions” related to how it uses data gleaned from rival

The world of mechanical keyboards is a very deep rabbit hole and it’s no secret that more and more people have fallen into it in recent years. So if you have somebody in your life who keeps talking about lubing switches, gasket mounts and the pros and cons of ABS vs PBT keycaps, chances are

The latest hit Netflix series “Wednesday,” the “Addams Family” spin-off directed by Tim Burton, has reached a milestone that only “Stranger Things” Season 4 and “Squid Game” managed to accomplish. “Wednesday” surpassed 1.02 billion total hours viewed in just three weeks since its debut, the company announced, with over 150 million households streaming the show.

Here are the stories that garnered the most interest from readers Mary Ann Azevedo 8 hours W elcome 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

Hello, hello! Greg here again with Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly recap the most read TechCrunch stories from the past seven days. Been too busy to read tech news? WiR should leave you with a pretty good idea of what people were reading/talking/tweeting about. Want it in your inbox every Saturday AM?

Elon Musk’s plan to “operate as a giant distributed utility” is creeping toward reality. Tesla first piloted a “virtual power plant” in California, inviting Powerwall home battery owners to sell electricity back to the grid at peak times to mitigate brownouts. Soon after, the automaker expanded the effort into Australia and Japan, and next it’s

European Union lawmakers have wasted no time warning Twitter-owner Elon Musk over “arbitrary suspension of journalists” following reports late yesterday that a number of reporters who had recently written about Musk had had their Twitter accounts suspended without warning. Věra Jourová, an EU vice-president for values and transparency, took to Twitter this morning to tweet the

Apple’s new “Emergency SOS” service that lets off-grid iPhone users call for help via satellite has led to one of its first successful rescue operations, certainly the first to be documented live. (Another example in Alaska was only reported in a bulletin after the fact.) As related by the Montrose Search & Rescue Team, which

AI-generated music is already an innovative enough concept, but Riffusion takes it to another level with a clever, weird approach that produces weird and compelling music using not audio but images of audio. Sounds strange, is strange. But if it works, it works. And it does work! Kind of. Diffusion is a machine learning technique

Even after billions of venture capital raised and invested into the digital health space, it’s still difficult to access quality healthcare. And while that may raise questions on if a scrappy startup has a fighting chance at fixing things, to entrepreneur Akili Hinson, it just means that Juno needs to be even smarter about the

Seeking to bring greater security to AI systems, Protect AI today raised $13.5 million in a seed-funding round co-led by Acrew Capital and Boldstart Ventures with participation from Knollwood Capital, Pelion Ventures and Aviso Ventures. Ian Swanson, the co-founder and CEO, said that the capital will be put toward product development and customer outreach as

It’s commonly held that solar panels need as much sun as they can get. That’s true, but only up to a point, as heat and other hazards can become a serious problem beyond that point, and solar panels can degrade pretty quickly. SmartHelio wants to help prevent that from happening. The startup uses AI tech

Back in June, I predicted that we would see an uptick in startups acquiring other startups this year. At the time, the venture market was souring and starting to show a divide between startups with years of cash on hand — companies that were also, often, overvalued — and those that were low on capital and would

You know what I miss about working in an office? Literally nothing, apart from having access to a fancy coffee machine. It turns out that the magic of the liquid black gold is within reach even for work-from-home keyboard warriors. You don’t even need to spend ridiculous amounts of money for a tasty hot beverage

Image-generating AI models like DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion can — and do — replicate aspects of images from their training data, researchers show in a new study, raising concerns as these services enter wide commercial use. Co-authored by scientists at the University of Maryland and New York University, the research identifies cases where image-generating

HR organizations are faced with a widening skills gap, economic headwinds and changing expectations around work. It’s no surprise, then, that burnout and exhaustion are widespread in HR, with one survey finding that 42% of teams are struggling under the weight of too many projects and responsibilities. Change starts with personnel and management, some might

Financial institutions are waiting for the SEC and other regulators to pass rules about how to disclose emissions from their portfolio companies. Until then, many are following the standard set by the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF). Pathzero helps them with a platform to exchange carbon information securely and analyze it. The Sydney, Australia-based

For companies aiming toward net zero, tracking scope 3 carbon emissions is a key challenge. Scope 3 are emissions along a supply and value chain, which means they have to account for a large number of partners. Avarni automates much of the process and says it can cut down the amount of time spent on

Elon Musk’s desire to stir conspiratorial shit up by giving select outsiders aligned with his conservative agenda access to Twitter systems and data could land the world’s richest man in some serious doodoo with regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. In recent days, this access granted by Musk to a few external reporters has

Keeping fit doesn’t need a lot of technology. A decent pair of running shoes and an exercise mat might just do it. But of course sometimes a little extra tech can give an inspiring boost — so long as whatever it is is useful, accessible and can move with you. The smart spot for fitness

On Thursday, Disney+ launched its first-ever ad-supported plan, “Disney+ Basic,” in the U.S. at $7.99 per month, which is the same price as the previous ad-free plan before Disney raised the price to $10.99/month. However, Roku users wanting to switch to the new plan are out of luck — at least for now. According to Disney

Microsoft today announced that it acquired Lumenisity, a U.K.-based startup developing “hollow core fiber (HCF)” technologies primarily for data centers and ISPs. Microsoft says that the purchase, the terms of which weren’t disclosed, will “expand [its] ability to further optimize its global cloud infrastructure” and “serve Microsoft’s cloud platform and services customers with strict latency

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. We’ve made it to Friday, folks. If you’re anything like me, that means finishing the workday with a well-deserved nap and reruns of “The Office.” Tweet, toot or Post at me about

Salesforce has always fashioned itself as a socially responsible company, and that includes working on a Net Zero carbon emissions goal. In fact, it launched Sustainability Cloud (now called Net Zero Cloud) in 2019, a product for tracking customer Net Zero goals. This year, they are taking that idea a step further with a new

According to Atomico’s new State of European Tech 2022 report, France has taken the UK’s title as the third largest listed tech nation, with Britain moving down to fourth. Nothing to do with Brexit, of course… Meanwhile, Sista, the Paris-based organisation which campaigns for more finds for female founders recently closed €30m of an intended

Apple has announced that its Self Service Repair store for iPhones and MacBooks is now open for business in Europe. First announced last November, the repair program essentially enables anyone to purchase genuine Apple components to repair their damaged devices, while the Cupertino company also provides online manuals to guide consumers through the self-service repair