Tech

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

Winamp version 5.9.1 is here, rejoice! The venerable — nay, aged — but reliable media player has been receiving sporadic updates over the last couple decades, but little truly new functionality has appeared (and that’s just fine by us users). But this new version brings an unexpected and thankfully optional feature: NFT playback. No, this

Setpoint, a startup that has built software to help other companies close loan transactions faster, has raised $43 million in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The raise comes just six months after Austin, Texas-based Setpoint closed a $5.5 million seed round and $150 million in securitization. Serial entrepreneurs Ben Rubenstein, Stuart

Einride today announced a $500 million tranche of financing as it looks to expand its autonomous and electric trucks into new markets globally. The cash injection constitutes an equity-based $200 million Series C portion from backers including Northzone, EQT Ventures, Temasek, Swedish pension fund AMF, Polar Structure, and Norrsken VC. Additionally, the Swedish company said

The real estate and infrastructure sectors contribute about 40% of global carbon emissions, and part of solving the climate crisis is fixing how those industries work. Accacia gives large property owners a way to track their carbon impact in real-time by integrating with ERPs and property management systems like Yardi. It’s already been deployed to

Chattermill, a platform that helps companies unlock insights by analyzing customer feedback data from across myriad digital channels, has raised $26 million in a Series B round of funding. Founded out of London in 2015, companies such as Uber and Amazon use Chattermill to unify all their customer data, integrating with social networks, customer feedback

Lora DiCarlo, a sex tech startup that made headlines in 2019 after being blacklisted from the Consumer Electronics Show, seems to have shut down. The company’s website is offline and reportedly orders have gone unfulfilled for months. TechCrunch has reached out to the eponymous founder for confirmation, but it sure looks like the end of

When Vijay Chattha was building a startup, his competitor was what some would call a media darling. The competition had a good story, which created investor interest. In turn, that interest helped land key customers. And so the cycle repeated. Chattha eventually sold that company in a lukewarm exit and took with him an important

Aaaaand we’re back! With our Thanksgiving mini-hiatus behind us, it’s time for another edition of Week in Review — the newsletter where we quickly wrap up the most read TechCrunch stories from the past seven(ish) days. No matter how busy you are, it should give you a pretty good idea of what people were talking

Welcome 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 it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of