Everyone deserves a Pinecil

This guy rules. | Photo by Christopher Person / The Verge Learning to solder was a life-changing experience for me, but it can seem daunting. You aren’t just screwing and unscrewing parts — you are melting hot metal with a scorching tip. While that seems like something out of reach for most people, I am … Read more

Paramount+ orders a live-action ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ series

A live-action series based on the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons is coming to Paramount+. The pilot of the show was written and directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber, who wrote films like “Dodgeball” and “Red Notice.” The series will be co-produced by Hasbro’s eOne and Paramount Pictures, who are also working together on the upcoming … Read more

TechCrunch+ roundup: New success metrics, M&A timeline, 5 cloud trends for 2023

You don’t need to be an economist to appreciate the myriad forces placing downward pressure on startups today. Setting aside the legions of investors keeping their powder dry, is your yearly revenue growing faster than the inflation rate? What percentage of your sales team has experience working during a downturn? Amidst the angst, there’s some … Read more

Qonto plans to move Penta customers to its platform by the end of 2023

Last year, French startup Qonto acquired its German competitor Penta. Both companies offer business bank accounts for small and medium companies as well as freelancers. Today, Qonto shared some details about the integration process. At the time of the acquisition, Penta was serving 50,000 companies in Germany while Qonto had 300,000 customers in France, Spain, … Read more

Roblox may arrive on Meta Quest later this year

It appears that Roblox, a major player in the metaverse space, could be getting its moment to shine on Meta’s virtual reality headset. According to The Verge’s Command Line newsletter, sources say that Roblox might be planning to come to Quest in late 2023. Roblox declined to comment to TechCrunch. Meta was not immediately available … Read more

Best practices for load testing Amazon SageMaker real-time inference endpoints

Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed machine learning (ML) service. With SageMaker, data scientists and developers can quickly and easily build and train ML models, and then directly deploy them into a production-ready hosted environment. It provides an integrated Jupyter authoring notebook instance for easy access to your data sources for exploration and analysis, so … Read more

Earth’s ozone layer is on the mend

In a report released October 3rd, 2000, the Goddard Space Flight Center said satellites have observed an 11.5 million square-mile hole, a severe thinning of Earth’s protective ozone layer, over Antarctica.  | Image: Newsmakers via Getty Images For decades, the Earth’s ozone layer, which protects life on our planet from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet (UV) … Read more

BioNTech acquires Tunisian-born and U.K-based AI startup InstaDeep for £562M

German-based biotech company BioNTech SE is set to acquire InstaDeep, a Tunis-born and U.K.-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup InstaDeep for up to £562 million (~$680 million) in its largest deal yet. Per The Financial Times, the German vaccine maker intends to use InstaDeep’s machine learning to “improve its drug discovery process, including developing personalised treatments tailored … Read more