Twitter suspends Mastodon after it tweeted about Elon’s jet

I’ll miss those cute elephants. | Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge Twitter has suspended the official Twitter account of Mastodon, one of the most popular destinations for people seeking a Twitter-like alternative. If you visit @joinmastodon’s profile, you’ll see a message that the account has been suspended. We don’t know exactly why the … Read more

Tesla Powerwall customers in Texas can now sell their electricity back to the grid

Elon Musk’s plan to “operate as a giant distributed utility” is creeping towards 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 … Read more

Daily Crunch: Major tech firms partner with Linux Foundation to support open map data development

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. The TC crew are a bunch of bookworms. Alex collected the top reads from 2022. Haje’s favorite was “A Deadly Education” (Naomi Novik’s first book in the Scholomance trilogy), which incidentally was … Read more

Google’s stranglehold on the mapping space could be challenged by new initiative from Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and others

Illustration: The Verge Meta, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and mapping company TomTom have launched a new mapping initiative in partnership with The Linux Foundation that could challenge the dominance Google holds in the mapping world, TechCrunch reports. The recently launched Overture Maps Foundation aims to encourage the development of new map products with openly … Read more

Sun King, a provider of solar energy products in Africa and Asia, expands Series D to $330M

Sun King, a provider of off-grid solar energy products in Africa and Asia, has secured a $70 million equity investment led by LeapFrog Investments. It’s an extension of the $260 million Series D round the solar company announced this April, which was led by BeyondNetZero, the climate investing venture of General Atlantic and M&G Investments’ … Read more