TechCrunch

TikTok is rolling out its comment dislike button globally to all users, the company announced on Friday. The short-form video app started testing the dislike button in April as a way for users to identify comments they believe to be irrelevant or inappropriate. If you click the dislike button on a comment, the dislike won’t be … Read more

Ford broke ground Friday at its $5.6 billion BlueOval City complex in Tennessee, the epicenter for its future electric vehicles and a key milestone toward its goal to sell 2 million EVs annually by late 2026. BlueOval City is slated to begin building advanced batteries for future Ford and Lincoln EVs in 2025, including the … Read more

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Coming to hang with us at Disrupt, where Equity is kicking off the entire event? Use code ‘EQUITY’ to save 15% on your tickets. Hell yeah, and see you there! Alex, Natasha and Mary Ann jumped on … Read more

Battery life has long been the Apple Watch’s biggest drawback. The issue only became more pronounced when the company went all-in on sleep-tracking with watchOS 7 in 2020. Rather than increasing the mAh on the hardware, Apple presented a workaround: an alert that pops up if the user dips below a certain percentage before bed … Read more

Tesla couldn’t get a judge to dismiss a case alleging racial bias at the automaker’s Fremont factory last month, so the automaker is now countersuing the agency responsible instead. The luxury electric vehicle maker on Thursday filed a complaint in state court in Alameda County saying the California Civil Rights Department (CRD) adopted “underground regulations” … Read more

Days ahead of the Italian general election, the country’s privacy watchdog has sent Facebook’s parent (Meta) an urgent request for information, asking the social media giant to clarify measures it’s taking around Sunday’s election. The risk of election interference via social media continues to be a major concern for regulators after years of rising awareness … Read more

The U.K. government has announced plans to make it easier for telecoms operators to access telegraph poles on private land, representing part of a broader push to bring high-speed broadband to all corners of the country. The announcement was made as part of the U.K.’s so-called “mini budget,” which was partly set up to address … Read more

Serial Kenyan tech entrepreneur Mike Macharia has spent the last two decades helping enterprises like East Africa’s biggest telco Safaricom to create infrastructure that bolsters their growth. His firm, Seven Seas Technologies, has previously worked with governments too — having been involved in the initial implementation of the decentralized service delivery hubs – Huduma Centres, … Read more

More than half of the population in Southeast Asia is under 30, making it a coveted market for novel technologies. Unsurprisingly, several countries in the region, like Singapore and Vietnam, have some of the world’s highest crypto adoption rates. While Indonesia isn’t the most crypto active in the region — total crypto value received was … Read more

Apple TV+’s original programming has received a major boost with the company landing a deal with “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” creator Vince Gilligan. Apple signed a two-season deal for his new project — dubbed as a grounded drama —that will be unrelated to two hit series. Deadline, which first reported the development, noted … Read more

Rad Power Bikes, a popular American e-bike brand that has raised over $300 million in the past two years, will start offering bikes as a subscription service next week. The company is partnering with Cycle, a Berlin-based e-bike subscription service that caters to couriers and last-mile delivery, to pilot the offering in Berlin. Starting September … Read more

Erik Torenberg is no longer the co-CEO of On Deck, a tech company that is trying to productize the community in a way that helps founders secure capital and advice. Torenberg, an early Product Hunt employee and the founder of investment firm Village Global, assumed the role only a year ago. But now, as On … Read more

Australia telecoms giant Optus said current and former customer data was accessed following a cyberattack on its systems. Optus said in a press release on Thursday that an unspecified number of customer names, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, and addresses and identity document numbers, such as driver’s license or passport numbers, were taken … Read more

When Nothing was unveiled early last year, founder Carl Pei promised that the hardware startup had a full road map. Early stories about the London-based firm alluded to a pitch deck full of Pokémon characters, each representing a different product in the pipeline. Roughly a year and a half later, Nothing has delivered two major … Read more

Apple today released the first major update to its new iOS 16 mobile operating system ahead of schedule. Earlier this week, Apple confirmed it would roll out an update next week aimed at addressing a handful of bugs that had been plaguing users, including an annoying copy and paste permissions-related bug and another that saw … Read more

DocuSign announced today that it has hired Allan Thygesen as its next CEO, effective October 10. Thygesen was most recently at Google where he was president of the Americas and global partners. He was in charge of Google’s $100 billion advertising business in the Americas, a rather significant business by any measure, and a position … Read more

With the Ultra, Apple has taken a page from its now-familiar playbook for how to broaden the appeal of its mobile devices and applied it to its watch lineup: Step 1: Introduce a solid but still not fully realized version 1.0. Step 2: Refine, refine, refine. Step 3: Make a “pro” version. The Ultra is … Read more

It can be hard to tell how venture capital firms are doing. Sometimes it’s easier after a big exit, like Figma’s last week, which gave us a window into the sizable returns some of its early backers, including Index Ventures and Greylock, could capitalize on. But VC firms are usually an opaque bunch when it … Read more

Apple’s major privacy update to iOS last year made it much more difficult for apps to track user behavior beyond their own borders, but a new lawsuit alleges that Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta kept snooping through a workaround. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and … Read more

Mark your calendars, startup fans, because TechCrunch is returning — live and in person — to the beautiful City by the Bay to host our flagship event, TechCrunch Disrupt, on October 18–20 at the Moscone West Convention Center followed by an online recap event on October 21. TC Disrupt is the grande dame of tech … Read more

It was a big week for the customer experience market, with two major players in the marketing tool space taking swings to bring the idea to the next level. The pair of moves taken together could move customer experience closer to reality after a long period of ambition. “Customer experience” is kind of a vague … Read more

They say if you’re going to cut, cut deeply so you only have to do it once. Alas, a growing number of companies are realizing that despite layoffs earlier in the year, they need to cut back more now. Klarna, the Stockholm, Sweden-based buy-now-pay-later outfit finds itself in this camp. According to the outlet Sifted, … Read more