AgriWebb is on a mission to help livestock producers feed the world efficiently, profitably and sustainably by providing its comprehensive, ground-truth database for beef production worldwide. The Australian startup, which builds a livestock management platform for ranchers and farmers, wants to digitize farm records and the meat production process from the cow to the consumer … Read more
Hello and welcome back to Max Q. Will every October issue have a Halloween/autumn pun as its title? I’LL NEVER TELL. In this issue: Blast off for Crew-5 Russia’s rethinking on the ISS News from Firefly, TK and more By the way…We are a little over ONE WEEK away from TechCrunch Disrupt, which is returning … Read more
We’ve seen AIs create music, pornography and art. The Estonian startup Yummy started off creating a meal-kit startup, but along the way created an AI that can create and adapt recipes based on your taste and dietary restrictions, complete with AI-generated images of what your dishes might look like. “Imagine a world where you would … Read more
Antonio Rodriguez, who joined Matrix in 2005 after a company he’d founded — that Matrix backed — was sold to Hewlett-Packard, talked with us last week about Matrix’s biggest fund in roughly 20 years, an $800 million vehicle that the firm closed in June and is announcing for the first time now. It’s a lot … Read more
We’re on the home stretch, startup fans. TechCrunch Disrupt kicks off in less than 10 days and runs from October 18–20. This message goes out to all the last-minute decision-makers. It’s the final week you can save serious cheddar on a Disrupt pass. It’s go time. Buy your pass before October 14 at 11:59 p.m. … Read more
In the Apple TV+ series “Ted Lasso,” characters Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) and Sam Obisanya (Toheeb Jimoh) download Bantr, a fictional dating app where users can’t see each other’s photos. Bumble, the women-focused dating app, has now partnered with “Ted Lasso” to bring the experience of Bantr to its users. On Thursday, October 13, Bumble … Read more
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over whether the world will get its act together enough to prevent catastrophic warming. There’s certainly a case to be made there — we’ve spent the last several decades kicking the can down the road at every opportunity. Well, here we are again, with the can again before us … Read more
As Meta makes deeper inroads with businesses on WhatsApp, its biggest bet to monetize the instant messaging app with over 2 billion users, we are getting an early glimpse at how user experience might change on the free app. It’s not great. Scores of people in India, WhatsApp’s largest market by users with over 500 … Read more
Gen Z social media app BeReal encourages its users to take a photo every day — a format designed to create a daily habit. But only a small number of the app’s users are currently doing so, new estimates from a third-party app intelligence firm indicate. According to research from Sensor Tower, BeReal is demonstrating … Read more
Meilisearch, the creator behind the open source search engine project of the same name, today closed a $15 million Series A round led by Felicis, with participation from CRV, LocalGlobe, ESOP, Mango Capital, Seedcamp and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch. CEO Quentin de Quelen tells TechCrunch that the new cash will help to expand Paris-based Meilisearch’s … Read more
Now comfortably into Q4 2022, TechCrunch is busy looking at a mountain of data from the third quarter, hoping to solidify our understanding of where the market for startup deal-making was, is right now and where it’s heading next. So far, we’ve seen stronger than anticipated American venture capital results, a somewhat troubling international picture, … Read more
YouTube is making it easier for creators to direct viewers to their channels. The company today announced “handles,” a new way for creators to identify their channel with an @username format in order to interact with their viewers across YouTube Shorts, channel pages, in video descriptions, in comments and more. These handles will be made … Read more
Today, October 10, Hulu raised its subscription prices. Announced in August, the Disney-owned streaming service, as well as ESPN+ and Disney+, are all getting price hikes. Hulu is increasing its ad-supported plan from $6.99 to $7.99 per month. Its ad-free plan now costs $14.99 per month instead of $12.99 per month. Subscribers with the Disney … Read more
PC shipments plunged across the world in the third quarter with overall sales falling 18%, according to numbers compiled by Canalys. The only company with positive year-over-year growth was Apple, with a modest 1.7% increase, according to Canalys. All of the other major PC makers experienced business decline, with most in double digit territory. IDC … Read more
We’re literally days away from the first in-person TechCrunch Disrupt since 2019 — and we can’t wait to get this party started on October 18. Get ready for three days packed with top-notch speakers and opportunity. No pass? Act fast: Buy your pass before October 14 at 11:9 p.m. (PDT) and you’ll save $700. With so … 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. Don’t forget that the code “EQUITY” can save you money on Disrupt tickets and TechCrunch+ access. And it makes us here on the show look good! We’re gearing up to take the show on the road … Read more
You have more than a month before Miami heats up for TC Sessions: Crypto on November 17, but you have only three days left until our special launch pricing sets sail and heads out to the OpenSea — ha, that’s a pretty NFT pun right there. Don’t waste another minute. Buy your pass — either … Read more
Jonathan Martinez Contributor Share on Twitter Jonathan Martinez is a former YouTuber, UC Berkeley alum and growth marketing nerd who’s helped scale Uber, Postmates, Chime and various startups. More posts by this contributor Why growth activation matters To optimize for growth, study your down-funnel metrics Who knew that “growth hacking,” a term coined in 2010 … Read more
Cloud kitchens became popular during the global pandemic as a way for restaurants to reach their communities when people were not going out as much. One of those was Foodology, a Colombia-based cloud kitchen and virtual restaurant company, co-founded by Daniela Izquierdo and Juan Guillermo Azuero in 2019. Unlike other kitchen groups that bring in … Read more
The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive the full edition of the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. This is a shorter version of The Station newsletter that is emailed to subscribers. Want all the deals, news roundups and commentary? Subscribe … Read more
An increasing percentage of the code that companies use to develop software is open source. In a 2018 survey by Tidelift, a software supply chain management platform, 92% of professional software developers said that their apps contained open source libraries. While that’s a positive trend — open source confers a wealth of benefits, not least … Read more
Apple’s recent hardware events have been punctuated by a touch of doom and gloom. It’s a tonal shift from the usual celebratory nature of these presentations — all by design, of course. The Apple Watch was the first to the party. Features like AFib readings and Fall Detection gave way to video testimonials from users … Read more
In the traditional business-to-business world, sellers often don’t know how much of a product they should order. Even at well-run companies, anywhere from 20% to 30% of inventory is either dead (i.e. doesn’t sell) or obsolete, according to one source. The impact on profitability can be quite severe. Dead stock costs sellers and manufacturers as … Read more
Samsung has confirmed the first third-party smart TV makers to ship with its Tizen operating system (OS), with several manufacturers preparing to launch Tizen-powered TVs this year across Europe and Australasia. Tizen, for the uninitiated, is a Linux-based OS hosted by the Linux Foundation for more than a decade, though Samsung has been the primary … Read more
Almost a week after Apple removed The OG App from the App Store, an Instagram client that promised to provide an ad-free and suggestion-free feed, Google followed the suit and booted the app off the Play Store. In a Twitter thread, co-founders of Un1feed, the company that published The OG App, said that the startup … Read more
Clerkenwell Health, a psychedelic-specialist clinical research organisation, has raised £2.1m in seed funding, bringing the total to date up to £2.5m, which will be used to get the London startup-based fully operational. Investors include Lionheart Ventures, Convergence Partners, and Exceptional Ventures, which was co-founded by Paolo Pio (former MD Europe at Joyance Partners) and Matt … Read more
Snapchat is bringing an initial set of parental controls to users in India — a couple of months after its debut in the U.S. and some other markets — to deliver parents and guardians in the key oversea market insights on how their teens are using the social networking app. The in-app tool, called Family … Read more
When Florida-based Chetu hired a telemarketer in the Netherlands, the company demanded the employee turn on his webcam. The employee wasn’t happy with being monitored “for 9 hours per day,” in a program that included screen-sharing and streaming his webcam. When he refused, he was fired, according to public court documents (in Dutch), for what … Read more
Elon Musk’s troubling, nascent vision for Twitter was on full display this weekend after the SpaceX and Tesla CEO strode into the center of a content moderation controversy created by Kanye West, who now goes by Ye. West popped up on Twitter Friday night for the first time since November 2020, tweeting “Look at this … Read more
In February, I received a letter from Chrysler saying that our 2017 Pacifica Hybrid was subject to a new recall. Several of the minivans had inexplicably caught fire and, given the evidence, the automaker suspected it might have to do with the high-voltage battery pack. The recall notice told us not to recharge the vehicle … Read more