June 6, 2025

The Download: China’s AI agent boom, and GPS alternatives

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Manus has kick-started an AI agent boom in China Last year, China saw a boom in foundation models, the do-everything large language models that underpin the AI revolution. This year, the focus has…

March 2024

Uber Eats’ new live location sharing feature helps couriers deliver food to users in hard-to-find locations

March 7, 2024

Uber Eats is adding a live location sharing capability to help couriers find customers in difficult-to-find locations, including public places such as campus courtyards, parks, and playgrounds. Starting today, the new feature is rolling out to all markets except Quebec. Uber Eats is available in over 11,000 cities across six continents. When users make a […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

PayPal launches Tap to Pay on iPhone for businesses using Venmo and Zettle in the US

March 7, 2024

PayPal announced today that it’s launching “Tap to Pay” for merchants with an iPhone through the Venmo and Zettle apps in the U.S. PayPal, which owns both Venmo and Zettle, says the feature will allow businesses to accept contactless card and digital wallet payments directly on their iPhones with no additional cost or hardware. The […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

How open source voting machines could boost trust in US elections

March 7, 2024
While the vendors pitched their latest voting machines in Concord, New Hampshire, this past August, the election officials in the room g­­asped. They whispered, “No way.” They nodded their heads and filled out the scorecards in their laps. Interrupting if they had to, they asked every kind of question: How much does the new scanner…

Turnitin laid off staff earlier this year, after CEO forecast AI would allow it to cut headcount

March 7, 2024

People worry that advances in AI will lead to job losses, but rarely does a company’s CEO openly admit that AI will help to reduce their headcount. Turnitin, a plagiarism detection company whose CEO Chris Caren last year warned that, in 18 months, his company would be able to reduce 20% of its headcount thanks […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Nikon buys film camera maker RED

March 7, 2024

Ever heard of Oakley Sunglasses? The guy who founded that – Jim Jannard – became a billionaire after selling a lot of sunnies, then went on to found RED digital cinema, one of the first major digital cinema camera brands. Today, Nikon announced that Nikon Corporation has announced its agreement to acquire the camera manufacturer, […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

We tested Anthropic’s new chatbot — and came away a bit disappointed

March 7, 2024

This week, Anthropic, the AI startup backed by Google, Amazon and a who’s who of VCs and angel investors, released a family of models — Claude 3 — that it claims bests OpenAI’s GPT-4 on a range of benchmarks. There’s no reason to doubt Anthropic’s claims. But we at TechCrunch would argue that the results […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.