US car dealerships face ongoing outage after CDK cyberattacks
CDK said it “does not have an estimated time frame” for recovery, as car dealerships and auto shops face continued outages.
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The world’s first industrial-scale plant for green steel promises a cleaner future
As of 2023, nearly 2 billion metric tons of it were being produced annually, enough to cover Manhattan in a layer more than 13 feet thick. Making this metal produces a huge amount of carbon dioxide. Overall, steelmaking accounts for around 8% of the world’s carbon emissions—one of the largest industrial emitters and far more…
June 2024
Instagram now lets users livestream exclusively to their Close Friends list
Instagram is introducing the ability for users to broadcast live to just their Close Friends list, the company announced on Thursday. The new “Close Friends on Live” feature allows users to go live with up to three other people. Instagram says the new feature can be used to share what’s on your mind, spontaneously catch […]
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Announcing the agenda for the Space Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024
We’re out-of-this-world excited to announce that we’ve added a dedicated Space Stage to TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. It joins Fintech, SaaS and AI as the other industry-focused stages — all under one big roof. And we’re excited to share we’ll be hosting a pitch competition this year “The Space Challenge, powered by Aerospace” as part of […]
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PayPal Ventures leads $20M round into Gynger, which offers companies ‘buy now, pay later’ for technology purchases
Gynger, a platform that lends capital to companies for technology purchases, has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by PayPal Ventures, it told TechCrunch exclusively. The financing brings the New York-based startup’s total venture capital raised to $31.7 million and included participation from Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI-focused venture fund), Velvet Sea Ventures, […]
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Pocket FM partners with ElevenLabs to convert scripts into audio content quickly
Lightspeed Ventures-backed audio platform Pocket FM just announced that it has partnered with voice cloning company ElevenLabs to quickly convert text content, such as script, into audio series using AI. Pocket FM, which raised $103 million in Series D funding in March, told TechCrunch at the time that it was already experimenting with the ability […]
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Anthropic claims its latest model is best-in-class
Claude 3.5 Sonnet can analyze both text and images as well as generate text, and it’s Anthropic’s best-performing model yet — at least on paper.
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Roots introduces a screen time app for tracking ‘digital dopamine’
As the U.S. Surgeon General is calling for a warning label on social media sites, similar to those found on tobacco products, one startup is launching a set of new tools that put the power to fight app addiction into users’ own hands. Designed for iOS, Roots offers an improvement over traditional screen-time apps by […]
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Materia looks to make accountants more efficient with AI
The U.S. is facing an accountant shortage. Fewer first-time candidates took the CPA exam in 2022 than in 2006, according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. One possible reason people aren’t as interested in the field is the large amount of drudge work involved: Accountants have to rifle through large amounts of unstructured […]
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Ex-HubSpot exec builds an AI-powered CRM that learns for you, with $4M seed led by Sequoia
Christopher O’Donnell has hobbies. He likes music and playing guitar, but above all, he loves building software. Which is why three years after leaving HubSpot, he built Day.ai, a CRM for the age AI. Unlike modern CRMs, which are essentially giant spreadsheets that somebody needs to populate and keep updated, Day learns everything about a […]
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The Download: playing games with AI
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. How generative AI could reinvent what it means to play To make them feel alive, open-world games like Red Dead Redemption 2 are inhabited by vast crowds of computer-controlled characters. These animated people—called…