February 7, 2025

These documents are influencing the DOGE-sphere’s agenda

Reports from the US Government Accountability Office on improper federal payments in recent years are circulating on X and elsewhere online, and they seem to be a big influence on Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency and its supporters as the group pursues cost-cutting measures across the federal government.  The payment reports have been…

Technology

Speed and tech dominated the lawns at Monterey Car Week

August 20, 2023
The Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance is just the cherry on top of a week of events highlighting, celebrating and sometimes even worshiping the automobile. While the lawn on Sunday mostly focuses on the past, other events like The Quail and the numerous private debuts scattered around Monterey, California have their sights very much set on […]

Cellebrite asks cops to keep its phone hacking tech ‘hush hush’

August 19, 2023
For years, cops and other government authorities all over the world have been using phone hacking technology provided by Cellebrite to unlock phones and obtain the data within. And the company has been keen on keeping the use of its technology “hush hush.” As part of the deal with government agencies, Cellebrite asks users to […]

How Index Ventures jumped to the front of the AI GPU line

August 19, 2023
Earlier this week, the New York Times shone a light on some of the desperation that founders are experiencing as they try and fail to secure compute power for their nascent artificial intelligence startups, thanks to the big companies (and even rich nations) racing to snatch them up. One founder reportedly said of the graphics […]

I’ve never seen so many crap startups

August 18, 2023
Startups are so full of shit right now.  The pipes are jammed and there are so many companies that are full to bursting with the desire to un-pack them.  We’ve just been through determining the shape of this year’s TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 200 and we are seeing a huge amount of waste recycling, poop and […]

Founders Fund, Index Ventures, Canvas Ventures join TC Disrupt Startup Battlefield judges

August 18, 2023
Just one more month until 20 of the world’s top early-stage startups take to the Disrupt Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 in San Francisco to vie for an equity-free, $100,000 prize. They’ll face tough scrutiny from our judges, and today investors from Founders Fund, Index Ventures and Canvas Ventures join that high-powered pack. Be in […]

Viome, a microbiome startup, raises $86.5M, inks distribution deal with CVS

August 18, 2023
Research on the human microbiome — microorganism communities that live in a part of your body such as your mouth or gut — has led to a number of insights and spurred further investigations into what makes up a healthy person. Combined with the continuing interest in alternative medicine, that is leading to some venture […]

For climate tech startups, the IRA is starting to pay off

August 18, 2023
The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law by President Joe Biden in August 2022, has allocated $400 billion in federal dollars for clean energy projects as the United States aims for up to a 40% reduction in economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. And even startups are beginning to benefit.  Private investment into climate tech […]

The Download: open source’s future, and cancer drugs shortages

August 18, 2023
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. The future of open source is still very much in flux When Xerox donated a new laser printer to MIT in 1980, the company couldn’t have known that the machine would ignite a…

A chemo drug storage shows the vulnerability of the healthcare supply chains

August 18, 2023
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. If you’ve been following health headlines in recent months, you may have heard that many prescription drugs are in short supply. Yesterday, the New York Times…

This UK startup engineered a clever way to reuse waste heat from cloud computing

August 18, 2023
Using heat generated by computers to provide free hot water was an idea born not in a high-tech laboratory, but in a battered country workshop deep in the woods of Godalming, England. “The idea of using the wasted heat of computing to do something else has been hovering in the air for some time,” explains…