Technology

Palm oil is used in everything from soaps and cosmetics to sauces and crackers, but its production can be environmentally devastating. Producers burn down rainforests and swamps to make way for plantations, decimating wildlife habitats and producing staggering greenhouse-gas emissions. A company started by MIT classmates has used synthetic biology to develop an alternative. David…

We’re in the less-than-30-day countdown to TechCrunch Disrupt 202 and the show’s crown jewel, the Startup Battlefield competition. You do not want to miss the global launching pad of some of tech’s most successful companies, including Cloudflare, Dropbox, Fitbit, Mint and Yammer. More than 900 Startup Battlefield alumni companies have generated over 121 exits and […]

COBOL, or Common Business Oriented Language, is one of the oldest programming languages in use, dating back to around 1959. It’s had surprising staying power; according to a 2022 survey, there’s over 800 billion lines of COBOL in use on production systems, up from an estimated 220 billion in 2017. But COBOL has a reputation […]

Following rumors that it was exploring the sale of its weather business as part of a move to streamline operations, IBM says that it’s found a buyer for The Weather Company, the weather forecasting and information company it acquired in 2015. Francisco Partners, the private equity firm, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire The […]

Companies mired in tech debt, with older, brittle systems, could face big issues when game changing technologies come along.

The list of reasons why venture investors don’t fund diverse startups is long, legion and ludicrous, to put it politely. Nontraditional founders still face a ridiculous uphill slog. Here’s some good news: If you don’t fit the “pale, male from Yale” stereotype, you can use your experience to your benefit. We’re excited to share a […]

Northvolt, a Swedish producer of lithium-ion batteries, has raised around $1.2 billion from BlackRock and various Canadian pension plans to build new factories in North America and Europe, according to report from Reuters. Tuesday’s announcement signals the first time Northvolt has shared concrete plans to build in North America. If Northvolt builds in the U.S., […]

In its quest to develop AI that can understand a range of different dialects, Meta has created an AI model, SeamlessM4T, that can translate and transcribe close to 100 languages across text and speech. Available in open source along with SeamlessAlign, a new translation data set, Meta claims that SeamlessM4T represents a “significant breakthrough” in […]