July 29, 2025

The Download: how to store energy underground, and what you may not know about Trump’s AI Action Plan

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. This startup wants to use the Earth as a massive battery Texas-based startup Quidnet Energy just completed a test showing it can store energy for up to six months by pumping water underground.…

Technology

The ice cores that will let us look 1.5 million years into the past

August 21, 2023
Moving quickly and carefully in two layers of gloves, Florian Krauss sets a cube of ice into a gold-plated cylinder that glows red in the light of the aiming laser. He steps back to admire the machine, covered with wires and gauges, that turns polar ice into climate data.  If this were a real slice…

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 […]