December 26, 2024

This international surveillance project aims to protect wheat from deadly diseases

When Dave Hodson walked through wheat fields in Ethiopia in 2010, it seemed as if everything had been painted yellow. A rust fungus was in the process of infecting about one-third of the country’s wheat, and winds had carried its spores far and wide, coating everything in their path. “The fields were completely yellow. You’d…

Waymo recalls and updates robotaxi software after two cars crashed into the same towed truck

February 13, 2024

Waymo is recalling the software that powers its robotaxi fleet after two vehicles crashed into the same towed pickup truck in Phoenix, Arizona, in December. It’s the company’s first recall. Waymo chief safety officer Mauricio Peña described the crashes as “minor” in a blog post, and said neither vehicle was carrying passengers at the time. […]

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Airbnb is making progress to get rid of those hated cleaning fees

February 13, 2024

Airbnb is slowly killing the cleaning fee as it aims for more transparent pricing. Since early last year, when the company started showing guests all-inclusive pricing when booking a property, almost 300,000 listings have removed or lowered cleaning fees, Airbnb said in its earnings report today. Now, nearly 40% of active listings no longer charge […]

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Instacart lays off 250 employees, or 7% of its workforce, to ‘reshape’ company

February 13, 2024

Grocery-delivery giant Instacart announced today that it’s laying off around 250 employees, or roughly 7% of its global workforce, as part of a restructuring. Instacart CEO Fidji Simo said in a letter to investors that the layoffs will allow the company to streamline how it operates. The company announced the layoffs alongside the release of […]

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Antithesis raises $47M to launch an automated testing platform for software

February 13, 2024

Software testing is hard. Even with the right talent in place, it doesn’t always go as planned — particularly when executed at scale. In a 2020 survey from Electric Cloud, 58% of developers blamed software bugs on test infrastructure and process issues — not design defects. The market for software testing solutions is quite massive, […]

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Akamai extends its edge-computing platform as it looks to challenge AWS, Azure and GCP

February 13, 2024

Akamai today announced the launch of its Gecko “Generalized Edge Compute” platform. This new initiative will increase the company’s cloud-computing network with an additional 10 regions worldwide in the first quarter of this year and then another 75 throughout the rest of the year. Ever since it acquired Linode in 2022, Akamai has made it […]

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Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI: Read the memo

February 13, 2024

After installing a new interim CEO earlier this month, Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, is making some major changes to its product strategy, TechCrunch has learned. Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and, somewhat remarkably, its Online Footprint Scrubber, which launched only […]

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TikTok is testing an exclusive ‘Sub Space’ where LIVE creators can interact with subscribers

February 13, 2024

TikTok is testing a new exclusive space for LIVE creators to interact with their subscribers, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Tuesday. The new space, called “Sub Space,” is in early testing and is designed to help creators increase their community engagement, while offering subscribers an additional perk. The new addition was spotted by X […]

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