To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Friday, cha cha cha! Fri-day! Cha cha cha! We’re doing a tiny, joyous, two-person conga line around our virtual Daily Crunch editorial Zoom meeting to celebrate the arrival of the first weekend
Month: February 2023
Rebellyous, a startup that’s striving to build “a better chicken,” has raised at least $20 million in fresh funding, TechCrunch has learned. Based in Seattle, the venture-backed company calls its production tech the “most advanced plant-based meat manufacturing system on the planet.” Rebellyous aims to raise as much as $30.7 million in total, according to
I absolutely love Ethan Hawke. No, I can’t tell you exactly why. Is it because I wish he was my flawed father figure or my intellectually stimulating one-night stand? The Black Phone, a 2022 horror-thriller now streaming on Prime Video, relieves me of this choice by turning the Gen-X heartthrob into an unambiguously odious villain. And
The venture secondaries market has been on the same roller-coaster ride as the broader VC market over the past few years, but it looks poised to break away in 2023. Like venture capital as a whole, the secondaries market was hot in 2021 as a bunch of new players — sound familiar? — entered the
There are many gifts to be found on self-proclaimed “video game siren” Velvet Caveat’s TikTok, like gay Team Rocket and, most recently, an electric blue Gyrados puppet holding down Ariana Grande’s part of “Rain On Me” during a lip-sync performance. CC Off English “No, but Gyariana killed it,” Caveat writes in the caption, perhaps underselling
CC Off English Logan Paul, the YouTuber and wrestler has been saddled with a class-action lawsuit over “fraudulent actions” regarding his NFT game, CryptoZoo. After a year of investigation, Stephen “Coffeezilla” Findeisen, a YouTuber who looks into fraudsters and fake gurus in the crypto space, discovered that Logan Paul’s CryptoZoo was something of a
The r/Pokémon subreddit Discord is one of the bigger online meeting places for players and fans of the hit Nintendo series. It boasts over 300,000 users who use it to battle, trade, or just hang out in between work, classes, or whatever else is going on in their lives. And this week its owner was
If you, like many others, have been stuck waiting nearly a decade for Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, you have also been living off crumbs for the series since Dragon Age: Inquisition launched in 2014. Well, thanks to the wonders of social media engagement farming, we got a few new glimpses into the development of Bioware’s fantasy
Square Enix’s new fantasy parkour game Forspoken has had a bit of a rocky launch in terms of public perception among gamers, who found its Joss Whedon-esque dialogue in advertisements cringe-inducing. However, Forspoken’s lead actress says she isn’t bothered by all the discourse the game’s dialogue has caused online, and honestly more power to her.
Artificial Intelligence is everywhere these days, with technologies like ChatGPT and DALL-E encroaching on human artistic creativity and expression. Sometimes it yields interestingly absurdist results, such as that AI-generated Seinfeld-like show Nothing, Forever. Other times, it feigns humanity, like the AI-controlled VTuber Neuro-sama, which has recently moved onto reacting to content in front of tens
I found an old leather jacket in the back of a closet recently. It’s a vintage item in fantastic shape — except for a huge tear in one of the front pockets. Two clothing donation centers rejected it, so I decided to see if it’s worth repairing. It was pricey when new, but with some
/ Founded in 2021, Anthropic also conducts research into AI language models. The company has built its own general-purpose chatbot, a potential rival to ChatGPT named Claude, but has yet to release it publicly. Illustration: The Verge The competition between Google and Microsoft over tech’s AI future continues to heat up. While Microsoft is firmly
/ Plus deals on the Pixel Buds Pro, a bundle of Google Nest cameras for your porch and yard, three months of Disney Plus Basic membership, and more. The Beats Fit Pro come in gray and pink (pictured) as well as white and black.Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge While there are all kinds
Information is power, especially when you’re just beginning your startup journey. Whether you’re in the idea stage or building on the friends-and-family plan or preparing to pitch investors, it’s imperative to understand the shifting VC funding landscape as you plan for future growth. It’s no secret that funding is harder to come by in this
Fans of Marvel Snap, the hugely popular, free-to-play card game, have come to a conclusion: the Ms. Marvel emote, the one where she’s grinning cheerfully, winking a bit and throwing up a thumbs up, is actually toxic as hell. Ms. Marvel might as well be giving you the finger and stomping on your entrails after
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This week Natasha Mascarenhas and Becca Szkutak took to their mics to sing a duet about this week’s startup news. Just kidding! But we did highlight some fun companies raising capital and talked
Tech companies were already huge before the COVID-19 pandemic began upending lives around the world three years ago. And they continued to grow as we became ever more reliant on our smartphones, computers and videoconference calls. Now Apple is the latest tech giant to signal that this period of growth may be coming to an
Season: A Letter to the Future is the disappointing evidence that beauty is only skin and texture deep. This slow-paced explore ‘em up, in which you must chronicle and journal the end of an era, is rigid-jawed with sincerity, though lacking in anything meaningful to say. CC Off English To set the scene, it’s apparent
Nature is healing, the tech show is returning to in-person events. I’m not sure I’m entirely over CES less than a month after returning from Vegas, but we’re already in full planning mode for TechCrunch’s return to Barcelona. We’ll be sending an extremely scaled-down team to this year’s event, but while we’re in Catalonia, we’d
It there’s one thing Nothing’s first phone excelled at, it was bringing a bit of excitement to the staid world of smartphones. Shipments have been stagnating, slowing and contracting for the past several years, and are now at some of their lowest numbers in roughly a decade. The Phone (1) wasn’t a revolution, but it
/ The X90 Pro is being released alongside the standard X90, with Vivo emphasizing the camera smarts of both handsets. The Vivo X90 Pro, with its vegan leather back.Image: Vivo Vivo’s X90 Pro, announced for the Chinese market last November, is getting an international release. The X90 Pro is notable for being the latest to
SunFi, the Nigerian clean tech startup that connects people and businesses who want solar energy access to payment plans that match their needs, has raised $2.325 million in seed funding. The self-described energy financial tech platform received backing from lead investors Nairobi-based Factor[e] and SCM Capital Asset Management and participating investors such as Voltron Capital,
This story is part of Samsung Event, CNET’s collection of news, tips and advice around Samsung’s most popular products. Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 4 builds on the success of 2021’s sleeper smartphone hit, the Galaxy Z Flip 3. While the durability of phones has increased over the years, it’s reasonable to be cautious, especially with a folding phone.
/ It’s promising information on ‘Search, Maps and beyond.’ Illustration: The Verge Google is about to share more about its work in artificial intelligence. Next week, Google will be holding an event about how it’s “using the power of AI to reimagine how people search for, explore and interact with information, making it more natural
Earlier today the developer behind co-op shooter Back 4 Blood–-released in 2021 on console and PC—announced that, having released multiple updates and three expansions, it was moving on. And the reaction to this was mostly negative, with players calling the game dead and suggesting the team was giving up on it. But really, I’m fine
/ Sundar Pichai is promising that you’ll be able to ‘interact directly’ with the company’s language models. Illustration: The Verge Google may be gearing up to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT by letting people “interact directly” with its “newest, most powerful language models as a companion to search,” according to CEO Sundar Pichai. It would be
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. On the one hand, we could be upset that Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, but the sun hasn’t come out where Christine lives for several days, so she’s pretty stoked that wherever
In 2016, Netflix dropped three of its best ever TV series. One of them was Stranger Things. The other was The OA. The third? The criminally underrated Canadian sci-fi series Travelers. From creator Brad Wright, who honed his expertise writing on three Stargate shows for 14 years, Travelers is a departure from traditional sci-fi tropes.
If you’re a fan of both football and video games you’ll no doubt have all kinds of fond memories of the two coming together on a team’s shirt, from Arsenal’s classic Dreamcast kit to Fiorentina’s shirts in the 90s. As iconic as those kits were, though, they were but blips on the radar compared to
There’s no denying that the robotics startup world has taken a hit during the ongoing economic downturn. Recent numbers prove what we’ve all suspected for some time. But two things are true: 1) The lull is temporary; and 2) While robotics isn’t recession-proof, construction might as well be. This is certainly a theme of late