Amazon can finally close the book on a long-running state aid saga in the European Union. The Commission confirmed Thursday it’s shuttered an investigation into whether Luxembourg, the Member State where Amazon has its EU HQ, had granted it “selective tax advantages.” The upshot is Amazon has no unpaid taxes to pay. The case dates […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Published: 2024-11-28 12:15:35
Decarbonizing our economies in the race to fight climate change demands a wholesale overhauling of all sorts of production processes to make them as sustainable as possible. Greening chemicals, which are used as ingredients in all sorts of products, is where U.K. startup Deep Blue Biotech is putting its energies. The biotech startup founded in […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Published: 2024-11-28 11:39:14
An African fintech that has grown on the strength of a 30,000-strong team of direct salespeople is moving into profit country by sub-Saharan country. Now, M-KOPA, the pay-as-you-go asset financing platform serving 5 million underbanked Africans, is racing toward a major milestone: surpassing an annual revenue rate of $400 million by year-end. The London-headquartered fintech […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Published: 2024-11-28 09:53:50
Google Chat is rolling out instant voice meetings — similar to Slack’s Huddles — that let you quickly switch to a voice or video call from within a chat. Google is not giving the feature a new name, though, opting to call the feature “Huddles” as well. If you are in a Google Chat, you […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Published: 2024-11-28 05:45:26
According to the Financial Times, HongShan, the Chinese investment firm spun off from Sequoia Capital in 2023, is aggressively expanding into Europe and North Asia owing both to “shrinking options” in China and to limited partners that have grown frustrated with how slowly HongShan is deploying the $9 billion in capital commitments it secured two […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Published: 2024-11-28 05:16:07
India has bucked the global trend in initial public offerings this year, establishing itself as a rare bright spot for tech listings while other major markets face continued headwinds. The world’s most populous nation is now preparing for an even more substantial wave of startup IPOs in 2025. More than 20 startups are preparing to […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Published: 2024-11-28 03:42:30
The FTC has launched an antitrust investigation into Microsoft, according to multiple reports that corroborate earlier reporting by the Financial Times. The agency is said to be looking into whether Microsoft violated antitrust law in multiple segments of its business, including its public cloud, AI, and cybersecurity product lines. Of particular interest to the FTC […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Published: 2024-11-28 03:40:02
Adults are spending an average of 4 hours and 20 minutes each day online across smartphones, tablets and computers in the U.K., according to figures from Ofcom’s annual Online Nation report diving into consumer digital habits. The figure is a big jump compared to 2023, when adults over 18 spent an average of 3 hours […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Published: 2024-11-28 00:12:43
The Federal Trade Commission is investigating Uber over whether it broke consumer protection laws by allegedly automatically signing people up for its Uber One subscription service and making it hard to cancel, according to Bloomberg News. The investigation was opened earlier this year after the FTC received customer complaints. Uber told Bloomberg that its cancellation […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Published: 2024-11-27 22:07:39
The Chinese autonomous driving tech company will go public on the U.S. markets at $13 per share. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Published: 2024-11-27 21:42:00
A new so-called “reasoning” AI model, QwQ-32B-Preview, has arrived on the scene. It’s one of the few to rival OpenAI’s o1, and it’s the first available to download under a permissive license. Developed by Alibaba’s Qwen team, QwQ-32B-Preview contains 32.5 billion parameters and can consider prompts up ~32,000 words in length; it performs better on […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Published: 2024-11-27 21:30:55
Spotify will no longer allow developers building third-party apps with its Web API to access several features within the music streaming platform, such as song and artist recommendations, the company announced in a developer blog post on Wednesday. The company appears to be limiting third-party developers from building AI apps using data from Spotify listeners. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Published: 2024-11-27 21:22:12
European investigators believe that a Chinese commercial ship purposefully dragged its anchor in order to slash through two critical data cables. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Published: 2024-11-27 21:01:31
The Pocket Operator Modular 400 from Teenage Engineering is an analog modular synthesizer that you put together yourself. If you’re at all interested in DIY kits or synths, this might be a great weekend project. You bend the bright yellow chassis into shape to start, mounting the various modules into place with tiny little screws. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Published: 2024-11-27 20:55:50
The phone giant said hackers did not access the contents or logs of customer phone calls or text messages, during an industry-wide attack on phone and internet companies. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Published: 2024-11-27 20:19:28
Threads is rolling out a redesign that keeps your feeds visible on the home screen, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced on Wednesday. The redesign allows you to quickly swipe between different feeds just like you can on X. The change is rolling out on Android on Wednesday, and will launch on iOS in the coming […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Published: 2024-11-27 20:15:30
Google Labs, the experimental arm of the tech giant, has introduced a new online project that offers an entertaining variation of the game of chess. The web experiment is named GenChess, which, as the name implies, uses Gemini Imagen 3, Google’s image generation model, allowing players to customize their own chess pieces using text prompts. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Published: 2024-11-27 18:18:37
Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. It’s nearly Thanksgiving, and you know what that means: stuffing your face to the point of comatosis. Well, that and entertaining all the unsavory relatives you manage to keep at bay the rest of the year. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Published: 2024-11-27 18:05:00
Hoping to quell some of the momentum behind social network Bluesky, a competitor to X and Meta’s Threads, Meta is developing a feature that takes inspiration from one of Bluesky’s more popular additions: the concept of “Starter Packs,” or hand-curated lists of suggested users that help newcomers find people to follow. Meta’s version of these […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Published: 2024-11-27 17:37:26
OpenAI has filed a trademark application for its latest AI model, o1, as the firm moves to shield its IP. On Tuesday, OpenAI submitted paperwork to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to register the trademark “OpenAI o1.” Interestingly, the documents reveal that OpenAI filed for a foreign trademark application in Jamaica in May, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Published: 2024-11-27 17:17:19