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Some vehemently want the ability to remove At a Glance from the top of the Pixel homescreen. I personally find it useful as a space for high-priority notifications and think most users also get daily utility out of it. However, I do think At a Glance in 2025 is underutilized and Android should be doing much more with it.                                                                Image:Google At a Glance has a prime location at the top of your first homescreen and lockscreen. Upcoming calendar events, Commute, and Time to Leave are good examples of high-priority alerts that benefit from the placement. All you have to do is turn on your phone’s screen or unlock to get information that is actionable. Similarly, Travel provides contextual help by showing what baggage carousel to check after landing. If Google does nothing else, I...

Gboard for Android is the latest Google app to hit 10 billion downloads on the Play Store. The listing says the app was released on June 5, 2013.                                                        Image:Google In December 2016, “Gboard” replaced the Google Keyboard on Android, with web Search being the main addition. (Gboard was first introduced that May for iOS.) In 2020, that lookup capability was removed entirely. Today, the app features offline voice typing on all devices, Google Translate, Scan Text OCR tool, and clipboard. You can customize the keyboard background with various themes, resize the height, one-handed, and floating modes. Expressive features include emoji, GIF, and sticker search, as well as Emoji Kitchen to make mashups. Pixel devices benefit from Assistant voice typing that keeps speech-to-text as you use the keyboard, Proof...

Amazon is bringing the new AI-powered Alexa Plus to a wide range of its existing Echo devices — but the upgrade will skip many of the earliest models. The majority of the company’s first-generation Echos won’t get support, according to the Alexa Plus FAQ page, though Amazon says they will continue to work with the standard Alexa.                                                        Photo: Dan Seifert  Alexa Plus won’t support “certain older generation Echo devices,” such as the first-generation Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Plus, Echo Tap, Echo Spot, and Echo Show; the second-generation Echo Show won’t support it, either. Amazon spokesperson Kristy Schmidt confirmed that is the full list of devices. If so, that still leaves many early Echo devices that will work with Alexa Plus. That means I’ll be able to ask Alexa to book a restaurant reservation thr...

When it comes to AI software, you can build something clever, but that’s not always the same as building something that is secure. With so much software now getting written by AI, having a window into its security can be a challenge. That’s the premise of Archipelo, a San Francisco-based cybersecurity startup that is today emerging from stealth with $12 million in funding.                                             Image Credits:Yuichiro Chino / Getty Images               Archipelo’s pitch is that it has a platform for so-called ‘Developer Security Posture Management’ (DevSPM). “We discovered that there is no developer security posture tool, and that’s what we built,” said Matthew Wise, CEO and co-founder of Archipelo, over a call. “What we found is that every enterprise has this problem. You can have a Fortune 500 bank that understands t...

Commercetools — a “headless commerce” platform that provides APIs to companies building online storefronts — saw a major boost in its business just a few years ago, raising money at a whopping $1.9 billion valuation as the world went shopping online in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and businesses rushed to improve their e-commerce operations.                                     Image Credits:Bill Oxford/ Getty Images                     Today, the playbook looks a little different for e-commerce, and for Commercetools.  Techticia has learned and confirmed that Commercetools has laid off dozens of employees over the last few weeks, including around 10% of staff earlier Wednesday, after failing to meet its sales growth targets. It’s also making a number of executive changes, including parting ways with its chief revenue officer and CFO,...

Avride sidewalk bots will start delivering restaurant orders and groceries in central Tokyo this week through a partnership with e-commerce giant Rakuten, the latest commercial expansion by the Yandex spinout into Northeast Asia.                                                         Image Credits:Avride                  The Austin-based autonomous vehicle startup is one of four projects under Nebius Group, a Netherlands-based company formerly called Yandex NV that sold off its Russian businesses in 2024 for about $5.2 billion. Since then, Avride has pressed forward with its autonomous vehicle technology development via its sidewalk bots and self-driving cars. And it’s made progress, notably by making deals with large corporations like Uber and now Japan’s Rakuten. Avride has a small commercial sidewalk ...

Inception, a new Palo Alto-based company started by Stanford computer science professor Stefano Ermon, claims to have developed a novel AI model based on “diffusion” technology. Inception calls it a diffusion-based large language model, or a “DLM” for short.                                                       Image Credits:Inception                         The generative AI models receiving the most attention now can be broadly divided into two types: large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models. LLMs are used for text generation. Meanwhile, diffusion models, which power AI systems like Midjourney and OpenAI’s Sora, are mainly used to create images, video, and audio. Inception’s model offers the capabilities of traditional LLMs, including code generation and question-answering, but w...

Digital payments platform Stripe has yet to lay out plans to go public, but in the meantime the company has thrown past and present employees a line for some liquidity. The company on Thursday confirmed a tender offer where investors will buy up shares from those employees at a valuation of $91.5 billion. Stripe said it will also repurchase shares as part of the transaction.                                 Image Credits:SOPA Images / Contributor / Getty Images A spokesperson declined to say who is in the secondary round except to confirm that it is “largely” existing investors. Past backers of the company number at over 150 investors per PitchBook data. They include General Catalyst, GV, Silver Lake, Atomico, Elon Musk, Salesforce and many more. The tender offer is a decent jump on the company’s valuation from its last secondary sale a year ago, which was valued at $70 billion. However, Stripe still fell sho...

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is as bullish as ever about his company’s future, repeating his sentiments that DeepSeek won’t impact sales, he said during the latest earnings call on Wednesday.                                      Image Credits:Akio Kon / Bloomberg / Getty Images Speculation that DeepSeek’s R1 model required far fewer chips to train fueled a record drop in Nvidia’s stock price last month. But during the earnings call, Huang touted R1 as an “excellent innovation,” emphasizing that it and other “reasoning” models are great news for Nvidia since they need so much more compute. “Reasoning models can consume 100 times more compute, and future reasoning models will consume much more compute,” Huang said. “DeepSeek R1 has ignited global enthusiasm. It’s an excellent innovation, but even more importantly, it has open sourced a world-class reasoning AI model. Nearly every AI developer is appl...

The automated logic behind many financial decisions — for example, decisions that determine whether a client is approved for a credit line — is hard-coded. Often, it’s not easily changed. If a head of credit at a bank wanted to adjust the bank’s lending criteria, for example, they’d likely have to raise a ticket with IT.                                                                          Image:AI Entrepreneurs Maximilian Eber and Maik Taro Wehmeyer, who met while studying at Harvard, ran up against the limitations of financial decisioning logic while at QuantCo, a company building AI-powered apps for enterprise customers. In 2020, the pair decided to found a startup, Taktile, to make modifying automated decisioning logic a more self-service process. “We realized that we were building the same things ...

Meta’s Oversight Board, the company’s independent group created to help with sensitive policy decisions, is preparing to weigh in on CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent changes to how Facebook, Instagram, and Threads handle hate speech, Engadget reported.                                                      Image Credits:Meta                      Zuckerberg announced an overhaul of its content moderation policies in January, shortly before the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump, as part of an effort to allow “more speech” on its platforms. That effort included Meta rolling back hate speech rules that protected immigrants and LGBTQ users on its apps. Meta’s Oversight Board has four open cases concerning hateful speech, and the board plans to use those cases to examine the company’s new policies, Eng...

ResilienceVC, a new seed-stage fintech venture capital firm based out of Washington, D.C., is announcing its $56 million debut fund, the firm shared exclusively with TechCrunch.                                                Image Credits:ResilienceVC   Founded by Tahira Dosani and Vikas Raj in 2023, ResilienceVC’s mission is a straightforward one: to back fintech companies dedicated to helping Americans find financial stability. It’s writing checks into companies that can help people address challenges such as becoming homeowners, getting affordable insurance and accessing government benefits. “We invest entirely in visionary startup entrepreneurs that are leveraging new technologies and new business models ultimately to drive financial resilience for all Americans,” Raj said. “For many Americans, the financial system is just not doing what it’s supposed to ...

Amazon shared an impressive vision of an “agentic” future on Wednesday — one in which the company’s improved Alexa, Alexa+, handles countless mundane tasks, from booking restaurants to finding appliance repairmen.                                                Image Credits:Kyle Wiggers                  If Amazon can deliver, it could be the first out to the gate with a comprehensive, consumer-focused agent tool. The company hopes to marry a more natural, expressive Alexa — one powered by generative AI models — with the ability to tap into first- and third-party apps, services, and platforms in a fully autonomous, intelligent way. “We believe that the future is full of agents — we have believed this for some time,” Amazon Alexa and Echo VP Daniel Rausch said in a keynote Wednesday. “There will be many AI agents out...

Amazon’s new and improved Alexa experience, Alexa+, starts at $19.99 per month, or free for Amazon Prime subscribers. It’ll roll out in early access beginning next month in the U.S., and then will come to a wider group of users in waves over the subsequent months, Amazon said.                                                    Image Credits:Kyle Wiggers                     Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 devices will be the first to get Alexa+. It’s unclear which other devices, like Amazon’s speaker-only Echo Dot and Echo Pop, will gain support. Amazon didn’t specify. As part of the launch of Alexa+, Amazon is debuting Alexa.com, a new web experience that’s designed for “long-form” work. It’s also introducing a refreshed Alexa mobile app with a new interface and functionality. “Today with generative AI a...

Data storage and resilience company Lonestar and semiconductor and storage company Phison launched a data center infrastructure on a SpaceX rocket on Wednesday that’s headed to the moon.                                        Image Credits:Yuichiro Chino / Getty Images The companies are sending Phison’s Pascari storage — solid state drives (SSDs) built for data centers — packed with Lonestar’s clients’ data on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket set to land on March 4. This marks the beginning of a lunar data center, the first ever, that the companies plan to expand in the future until it holds a petabyte of storage. Chris Stott, the founder, chair, and CEO of Lonestar, told TechCrunch that the idea to build a data center in space originated back in 2018 — years before the current AI-driven surge in data center demand. He said customers were seeking ways to store their data off Earth so it would be ...

Being somewhat later than Europe in adopting the idea of parcel delivery, much of Asia built its delivery infrastructure around e-commerce, effectively “Uberizing” how deliveries worked down to the last mile. Think DoorDash but for parcels, not food. This is what the founders of Europe’s Relay realized and decided to bring to the region — and why investors just gave it a massive Series A round.                                                  Image:Getty Images Most Western parcel delivery companies have fixed daily routes for drivers, dispatching them from far-flung depots near places like airports to suburban destinations. This creates enormous overhead, wastes mileage, and increases carbon emissions for parcels, especially if they are returned. Instead, Asia’s “asset-free” model uses mini-depots, like a local store. Relay’s end-to-end parcel delivery service ad...

Apple delivered its latest budget handset, the $599 iPhone 16e, without pomp. There was no big event in person, nor was there one online. No journalists scrambled through hoards of colleagues to snap photos of the phone. Instead, CEO Tim Cook tweeted out that new hardware was on the way, days before Apple announced the handset via a press release.                                                           Image Credits:Brian Heater                                                                Accordingly, the 16e isn’t an exciting device. It’s a safe one. It’s an amalgam of earlier iPhones in a bid to create a product that’s reliable, while keeping costs down. The handset most closely re...

eBay announced on Thursday that it has updated its platform to help buyers find fast-shipping items and local listings, thanks to changes to Search item cards and additional usage of AI.                                                       Image Credits:Alexsl / Getty Images The company is making it easier to identify items with fast delivery, as search item cards now display delivery range estimates for all fast shipping items. It has also added a “shipping and pickup” filter that allows customers to find items with fast shipping times. Plus, they can use this filter to find items that are available via local pickup. eBay has rolled out an update to item cards that shows potential buyers how long it would take to drive from their location to the item’s location. eBay says since its seller network is global and decentralized, it was hard for predictive ...

A pair of Chromebook updates today highlight their broad usage across personal and enterprise, starting with Roblox enhancements.                                                            Image:Getty Images On the consumer front, Roblox is getting an x86 version that results in 2x faster performance. This includes smoother gameplay (frame rate increases) and quicker load times for the login screen, homepage, and games. Google notes how “Roblox continues to be one of the most popular immersive gaming and creation platforms on Chromebooks.” To that end, ChromeOS players can now get two free in-game items. “…special Chrome jetpack for your avatar that lets you soar through the skies.” “…the “Chromebook Cruiser” in the popular Roblox game, Bloxburg– unlocking a hoverboard for super speedy ground travel.” Meanwhile, enterprise customers will b...

In a newly issued executive order (EO), the Trump administration has instructed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Elon Musk-advised initiative to reduce federal spending, to create a “centralized technological system” in every agency to record contract and grant awards.                                     Image Credits:Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg / Getty Images          As part of the ramp-up of these systems, agency employees who approved individual contract and grant payments will have to submit a written justification for their approvals. Agency heads will be able to “pause and rapidly review” any payment for which approving employees haven’t submitted a justification, per the EO. The EO also instructs agency heads, with assistance from DOGE, to build systems that “centrally record” approval for federally funded travel for conferences and other “non-esse...

Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, Blue Origin, announced the crew for its next mission on Thursday, which can only mean one thing: more random rich people are going to space.                                                    Image Credits:A.RICARDO /Shutterstock  The crew most notably includes popstar Katy Perry and broadcast journalist Gayle King. They will be joined by two scientists — Aisha Bowe and Amanda Nguyen — as well as Jeff Bezos’ fiancée, TV personality Lauren Sánchez and film producer Kerianne Flynn. Blue Origin says this marks the first all-female space crew since Soviet astronaut Valentina Tereshkova’s 1963 solo mission, which made her the first woman ever to go to space. For the company’s New Shepard rocket, this is its 31st trip to space, and its 11th with a crew. This journey is expected to last around 10 to 12 minutes; and if you’re willing ...

Meta is mulling launching a standalone app for short-form videos, The Information reported, citing an anonymous source who heard Instagram head Adam Mosseri talking about the project to staff.                                                        Image Credits:Instagram                 The project is reportedly code-named Project Ray that aims to improve recommendations for new users and existing users in the U.S., and feature more three-minute videos, the report cited the source as saying. Last month, the company announced a video editing app called Edits to compete with CapCut (owned by TikTok parent company ByteDance), as it aimed to capitalize on TikTok and ByteDance’s uncertain future in the U.S. Currently, Instagram’s feed is a mix of photos, videos (Reels), and Stories. However, many users feel th...

AI has the power to transform how people work, but getting tangible value out of AI isn’t as easy as throwing any AI application at any workflow. It can be hard for enterprises to figure out which AI applications help their business and which are just hype. Workhelix wants to solve that problem.                                                     Image Credits:Workhelix Workhelix is a tech-enabled service startup that works with enterprises to better understand and monitor AI automation at their companies. Workhelix breaks down a company’s employee positions into specific job functions and tasks and scores each task for its suitability for AI adoption. This helps companies build roadmaps for how and where to adopt AI and gives enterprises a way to monitor if the AI they adopted is working. Co-founder and CEO James Milin told TechCrunch that many companies are...

Meta has unveiled the next generation of its Project Aria augmented reality glasses for research: Aria Gen 2.                                                               Image Credits:Meta                                          Aria Gen 2, which arrives roughly five years after the first-generation Aria device, adds new capabilities to the platform, including an upgraded sensor suite and Meta’s custom silicon. Aria Gen 2 has a PPG sensor for measuring heart rate and a contact microphone to distinguish the wearer’s voice from that of bystanders. Meta says that the 75-gram Aria Gen 2, which can perform AI tasks like eye tracking, hand tracking, and speech recognition, packs open-ear “force-canceling” speakers and a battery that l...

Max is effectively raising the price to get its CNN and Bleacher Report add-ons by removing them from the cheapest tier.                                                   Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge                                                Though Max has always said that it planned to charge more for access to its CNN and Bleacher Report Sports add-ons, the price hikes are coming in a roundabout way, targeted at subscribers of the streamer’s cheapest tier. Max announced today that it no longer intends to charge subscribers of its Standard ($16.99 / month or $169.99 / year) and Premium ($20.99 / month or $209.99 / year) tiers an extra $9.99 a month for CNN Max and Bleacher Reports Sports. The add-ons will be removed from Max’s ad-suppor...

Meta has fixed an error that caused some users to see a flood of graphic and violent videos in their Instagram Reels feed. The fix comes after some users saw horrific and violent content despite having Instagram’s “Sensitive Content Control” enabled.                                Image Credits:Silas Stein/picture alliance / Getty Images                “We have fixed an error that caused some users to see content in their Instagram Reels feed that should not have been recommended,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC. “We apologize for the mistake.” Meta’s policy states that it prohibits content that includes “videos depicting dismemberment, visible innards or charred bodies,” and “sadistic remarks towards imagery depicting the suffering of humans and animals.” However, users were shown videos that appeared to show dead bodies and graphic violence agai...