Author: TechCrunch News

Update: Starbucks announced Friday that it’s discontinuing its NFT program, which was in beta, to “prepare for what comes next as we continue to evolve the program,” according to an FAQ page.    We spoke with Steve Kaczynski, the program’s lead, on the Chain Reaction podcast last month. On Friday, he tweeted that his future…

India is walking back on a recent AI advisory after receiving criticism from many local and global entrepreneurs and investors. The Ministry of Electronics and IT shared an updated AI advisory with industry stakeholders on Friday that no longer asked them to take the government approval before launching or deploying an AI model to users…

The sun is peeking out behind the clouds and the birds are singing. That can only mean one thing: developer season is nearly upon us. While the rest of you are out there touching the proverbial and literal grass, the world’s developers are jamming into conference halls to find out what the next year holds…

Zscaler, a cloud security company with headquarters in San Jose, California, has acquired cybersecurity startup Avalor 26 months after its founding, reportedly for $310 million in cash and equity. In a press release announcing the news, Zscaler founder and CEO Jay Chaudhry said that the deal would expand Zscaler’s platform with capabilities including streamlined reporting of…

Apple has added another AI startup to its acquisition list with Canada-based DarwinAI, which specializes in vision-based tech to observe components during manufacturing to improve efficiency, Bloomberg reported. While Apple or DarwinAI haven’t announced this deal, several members of the startup’s team joined Apple’s machine learning teams in January, as per their LinkedIn profiles. DarwinAI…

India’s Paytm has secured a vital license it needed to survive and maintain continuity of several core features of its eponymous payments app, a day before the firm’s banking unit is scheduled to cease operations because of regulatory clampdown. The National Payments Corporation of India, the firm that built the eponymous UPI rail in the…

SpaceX will attempt to send the massive Starship rocket to orbit for the third time early Thursday morning after U.S. regulators gave the green light for launch. The company is aiming to complete the launch within a 110-minute window that opens at 7:00 a.m. CT. Starship testing is conducted from SpaceX’s sprawling Starbase campus near…

OpenAI’s legal battle with The New York Times over data to train its AI models might still be brewing. But OpenAI’s forging ahead on deals with other publishers, including some of France’s and Spain’s largest news publishers. OpenAI on Wednesday announced that it signed contracts with Le Monde and Prisa Media to bring French and…

One undeniable trend from this year’s Modex conference: suddenly everyone is into truck unloading. The past couple of years have gone from a few select companies to seemingly everyone in and around warehouse robotics looking to tackle the problem. Most solutions are some variation on a basic theme: a robotic arm attached to a mobile…