Author: TechCrunch News

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app economy in 2023 hit a few snags, as consumer spending last year dropped for the first time by 2% to $167 billion, according to data.ai’s “State of…

Hey, TechCrunch besties. After a week in Korea and the Philippines, it’s great to be back in the States — and slightly more tan (i.e., burnt) than before. Massive thanks to Henry, who was forced to step in over the past two weeks thanks to my failing to realize that Korean Air does not offer…

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior Reporter and Equity co-host Natasha Mascarenhas. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. After tech’s massive exodus of talent, we’re starting to see laid-off talent start companies that are ambitious and aspirational in aim. I’m talking about the…

The FTC is embracing change with the establishment of an Office of Technology (OT) that will help it effectively regulate the fast-moving tech world. Citing “systemic concerns” relating to tech and its potential for fraud and abuse, the FTC’s new division will ensure the agency doesn’t get left in the dust by tech-savvy scammers. Because…

AI chatbots can spit out convincing — if at times overconfident — natural language responses, but what if an AI could build custom virtual worlds based on a text description alone? Roblox is exploring that possibility with its kit of developer tools, which are designed to make it possible for just about anyone to build…

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. Okay, NOW it’s Friday. Got any fun plans for the long weekend? Haje is moving house (ugh), and Christine is browsing GIFs of puppies until her battery runs out. Probably. Most people…

As the fervor around generative AI grows, critics have called on the creators of the tech to take steps to mitigate its potentially harmful effects. In particular, text-generating AI in particular has gotten a lot of attention — and with good reason. Students could use it to plagiarize, content farms could use it to spam…

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important crypto stories delivered to your inbox every Thursday at 12 p.m. PT, subscribe here. Welcome back to Chain Reaction. The past few weeks in crypto land have been focused on the latest craze: Ordinals. What are Ordinals, you might ask? They’re NFT-like Bitcoin digital artifacts…

There’s still a surprising number of open jobs When you lose 100,000 jobs in one month, as happened in tech in January, it’s easy to think that the bottom is falling out of the tech jobs market. The torrent of big company layoffs has been swift and brutal, with Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Salesforce, among…

The importance of KYC and identity verification in an increasing fintech landscape like Africa’s cannot be overemphasized. As thousands of financial institutions serve millions of Africans, stringent regulatory requirements are needed to keep hackers and fraudsters at bay, which is why investor interest in startups offering KYC and identity verification services is intensifying. Smile Identity,…