Author: TechCrunch News

You don’t need to move to San Francisco to launch a startup, but working here does have some advantages: moderate weather, natural beauty, great food, and sure, the world’s largest concentration of venture capital. Y Combinator’s Demo Day took place this week, and although the event itself was virtual-only, 86% of the founders in YC’s…

Insurance is one of the few industries that have remained largely unchanged over the past few decades at a low level: You suffer losses as a direct result of something going south, and you get paid by your insurer. But that old model doesn’t always work. For example, a construction company in a region regularly…

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Welcome back to The TechCrunch Podcast, where we break down the biggest stories in tech with the people who covered them. The internet is always changing, but something about generative AI feels different. With the advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the machines are evolving beyond remix and delivery machines to become the content creators themselves. In…

Tesla has nominated JB Straubel, the company’s former CTO who is now running his own startup Redwood Materials, as its next independent board member. The company said in a regulatory filing Thursday that Straubel, if elected by shareholders (which is almost a certainty) would take over the spot vacated by Hiromichi Mizuno, the former chief…

China has been a major sales driver for Tesla in recent times, thanks to the company’s aggressive price cuts. The country delivered 88,869 vehicles in March, according to fresh estimates from the China Passenger Car Association. That means more than half of the carmaker’s Q1 deliveries originated from its Shanghai factory. Tesla Q1 deliveries beat…

India’s central bank has halted its plans for a high-profile project intended to rival the nation’s dominant payment system, Unified Payments Interface. The project had attracted significant interest from a variety of major conglomerates, tech giants, and financial institutions, including Amazon, Reliance, Facebook, Tata Group, Google, HDFC, and ICICI. The Reserve Bank of India had…

Samsung Electronics plans to cut back memory chip production as its operating profit in the first quarter of 2023 is expected to plummet about 96% from the previous year. This will be the lowest profit posted by the South Korean tech giant since Q1 2009. The global macroeconomic slowdown, memory chip oversupply and sluggish demand…

Tesla’s 2,500-acre manufacturing hub in Austin, Texas tripled its workforce last year, according to the company’s annual compliance report filed with county officials. Bloomberg first reported on the news. The report filed with Travis County’s Economic Development Program shows that Tesla increased its Austin workforce from just 3,523 contingent and permanent employees in 2021 to…

Kobo launched its Kobo Plus subscription tier in the U.S. today. The plan starts at $7.99 per month and gives users access to 1.3 million books (but not all titles) from Kobo’s library. This new subscription will compete with Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited plan, which costs $9.99 per month. Amazon also offers a Prime Reading plan…