Author: TechCrunch News

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by what the weekday Exchange column digs into, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. It’s the end of a short week, but instead of not having much to chat about we…

One might think that a short week due to a U.S. holiday calls for a short weekly recap, but we have plenty to share about growth marketing from our coverage over the week. With the help of your recommendations, this week we were able to interview Peep Laja and Lucy Heskins, and publish multiple guest…

It’s not easy following a larger-than-life founder and CEO of an iconic company, but that’s what former AWS CEO Andy Jassy faces this week as he takes over for Jeff Bezos, who moves into the executive chairman role. Jassy must deal with myriad challenges as he becomes the head honcho at the No. 2 company…

The Biden administration just introduced a sweeping, ambitious plan to forcibly inject competition into some consolidated sectors of the American economy — the tech sector prominent among them — through executive action. “Today President Biden is taking decisive action to reduce the trend of corporate consolidation, increase competition, and deliver concrete benefits to America’s consumers,…

We’re entering a phase in the COVID-19 pandemic where transmission is going to go through the roof because of the Delta variant. But as vaccinations ramp up around the world, the main cost to society now will not be the health services being overwhelmed, but mass disruption to businesses as staff are forced to self…

The Artemis Fund is a Houston-based firm built by three women with the goal of encouraging more women-led startups. The company launched in 2019 and has raised a $15 million initial fund, which closed earlier this year. Diana Murakhovskaya, who launched the firm with Stephanie Campbell and Leslie Goldman, says that the three women met…

It’s the most important primary layer in the modern tech stack for internet software, and its most intriguing evolution was written on a napkin in a New York City bar and translated to just shy of two dozen lines of Python code. Such is the nature of tech innovation today, and such was the birth…

There are excruciatingly high stakes for software today. Trillions of dollars of market cap, billions of consumers, hundreds of billions of revenue, and limitless hours of usage are dependent on software working in real time, all the time, without downtime. As the sophistication of software delivery has increased, every layer of the tech stack has…

Just a Spotify used VC and PE backing to acquire the assets of the music industry so that we must now all rent our music via subscription, rather than own it for life, so a PropTech startup plans to follow a similar strategy for single-family homes. Casafari, a real estate data platform in Europe based…

For years YouTube’s video-recommending algorithm has stood accused of fuelling a grab-bag of societal ills by feeding users an AI-amplified diet of hate speech, political extremism and/or conspiracy junk/disinformation for the profiteering motive of trying to keep billions of eyeballs stuck to its ad inventory. And while YouTube’s tech giant parent Google has, sporadically, responded…