TECHNOLOGY

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 people. If you’re looking for a recap of the week’s news in tech, you’ve come to the right place. It’s Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular recap column. Glad to have you. Before we get on with the meat of it, a PSA that tickets for TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 are available now. Disrupt,

Welcome to the TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Generative AI isn’t just about creative endeavors and parlor tricks. Investors and Big Tech alike are betting that it will also affect enterprise infrastructure

On a balmy day in mid-April, thousands of people queued in line to enter the Hong Kong Convention Center where the city’s inaugural web3 festival was underway. Most had flown in from mainland China, but many others had trekked from Singapore, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand and even the U.S. to see what the city had to

OpenAI, the startup behind the widely used conversational AI model ChatGPT, has picked up new backers, TechCrunch has learned. VC firms including Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive and K2 Global picking up new shares, according to documents seen by TechCrunch. A source tells us Founders Fund is also investing. Altogether the VCs have

Shares of First Republic Bank plunged by nearly 50% Friday, ratcheting pressure on the troubled bank and adding to its mounting market-confidence woes. As of noon ET, the stock was trading at $3.72, down 40% from Thursday’s close of $6.19, after having dropped as low a $3 at one point Friday. Before the Silicon Valley

Reddit announced Thursday that it is testing Discord-like chat channels with select subreddits. With this move, the social network is trying to give more avenues for community members to interact with each other apart from the usual asynchronous commenting system. The company said it is starting this test with 25 volunteer subreddits — the company didn’t

Founded in 2014, Blossom Finance was first intended for Muslim entrepreneurs in the United States. The microfinancing platform connects investors with small businesses using mudarabah, a shariah-compliant profit-sharing agreement. But founder Matthew Joseph Martin soon realized that the startup, backed by investors like Boost VC and Tim Draper, was serving a relatively niche market in

If you find smartphone notifications annoying enough already thanks to their skill at exploiting the full range of distraction options available, whether dropping a banner from above or sprinkling pox-like red balls over your homescreen icons so as to lodge like grit in the eye, you should prepare yourself for even less subtle demands bubbling

Warner Bros. Discovery has found a new partner to bring HBO content to India: Mukesh Ambani-backed Viacom18. HBO Original, Max Original and other Warner Bros. television series will arrive on JioCinema next month and will air shows “on the same day as the U.S.,” Warner Bros. and Viacom18 said in a statement. The “exclusive” content

Meta shared some updated engagement info around its platforms on its Q1 2023 quarterly earnings call on Wednesday, with Meta CFO Susan Li joining CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg to field questions from analysts about its results. Zuckerberg shared that time spent on Instagram has grown more than 24% since the company launched Reels on

Having the ability to load up a digital wallet to pay for goods and services at businesses you frequent, and then earn rewards for those purchases, would be convenient and well, rewarding. But as of now, few merchants outside of retail giants such as Starbucks offer that ability. Ansa is a startup emerging from stealth

Japanese shared micromobility startup Luup has raised $30 million (4.5 billion yen) in a Series D financing round, which consists of 3.8 billion yen in equity and 700 million yen in debt. Luup has now amassed a total of $68 million in equity, debt, and asset financing to date, at what sources said valued the

Hyundai Motor Group and General Motors announced separately Tuesday plans to build electric vehicle battery plants in the U.S. in partnership with South Korean battery manufacturing firms. Hyundai will set up a $5 billion battery cell production joint venture in the U.S. with SK On, the company that is also working with Ford to set

We’re coming at you live from TechCrunch’s Early Stage in Boston. Darrell and Becca are joined onstage by Russ Wilcox who founded E Ink and is currently a partner at Pillar VC. They discussed how Russ navigated multiple economic downturns and eventually sold E Ink to Amazon, why he made the change from Founder to

Opera has launched a new browser called Opera One, which will eventually replace its flagship browser. The Norway-based company said that this new browser has elements that will make it ready for a “generative AI-based future” without specifying what it means. The core feature for Opera One, which is being launched as a developer preview,

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. As Twitter continues its absolutely farcical march toward its own demise, we are grabbing the popcorn to watch the fire blaze. In other news: Happy Monday, folks! — Christine and Haje The

CorrActions, an Israeli startup that, among other things, built a driver monitoring system that can understand a driver’s cognitive state, today announced that it has raised a strategic investment from Volvo Cars Tech Fund. According to the company, the target for this round is $6 million. The idea behind CorrActions is to use sensors that

For all the investment speculation and hype, cryptocurrency has so far struggled to find meaningful use cases. Now there’s some effort from Singapore to turn the general public into crypto adopters through blockchain payments. Cosmose AI, a nine-year-old company that uses AI analytics to track in-store foot traffic and engage with shoppers online, is partnering

Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous