Category: Apps

America’s supply chain vulnerabilities were on full display Thursday after drone manufacturer Skydio told customers it was facing a battery squeeze after being hit with sanctions from China.  “This is an attempt to eliminate the leading American drone company and deepen the world’s dependence on Chinese drone suppliers,” Skydio CEO Adam Bry said in a…

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on Thursday hinted at an improved, “agentic” version of the company’s Alexa assistant — one that could take actions on a user’s behalf. “I think that the next generation of these assistants and generative AI applications will be better at not just answering questions and summarizing, indexing, and aggregating data, but…

Hello, and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is a wrap, and I’m more than thrilled by the amazing space industry programming we had on offer this year. We covered everything from building a dual-use business to orbital re-entry, we caught up with Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck, and heard about the ground station…

This year, 2024, looks set to be the most profitable yet for hackers, with four ransom demands paid in the tens of millions of dollars. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. ​ The ransomware industry is thriving, not losing.  Despite various law enforcement wins against ransomware actors, like the sweeping takedown…

The European Union has expanded its scrutiny of online marketplaces by opening a formal proceeding on Chinese low cost ecommerce platform, Temu, under the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Commission announced Thursday. Enforcers of the online governance framework will now dial up their oversight of Temu. The bloc’s suspicions are focused on concerns about the…

Companies are concerned that their eagerness to adopt AI has made them more vulnerable to cyberthreats. Per a recent poll of over 350 IT leaders, more than half of the executives surveyed said the complexity of AI applications weakened their organization’s cybersecurity posture. More than two-fifths of executives believe their security teams lack the skills…

In 2014, Ivan Crewkov moved his family from Serbia to the U.S. as his startup, Cubic.AI, was preparing to launch a Kickstarter campaign for its smart speaker. A week before the campaign was supposed to go live, Amazon launched its Echo smart speaker, rendering Cubic.AI essentially dead in the water. “It was a disaster,” Crewkov…

AI video platform D-ID announced today that it is releasing two new types of avatars — Express and Premium+ — for content creation. Companies are chasing the golden goose of creating AI avatars that are more humanlike and can potentially offload video creation for enterprise use cases in areas like marketing, sales, and customer support.…

MealMe, a unified API that embeds food and retail ordering into consumer apps and websites, announced on Thursday that it secured $8 million in Series A funding. The newly raised capital brings the total amount raised to $16 million.  MealMe has undergone several changes since its launch in 2019. Initially, it was a consumer app designed…

Space executives took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt on Monday to talk about the challenges and opportunities of building out dual-use technology, or tech that has both a defense and a commercial use case.  The dual-use strategy can be tricky for young startups to manage, however, because they run the risk of diluting their focus…