We are thrilled to announce that Astro Teller, the head honcho of Alphabet’s X, the Moonshot Factory, will be joining us as a featured speaker at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, happening October 27-29 at Moscone West in San Francisco. The whole affair promises to be fun filled and rife with intel and insights that you won’t […]
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Evernote founder’s video startup mmhmm becomes Airtime, launches new products
Evernote founder Phil Libin is ready to liven up your video meetings. The entrepreneur’s video startup, mmhmm, launched in 2020 amid the pandemic, on Thursday unveiled its latest product: a video toolkit for online meetings called Airtime. The suite includes two related tools: a virtual camera that helps you appear more polished on video calls, […]
Report: Neumann’s Flow raises $100M+, more than doubles valuation to $2.5B
Former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann has raised over $100 million in capital for his proptech startup, Flow, in a round that values that company at about $2.5 billion, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. Citing anonymous sources familiar with the deal, Bloomberg reported that existing backer Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) participated in the financing. Neumann told Bloomberg that […]
OpenAI may be developing its own social platform but who’s it for?
OpenAI is reportedly building its own X-like social network. The project is still in the early stages, but there’s an internal prototype focused on ChatGPT’s image generation that contains a social feed, The Verge reports. A social app would give OpenAI its own unique, real-time data that X and Meta already use to help train […]
Parents who lost children to online harms protest outside of Meta’s NYC office
Meta may have managed to kill a bipartisan bill to protect children online, but parents of children who have suffered from online harm are still putting pressure on social media companies to step up. On Thursday, 45 families who lost children to online harms – from sextortion to cyberbullying – held a vigil outside of […]
Threads officially moves to Threads.com and updates its web app
Instagram Threads, Meta’s newest social network and X competitor, is officially relocating from the website Threads.net to Threads.com. The transition will coincide with a handful of quality-of-life improvements for the Threads web app, including features to more easily access custom feeds, saved posts, and likes, as well as other tools for creating new columns, copying […]
Flex acquires a16z-backed Maza for $40M as fintech M&A heats up
Flex, a startup that offers personal finance software for business owners, has acquired Maza, a finance app aimed at Spanish speakers in the U.S., for $40 million, the companies told TechCrunch exclusively. At first glance, the pairing may seem a bit curious. Flex’s software and payments infrastructure is to help business owners have a single […]
Netflix now offers dialogue-only subtitles
Netflix just introduced a new way to experience subtitles that eliminates the need to read audio cues like “door slams” or “phone rings.” Announced on Thursday, Netflix’s new dialogue-only subtitles can be enabled by going to “Navigate to Audio” and then “Subtitles.” Users will see an option labeled “English” instead of “English (CC),” indicating that […]
Facebook cracks down on spammy content by cutting reach and monetization
Facebook will begin lowering the reach of accounts sharing spammy content and making them ineligible for monetization, Meta announced on Thursday. The company is also increasing efforts to remove Facebook accounts that coordinate fake engagement and impersonate others, it says. The move comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has promised a return to “OG Facebook.” […]
TikTok adds support for ALT text for photos
TikTok is rolling out support for ALT text for photo posts to make content more accessible for users with visual and cognitive impairments. The company says creators can now provide descriptive text for photos to help users with screen readers understand the visual content through spoken descriptions. TikTok told TechCrunch in an email that creators […]