Bad news: If you had your heart set on a sub-$40,000 Cybertruck, it ain’t coming next year, if ever. Though Tesla plans to ramp up production of its electric pickup in 2024, the company clarified today after its splashy delivery event that the cheapest Cybertruck variant will be available in 2025. Tesla first announced a single-motor Cybertruck variant with rear-wheel drive back in 2019, promising … [Read more...]

With dubstep as the soundtrack and neon lighting as the backdrop, Elon Musk handed the first Cybertrucks over to a select group of customers that included Reddit co-founder and VC fund Seven Seven Six founder Alexis Ohanian and Trousdale Ventures founder and CEO Phillip Sarofim. The live streamed portion of the Tesla Cybertruck delivery event was a short affair — around 30 minutes. But the event … [Read more...]

The former program manager of Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engines has filed a lawsuit against the company alleging whistleblower retaliation after he spoke up about safety issues. The complaint was filed on Monday in the Los Angeles County Superior Court. It includes a detailed narrative about program manager Craig Stoker’s efforts over seven months to escalate his concerns over safety and a hostile … [Read more...]

Wombo, the makers of viral AI-generated art app Dream by Wombo, is back with another new AI-powered app called Wombo Me. The new AI avatar app from the Canadian startup lets you turn a single selfie into multiple lifelike avatars. Although there are several popular AI avatar apps already on the market, like Lensa AI, Wombo wants to give users a more streamlined experience when generating … [Read more...]

Alternative investment platform Yieldstreet announced today that it has agreed to acquire Cadre, an online real-estate-focused investment platform aimed at institutional and high net worth investors. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in 2015, Yieldstreet gives people a way to invest in areas like real estate, marine/shipping, legal finance, commercial loans and other … [Read more...]

Amazon's big AWS cloud event has begun, with a clear focus on the use of AI to keep its lead intact Christine Hall 9 hours Amazon Web Services is live in Las Vegas for its AWS re:Invent event, which kicked off November 27 and runs until December 1. We expect a rapid-fire stream of announcements and unveilings of recent things it’s been working on, … [Read more...]

Welcome back to Chain Reaction. To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important crypto stories delivered to your inbox every Thursday at 12 p.m. PT, subscribe here. Last week we didn’t publish a Chain Reaction newsletter, thanks to Thanksgiving. But we’re back at it this week and saying goodbye to November after a long, eventful month filled with lawsuits, price changes and the typical … [Read more...]

Everyone talks a good game, but fewer than 1% of founders mention ‘sustainability’ in their fundraising docs Haje Jan Kamps 9 hours When I talked to hundreds of founders at TechCrunch Disrupt this year, everybody seemed to be in a broad consensus that climate change is a bad thing. But still it seems like it is all lip service. I recently … [Read more...]

Instagram’s Twitter/X rival, Threads, is becoming more competitive with the expansion of its keyword search feature to all markets where the app is available. The feature was initially tested in English-speaking markets including Australia and New Zealand in August before expanding to most other English and Spanish-speaking countries, including the U.S. in September. Now, according to Instagram … [Read more...]

While Apple Music Replay fails to live up to Spotify Wrapped, YouTube Music’s 2023 Recap offers a personalized and interactive experience. YouTube Music introduced three new features this year– custom album art, music moods and the ability to personalize and shuffle Google Photos with favorite songs. And, for the first time, you can see your stats in the YouTube Music app, whereas Apple Music’s … [Read more...]

With all of the communication methods businesses use to get in front of customers, some continue to get results for their marketing campaigns from ye old email. That’s because “it is the workhorse of marketing campaigns,” according to Noah Dinkin, founder and CEO of Stensul. The company is a multi-channel marketing creation platform providing tools to help customers more easily create … [Read more...]

Whether you are a tech optimist or not, you have to acknowledge that progress rarely follows a straight line. While the world keeps getting better at churning semiconductors, we are still struggling to find new drugs to treat resistant diseases, and the process isn’t getting cheaper. Some hope that AI can help, and it likely will — when it comes to biotech, it is much more than a buzzword.  … [Read more...]

X CEO Linda Yaccarino is publicly backing Elon Musk after he explicitly said “go fuck yourself” to advertisers leaving X during an onstage interview yesterday at the New York Times DealBook Summit. Musk, who in recent days has endorsed antisemitic content on the platform alongside other conspiracy theories, like the debunked Pizzagate, has threatened lawsuits against Media Matters, the Center for … [Read more...]

TikTok says it will spend €12 billion as part of an ongoing push to ingratiate itself with European regulators, with the company beginning work on its previously-announced Norwegian data center. The short-form social video company has been working hard these past few years to convince the world that it’s not beholden to its parent company ByteDance in China, efforts not helped by revelations last … [Read more...]

Witness lists and testimony, mental health evaluations, detailed allegations of abuse, and corporate trade secrets. These are some of the sensitive legal court filings that security researcher Jason Parker said they found exposed to the open internet for anyone to access, and from none other than the judiciaries themselves. At the heart of any judiciary is its court records system, the technology … [Read more...]

Android users are poised to receive nearly a dozen new features in the latest release of the mobile operating system, including updates designed for smartphones, tablets, Wear OS smartwatches and even Google TV devices. Alongside the launch, Google is celebrating a new RCS milestone of over 1 billion monthly active users of the SMS replacement technology — which Apple, facing regulatory pressure, … [Read more...]

Clayful is a platform that enables students aged eight to 18 to connect with a mental health expert within 60 seconds when they need it. The startup said it had raised $7 million in funding from investors, including Google Latino Founders Fund, Reach Capital, Ovo Fund, Common Sense Ventures, Charter School Growth Fund and Wisdom Ventures.  Clayful wants to “ensure every student gets a … [Read more...]

It’s officially been one year since ChatGPT launched, taking the world by storm as the research preview turned into an everyday tool that brought AI chatbot technology to mainstream users. A large part of that effort was driven by the release of the ChatGPT mobile app, whose May 2023 launch on iOS put the chatbot into more consumers’ hands, later followed by a July 2023 release on Android. Now, on … [Read more...]

Fidelity National Financial, or FNF, one of the largest real estate services companies in the United States, said it “contained” a recent cyberattack that engulfed its many subsidiaries and customers in a state of chaos for more than a week. In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, FNF said the incident was now under control as of November 26. “The Company is restoring … [Read more...]

WhatsApp is rolling out a new “secret codes” feature that adds another layer of privacy to your locked conversations on the messaging platform. The app launched locked chats earlier this year to help people hide sensitive conversations, and is now adding a way to further protect those chats and make them harder to find if someone has access to your phone. Instead of having all of your locked chats … [Read more...]