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Block Party founder Tracy Chou announced on Wednesday that the company has been acquired by DeleteMe, an online personal data removal service. A software engineer and advocate for diversity in tech, Chou founded Block Party in 2018 as a tool to help people stay safe from targeted harassment on Twitter, inspired by her own experiences on the platform. Chou raised a $4.8 million seed round in 2022 to expand the tool to other social networks, which turned out to be really good timing — soon after, Elon Musk would buy Twitter. Under his ownership, the company began charging for access…

Ultrahuman is back in the United States. The noted Oura Ring competitor has been absent from the American market since October because of a patent dispute but is now cleared by US Customs and Border Protection.As WIRED reported in August, the US International Trade Commission had previously ruled in favor of Oura in a patent infringement case against competitors Ringconn and Ultrahuman. This decision was a big setback for Bengaluru, India-based Ultrahuman, which had established a manufacturing facility in Plano, Texas, to bypass tariffs. Ringconn reached a royalties agreement with Oura, while Ultrahuman pulled its Ring Air from the US…

Principal media buying has moved from a quiet industry practice to a very public flashpoint. While much of the current discussion focuses on digital and programmatic channels, principal media spans the full media ecosystem, from traditional linear channels to programmatic marketplaces.The practice has long existed across traditional media—broadcast, cable, radio, and outdoor—where agencies could leverage scale to secure and resell inventory. What’s changed is not the existence of principal buying, but its scale, complexity, and the degree to which it now sits at the center of agency economics.This is an extremely sensitive topic, but the recent surge in reporting, coupled with…

Over the past few years, a new category of mobile apps has quietly exploded into a multi-billion dollar business. They’re called “micro dramas” — short-form, mobile-first scripted shows designed to be watched vertically on your phone. Think soap opera meets TikTok, complete with secret billionaire romances, disapproving werewolf mothers-in-law, and cliffhangers engineered to keep users tapping. The leading app, ReelShort, made $1.2 billion in consumer spending last year alone.  On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan and TechCrunch senior reporter Amanda Silberling sit down with Henry Soong, founder of Watch Club, who thinks the micro drama industry is still “in its MySpace era.” He has a vision for what the Facebook moment could…

One morning a few weeks ago, John Kiriakou got a call from his 16-year-old niece. “Uncle John, you’re exploding on TikTok,” he recalls her telling him.Kiriakou, a 61-year-old ex-CIA officer who went to prison in 2013 for disclosing classified information related to the agency’s Middle East torture program, had no idea what she was talking about. He doesn’t have a TikTok account. He’s more of a Facebook lurker, if anything. But clips from a podcast Kiriakou filmed in January with Steven Bartlett, who hosts the Diary of a CEO show, which has more than 15 million subscribers on YouTube, were…

The evening newscasts closed out winter and entered spring with some good news, as all three recorded no viewership losses in total viewers or the Adults 25-54 demo for the week of March 16.ABC World News Tonight with David Muir and CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil each experienced week-to-week gains in both measured categories. WNT is currently on a hot streak with its largest overall viewer lead over NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas dating back to April 13, 2020. The Muir-led news program widened its lead over Nightly News by double-digit percentage points in total viewers (+17%) and the…

Energy startup Arbor Energy on Wednesday said it had sold up to 5 gigawatts worth of its modular turbines to GridMarket, a company that helps arrange power projects for data centers and industrial users.  “Everyone wants more power. They wanted it yesterday,” Brad Hartwig, co-founder and CEO of Arbor, told TechCrunch. “The time frames are compressing and the scale is getting larger.” Arbor’s Halcyon turbines are based on rocket turbomachinery, high-performance engine technology originally developed for spaceflight, and its first commercial turbines will be 3D printed and capable of generating 25 megawatts each. GridMarket’s order, if fully fulfilled, represents 200…

Dozens of cities and counties across the US have introduced local moratoria on data center development in response to local pushback. At least a dozen state legislatures—in Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming—have introduced state-level moratoriums this year.But Sanders’s bill marks a significant departure from many of these pieces of legislation. The new bill focuses not only on the environmental and community impacts of data centers, but on AI safety as a whole. Since his announcement in December, Sanders has been outspoken about the potential dangers AI poses to society,…

The cry of “atoms, not bits!” — a phrase capturing Silicon Valley’s growing obsession with physical manufacturing over digital products — reached a fever pitch last week with word that Jeff Bezos is putting together a $100 billion fund to roll up and automate factories. But automating factories isn’t purely a hardware problem. It increasingly depends on sophisticated software and AI tools, and that shift is reshaping the companies building the infrastructure of the physical manufacturing world. Karthik Gollapudi, the CEO of Sift Stack, an El Segundo, California, company whose tools support the design and manufacturing of complex machines like…

Last month, Iran’s Tehran Times posted what appeared to be damning satellite proof: a before-and-after image of “American radar,” supposedly “completely destroyed.”It wasn’t. The image was an AI-manipulated version of a year-old Google Earth shot from Bahrain—wrong location, wrong timeline, fabricated damage. Open source intelligence researchers debunked it within hours matching it to older satellite imagery and identifying identical visual artifacts, down to cars frozen in the same positions.A small act of disinformation, quickly debunked. But it pointed to a challenge that becomes more difficult during active conflict: The satellite infrastructure that journalists, analysts, pilots, and governments rely on to…

OpenAI’s plans to make ChatGPT into an e-commerce hub aren’t exactly panning out — at least, not yet. In an announcement on Tuesday, the company revealed that it’s pivoting away from a recently launched feature that lets users buy items directly from the chatbot’s interface. OpenAI originally launched buying capabilities in ChatGPT last year — positioning itself as a “shopping assistant” that could connect consumers to relevant vendors. A feature called “Instant Checkout” launched in September and encouraged users to talk with the chatbot about what they were looking to buy and, much like a traditional e-commerce site, add products…

Last month, Samsung jacked up the price of two of its flagship smartphones by $100. Now, its two new midrange models—the Galaxy A37 5G and Galaxy A57 5G—are getting $50 price bumps, despite minor hardware updates over last year’s Galaxy A36 and A56. Samsung has also trimmed the lineup—there’s no successor to the Galaxy A26 this year, at least not yet.These price increases may be indicative of the economic climate, what with tariffs, higher oil prices due to the war in Iran, and the memory shortage that has driven up RAM and storage costs across the board. If a phone’s…

Andrew Ashur, the founder and CEO of window cleaning robot startup Lucid Bots, likes to joke that his company is the antithesis of the robotics industry right now. While many companies are trying to build humanoids or tout demos of their robots dancing and doing flips, Lucid Bots’ drones are out in the field making traditionally unsexy and dangerous work, like cleaning windows, safer and more efficient. “The sad truth is most are still selling a lot of hype and headlines, and we sell performance on the job site that shows up in our customers, profits, and losses,” Ashur told…

It has been three years, five months, six days since my kids announced they were too old for Lego (not that I’m counting). As kids grow into teens, they may feel the need to distance themselves. It’s a natural part of growing up, so I’m told. Parents with younger kids: Brace yourself for a rapid-fire series of painful parental purges.No more bike rides, no more playing in the park, and no more hugs are tough, so I don’t know why Lego hit me so hard. Perhaps because we spent so much time building sets together. Perhaps because dragging the old…

Job hunting site Indeed has named Stagwell’s 72andSunny its global creative agency of record as AI irrevocably reshapes the job market.The appointment expands a years-long project-based relationship into a partnership spanning creative, strategy, brand marketing, and product marketing. 72andSunny’s previous work with Indeed includes global campaign “The World Can Work Better,” which launched across the U.S., France, and the U.K. in 2023.Indeed’s media spend is estimated at $167 million annually, according to COMvergence.“We’ve spent years building a foundation of creative excellence with 72andSunny and are thrilled to deepen that collaboration,” said Jennifer Warren, vp of marketing at Indeed, in a…

Data center developer Crusoe is ramping up its energy storage capacity with battery buys from Form Energy and Redwood Energy. The company said it will buy 12 gigawatt-hours of Form Energy’s 100-hour batteries. It’s the second large sale made by Form, which last month said it would build a 30 gigawatt-hour battery for Google in Minnesota. That deal was worth about $1 billion, according to The Information.  Form, which didn’t disclose the value of the sale, will start delivering Crusoe’s batteries in 2027. Crusoe’s smaller purchase should still bring Form hundreds of millions in new revenue as the battery company…