Author: admin
Pinterest is expanding its partnership with Amazon. The social pinboard site said on Wednesday that it will now serve as a home for creators’ Amazon Storefronts. These online stores allow creators to generate income from affiliate links that direct their fans to products that they often feature in their videos and social media content. The move gives Pinterest another way to appeal to creators who have largely built their shopping and affiliate businesses on larger platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook. Pinterest says more than half its users visit it to shop, and that it sees more than 80…
Waymo, the Alphabet subsidiary offering robotaxi rides in 11 US metros right now, says it’s ready for the FIFA World Cup. Match attendees can catch driverless rides to six of the 16 North American venues: stadiums in Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, and the San Francisco Bay Area.The sprawling football event, expected to attract some 6.5 million visitors to the continent over more than a month, could prove an exciting close-up for Waymo. The company says it’s serving half-a-million paid rides a week—paltry stuff compared to the likes of ride-hail giants Uber and Lyft, but more impressive once you remember…
Advertisers can now target Walmart shoppers on YouTube and see when those ads lead to sales, thanks to a new deal between Walmart Connect and Google, executives told ADWEEK.It’s part of a broader effort from the retailer’s ad arm, Walmart Connect, to make it easier for advertisers to target Walmart shoppers on streaming TV platforms, where brand dollars are increasingly headed.Last year, Walmart dropped the exclusivity clause in its deal with The Trade Desk, allowing the retailer to partner with more adtech companies. In May, the company announced a deal with supply-side platform Magnite, which allows Walmart Connect to sell…
SpaceX is coming to market on Friday, and investors can barely contain their excitement. The $75 billion stock offering is reportedly deeply over-subscribed, with some institutional investors ponying up for $10 billion blocks of Elon Musk’s empire. There are lots of reasons to be skeptical of the investment — big IPOs tend to sink, the company is losing money, and Musk’s erratic online behavior would be terrifying coming from any other tech CEO — but it doesn’t seem to be slowing anyone down. Tech investors have learned to never bet against Elon, whatever the business logic indicates. But a dispassionate…
TechCrunch is partnering with VivaTech 2026 to highlight the technologies, founders, and ideas driving the next wave of innovation. As part of the collaboration, TechCrunch and VivaTech will spotlight emerging startups through the VivaTech Innovation of the Year competition. The winner will earn a chance to pitch live in Paris and secure a place in Startup Battlefield 200 ahead of TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, taking place in San Francisco from October 13-15. For anyone tracking the future of enterprise AI, VivaTech 2026 offers a front-row seat to some of the industry’s most important conversations. Register now to hear from the leaders…
Anthropic released its latest model Fable on Tuesday, billing it as a public and limited version of its powerful and much-hyped cybersecurity model Mythos. But not everyone is happy with the restrictions, and a number of cybersecurity researchers and professionals have aired complaints online. “[Fable] rejects any request that could be tangentially cyber related. Even innocuous tasks like reading a blog post,” said Valentina “Chompie” Palmiotti, a well-known security researcher who works at IBM X-Force. When a prompt triggers its guardrails, Fable pauses the chat and says that its “safety measures flagged this message for cybersecurity or biology topics.” The…
A new startup aims to reinvent how people discover their next favorite place to dine and, one day, perhaps more. Zest, a newly launched restaurant discovery app, uses a combination of transaction data and AI to make personalized restaurant recommendations based on where people actually go to eat, drink, or grab a coffee. Founded in November 2024, Zest currently has $1.8 million in pre-seed funding from Alexis Ohanian at 776 and Steve Jang at Kindred Ventures. It has been in beta testing since nearly day one, expanding from friends and family to larger groups over time. Now, the app has…
If founders and other business leaders weren’t already envious of Dario Amodei, who sits atop one of the world’s fastest-growing AI companies — currently valued by private market investors at roughly the trillion-dollar mark little more than five years after it was founded — they’re going to be seriously envious now. In a new sit-down with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang, he reveals he has just one direct report; that’s his chief of staff. Everyone else on Anthropic’s executive team reports to his sister, co-founder and President Daniela Amodei, who handles day-to-day operations. Anyone who has managed a large team knows that…
Opendoor, the San Francisco-based online home-buying platform, is shutting down its India operations less than two years after expanding its presence in the country. The decision has become a flashpoint in the debate over whether AI is starting to alter the economics of offshore work. In announcing the decision on Wednesday, CEO Kaz Nejatian cited a push to bring operational work back to the U.S., where Opendoor’s customers are, and a shift toward smaller AI-native teams. The company did not respond to requests for comment on how many employees were affected or how much of the decision was driven by…
Anthropic is backtracking on a policy that would have covertly limited competitors from using its new AI model, Claude Fable 5, to develop other AI models. The company changed course after the move received significant backlash from the AI research community.“We’re changing Fable 5’s safeguards for frontier LLM development to make them visible,” Anthropic said in a statement to WIRED. “We made the wrong tradeoff and we apologize for not getting the balance right.”Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, a version of its latest AI model with additional safety guardrails designed to prevent misuse, earlier this week. Some of the safeguards…
Wing, the Alphabet-owned company that delivers groceries and even coffee using autonomous drones, is pushing into seven more U.S. cities through its partnership with Walmart. The expansion is part of a broader plan to build a drone-delivery network of more than 270 Walmart locations by next year. The new markets include Memphis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Salt Lake City, bringing Wing and Walmart’s total service footprint to nearly 20 U.S. markets. Wing is already delivering Walmart goods to customers in Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Greater Houston. The company has announced plans to…
More than 5 million fans are expected to attend the 2026 FIFA World Cup taking place this summer across 16 venues in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The stakes are high—and not merely on the pitch.Experts have warned that heightened terrorism concerns linked to the war in Iran could be used by the Trump administration to justify the deployment of invasive surveillance technologies without adequate safeguards. Moreover, there are concerns that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has an array of advanced surveillance technologies in its arsenal—from face recognition to spyware—could carry out aggressive immigration enforcement during the tournament.Human…
A new report by cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike found North Korean hackers posing as remote IT workers and online recruiters made up about half of all documented “hands-on-keyboard” intrusions at U.S. tech companies over the past year. The company’s latest annual report on the cybersecurity landscape highlights the growing threat from North Korean operatives, which have become a significant source of cyber intrusions across the tech industry. Hackers associated with the Kim Jong Un regime continuously target companies and developers with schemes aimed at stealing information and cryptocurrency to fund Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program, which is banned under international law. CrowdStrike…
When you tune in to the 2026 World Cup, you’ll get a peek at something you probably haven’t seen before: an up-close live feed at what’s happening on the field from the referee’s perspective.Broadcasts will incorporate a point-of-view captured feet away from the action by a tiny camera attached to the official’s headset, sitting just near their temple. The images are be beamed wirelessly to the broadcast booth, where the video is digitally smoothed in real time and incorporated into the televised program.If you’ve ever wanted to know what the game looks like from a ref’s vantage point—whether you want…
Companies are burning through exorbitant sums of money to keep pace in the AI arms race. Debt is climbing. Amidst this flurry of activity, Amazon has signed a deal to borrow some $17.5 billion from a number of financial lenders, according to Bloomberg. The banks behind the loan reportedly include Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, HSBC, and BofA Securities. The deal has been characterized as a delayed draw term loan, meaning Amazon can draw down the funds on its own timeline rather than taking the full sum upfront, giving it flexibility in how and when the money gets deployed. The…
The design of the official ball of the 2026 World Cup could become a determining factor in the scores of the 104 matches that will be played during the tournament. According to new research, the ball known as the “Trionda” is the first in the history of the men’s World Cup to be made with only four panels, a feature that changes the way it cuts through the air and consequently alters the ball’s acceleration, trajectory, and range.As has been the case every four years since 1970, Adidas unveiled the official ball of the 2026 World Cup in October last…