Author: GT

On Monday, researchers at cybersecurity giant Kaspersky published a report identifying a new spyware called Dante that they say targeted Windows victims in Russia and neighboring Belarus. The researchers said the Dante spyware is made by Memento Labs, a Milan-based surveillance tech maker that was formed in 2019 after a new owner acquired and took over early spyware maker Hacking Team. Memento chief executive Paolo Lezzi confirmed to TechCrunch that the spyware caught by Kaspersky does indeed belong to Memento. In a call, Lezzi blamed one of the company’s government customers for exposing Dante, saying the customer used an outdated version…

Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., during the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, June 4, 2025. David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesGoogle parent Alphabet is planning a “significant increase” in spend next year as it continues to invest in AI infrastructure to meet the demand of its customer backlog, executives said Wednesday.The company reported its first $100 billion revenue quarter on Wednesday, beating Wall Street’s expectations for Alphabet’s third quarter. Executives then said that the company plans to grow its capital spend for this year.”With the growth across our business and…

India’s free digital payments revolution has upended how money moves — but not how fintechs make it. Now, Flipkart’s fintech arm Super.money is partnering with Kotak811, the digital offering of one of India’s top commercial banks, Kotak Mahindra Bank, to change that, bundling UPI payments, savings, and secured credit into a single account aimed at turning usage into profit. The partnership aims to issue about 2 million secured credit cards in the next 12 months — roughly 60% to first-time borrowers — and 5 million within two years. Super.money, which already serves 10 million active users, expects the Kotak alliance…

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025. David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesMeta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is sounding a familiar tune when it comes to artificial intelligence: better to invest too much than too little.On his company’s third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Zuckerberg addressed Meta’s hefty spending this year, most notably its $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI as part of a plan to overhaul the AI unit, now known as Superintelligence Labs.Some skeptics worry that the spending from Meta and…

Uber has picked San Francisco to launch a premium robotaxi service that will use Lucid Motors’ all-electric Gravity SUVs equipped with self-driving tech developed by Nuro, in 2026 — a move that puts the ride-hailing giant in direct competition with Waymo. The announcement was made as the last day of TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 kicked off in San Francisco. Nuro president and co-CEO Dave Ferguson, and Uber chief product officer Sachin Kansal are scheduled to be interviewed on the Disrupt stage Wednesday afternoon. “The Bay Area has long been the birthplace of transformative technology, and it’s only fitting that Uber’s next-generation…

Mogul, the film studio fantasy platform created by the movie theater subscription service MoviePass, on Wednesday launched out of private beta, the company announced. The platform is now available as a public beta for everyone. Designed specifically for the Hollywood industry, players own their own film studio and draft a team of actors, directors, and movies to earn points based on their performance. Mogul draws inspiration from daily fantasy sports, where players assume the role of team managers, forming teams made up of real-life athletes. Today, the web version of Mogul is open for the more than 400,000 users on the…

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella departs following a meeting of the White House Task Force on AI Education in the East Room of the White House in Washington on Sept. 4, 2025.Eric Lee | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesMicrosoft was hit with outages in its Azure cloud and 365 services on Wednesday, hours before the company’s quarterly earnings release.Users on social media reported problems accessing their sites and services running on Microsoft’s products, and the company’s websites, including its Xbox and investor relations pages, were down. The problems began around 11:40 a.m. ET, according to Downdetector, which relies on user reports.”We are…

When Phia‘s founders Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni decided to build an AI startup, they targeted an area they understood well: online shopping. The founders, who met at Stanford when they were randomly paired up as roommates, understood e-commerce because they had spent hours upon hours trying to find the right items to expand their wardrobe. And AI, they realized, had the potential to help people discover, shop, and buy in new ways. They also realized that capability was a market opportunity. “There felt like there was this giant white space for, like, what should we actually buy, and why…

Meta’s stock slid in after-hours trading on Wednesday after the tech giant posted strong third-quarter results but warned that its expenses will be significantly higher in 2026 than this year. Like its rivals, Meta Platforms Inc. has been on an artificial intelligence spending spree and said its costs will grow much faster next year, driven by infrastructure costs and employee compensation as it has hired AI experts at eye-popping compensation levels. “Employee compensation costs will be the second largest contributor to growth, as we recognize a full year of compensation for employees hired throughout 2025, particularly AI talent, and add…

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell speaks during a news conference following a meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee at the Federal Reserve on Oct. 29, 2025 in Washington, DC. Alex Wong | Getty ImagesFederal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said on Wednesday that the artificial intelligence boom is different from the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s.”This is different in the sense that these companies, the companies that are so highly valued, actually have earnings and stuff like that,” Powell said, during a news conference following the Fed’s two-day policy meeting. AI investments in data centers and chips are also…