Author: GT

Slow Ventures’ Creator Fund has invested $2 million into Jonathan Katz-Moses, a popular woodworking content creator with around 600,000 followers, nearly 75 million video views, and his own line of woodworking tools.  This marks the first investment for Slow’s $60 million Creator Fund since its launch in February. The fund looks to help creators launch businesses, under the belief that what made them successful influencers is what can also make them a good founder.  Speaking to TechCrunch, Slow Ventures partner Billy Parks, the lead investor on the deal, said the role of creators has greatly changed in the past decade…

Most organizations say they aren’t fully prepared to use generative AI in a safe and responsible way, according to a recent McKinsey report. One concern is explainability — understanding how and why AI makes certain decisions. While 40% of respondents view it as a significant risk, only 17% are actively addressing it, per the report. Seoul-based Datumo began as an AI data labeling company and now wants to help businesses build safer AI with tools and data that enable testing, monitoring, and improving their models — without requiring technical expertise. On Monday the startup raised $15.5 million, which brings its…

Nvidia on Monday unveiled a set of new world AI models, libraries, and other infrastructure for robotics developers, most notable of which is Cosmos Reason, a 7-billion-parameter “reasoning” vision language model for physical AI applications and robots. Also joining the existing batch of Cosmos world models are Cosmos Transfer-2, which can accelerate synthetic data generation from 3D simulation scenes or spatial control inputs, and a distilled version of Cosmos Transfers that is more optimized for speed. During its announcement at the SIGGRAPH conference on Monday, Nvidia noted that these models are meant to be used to create synthetic text, image, and…

Revel has shut down its ride-hailing service in New York City, in yet another pivot for the company that started out by renting electric scooters in 2019. Moving forward, Revel will instead focus on its nascent EV charging business, which includes operating five stations in New York and one in San Francisco. A visit to Revel’s app on Monday showed a message thanking users for “riding with us the last 4 years!” and announcing it has “permanently closed our rideshare service.” Revel’s website echoed the same message, adding: “Moving forward, Revel will continue to grow our Fast Charging business with…

Games giant Electronic Arts launched an open beta over the weekend for its upcoming first-person shooter Battlefield 6, and — almost immediately — the game was swamped with cheaters. Soon after the game’s launch, countless players complained online about encountering cheaters. In response, a member of Electronic Arts’ anti-cheat team, which goes by AC, wrote in an official forum that the company saw players report 104,000 “instances of potential cheaters” over the first two days of the game’s being online, and that it stopped 330,000 “attempts to cheat or tamper with anti-cheat controls.”  Like many video games today, such as…

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! I took a tour through a few 10Q reports this week to get a sense of how EV makers like Rivian and Lucid (or even legacy automakers that also sell EVs) feel about the one-two punch of tariffs and the end of the federal tax credit. Although these documents are loaded with legalese, it’s clear that both economic developments are on the minds of their respective executive teams. …

Apple usually announces its new hardware in the fall, and this year is likely no different. The event is reported to be on September 9, and Apple is expected to release its iPhone 17 lineup, along with updates for the Apple Watch and AirPods.  As always, there are many rumors circulating, including bigger screens and improved cameras for the iPhone 17 models and the introduction of an ultra-thin iPhone Air that could replace the Plus model. iPhone 17, 17 Pro, and 17 Pro Max The iPhone 17 is expected to get a significant makeover to align more closely with the…

StubHub, the ticketing marketplace that spun out of eBay in 2020, has resumed its plans to go public and is now aiming to hold its IPO next month, CNBC has learned.The company originally paused its IPO plans in April as the stock market was reeling from President Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs. The decision came after StubHub submitted its prospectus in March indicating it would list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “STUB.”StubHub now expects to kick off its IPO roadshow after Labor Day, Sept. 1, and make its debut later in the month, according to a…

The Trump administration has finally issued new guidance that states can use to dole out $5 billion in funding for electric vehicle charging infrastructure, after spending months withholding the money. A coalition of states sued over the funding freeze in the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, which was one of the administration’s many attempts to stop funding appropriated by Congress at the start of Donald Trump’s second term. A judge ruled in June that those states were likely to succeed and issued an injunction against the administration’s spending freeze. The Department of Transportation (DOT), led by former MTV personality…

NEW YORK (AP) — AOL’s dial-up internet is finally taking its last bow.Yes, while perhaps a dinosaur by today’s digital standards, dial-up is still around. But AOL says it’s officially pulling the plug for its service on Sept. 30.“AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet,” AOL wrote in a brief update on its support site — noting that dial-up and associated software “optimized for older operating systems” will soon be unavailable on AOL plans.AOL, formerly America Online, introduced many households to the world wide web for the first time when its dial-up service…