Author: GT

Packages ride on a conveyor belt during Cyber Monday at an Amazon fulfillment center on December 2, 2024 in Orlando, Florida.Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo | Getty ImagesAmazon is turning to the startup world to find a potential fix for one of its thorniest logistics problems.Retailers of all sizes have in recent years struggled with an uptick in fraudulent returns. The scam involves shoppers requesting a refund, but instead of returning the merchandise, they keep the item and send back an empty package or a box of unrelated junk.It’s become a costly nuisance for retailers, accounting for $103 billion in losses…

The Trump administration published its much-anticipated AI Action Plan on Wednesday, a document that takes a sharp shift away from former President Biden’s cautious approach to addressing the risks of AI, and instead barrels ahead with plans to build out AI infrastructure, cut red tape for tech companies, shore up national security, and compete with China.  The downstream effects of this shift will likely ripple throughout various industries and may even be felt by the average American consumer. For instance, the AI Action Plan downplays efforts to mitigate possible harms of AI and instead prioritizes building out data centers to power…

Open source X and Threads competitor Mastodon will begin experimenting with a new way to raise funds: in-app donations. The organization on Wednesday announced it’s launching a campaign that introduces banners inside its Android and iOS apps, prompting users to make a monetary donation. Initially, the feature will be shown only to those on the Mastodon servers the nonprofit itself operates, Mastodon.social and Mastodon.online. These banners will be easy to dismiss, Mastodon says, and will only be shown to people who have accounts that have existed for at least four weeks. The organization promises that it won’t continually prompt users…

On August 9, the people who previously ran startup incubator Y Combinator’s events and PR, along with a former Andreessen Horowitz social media manager, are holding a small, invitation-only event, TechCrunch has learned. The To Do List Summit will cap off at 80 early-stage founders and will teach them how to work with the press and run their own social media, the organizers promise. The fee for the event is $600. YC laid off most of the folks putting on this event between a small layoff about a year ago and a larger one in 2023. These layoffs were surprising…

The Trump administration wants its AI technology to be considered an industry leader both on home soil and abroad. But it also doesn’t want the U.S.’s AI prowess to empower or embolden a foreign adversary. That’s quite the balance to strike. If President Trump’s AI Action Plan, which was released on Wednesday, is any indicator, it seems the administration is still figuring out the right course of action to achieve those goals. “​​America currently is the global leader on data center construction, computing hardware performance, and models,” the plan stated. “It is imperative that the United States leverage this advantage…

Falling EV sales combined with a lower average selling price, less cash from regulatory credits, and a decline in solar and energy storage revenue took a toll on Tesla’s bottom line in the second quarter of 2025. And a 17% growth in revenue in its services business, which includes capital generated from its Supercharging network, wasn’t enough to close the gap. The company reported Wednesday revenue of $22.5 billion, a 12% decline from the same period last year. The company’s Q2 revenue results did show an improvement over the first quarter when it generated $19.3 billion in revenue and did…

Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai shared an update on the adoption of consumer-facing AI apps and features, including Google Search’s AI Overviews, Gemini, and AI Mode. On the company’s Q2 2025 call with investors, Pichai shared that AI Overviews — a Google Search feature offering an AI summary of search results available in 200 countries and territories — now has 2 billion monthly users, up from 1.5 billion in May 2025. In addition, Google’s Gemini app has grown to 450 million monthly active users. “We continue to see strong growth and engagement with daily requests growing over 50% from…

YouTube continues to lead in the streaming market, with advertising revenue increasing by 13% year over year, according to Alphabet, Google’s parent company, in its second-quarter earnings report released on Wednesday. This growth brings YouTube’s total ad revenue to $9.8 billion, up from $8.7 billion in the same period last year. The company slightly exceeded analyst expectations, which had forecast YouTube’s Q2 ad revenue to be around $9.6 billion. For years, YouTube has been striving to capture a larger share of television ad dollars, especially as its popularity on TV has grown, accounting for a significant portion of its viewership.…

The data nerds are fighting back.After watching data sets be altered or disappear from U.S. government websites in unprecedented ways after President Donald Trump began his second term, an army of outside statisticians, demographers and computer scientists have joined forces to capture, preserve and share data sets, sometimes clandestinely.Their goal is to make sure they are available in the future, believing that democracy suffers when policymakers don’t have reliable data and that national statistics should be above partisan politics.“There are such smart, passionate people who care deeply about not only the Census Bureau, but all the statistical agencies, and ensuring…

An unproven small launch startup is partnering with a severely depleted SPAC trust to do the impossible: go public in a deal they say will be valued at $400 million. Innovative Rocket Technologies Inc. (iRocket) and BPGC Acquisition Corp., a special purpose vehicle company founded by former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, is aiming to close the transaction in the fourth quarter of this year. Interestingly, the SPAC has been depleted of most of its cash after it raised $345 million in its IPO in March 2021. According to a September 2024 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the…