Author: GT

As a parent, it can be daunting to hand over a smart device to their tween when a myriad of online dangers exist. Pinwheel, a kid-friendly tech company, is introducing a new solution for parents who want to stay connected with their children without giving them a phone.  The Pinwheel Watch is a recently launched smartwatch designed specifically for kids aged 7 to 14, offering a child-safe alternative that prevents access to social media and the internet. It features parental management tools, GPS tracking, a camera, voice-to-text messaging, fun mini-games, and — here’s a surprise — an AI chatbot. The…

Imagine you’re messaging some friends on the Facebook Messenger app or WhatsApp, and you get an unsolicited message from an AI chatbot that’s obsessed with films. “I hope you’re having a harmonious day!” it writes. “I wanted to check in and see if you’ve discovered any new favorite soundtracks or composers recently. Or perhaps you’d like some recommendations for your next movie night? Let me know, and I’ll be happy to help!” That’s a real example of what a sample AI persona named “The Maestro of Movie Magic” might send as a proactive message on Messenger, WhatsApp, or Instagram, per…

Scientists are striving to discover new semiconductor materials that could boost the efficiency of solar cells and other electronics. But the pace of innovation is bottlenecked by the speed at which researchers can manually measure important material properties.A fully autonomous robotic system developed by MIT researchers could speed things up.Their system utilizes a robotic probe to measure an important electrical property known as photoconductance, which is how electrically responsive a material is to the presence of light.The researchers inject materials-science-domain knowledge from human experts into the machine-learning model that guides the robot’s decision making. This enables the robot to identify…

CANNES — Wall Street’s new plumbing is being built on Ethereum and this week its architects took over the same French Riviera villas and red carpet venues that host the Cannes Film Festival in May.The Ethereum Community Conference, or EthCC, took over the beachside town that was swarming with crypto founders, developers, and some of the institutional giants now building atop the infrastructure.The crypto elite climbed the iconic red-carpeted steps of the Palais des Festivals — a cinematic landmark now repurposed as the stage for Ethereum’s flagship European event.”The atmosphere this year was palpable in Cannes,” said Bettina Boon Falleur,…

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates ruled on Thursday that the Trump administration’s Office of Personnel Management did not comply with all necessary laws when it ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to speedily comply with the president’s executive order on “gender ideology.” On the first day of his term, President Trump passed a deluge of executive orders, including one that ordered government agencies to change the language of government materials that address “gender ideology.” This is the administration’s way of referring to transgender or non-binary people. Soon after, agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services…

Investing in Y Combinator startups can lead to significant returns to investors. “If you look at the data: 6% of YC companies become unicorns, and of that 6% a quarter become decacorns,” Kulveer Taggar told TechCrunch. Taggar is a two-time YC alum best known for founding Zeus Living, a property management startup that raised over $150 million in funding. Taggar is so confident in the continuing return potential offered by the famed accelerator that he established Phosphor Capital, a venture firm dedicated solely to investing in YC companies. Since launching last year, Phosphor has raised $34 million in capital across…

Raising in 2025 doesn’t look anything like it did in 2021 — and that’s exactly the point. At TechCrunch All Stage on July 15 at Boston’s SoWa Power Station, Kristen Craft, head of Business Development at Fidelity Private Shares, will lead a roundtable session titled “It’s Not 2021 Anymore. Navigating the 2025 VC Landscape,” happening on the Foundation Stage. In this conversation, Craft will guide founders through the new norms of venture capital. From shifting investor expectations to sharper scrutiny on business models, she’ll explore what it takes to raise successfully in a market that no longer rewards unchecked growth…

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever says he is stepping into the CEO role at Safe Superintelligence, the AI startup he launched in 2024. In a post on X, Sutskever confirmed Thursday that Daniel Gross, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, departed the company as of June 29. Safe Superintelligence co-founder Daniel Levy is becoming president of the startup, according to Sutskever. The announcement follows weeks of reporting that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was in advanced talks to hire Gross, as well as his longtime investing partner, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. At one point, Zuckerberg reportedly attempted to acquire all of Safe Superintelligence, a…

Cloudflare wants AI companies to pay up. The cloud infrastructure provider, which powers around 20% of the web, is launching a new experiment that would let publishers charge AI firms every time their bots scrape a site. It’s called Pay per Crawl, and it could reshape how content is accessed and monetized online. Today on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec and Max Zeff dig into Cloudflare’s big swing, why it’s a natural next step after a year of laying groundwork for bot-blocking tools, and whether the plan to sit at the center of a pay-for-content protocol is genius… or…

Robinhood has begun offering tokenised shares in private companies, sparking backlash from OpenAI as one of the targeted firms.During an event in Cannes on Monday, Robinhood co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev displayed what he described as “stock tokens” for OpenAI and SpaceX. The move forms part of Robinhood’s European expansion, which also includes offering more than 200 tokenised shares of publicly-traded US stocks to EU users.Tenev told attendees that European users who download the Robinhood app would have the opportunity to own tokenised shares in OpenAI and Elon Musk’s space exploration venture SpaceX, both of which are private companies that…