Author: GT

The Chinese e-commerce marketplace app DHgate, which is now the No. 2 free iPhone app in the U.S., isn’t the only one that’s oddly benefiting from President Trump’s tariffs on U.S. imports from China. Another Chinese shopping app, Taobao, has now also entered the Top 5 as of Thursday. U.S. consumers began flocking to these apps over the past several days in the wake of numerous TikTok videos from Chinese manufacturers explaining how much of the luxury goods market operates out of China. The videos claim that many products from top luxury brands — like clothing, handbags, shoes, and accessories…

President Donald Trump’s tariffs have underscored the increasing geopolitical risk that almost all businesses now face. As the situation continues to shift with Trump’s unpredictable deal-making, it’s also becoming clear how challenging it is for companies, nonprofits, consultants, and lawyers to keep up with the rapid day-to-day changes. “We are drowning in trade updates every hour of every day,” Matthew Oresman, London managing partner of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, a global law firm, told TechCrunch.  The firm, whose clients span multinationals and high-net-worth individuals, as well as companies in tech, energy, and AI, is one of the first customers for…

Occidental has bought Holocene, marking the second direct air capture startup the fossil fuel company has bought in two years. The deal was executed through Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, a subsidiary of the oil and gas company, for an undisclosed amount. HeatMap first reported the news. Holocene had been racing to advance its amino acid-based carbon removal technology following a $10 million deal it signed in September with Google to deliver 100,000 metric tons of carbon removal by the early 2030s. At $100 per metric ton, the price was significantly lower than what competitors could offer today. Currently, removing carbon dioxide…

An attendee wearing a Super Mario costume uses a Nintendo Switch 2 game console while playing a video game during the Nintendo Switch 2 Experience at the ExCeL London international exhibition and convention centre in London, Britain, April 11, 2025. Isabel Infantes | ReutersNintendo on Friday announced that retail preorder for its Nintendo Switch 2 gaming system will begin on April 24 starting at $449.99.Preorders for the hotly anticipated console were initially slated for April 9, but Nintendo delayed the date to assess the impact of the far-reaching, aggressive “reciprocal” tariffs that President Donald Trump announced earlier this month.Most electronics companies,…

In a bid to more aggressively compete with rival AI companies like Google, OpenAI is launching Flex processing, an API option that provides lower AI model usage prices in exchange for slower response times and “occasional resource unavailability.” Flex processing, available in beta for OpenAI’s recently released o3 and o4-mini reasoning models, is aimed at lower-priority and “non-production” tasks such as model evaluations, data enrichment and asynchronous workloads, OpenAI says. It reduces API costs by exactly half. For o3, Flex processing is $5 per million input tokens (~750,000 words) and $20 per million output tokens, versus the standard $10 per…

Welcome to your Good Friday edition of the daybook. With markets on a shortened schedule for the Easter holiday, today’s update is shortened as well. CoinDesk’s Crypto Daybook Americas will be back to its regular size on Monday, April 21. Enjoy the holiday! By Francisco Rodrigues (All times ET unless indicated otherwise) It’s Easter. Traditional markets are closed in many parts of the world and plenty of people are taking a break from work, and that’s keeping crypto markets in check as well. The CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20), a measure of the biggest, most active cryptocurrencies, has gained less than…

Expense management startup Ramp is being considered for a charge card pilot program by the U.S. government’s General Services Administration, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The government’s internal expense card program, dubbed SmartPay, is a $700 billion program. It is estimated that the charge card pilot program contract for which Ramp is being considered is worth up to $25 million, according to a report by Pro Publica. Pro Publica claims that fintech Ramp has been lobbying for the administration’s attention since January, before President Trump was sworn in.  In January, Ramp co-founder CEO Eric Glyman and Ramp VC…

On February 18, 2024, Ian Laffey posted on X that he and two others he’d just met built a cheap drone at a hackathon that calculated its coordinates simply by using its camera and Google Maps. He and his colleagues, Sacha Lévy and Carl Schoeller, were all engineers under the age of 25. The tech had clear potential to combat rampant GPS jamming of drones in Ukraine. Instead of GPS, drone operators there have to use high-tech goggles to guide their drones by sight. But that leads to lots of problems, especially under poor conditions like thick fog or at…

When news broke that OpenAI was in talks to acquire AI coding company Windsurf for $3 billion, one of the first questions on the mind of anyone following the space was likely: “Why not buy Cursor creator Anysphere instead?” After all, OpenAI Startup Fund has been an investor in Anysphere, the maker of Cursor, since the quickly growing coding assistant’s seed round in late 2023.  (Anysphere is often referred to by its product name, Cursor.) It turns out that OpenAI indeed approached Anysphere in 2024 and again earlier this year about a potential acquisition,  according to a report from CNBC. The…

Shiba Inu (CRYPTO: SHIB) has amassed a following among a certain group of cryptocurrency enthusiasts who value community and follow the hype. It probably helps that Shiba Inu’s price has climbed astronomically since its launch in August 2020, despite the extreme volatility. As of April 17, this meme token is trading for a gut-wrenching 87% below its all-time high. That record was established in October 2021, at the tail end of a strong run for both stocks and cryptocurrencies. Speculative investors could be eyeing the current situation as an opportunity to be more aggressive. Where to invest $1,000 right now? Our…