Author: GT

Welcome back to Week in Review! We’ve got tons of cool stuff for your reading pleasure this week: Jeff Bezos backs EV startup Slate; a Meta whistleblower accuses the company of collusion; Waymo may use interior camera data; and much more. Let’s get to it! I want this: Slate, an EV startup, has the ambitious goal of building an affordable two-seater pickup truck for the attractive price of $25,000. It’s amassed a sizable war chest in service of that goal, backed by Jeff Bezos, and hopes to get its vehicle into production as soon as late 2026. China collusion: Sarah…

The Trump administration is carving out big tariff exemptions for the tech industry. While President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he would delay many of the market-shaking tariffs that he’d announced the previous week, he kept a universal baseline 10% tariff in place, while also increasing tariffs on Chinese goods to 125% (on top of a 20% tariff that he’d already imposed on goods from China). There’s been plenty of speculation about what the tariffs will mean for the tech industry, which manufactures many consumer electronics in China and elsewhere abroad. One of Trump’s stated goals is to bring manufacturing…

In recent years, focus on career and delayed marriage age is driving some women to consider preserving their fertility through egg freezing. But the steep cost of the procedure, estimated at $10,000 to $15,000 per attempt, means many women can’t afford it during their most fertile years: 20s and early 30s. Cofertility, a startup founded by former Uber executive Lauren Makler and health tech angel investor Halle Tecco, offers women no-cost egg freezing in exchange for donating half the retrieved eggs to those unable to conceive. The three-year-old startup just raised a $7.25 million Series A round led by Next…

In a quiet transformation from merchandising giant to (also) healthcare giant, Amazon may be positioning its sprawling logistics network and growing medical footprint to potentially save lives, starting with your front door. According to Bloomberg, back in 2023, Amazon piloted a several months-long pilot program called Project Pulse, equipping delivery vans with defibrillators and training drivers in CPR. In cities like London, Amsterdam, and Bologna, more than 100 drivers participated, with several of them receiving alerts from citizen responder apps and arriving on site. (Rescue services were reportedly already treating the victims.) The company hasn’t moved forward but it is…

Amid tariff pressures and a subsequent rollback, Bitcoin experienced a dramatic $10,000 swing over the past week. Ranging from a high of $84,000 to a low of $74,000, before rebounding to around $81,000. Despite the volatility, the leading cryptocurrency demonstrated resilience, suggesting that Bitcoin may be transitioning from a highly speculative asset to a steadier, more mature store of value. The Senate has voted to confirm Paul Atkins as the next Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman, signaling a fresh chapter in the agency’s leadership. After the confirmation, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott (R-S.C.) praised Atkins’s deep expertise and…

Spotify announced on Friday that it plans to invest €1 million — or approximately $1.1 million — to boost audiobook production in languages other than English, beginning with French and Dutch. The investment indicates that Spotify is eager for more non-English titles in its limited library as it tries to compete with major players like Audible in the $8.7 billion global audiobooks market. Adoption has been particularly slow in France and the Netherlands, which is why Spotify is starting with these languages. According to the company, less than 3% of French-language books are currently available in audio format, with only…

The proliferation of mainstream artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the last couple of years has stirred the crypto and blockchain industry to explore decentralized alternatives to Big Tech products. The synergy between AI and blockchain is built on addressing the risk of centralized ownership and access to data that powers AI. The theory goes that decentralization can mitigate against the entire AI economy being powered by the data owned by a few tech behemoths like Alphabet (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN), Microsoft (MSFT), Alibaba (9988) and Tencent (0700). It is unclear as yet whether or not this will prove to be a…

Back in 2010, when Matt Rogers founded Nest with Tony Fadell, home heating and cooling wasn’t exactly an area you’d think two ex-Apple engineers would be obsessing about.  That fixation defined a new category of product, the smart thermostat, which is now serving as a beachhead for other companies’ smart home ambitions, even as Google lets Nest whither on the vine, killing products that were once core to the company. “Nest is not necessarily doing everything that I set them out to do years ago,” Rogers told TechCrunch. “It’s one of the things when you sell a company.” But Rogers…

Luxor Technology wants to make bitcoin mining easier. That’s why the firm has rolled out a panoply of products (mining pools, hashrate derivatives, data analytics, ASIC brokerage) to help bitcoin miners, large and small, develop their operations. Aaron Forster, the company’s director of business development, joined in October 2021, and has seen the team grow from roughly 15 to 85 people in the span of three and a half years. Forster worked a decade in the Canadian energy sector before coming to bitcoin mining, which is one of the reasons why he’ll be speaking about the future of mining in…

The business of moving goods in the United States is dominated by trucks, which handle about two-thirds of the 20.2 billion tons of freight that’s transported annually. Parallel Systems founder and CEO, Matt Soule, wants to change that by putting a modern autonomous and electric twist on the centuries-old railroad system.  The Los Angeles-based company is building battery-powered autonomous freight technology that works with existing freight cars and integrates with existing train control software. Soule’s pitch: Parallel’s system makes it less expensive for companies to use rail — not trucks — for short-distance deliveries. Rail has been traditionally underutilized because…