Auston Bunsen had a lot of free time after his company QuickNode reached a certain size. That company, a blockchain developer platform, was founded in 2017 and subsequently raised around $60 million in funding, according to Pitchbook. Then Bunsen started thinking about the fact that people would perhaps like to unlock their doors with their iPhone. “I eventually met…
With Meta’s new range of smart glasses, Mark Zuckerberg is pitching a vision of the future that sci-fi authors have been warning about for decades — one where privacy is truly dead, and everyone is recording everyone else at all times. This in itself is nothing new. Introduced at the company’s recent Meta Connect event,…
While enterprises looking to sell goods and services online wait for the backbone of agentic commerce to be hashed out, PayPal is hoping its new features will bridge the gap. The payments company is launching a discoverability solution that allows enterprises to make its product available on any chat platform, regardless of the model or…
The MTA says the spiked partitions it has introduced at 180-plus stations have helped reduce evasions. But at what cost? In January 2025, subway riders at the 59th Street-Lexington Avenue station in Manhattan noticed a surprising new addition: spiked metal partitions between each fare gate. Some commuters called the partitions “silly and foolish.” Others said…
OpenAI is offering its ChatGPT Go plan available free of charge for one year to users in India who sign up during a limited promotional period starting November 4, as the company looks to expand in one of its top markets. On Tuesday, OpenAI announced the promotion but did not specify how long the offer…
Of all the companies that could have launched a robot vacuum in 2025, I didn’t have DJI in the running — but here we are. The drone and camera manufacturer released the DJI Romo robovac in Europe today, following its China debut this summer. The Romo is a combo robot vacuum and mop with a…
A new framework developed by researchers at Google Cloud and DeepMind aims to address one of the key challenges of developing computer use agents (CUAs): Gathering high-quality training examples at scale. The framework, dubbed Watch & Learn (W&L), addresses the problem of training data generation in a way that doesn’t require human annotation and can…
As ghost tour chains grow, the haunted history sector has seen allegations of unfair competition and labor violations that spookily echo the rise of other online-enabled businesses. When David Dominé moved to Louisville, Kentucky, for law school in the 1990s, he was captivated by the historic district of Old Louisville, lined with stately Victorian mansions….
At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, Sequoia managing partner Roelof Botha argued that the venture industry isn’t an asset class, and that throwing more money into Silicon Valley doesn’t lead to better companies. “Investing in venture is a return-free risk,” Botha said during an interview on TechCrunch’s Disrupt’s main stage on Monday. “Anybody who’s studied the capital…
We’re still in the process of understanding how Grokipedia works. Since 2001, Wikipedia has been the backbone of knowledge on the internet. Hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, it remains the only top website in the world run by a nonprofit. Unlike newer projects, Wikipedia’s strengths are clear: it has transparent policies, rigorous volunteer oversight, and…
