Author: Editor-in-Chief

Otter.ai CEO Sam Liang isn’t satisfied with the company being viewed, and used, as just a meeting notetaker. Liang wants Otter.ai to become a go-to source for enterprises and a new batch of products released Tuesday is the first step in that evolution. The Silicon Valley-based AI meeting assistant startup on Tuesday released a new suite of tools for enterprises designed to better incorporate data from meetings into other workflows by funneling that information to a central knowledge base. The aim is to grow Otter’s business by helping companies get more out of the meetings they record. Otter’s new product…

Tesla has spent more than a year teasing that “more affordable models” of its vehicles were on the way, and on Tuesday, the company finally revealed them. The company is now selling a more bare-bones version of the Model 3 sedan and the Model Y SUV, which start at $36,990 and $39,990, respectively. The new versions, each dubbed “Standard,” get an estimated 321 miles of range on a full battery, and will come with fewer features than the more premium rear-wheel or all-wheel drive variants when they ship later this year. They don’t even have Autopilot, the company’s basic…

There’s new legal drama for The Real Housewives franchise. Todd Nepola, the ex-husband of Alexia Nepola, a cast member of the Miami-set edition, has sued the show’s network, Bravo, along with parent company NBCUniversal Media and producers Purveyors of Pop, for defamation. He seeks more than $10 million in damages. After dating for four years, the couple married in 2021, and he appeared on 21 episodes of RHOM before April 2024, when he filed for divorce. But Alexia, one of the original cast members when it premiered in 2011, continued to appear on the reality show, so their relationship was part of the narrative.…

X announced on Tuesday that Verified Organizations, its premium subscription offering for businesses and governments, is being rebranded and will now be split into two offerings: Premium Business and Premium Organizations. While the Premium Organizations tier comes with a grey checkmark and is intended for governments and multilateral organizations, Premium Business will feature a gold checkmark and is designed to help businesses drive growth on X. The Premium Business subscription offering includes new tools for businesses to scale their organizations, whether they’re a small business, startup, or global corporation, X says. There are three tiers for Premium Business: Basic,…

The Indian government’s tax authority has fixed a security flaw in its income tax filing portal that was exposing sensitive taxpayers’ data, TechCrunch has exclusively learned and confirmed with authorities. The flaw, discovered in September by a pair of security researchers Akshay CS and “Viral,” allowed anyone who was logged into the income tax department’s e-Filing portal to access up-to-date personal and financial data of other people. The exposed data included full names, home addresses, email addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, and bank account details of people who pay taxes on their income in India. The data also exposed…

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) paid $825,000 earlier this year to a company that manufactures vehicles equipped with various technologies for law enforcement, including fake cellphone towers known as “cell-site simulators,” which can be used to spy on nearby phones. According to public records, the award dated May 8 “provides Cell Site Simulator (CSS) Vehicles to support the Homeland Security Technical Operations program” and is a modification for “additional CSS Vehicles.” The contract was signed with TechOps Specialty Vehicles (TOSV), a Maryland-based company. TOSV also signed a similar contract with ICE in September 2024 for $818,000, showing that the relationship…

Hackers working for the North Korean government have stolen more than $2 billion in crypto so far this year, according to blockchain analysis firm Elliptic. On Tuesday, Elliptic published a blog post with this new estimate, which the company says is the “largest annual total on record, with three months still to go,” and is based on more than 30 hacks this year. The previous record was in 2022, when North Korea stole $1.35 billion. The regime’s total amount of stolen crypto since 2017 is at least $6 billion, according to Elliptic, which said that figure may still be an…

Tech behemoth IBM is teaming up with AI research lab Anthropic to bring AI into its software. Armonk, New York-based IBM announced it will be adding Anthropic’s Claude large language model family into some of its software products on Tuesday. The first product to tap Claude will be IBM’s integrated development environment, which is already available to a select group of customers. IBM also announced it created a guide in partnership with Anthropic on how enterprises can build, deploy, and maintain enterprise-grade AI agents. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. TechCrunch reached out to IBM for more information on the future of the partnership. Anthropic has been making a big push into…

Äio (pronounced EYE-oh) is the Estonian god of dreams. It seems a sweetly appropriate namesake for a rising startup, called ÄIO, from that tiny Baltic country that has developed a process to turn agricultural waste like sawdust into fats for the food and cosmetic industries. This process could be a way to reduce the world’s dependency on palm oil, which has become a staple for food and cosmetics for its emulsifying and preservative properties. Unfortunately, because of that plant’s need for hot humid climates, this massive industry has also notoriously destroyed rain forests and other sensitive ecosystems to make way for farms. ÄIO was co-founded by biotechnology scientists Nemailla Bonturi and…

The scourge of modern concrete is, perhaps surprisingly, rust. Most concrete structures are laced with steel rebar to add strength, but if the metal corrodes, it can cause the concrete to fail prematurely. Bridges, which are exposed to water and salt, are some of the most vulnerable. About one third of bridges in the United States need to be repaired or replaced, which could cost nearly $400 billion over the next decade. There are plenty of ways engineers cope with rust, from coating the rebar with epoxy to pouring extra concrete to buy some time before seeping water reaches the…