Storing great pools of data is an increasingly figured-out challenge. Between public clouds, and data lakes more specifically, you can stick oceans of corporate data in any number of places. But leveraging that data into something useful is another challenge altogether. The analogy that data is this era’s oil is at best half-baked. Oil takes […]
Epic Games Store Will ‘Welcome’ NFT Games After Steam Bans Them
Epic Games and its CEO Tim Sweeney are open to letting games that use blockchain technology and NFTs onto its PC store, even as NFTs continue to be criticized for being a giant, planet-burning scam filled with grifters. This follows Valve’s decision to…
Does the NFT craze actually matter?
Hello friends, and welcome back to Week in Review! Last week, we talked about Apple’s subscription addiction. This week, I’m diving deep into whether there’s actually any meaning to pull out of the NFT mania of 2021. If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox from the newsletter […]
F12 isn’t hacking: Missouri governor threatens to prosecute local journalist for finding exposed state data
Missouri governor Mike Parson is facing a monumental backlash after threatening to prosecute a journalist for responsibly reporting a serious security lapse in the state’s website. Earlier this week, St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalist Josh Renaud reported that the website for the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) was exposing over 100,000 teachers’ Social Security […]
Spice AI wants to help developers build smarter applications
Spice AI, a Seattle-based startup that aims to make it significantly easier for developers to leverage AI in their applications, today announced that it has raised a $1 million seed funding round. That’s obviously not a huge round, but the investors will likely make you perk up a bit: Madrona Venture Group, Picus Capital, TA […]
One-time TikTok rival Byte relaunches as Clash, an app for video creators and their top fans
When the Trump administration announced it would ban TikTok in the U.S., a number of alternative short-form video apps began to flourish, as users hedged their bets on a potential TikTok exit. Among these was Byte, an app co-created by Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann, which topped 1.3 million downloads in its first week alone. But […]
Plume raises $300M as it passes 1.2B devices in 35M homes using its smart WiFi service
Plume — a communications startup that partners with carriers to provide smart mesh WiFi to improve broadband connectivity in homes, and then offers other smart home services on top of that network — has been in the middle of a massive boom in its business fueled by the rapid uptake, use, and complete reliance on […]
Google brings AppSheet automations to Gmail, Jira support to Chat and Spaces
Google today announced a new feature for its AppSheet automation service that will allow developers on its no-code platform to create custom apps and automation that can interact directly with Gmail. By leveraging dynamic email, developers can now build applications that users can trigger and execute right from inside their Gmail inbox — and while […]
Google’s Looker partners with Tableau
In 2019, Google acquired the business intelligence service Looker for $2.6 billion and Salesforce picked up Tableau for $15.7 billion. But today, the two competitors are growing closer together thanks to a new integration between the two. Specifically, Tableau users will soon be able to access Looker’s semantic layer, while Google’s Looker users will soon […]
Google Cloud launches a managed Spark service
At its Cloud Next event, Google today announced the launch of Spark on Google Cloud as a fully managed service. With this, the popular open-source data processing engine will become a premium offering on Google Cloud. “With this innovation, Spark finally arrives in the cloud-native world,” said Gerrit Kazmaier, Google’s VP & GM for Database, […]