Spotify announced on Monday that its premium subscription prices will increase for users in multiple markets across the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific region. Over the next month, impacted subscribers will receive an email explaining that their monthly subscription cost will increase from €10,99 to €11,99. Spotify made a similar change…
Google has removed the names of more than 50 DEI groups from a list of companies to which it substantially contributes, according to a new watchdog report and as reported by CNBC. The list, Google’s 2024 selection of groups and organizations backed by Google’s U.S. Government Affairs and Public Policy team, no longer features the…
Lyft’s European expansion will include Chinese-made robotaxis. The U.S. ride-hailing company announced Monday it has made a strategic partnership with Baidu to deploy the Chinese tech giant’s Apollo Go autonomous vehicles across several European markets. The companies want to launch robotaxi services in Germany and the United Kingdom in 2026, pending regulatory approval. If approved,…
When Parthi Duraisamy was a consultant at McKinsey’s Dubai office, he discovered that the American Express cards his company relied on for corporate expenses were rarely accepted in the Middle East. This forced Duraisamy to cover significant travel expenses out of pocket and file endless expense reports. “It was a constant pain,” Duraisamy explained on…
At a time when the world feels increasingly divided between East and West, Uzbekistan has emerged as a rare middle ground, as the Central Asian nation’s homegrown unicorn, Uzum, has raised $65.5 million in a new funding round co-led by China’s Tencent and the New York- and London-based VR Capital, with participation from U.S.-based FinSight…
Elon Musk’s AI company has officially rolled out Grok Imagine, xAI’s image and video generator, to all SuperGrok and Premium+ X subscribers on its iOS app. And true to form for Musk, who positions Grok as an unfiltered, boundary-pushing AI, the generator allows users to make NSFW content. Grok Imagine, which promises to turn text…
Elon Musk says he’s bringing back Vine — sort of. The X owner announced over the weekend that the company discovered the video archive for the popular short-form video app, thought to have been deleted, and is working to restore user access. Vine — something of a precursor to today’s TikTok, but with only six-second-long…
AI startup Perplexity is crawling and scraping content from websites that have explicitly indicated they don’t want to be scraped, according to internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare. On Monday, Cloudflare published research saying it observed the AI startup ignore blocks and hide its crawling and scraping activities. The network infrastructure giant accused Perplexity of obscuring its…
Amazon is denying that it’s shutting down Wondery, the podcast studio it acquired in late 2020, after Bloomberg reported on Monday that the company was closing the studio and cutting 110 jobs. Amazon told TechCrunch that Wondery will continue to develop creator-led podcasts under the Wondery brand within a new team. What’s changing is that the…
Indian startup Jeh Aerospace founders Vishal Sanghavi and Venkatesh Mudragalla have had a front row seat to the commercial aircraft sector and its growing production bottleneck. The two former Tata Group executives spent close to two decades in different positions at the company and worked on projects that included participation from global aerospace companies, including…
