New year, new price for the Quest 2 headset

TechCrunch Newsletter

By Christine Hall Tuesday, January 02, 2024

Happy New Year my dear Daily Crunchers! I'm back from a long, much-needed vacation and ready to deliver today's big stories. Big thanks to Kyle and Cody for taking the reins in my absence. Ivan had two of the top stories for today. First, it might be too late to ask Santa for the Quest 2 headset, however, Meta is giving you a present by lowering the cost. Especially for those of you not ready to shell out $500 for the Quest 3. Read more. In the second one, Fidelity made further cuts to its valuation of X Holdings, the parent company of social media site X, to close out 2023. X's valuation is now almost a third of the investment price. Read more. And Aria got a scoop that Countdown Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm investing in hard tech, is shutting down. Read about what that could mean for future industry investments. Image Credits: Joan Cros/NurPhoto / Getty Images

More top reads New year, new rebates: If you're looking into finally switching to an electric vehicle, we show you the five EVs that qualify for the full federal tax credit in 2024. Read more. Delivery woes: On news that Rivian deliveries slipped 10% in the fourth quarter, so did its share price, raising demand questions. Read more. Would you swallow this?: MIT scientists are working on a vibrating obesity pill that will send signals to the brain that you are full. Read more.  Click if you agree: See how OpenAI moves to shrink regulatory risk in the European Union around data privacy. Natasha also lays out how this all came about. Accelerating sales: Whereas Rivian had some delivery difficulties, Tesla shipped a record number of electric vehicles in the fourth quarter. See which model got it there. Mickey Mouse becomes a meme: The public domain just got one of cartoon's biggest superstars. And people have wasted no time in making fun. New update alert: Telegram's latest update brings a redesigned call interface that uses less of your phone's battery. And bots, oh the bots. Mythbusters: Becca spoke with some founders who debunk the myth that crowdfunding is only good for cash. Read more. (TC+) Intro: Now that The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, Alex wonders if we, meaning those who have had materials gobbled up by ChatGPT for learning purposes, have to become digital copyright experts. You be the judge. (TC+) Weekend warriors you may have missed: Try these apps to reach your New Year's resolutions in 2024. Climate tech might be the hot job market in 2024. (TC+) What a long, strange year it's been in enterprise tech news. (TC+) Image Credits: Rivian

On the pods Equity is back with a look at the latest in tech news from the weekend and what's making headlines early in the week. We’re talking through The New York Times’ suit against OpenAI, how X’s value continues to fall, climate tech’s job growth and more. Listen here. This week Found is going down under. New Zealand-based TechCrunch reporter Rebecca Bellan talked with Alex Zaccaria, the co-founder and CEO of Linktree, about how they’ve scaled the freemium model to grow the social media reference landing page startup. Alex also talked about the challenges and benefits of fundraising internationally, the upside to raising in a more difficult climate, and how they see Linktree changing the way creators curate content for their audiences. Listen here.

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Shield AI, which is building an ‘AI pilot’ to turn aircraft into autonomous systems, expands massive Series F

TechCrunch Newsletter

By Kyle Wiggers Friday, December 29, 2023

Welcome to the final Daily Crunch of the year. We’ll be off Monday for New Year’s Day, but fret not! We’re back on Tuesday. This morning, Aria exclusively reported on Shield AI, the defense tech startup, expanding its latest funding round with $300 million in equity and debt — bringing its total Series F to $500 million. Shield AI is building an “AI pilot” to turn aircraft into autonomous systems, with the goal of allowing fleets of aircraft to operate independently of remote operators, communications or GPS. Read more here. She also covered SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket, which launched a secretive military spaceplane to orbit last night after weeks of delays, though scant details about the mission have been released to the public. Read more. And I wrote about Copilot Chat, GitHub’s ChatGPT-like programming-centric chatbot, becoming generally available for all Copilot users. It’s powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 model and can answer questions about codebases. Read more.  Elsewhere, Connie has an interview with Sanna Marin, the popular former prime minister of Finland. They talked Putin, powerful women and legislating in the age of AI. Read more.  Image Credits: Shield AI

More Top Reads The TechCrunch Pub Quiz: How well do you remember the major events in tech this year? Play TC’s quiz to find out — round 2 published today. Here’s round 1. Overlooked tech in mobility: Rebecca dug into the technology that's helping cities move today. Some of it is unsexy, but transportation is, more often than not, a utility. Read more. Investor survey roundup: For TechCrunch+, Karan put together a curated list of timely TC investor surveys from the year. They touch on topics including alternative protein, the robotics revolution, the Silicon Valley Bank collapse and the future of power. Learn more. Badly handled breaches: Carly highlights 2023’s worst-handled data breaches — the ones plagued with delays, silence and unanswered questions. Read the full list.  Offline LLMs: Giga ML, a Y Combinator-backed startup, wants to help companies deploy text-generating AI models offline and then fine-tune them to their needs. Learn more. Ditching Audible: Amazon-owned Audible is arguably the most popular audiobook app out there. There are several other lesser-known options that offer a great listening experience for people looking to try out a new app or just getting into the world of audiobooks — Aisha has the list.  China’s robotaxis face roadblocks: A few years ago, robotaxis were the darlings of VCs in China. But now, losses are pushing China’s self-driving upstarts to seek new revenue streams, reports Rita. Learn more. What lies ahead for robotics: Brian reflects on the year that was for the robotics industry — and what comes next. Humanoid robots? Generative AI? It’s all on the table. Read more. Image Credits: Juan Maria Coy Vergara / Getty Images

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On the pods The Equity crew said goodbye to 2023 with its annual predictions episode. As they attempt to do every year, the hosts brought in a number of voices to speak on startup trends, media, proptech, AI and transport — and went back and vetted their predictions from last year. Listen here.

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Newest Jobs from Crunchboard IT Technology Analyst II at Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission (Middletown, PA, United States) IT Project Lead at Valley Water (San Jose, CA, USA) Founding Team - Senior Full Stack Developer at Mindworks (San Francisco, CA, USA) Senior Software Engineer at Zulu Airline Systems, Inc. (Atlanta, GA, USA) Systems Administrator I or II at City of Newport (Newport, OR, USA) See more jobs on CrunchBoard Post your tech jobs and reach millions of TechCrunch readers for only $349 per month.

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