Praveen chintu

When ByteDance bought the Chinese VR headset maker Pico a year ago, the message it sent was clear: it was betting that the immersive device would be where future generations spend most of their time consuming digital content. It’s a marriage reminiscent of Meta’s acquisition of Oculus back in 2014, except the world is now in a different place with technological advances that make VR headsets cheaper, less laggy, and more comfortable to wear. The TikTok parent has long aimed to compete in a market dominated by Oculus’s VR devices for consumers. When Meta launched Quest 2 in 2020, ByteDance worked on a confidential internal project to develop AR glasses, The Information reported . Pico’s product launch this week is a further indication of its ambition to challenge Quest, which has enjoyed roughly two-thirds of the global AR and VR market for the past two years. The Pico 4, which starts at €429 (around $420 thanks to a strong dollar) for 128GB and ships to Europe, Japan, and Sout...

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here . Happy Friday! We don’t know about you, but we are both ready for some R&R after ploughing through a wall of deep-cringe texts from the Musk/Twitter trial. We hope you get some, too, this weekend. This afternoon, Tesla is running its second AI day. Last year’s was a hoot , and we have some predictions for what’s coming down the pipe today, too . — Christine and Haje The TechCrunch Top 3 Under attack : Microsoft confirmed that it “is aware” of some attacks to its Exchange server. Carly is staying on top of the story and reports that there is “no immediate fix.” Eyeing that sweet capital : Manish has a scoop that Uniswap Labs, a decentralized exchange, is going after over $100 million in new funding. Stream on : YouTube TV is offering a new à la carte option that enables subscribers to purchase stand-alone networks without subscribing to the...

Crypto has evolved from a niche product into a critical piece of the infrastructure underpinning an entirely new vision for the internet — web3. Startups are at the core of this innovation, and despite volatility in the crypto markets, builders in the space have remained steady in their efforts to leverage blockchain technology to reshape online spaces and interactions. In November, TechCrunch is hosting TC Sessions: Crypto — a special event dedicated to the crypto and web3 space. The stage is filled with top VCs, industry experts – FTX’s Amy Wu, CEO of OpenSea, Devin Finzer and more!  Pitch on the live stage in person , in Miami, Florida. Pitch your Web3 or crypto tech startup TechCrunch is on the lookout for founders building web3 or crypto companies to pitch in-person at TC Sessions: Crypto. We know that web3 cuts across all industries and verticals – new protocols, finance, infrastructure, gaming, recruiting and more. Startups applying to pitch should have web3 or cryp...

Embedded insurance — selling coverage at the same time as another product or service — is on the rise. According to data platform Dealroom , it accounts for a growing share of all policies sold, and startups in this space raised nearly $800 million in 2021 alone. Having recently polled investors on all things insurtech, we were curious to know if the market remained as bullish on embedded insurance as last year — and whether it was warranted. “Personally, I remain bullish on embedded insurance,” Brewer Lane Ventures general partner Martha Notaras told TechCrunch. “Many insurance purchases are difficult, so rolling insurance into another transaction makes a lot of sense.” While seeing clear value in the ability to bundle insurance with another purchase, Notaras and other investors we talked to also had reservations. “We believe in the concept of embedded insurance, but a more measured approach would suit investors well when analyzing these businesses,” Distributed Ventures partner...

Tesla AI Day is here — the company’s second-annual event designed to show off its progress in AI and robotics. Viewers should expect demos and updates on the Optimus robot, the Dojo supercomputer as well as its “Autopilot” advanced driver assistance system, along with the $15,000 upgrade known as FSD, or “Full Self Driving.” (Tesla vehicles are not self-driving.) CEO Elon Musk has billed Tesla AI Day as a recruitment event. And what better way to reach the 80-hour workweek ride-or-die for Tesla crowd than scheduling this for a Friday evening? Note, this event is meant for recruiting AI & robotics engineers, so will be highly technical https://t.co/BcxAEv6qJd — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 29, 2022 Tesla AI Day is scheduled to begin at 5 p.m. PT September 30 (that’s today). If past is prologue then Tesla AI Day will not start promptly at 5 p.m. — Elon tends to run late. Like the company’s other events, Tesla AI Day 2022 should be livestreamed on the Tesla YouTube chan...

As per a report by Boston Consulting Group (BCG), India currently has a user base of 300 million mobile gamers. Growing at a CAGR of 38 percent, the Indian mobile gaming industry is expected to triple in size to a $5 billion market by 2025. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/zSawbU4

Announced in Pittsburgh last week on the sidelines of the Clean Energy Ministerial attended by Union Science and Technology Minister Jitender Singh, the California-India ZEV Partnership provides a unique opportunity for sub-national policy design as a lever for vehicle electrification and, importantly, to harness the role of states as key laboratories of innovation in both countries and the global south, officials said. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/2QvbyVl

Truepill , a platform that helps other companies offer diagnostics, telehealth services and prescriptions, has conducted its fourth layoff of the year. Sources say the layoff impacted around 65% of the existing staff across the engineering, human resources, design, IT and finance teams. The layoff comes around two months after its last round, which impacted about a third of the company, or 175 people. One employee, who spoke to TechCrunch on the condition of anonymity, said that they were told that their position was “no longer sustainable due to economic factors” on a 1:1 call with leadership. Severance was mentioned but HR has not yet reached out to the employee with further details. “[The company said] it hoped there wasn’t going to be any layoffs after the August round,” the source said. “[Leadership said that] investors made some requests in order for the company to extend the financial runway so they made tough choices, but that we were now on good footing.” A company-wide al...

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here . Today we are mostly listening to acoustic covers of songs we love (a surprise Iron and Wine cover , perhaps?), and mentally preparing ourselves for TechCrunch Disrupt. Which reminds us — did you know you can get 15% off passes with the DC discount code for being a Daily Crunch reader ? Don’t say we never did anything for you, dear reader!  — Christine and Haje The TechCrunch Top 3 Simple crypto : Cryptocurrencies are still complex, or that’s the viewpoint of Solvo, a new app that is making crypto investment simpler, Romain reports. What’s different is that instead of being offered dozens of currencies to choose from, Solvo has curated a list of 10 so you don’t get lost in all the names. Well that didn’t last long : On Monday we brought you news that “the OG app is out to bring Instagram back to its glory days .” Today, Ivan has an update tha...

It’s demo day season. This morning marked the kickoff of VC firm 500 Global’s Fall 2022 Demo Day, which saw over a dozen startups give their best pitches to prospective investors — and customers. Participants ran the gamut from fintech and sustainability to edtech and developer tools, and several stood out from the rest of the pack. The event comes just weeks after Y Combinator had its bi-annual Demo Day , its first since moving operations back to in-person. 500 Global, formerly branded under 500 Startups , has an accelerator that competes with YC. Both outfits look to back early-stage founders with money and advice in exchange for equity. YC has backed over 3,500 founders, while 500 Global has backed more than 2,800 founders, according to each institution’s websites. Unlike YC, 500 Global has geographic-specific accelerator programs, similar to Techstars, with focus on areas like Aichi, Japan, Cambodia, and Alberta, Canada. That said, today’s debut from 500 Global is from its first ...

Meta’s researchers have made a significant leap in the AI art generation field with Make-A-Video , the creatively named new technique for — you guessed it — making a video out of nothing but a text prompt. The results are impressive and varied, and all, with no exceptions, slightly creepy. We’ve seen text-to-video models before — it’s a natural extension of text-to-image models like DALL-E, which output stills from prompts. But while the conceptual jump from still image to moving one is small for a human mind, it’s far from trivial to implement in a machine learning model. Make-A-Video doesn’t actually change the game that much on the back end — as the researchers note in the paper describing it, “a model that has only seen text describing images is surprisingly effective at generating short videos.” The AI uses the existing and effective diffusion technique for creating images, which essentially works backwards from pure visual static, “denoising” towards the target prompt. What’s ...

Here’s a question for you: How seriously should we take Amazon’s home robotics play ? Perhaps a better way of framing it is: When do we take Amazon’s home robotics play seriously? I realize these sound like pointed questions, and I should specify that they’re not really specific to Amazon. They’re more a result of having been burned in the past. The road to the home robot is littered with fine intentions from companies large (Sony) and small (Anki, etc.). For decades, robots have been a kind of industry shorthand for forward-thinking innovation. Want the world (and, more importantly, shareholders) to know you’re focused on the future? Roll a robot out at your press conference, and who cares if it ever comes out? Amazon’s obviously addressed that last bit of potential criticism. Astro came out. Announced a year ago this week, the company launched the robot as part of its “Day One Edition” program, offering it up with limited availability at a steep price ($1,500). During a call before...

Digital mortgage lender Better.com continues to lay off staff, and seemingly in as callous a way as possible. Indeed, whereas most companies try to avoid repeated layoffs, the outfit — which gained notoriety by laying off about 900 employees over Zoom on December 1, 2021 — has since been laying off smaller groups very systematically, say sources. The tactic accomplishes two things. One, it has a disconcerting effect on existing employees, who never know when the axe might fall so begin seeking to leave on their own, enabling Better.com to avoid laying them off and paying out related severance payments. Secondly, sources say Better.com is navigating around large severance payments by letting go 249 people or fewer at a time. Why that matters: The company’s recent layoffs are believed to have not triggered the WARN Act , which means it would not be required to pay out as much in severance to the affected employees. According to New York state law, by not laying off more than 250 peop...