Tech

The first thing you’ll likely notice about Meta’s new Quest 3S is that it costs only a few hundred dollars, not many hundreds (or thousands) like other virtual reality headsets. The price stands out, because the Quest 3S arrives only a few months after Apple’s Vision Pro—a heavy and buggy …

OpenAI has hired its first chief economist: Aaron Chatterji, formerly the chief economist at the Commerce Department under President Joe Biden and a senior economist in President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. Chatterji, who’s also a professor of business and public policy at Duke, will study AI’s economic impacts at …

While Amazon Go helped pioneer the concept of the totally contactless store, others, like 7-Eleven and Walmart, have entered the territory. And the arena is growing, in part because several startups — such as  Standard Cognition, Zippin, AiFi, Grabango, Trigo — have proliferated, offering their technology to retailers.  But in …

Haut is a 21-story timber-hybrid high-rise completed in Amsterdam in 2022. It was designed by the British engineering collective Arup and Team V, a Dutch architecture firm. Haut has 55 apartments, a bicycle parking area, an underground parking garage, and an urban garden. It was the first residential building in …

Squarespace helps small businesses and regular Joe Schmoes to get software help to build their own websites (for both personal and business), even including the commerce side of things with point of sale, inventory, and customer data features (both online or in person). In the age where literally everything is …

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week we’re looking at One Zero potentially raising $100 million, Apple Pay expanding support for loan options, and another way Stripe is making crypto a big priority for its business.  If you’d like to receive the Fintech newsletter in your inbox every Tuesday, sign up …

Paytm, a leading Indian financial services firm, has received regulatory approval to resume adding new UPI payments users, following an eight-month restriction on many of its operations. UPI, which processes over 15 billion monthly transactions, dominates India’s online payments. Walmart-owned PhonePe and Google Pay process about 87% of UPI transactions, …

LinkedIn users on Tuesday began noticing a problem with their follower counts on the platform: They were dropping rapidly, and sometimes by many hundreds of users at once. With no official word at the time from LinkedIn, many began speculating that the situation was the result of LinkedIn purging fake …

Cement startup Furno will receive a $20 million grant from the Department of Energy, funds that will help the company build up to eight micro-kilns at a concrete plant in Chicago.  Chicago might not seem like the sort of place where cement is hard to come by. But with the …

Federal regulators have cleared the path for electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft to share U.S. airspace with planes and helicopters — a win for the burgeoning industry and a timely decision for startups like Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation that are expected to launch air taxi networks commercially in …