TechCrunch Industry News

Amazon is selling access to the underlying technology stack of Alexa to let companies — starting with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles — build their own intelligent assistants with unique voices, skills and wake words. The new Alexa Custom Assistant product, which was announced Friday, can coexist and cooperate with the Alexa assistant. Theoretically, this means an […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Even before the leaks, we all saw the Galaxy Buds Pro coming. It was a given that the company was planning to deliver its own take on Apple’s AirPods Pro, with improved sound quality and active noise canceling. The real secret weapon here, however, may be the price. This morning’s S21 announcement found Samsung dropping […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For the last couple of years, Samsung’s CES press conferences have featured a parade of futuristic home robots. They’re are smart, dexterous and impressive (and reasonably adorable). But home robots are hard. Like, really, really hard. There’s a reason the robotic vacuum continues to be one real viable home robot nearly 20 years after the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Payments company Checkout.com is raising once again. The company has closed a $450 million Series C round with Tiger Global Management leading the round — Greenoaks Capital and all existing investors are also participating. If you’re not familiar with the company, Checkout.com wants to build a one-stop shop for all things related to payments, such […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Smartphone sales are bad — and have been for a couple of years now. Certainly this ongoing pandemic hasn’t helped. All the talk about how 5G and new form factors were going to cause a kind of bounce-back all fell by the wayside, as people put a pause on unnecessary luxuries. Samsung is the only […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Alternative social media apps including MeWe, CloutHub and other privacy-focused rivals to big tech, are topping the app stores following Trump’s ban from mainstream social platforms like Facebook and Twitter and the more recent removal of conservative social app Parler from both the App Store and Google Play. In the days since the Parler ban, […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As CES starts in earnest today, I anticipate we’ll be seeing a lot of hardware focused on remote work. PC sales saw a nice spike last year, even as smartphone sales continued to slip. There was a lot of adapting that needed to be done, moving from offices to virtual work places, and now we’re […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

LG spent a good chunk of its CES press conference talking about its lineup of TVs for 2021. You can expect bigger, slimmer and brighter TVs. I’m not going to list the specifications of new models. But there are a few new features that are worth mentioning. LG doesn’t use Android TV for the operating […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It might be easier at this point to ask which tech platforms President Donald Trump can still use. Payment-processing company Stripe is the latest tech company to kick Donald Trump off of its platform, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. That means the president’s campaign website and online fundraising arms will no […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Happy almost CES! Sure the year’s biggest consumer electronics show hasn’t officially kicked off, but, well, what do such arbitrary signposts really mean in a year like 2021, right? Samsung just dropped what’s almost certainly one of its biggest pieces of news for the show, with the arrival of the Galaxy Chromebook 2. The two-in-one […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices