Technical

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...

Is Tumblr porn making a comeback? No, it’s not — and Amanda Silberling joins me on this week’s TechCrunch podcast to explain why, and why people thought it might be. Devin Coldewey also joins us to talk about NASA’s DART mission, which saw the US space agency throw a little spacecraft at a big asteroid moon. Yes it’s all real and it all makes sense, I promise. And of course, we run down the biggest stories in tech this past week that you need to know about. By the way, if you recently were laid off, TechCrunch is offering a free expo pass to Disrupt (Oct. 18-20) in San Francisco. No strings attached. These tickets get you access to the expo floor, breakout sessions, and plenty of networking opportunities like partner roundtables and parties. For more info, check out this page . Articles from the episode: No, Tumblr is not bringing back porn Watch the asteroid-smashing DART spacecraft make its 6-million-mile shot today NASA’s DART anti-asteroid satellite successfully smashes into ...

India’s market regulator has tightened disclosure norms for firms looking to file for an initial public offering after lackluster performance of more than half a dozen tech startups in the past year and a half. Firms looking to raise funds from public offers will now be required by law to disclose their key performance indicators and issuing pricing based on past transactions and private funding rounds in their offer documents, the Securities and Exchange Board of India said in a statement. The regulator said the new step is aimed at bringing parity between retail and private equity investors. It said retail investors haven’t had adequate access to key indicators of a firm whose shares they are buying whereas private equity backers have been able to monitor and act on those data internally for years. India gets its S-1 Startups are also getting an option to pre-file their offer documents and get a review from the regulator, similar to the S-1 filings the U.S. and Canadian startups ...

It’s been a little over a year since accelerator 500 Startups rebranded to 500 Global in an attempt to reposition itself as a venture firm. It also launched a $140 million fund to invest in later-stage companies for a total of $2.8 billion in assets under management, according to its website . The new 500 fund has a strategy similar to Y Combinator’s continuity fund, which exists for growth-stage investments and contrasts with Techstars, which recently closed an $8 million pre-seed fund for startups too early for even its own accelerator. This repositioning of 500 Global’s brand and priorities sets a fresh, broader tone for its new accelerator participants. This week, over a dozen startups in the firm’s accelerator program presented on a virtually held live demo day, which featured several moonshots , debuting weeks after Y Combinator’s demo day. The demo day seemed a perfect time to check in with Clayton Bryan, partner and head of 500 Global’s accelerator fund, to hear how the acce...

Twitter is launching a redesigned user interface for DMs on Android, the company announced on Friday. Starting today, Twitter users on Android will see a more modern interface for direct messages that is consistent with the rest of the app. With this roll out, Twitter is bringing the Android experience on par with its iOS interface. The refresh also brings an improved composer, as well as better Tweet forwarding, context for message requests and clearer read receipts. The social network is also introducing improvements to the interface’s scrolling performance and responsiveness. Image Credits: Twitter Now, when Android users open up their DMs, they will no longer see the boxy design that they’re used to. You will now also see if you have received message requests from people you may know. The three-dot menu in the top right corner of the UI has also been replaced with a Settings symbol. Twitter says it saw a need to improve how people use DMs on Twitter on Android devices, which...

Between recent drama around gambling and its controversial decision to take a bigger slice of the subscription revenue pie , it’s been a dramatic couple of weeks for Twitch. Now, the company says it’s testing one new way for streamers to bring in cash from their most committed followers in the form of “elevated chats,” which let viewers pay to highlight a chat message and keep it visible for a set amount of time. Twitch’s elevated chats look a lot like YouTube’s “super chats.” Like that feature, paying more will get your message featured for a longer interval, starting at $5 for 30 seconds and going up to $100 for 2.5 minutes in the spotlight. Those time intervals aren’t customizable for the time being. We're experimenting with a new way for viewers to pay to support their favorite streamers! Elevated Chat will be available on select channels today. Keep your messages visible in chat a for a longer period of time! Learn more https://t.co/t54NIG5uay — Twitch Support (...

SpaceX and NASA have signed a new agreement to study the feasibility of sending a commercial crew in a SpaceX Dragon to boost the orbit of the Hubble Space Telescope. If completed, the mission could extend the operational lifespan of the telescope by as much as 20 years. NASA officials cautioned that today’s news is not a mission announcement. For now, it’s just a feasibility study to consider whether such a mission is sensible, given technical and other constraints. Indeed, one might assume that an uncrewed space tug might be best suited for an orbital boosting mission, and there are plenty of space startups working on that kind of technology. But apparently the mission was SpaceX’s idea, and for some reason, they (and their partner, Jared Isaacman’s Polaris Program) want humans involved. The agreement starts to make more sense with NASA’s acknowledgement that the mission, should it go forward, would come at no cost to the government. NASA and SpaceX are also each funding their part...

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...

Satellites in low Earth orbit can’t linger too long after they’ve finished what they went there to do, according to new rules passed by the FCC today. Now there’s a five year limit on loitering in orbit , which should help keep the space debris problem more manageable in years to come. The FCC, for reasons beyond the scope of this article, is the de facto regulator for commercial satellite operations, and although they have updated many of their rules in recent years, the old 25-year limit for post-mission deorbiting came from a different era. Chairwoman Rosenworcel pointed out that many pieces of space junk, indeed entire craft and launch components, from as far back as the ’50s are still in orbit. The Commission argued that it’s in everybody’s favor if we address the potential for clogging up orbit before it becomes a crisis. “If thousands of new satellites launch every year and are replenished every 5, 10, or 15 years, yet take 25 years to demise once the mission is done, the rat...

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 ...

When insurtech company Metromile went public via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in February last year, it was valued at over $1 billion. A year and five months later, Lemonade acquired the company for less than $145 million. As the markets turned early this year, insurtech left most generalist investors’ playbooks almost as fast as Metromile and its peers’ plummeting valuations. Yet, the sector is very much alive, and the “correction” of these companies’ valuations presents an opportunity for those who have cash left on their balance sheets, investors told TechCrunch. “Just like how not every insurtech was a unicorn last year, not all of them are worth zero today,” said Florian Graillot , founding partner at Astorya.vc . The insurtech market has been through a rough time this past year, so we reached out to eight active investors in the space to get a read of what’s been cooking as the markets aggressively recalibrated what an insurtech startup is worth. We’re wid...

Consumers reduced their mobile app spending in the third quarter of 2022 by roughly 5%, but the social video app TikTok just delivered another record-breaking quarter on this front. For the fourth straight quarter in a row, TikTok continued its streak as the app that has ever generated the most revenue in a quarter. These new findings, in a report published today by Sensor Tower, see TikTok again becoming the highest-grossing app in the world even as the overall market is seeing a slight decline. However, the report does combine TikTok revenue with its Chinese version, known as Douyin — so it’s technically the revenue generated by the two apps offering the same feature set of short-form, vertical videos — not one. TikTok’s global app along with Douyin on iOS together retained the position as the top-grossing non-game app across the App Store and Google Play combined, with approximately $914.4 million in consumer spending in the quarter. Reached for comment, Sensor Tower explained t...

As regulators around the world try to provide frameworks for the digital asset industry, two U.S. senators have introduced a bill to help crypto companies report cybersecurity threats. U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, and Cynthia Lummis, Republican of Wyoming, exclusively shared with TechCrunch the reformed legislation , the Cryptocurrency Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, which would amend the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 to include cryptocurrency firms. The bill is endorsed by the Electronic Transactions Association. “Some bad actors have used cryptocurrency as a way to hide their illegal practices and avoid accountability,” Blackburn said in a statement to TechCrunch. “The Cryptocurrency Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act will update existing regulations to address this misuse directly. It will provide a voluntary mechanism for crypto companies to report bad actors and protect cryptocurrency from dangerous practices.” The bill ai...

Tesla’s second AI Day is fast approaching, and with it a flurry of speculations as to what will be discussed at the event — a phenomenon that we at TechCrunch are certainly not above. AI Day is the luxury electric vehicle maker’s annual event to hype up its artificial intelligence capabilities across different business segments, with the ultimate goal of recruiting the brightest minds and engineers. Even without Tesla’s star head of AI Andrej Karpathy, who left the company in July , expect this event to be full of technical jargon and big promises from Tesla’s executives, including the big dog himself, CEO Elon Musk. We’ll talk about what we’re expecting to hear about based on recent news, as well as last year’s AI day event . But first, how to watch. Tesla’s AI Day is scheduled for September 30 and should begin around 5 p.m. PT, although Tesla’s events are often notorious for running late. Remote viewers can watch it livestreamed on Tesla’s YouTube channel  or on its website...

At a Google Search-focused event this morning, Google announced that it will soon introduce ways to translate news coverage directly from Search. Starting in 2023, English users, for example, will be able to search and see translated links to news results from Spanish-language publishers in countries such as Mexico, in addition to links to articles written in their preferred language. “Say you wanted to learn about how people in Mexico were impacted by the more than 7 magnitude earthquake earlier this month,” Google News product manager Itamar Snir and Google Search product manager Lauren Clark explained in a blog post. “With this feature, you’ll be able to search and see translated headlines for news results from publishers in Mexico, in addition to ones written in your preferred language. You’ll be able to read authoritative reporting from journalists in the country, giving you a unique perspective of what’s happening there.” Image Credits: Google Building off its earlier trans...

This spring, Google announced it would expand the types of personal information users could request to have removed from Google Search results to include contact information, like a phone number, address or email. At Google’s “Search On” event today, where the company unveiled a number of announcements related to its Search products and services, it said this feature would now be rolling out widely to users in the U.S. and would later expand to include alerts. Originally, Google had said the feature would arrive in the Google App in the “coming months” without giving an exact launch date. Today, Google says the “Results About You” tool will become accessible to all English language users in the U.S. within the next few weeks. It will also introduce a new feature, yet unreported, that will allow users to receive proactive alerts about their contact information appearing in Search results. When available, users will be able to find the tool in the Google App or by clicking on the thr...