The Rivian R2, an all-electric sport utility vehicle that’s smaller and more affordable than the automaker’s flagship SUV, appears to be a hit with potential customers.
At least, if the number of reservations for the R2 is any guide.
Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe posted Friday on Instagram that the company had received more than 68,000 R2 reservations less than 24 hours since the vehicle was revealed at an event in Laguna Beach, California.
The R2 is a five-seat, all-electric midsized SUV that will have more than 300 miles of range and a base price of $45,000.
Rivian also revealed Thursday the R3 and the R3x, all-electric hatchback vehicles with sporty Honda e vibes.
X announced a new long-form post format called Articles today.
The feature, which is only available to Premium+ subscribers and verified organizations, lets users publish posts with text formatting, other X posts, and embedded videos and images — akin to a post on a WordPress-like content management system or an article on Medium.
Last year, the Elon Musk-owned social network increased the limit for long posts to 25,000 characters for paying users.
And yet, in July 2023, Musk noted that the company is working on a way for creators to post long-form articles with mixed media.
Musk has long pushed creators like MrBeast and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson to post on X directly.
Sea is “still making changes” and has yet to launch its popular mobile game Free Fire in India, more than six months after announcing plans to do so.
Garena, the gaming unit of Sea, announced plans to relaunch Free Fire in India in August last year.
At the time, Garena said Free Fire India will be made available in the country on September 5.
India banned Free Fire and dozens of other Chinese apps in 2022.
Days later, Sea said it was shutting down Shopee’s operations in India, months into testing the social commerce service in the country.
Welcome to TechCrunch Crypto, formerly known as Chain Reaction.
Hello and welcome back to the TechCrunch Crypto newsletter.
We discussed spot bitcoin ETFs, regulation of digital assets and what the next era for crypto could look like.
This week in web3Crunching numbersAs mentioned, this week the crypto space saw all-time highs for bitcoin.
In a first for Chain Reaction, we also minted this podcast on Zora’s platform, which you can check out here.
The occasion was the unveiling of the Rivian R2, a smaller and more affordable all-electric SUV, and a vital vehicle for the EV upstart hoping to show the world it’s here to stay.
The air was filled with conversations about their Rivian vehicles, exclamations and congratulations, hugs and handshakes, and discussions of their hopes for the R2.
When the Rivian R2 did arrive — it did not come alone.
The R2, a two-row all-electric SUV that will have an estimated range of 300 miles and a base price of $45,000, was the main event.
Today, Rivian produces four vehicles at its sole factory in Normal, Illinois: its two consumer vehicles, the R1T truck and R1S SUV, and two versions of its commercial van.
PayPal launches Tap to Pay on iPhone for businesses using Venmo and Zettle in the USPayPal announced today that it’s launching “Tap to Pay” for merchants with an iPhone through the Venmo and Zettle apps in the U.S. PayPal, which owns both Venmo and Zettle, says the feature will allow businesses to accept contactless card and digital wallet payments directly on their iPhones with no additional cost or hardware.
In addition to being able to accept payments from cards or digital wallets like Apple Pay or Google Pay, Tap to Pay allows merchants to add taxes, accept tips, send receipts and issue refunds without any additional hardware.
Funds from sales are quickly put into a business’s Venmo or PayPal Zettle account, the company says.
With Tap to Pay on iPhone, Venmo business profile users will be able to reach for customers by accepting payments from buyers even if they don’t have a Venmo account.
A year later, Strip enabled businesses to carry out Tap to Pay transactions on NFC-equipped Android devices, as well.
The guy who founded that – Jim Jannard – became a billionaire after selling a lot of sunnies, then went on to found RED digital cinema, one of the first major digital cinema camera brands.
Today, Nikon announced that Nikon Corporation has announced its agreement to acquire the camera manufacturer, and turning into a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Nikon Corporation.
This sensor’s physical size was comparable to analog film, bridging the gap between digital and traditional film production.
This short film convinced director Steven Soderbergh to shoot his film “Che” with Red technology, marking a significant milestone in digital cinema.
The company’s cameras were used to film over 25% of the top 100 grossing films filmed on digital video in the US shot on digital video by 2016.
Adobe is making it easier for users to create and publish social content on mobile, as the company announced today that it’s launching the latest version of the Adobe Express app in beta.
With this update, Adobe is bringing its Firefly AI models directly into the app, allowing users to quickly create and edit social content using generative AI tools.
The Adobe Express app lets you preview and publish content to social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
Since Apple restricts the number of beta users in apps, iOS users need to sign up to get access to the beta app.
Today’s announcement comes a few weeks after Adobe and TikTok announced that TikTok’s AI-powered Creative Assistant is now available directly within Adobe Express.
It has solutions to address blockchain transactions and solutions for data exchange around artificial intelligence training and usage.
It has also built and posted four libraries to carry out that work on GitHub and claims that 3,000 developers are using these.
Zama’s technology is the key to build multiplayer, privacy-preserving applications,” said Kyle Samani, managing partner of Multicoin Capital, in a statement.
That still doesn’t represent useful speeds for most of the world’s transactions, but given that blockchain transactions themselves are typically slow-moving, that presented an opportunity to offer Zama’s solutions to crypto developers.
In the meantime, companies like Zama are continuing to work on algorithms and techniques to compress the work involved to carry out homomorphic encryption on existing infrastructure.
The NYT Games app is debuting a new redesign to help users discover games and track their progress more easily.
The redesign comes nearly a year after the New York Times renamed its games-focused app from “NYT Crosswords” to “NYT Games” to better represent its growing family of games.
NYT Games principal product designer Lian Chang told TechCrunch that the redesign caters to both old and new players.
Chang says the redesigned game cards incentivize players to come back to a game and finish it.
The idea behind the redesigned game cards was to not only be inviting for discovery purposes, but also be functional.
