Just a few weeks after its most recent round of layoffs, Unity is once again reducing its workforce.
Unity is the maker of a video game engine that is widely used in the video game industry.
Under the old pricing scheme, indie developers who earn less than $100,000 per year would be able to use Unity for free.
Bigger video game studios would have to pay $1,900 per user per year.
And yet, that controversy had some wide-ranging consequences as many developers lost faith in the game engine company.
The new venture will launch this summer in Mercedes-Benz’s electric EQ models, will.i.am told TechCrunch during a press event.
That car had 16 Sound Drive tracks loaded, some familiar and others created especially for the experience.
Sound Drive is not quite a performance as such, Will.i.am likens being a conductor or DJ, but that’s just the beginning.
Down the road, Sound Drive will let you geotag samples, linking auditory cues with memories.
Mercedes-Benz is the first partner, where the technology will launch with 10 tracks this summer as MBUX Sound Drive.
Instagram has a feature where you can add music directly to your posts — a popular option among users who want to add life to their content and show off their musical taste.
Then, you click on the music note icon at the top of the editing screen, which brings you to Instagram’s music library of over 12,000 songs.
Previously only available on Stories and Reels, Instagram expanded its music feature in 2022 to bring the capability to image posts.
However, Instagram has yet to support music on carousels with videos.
The app is also reportedly experimenting with music on profiles — a nod to the MySpace era.
Welcome to the TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter.
I would be lying if I said that mixed reality and generative AI were two of my favorite things.
And yet, a Christmas Day TV special made me unexpectedly bullish about them.
— AnnaVersailles 400I am not an early adopter of the metaverse.
But I am ready for things to change in 2024, with new mixed-reality experiences that cater to people like me.
A lawsuit blaming Snapchat for a series of drug overdoses among young people can proceed, a Los Angeles judge ruled this week.
A group of family members related to children and teens who overdosed on fentanyl sued Snapchat maker Snap last year, accusing the social media company of facilitating illicit drug deals involving fentanyl, a synthetic opioid many times deadlier than heroin.
In the ruling on Tuesday, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lawrence Riff rejected Snap’s effort to get the case dismissed.
Riff did dismiss four counts against Snap but overruled the company’s efforts to throw out more than 10 others, including negligence and wrongful death.
The depth of disagreement is revealed by the parties’ inability jointly to label Snap’s social media presence and activities: “service,” “app,” “product”, “tool,” “interactive course of conduct,” “platform,” “website,” “software” or something else.
Google’s DeepMind Robotics researchers are one of a number of teams exploring the space’s potential.
The newly announced AutoRT is designed to harness large foundational models, to a number of different ends.
In a standard example given by the DeepMind team, the system begins by leveraging a Visual Language Model (VLM) for better situational awareness.
A large language model, meanwhile, suggests tasks that can be accomplished by the hardware, including its end effector.
LLMs are understood by many to be the key to unlocking robotics that effectively understand more natural language commands, reducing the need for hard-coding skills.
CES has always been the place for weird, out-there gadgets to make their debuts, and this year’s show is no exception.
Skyted, a Toulouse, France-based startup founded by former Airbus VP Stéphane Hersen and acoustical engineer Frank Simon, is bringing what look like a pair of human muzzles to CES 2024.
The app also calculates the wearer’s “voice level” and shows insights into their “perceptibility” and “intelligibility,” sort of like a Fitbit for speech.
The masks muffle 80% of a wearer’s voice, Skyted claims, while enhancing the volume in voice and video calls by isolating outside noise.
On its website, Skyted advertises… unusual in-app features like a “voice awareness” mode that lets parents quiet their noisy mask-donning kids while they’re playing video games.
A year after announcing its own lineup of Roku-branded TVs, the hardware company revealed today a new range of high-end televisions.
Roku also introduced Roku Smart Picture, an AI-powered feature that automatically adjusts picture and audio quality.
The Roku Pro Series TVs feature a thinner design than its Roku Select and Plus Series TVs, with a mount to rest flat against the wall.
Also arriving in the spring of 2024, Roku Smart Picture is a new feature coming to the Roku TV program that is designed to optimize the viewing experience.
The feature will roll out to all Roku TV models.
I’ve recommended plenty of their products over the years and have been tempted to check out an Anker Nebula projector for some time.
Just ahead of the holidays, I contacted the company to check out a review unit, and shopped around for a decently priced projector screen.
The story of how I ended up with a 100-inch projector screen in my bedroom is an entirely unexciting combination of pricing, comparison shopping and reading reviews.
Released earlier this year, the Anker Nebula Capsule 3 is more or less exactly what I’ve been looking for in a projector.
Factor in the projector screen and that’s another $70 in my case.
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
And that means it’s time to brush the dust off of an Equity tradition that stretches back many years: Our predictions episode!
As we try to every year, we brought in a number of voices to ensure that we covered enough ground.
This time around, we have Alex Wilhelm, Mary Ann Azevedo, Kirsten Korosec and Becca Szkutak — the people you heard the most on the podcast this year!
We had other themes mixed in as well, so find your headphones and get ready for some Hot Takes, yeah?
