You could open up the TikTok app and snap a picture of it to find similar items available for purchase on TikTok Shop.
The ability to use image search for shopping is something that Google has offered for years with Google Lens, its visual search tool.
TikTok recently revealed that TikTok Shop now has more than 15 million sellers worldwide, including over 500,000 in the U.S.
It spent more than $400 million on platform safety and created a team of more than 7,500 people to help keep TikTok Shop safe.
TikTok has been betting big on e-commerce, as it sees TikTok Shop as its next big potential revenue source.
Tesla’s layoffs and executive departures took a bite out its share price this week.
The well-known electric vehicle company shed around 10% of its staff, impacting an estimated 14,000 staff or more.
It missed delivery estimates for the first quarter, has reportedly reduced hours for the production-line of its Cybertruck, and is seeing rivals in China stack market share with low-priced EVs.
Tesla, in other words, helped foster the global electric vehicle market, but is losing some of its primacy in that same market.
In human terms, for every dollar of car that Tesla sells, it generates far more company worth than its rivals.
TechCrunch Mobility: Cruise robotaxis return and Ford’s BlueCruise comes under scrutiny Plus, a Faraday Future whistleblower case and humanoid robots in car factoriesWelcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation.
Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox.
It was another wild week in the world of transportation, particularly in the EV startup and automated driving industries.
Exoes, a French-based startup that developed battery cooling technology for EVs, raised €35 million ($37.5 million) from BpiFrance and Meridiam Green Impact Growth Fund.
Both former employees have filed lawsuits claiming the troubled EV company has been lying about some of the few sales it has announced to date.
When it comes to news items that we love at TechCrunch, IPOs rank pretty darn high.
Another great newsy bit that comes along less frequently than we’d like is a startup buying another startup.
These deals are often very interesting as they either bring a gob of talent, or technology to an already growing company, potentially accelerating it.
So it was with joy that the Equity Podcast crew dug into Automattic buying Beeper for $125 million.
But certainly we are an ocean or two away from the heady days we saw back in 2021.
Just last year, Klaviyo went public, adding to the parade of startup success stories.
But they all showed what’s possible for the many people who dream of building a successful business in the Boston area.
When you put it all together, Lyman says, you get some of the primary building blocks for a successful startup ecosystem.
And what Boston may lack in nightlife, it surely makes up for in brain power and long history of startup success.
As Seseri says, success begets success.
The New York Stock Exchange said Monday it will immediately suspend trading shares of EV startup Fisker and is moving to take the company off of its stock exchange.
The exchange said Monday that Fisker’s stock is “no longer suitable for listing” because of “abnormally low” price levels.
The decision comes a month after Fisker was warned by the NYSE that its stock price had spent 30 days trading below $1, putting it out of compliance with the exchange’s rules.
The suspension caps a tumultuous day for Fisker, which saw shares fall more than 28% before trading was halted.
The suspension comes just hours after Fisker announced it lost a potential deal with a large automaker, reported to be Nissan — a development that has also endangered a recently-announced attempt at securing emergency funding.
A decade ago, both Fisker Automotive and Coda sold themselves off to other buyers in their Chapter 11 restructurings.
Now known as Nu Ride Inc., the reconstituted version of Lordstown Motors will also pursue “potential business combinations,” though it did not say what kinds of mergers it is seeking.
It sold the former General Motors factory it once owned to Foxconn; the assets related to its electric pickup truck were snapped up by Lordstown founder Steve Burns.
Lordstown Motors sued Foxconn in June 2023 when it initially filed for bankruptcy protection.
Lordstown’s lawsuit has more or less been on hold while the Chapter 11 proceedings played out.
Rivian has a little cinematic surprise tucked in its new “treehouse” rooftop tent, one of the many accessories the automaker plans to sell alongside its next-generation R2 SUV and future R3 EVs.
The rooftop tent, which Rivian calls the treehouse, is equipped with a movie projector, which is run using power from the Rivian, Brian Gase, Rivian’s senior director of prototype and special projects, told TechCrunch during a customer event in Laguna Beach, California.
The customer event was held Thursday evening, several hours after Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe unveiled the all-electric R2 SUV and the sporty R3 and R3x hatchback vehicles.
The treehouse, as Rivian has branded it, is different from the white-labeled Yakima tent designed for its flagship R1T truck.
This new treehouse product is contained in a hardshell, which then opens up into a large rooftop tent.
Discord is back online after an outage this morning, the company confirmed to TechCrunch.
The outage came as Meta’s Instagram, Facebook and Threads all went down this morning.
YouTube has also confirmed that its service is having issues this morning too, and that it’s working on a fix.
Users reported that they were unable to load messages, while others say said they were unable to access the service at all.
Update 05/05/2024 11:45 AM ET: The article has been updated to reflect that Discord has solved the issue and is back online.
OpenAI releases Sora, a credit score–based dating app launches and an anti-Tesla ad comes under fireWelcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter covering noteworthy happenings in the tech industry.
This week, OpenAI stunned the blogosphere with the release of Sora, a new AI model that can generate videos in impressively high fidelity.
Elsewhere, startup Score released a dating app exclusive to people with good to excellent credit scores.
Google upgrades Gemini: Google expanded the range of its Gemini AI models available to developers across its platforms.
And it’s previewed a new Gemini model capable of analyzing whole books, hours-long audio and hour-long videos.
