But other bumps can be attributed to the quirks of the industry itself: It’s a labor intensive business that’s resistant to automation and heavily fragmented.
It is crazier than many other services industries,” Lee Kesheshian, founder and CEO of Civic Renewables, told TechCrunch.
To try to address the quality and consistency problem, Civic Renewables is buying small installers and rolling them up.
“Now let’s go and put those systems in place under this umbrella.”Each company that Civic Renewables buys will retain its branding but append the umbrella organization’s name.
Because solar has been around for a while, the business plan underpinning Civic Renewables could show a path for at least part of the climate tech market.
Google continues rolling out Gemini to different products as today the company announced that Android Studio’s bot is getting upgraded with Gemini Pro.
In May 2023, during the Google IO developer event, the company first introduced Studio Bot powered by the PaLM-2 foundation model.
The company is rolling out Gemini in Android Studio in over 180 countries for the Android Studio Jellyfish version.
Just like the Studio Bot, the new Gemini bot lives in the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and developers can ask coding-related questions.
The company said users can easily access the Gemini API starter template through Android Studio to add generative AI-powered features to their apps.
“The top use of Nextdoor is people looking for providers, HVAC especially,” Laufer told TechCrunch.
PipeDreams has purchased nine companies so far and currently operates in the San Francisco Bay Area, Tucson, and Denver with plans to expand.
“The beauty of this industry is it’s massive, there are over 100,000 businesses doing plumbing and HVAC,” Laufer said about the U.S. market.
Laufer said owning the HVAC companies outright is what differentiates PipeDreams from other competitors looking to just connect consumers with professionals, like Angie and Thumbtack.
PipeDreams is also addressing the skills shortage in the HVAC and plumbing industries, as Gen Z is less interested in learning trades then generations before them.
Threads, the Twitter-like app from Instagram, is rolling out its “trending now” feature widely to all users in the U.S.
Trending topics are available on the search page and in the app’s For You Feed.
The feature is somewhat limited, as Threads only display five trending topics at a time, while X shows you multiple.
It’s possible that Threads may be limiting the number of trending topics to prevent issues around safety and spam.
During President Biden’s State of the Union address earlier this month, Threads’ trending topics were dominated by political chatter.
Apple released VisionOS 1.1 on Thursday with the most notable feature being improved personas of users.
Additionally, users can also now set up their personas without holding the device through Settings>Persona and selecting “Hands-free Capture” mode after initial steps for setup.
The new version of VisionOS also introduces Mobile Device Management (MDM), for enterprises to manage their devices.
This enables admins to set up devices for custom configuration, install apps at scale, and perform a remote erase of the device.
“We know that in order to unlock all of [the power of the Apple Vision Pro], businesses are going to want to manage these devices at scale.
Waze is adding a few new features that will help users navigate tricky roundabouts, get alerts when a speed limit is about to change and get warnings about speed bumps and sharp curves.
The new feature is rolling out globally to Android users this month and iOS users later this year.
Users will start to see alerts when a speed limit is about change along their route, giving them more time to adjust their speed.
This update is rolling out globally to all Android and iOS users this month.
These alerts are rolling out now globally to all Android and iOS users this month.
Google announced a new set of features for phones, cars, and wearables today at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona.
The company said that starting this week, Google Messages will get a feature that lets you access Gemini in the app.
Google is also rolling out a feature for Android Auto that reads out summaries of long text messages and contextualizes group chats.
On the productivity front, Google is extending support for handwritten notes to docs on Android phones or tablets using just a finger or a stylus.
Google is also updating the Fitbit app with support to get data from different sources like AllTrails, Oura Ring, and MyFitnessPal.
Meta announced today that it is rolling out new DM restrictions on both Facebook and Instagram for teens that prevent anyone from messaging teens.
What’s more, Meta is also making its parental controls more robust by allowing guardians to allow or deny changes in default privacy settings made by teens.
Previously, when teens changed these settings, guardians got a notification, but they couldn’t take any action on them.
Meta first rolled out parental supervision tools for Instagram in 2022, which gave guardians a sense of their teens’ usage.
Meta didn’t specify what work it is doing to ensure the privacy of teens while executing these features.
Telegram is rolling out a bunch of upgrades as part of its January feature drop including “view-once” video and audio messages, the ability to pause recording while sending a video or an audio message, and new read-time controls.
Now, the company is extending this feature to voice and video messages.
Users can hit the mic icon to start recording and then pull up to tap on the “view-once” icon to allow the recipient to hear the voice message or look at the video message just once.
Additionally, Telegram is rolling out the ability to pause and resume recording for voice and video messages through the same menu.
Telegram is also adding a way for people to see when the recipient reads your message in one-on-one private chats.
Elon Musk’s own social network X is rolling out the ability to make audio and video calls directly from the app to its Android client.
One of the X engineers working on the project posted about the feature release and said it will be available to Android users after an app update.
audio and video calls on X slowly rolling out for android users today!
It’s one of the long list of things only paid users can do on X.
Users can enable or disable calling through Settingle > Privacy and safety > Direct Messages > Enable audio and video calling.
