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.
This week at WWDC 2024, that prize went to Apple Intelligence.
It’s something that I’ve been requesting from Apple for several years, fueled by my own health struggles and the fact that I’ve somehow managed to contract COVID four times so far.
The ability to pause your activity rings is a minor feature update for most, but for those of us who obsess about such things to an unhealthy degree, it’s the best Apple Watch update in years.
There are several options for pausing: You can do it for one day, by day of the week or for entire months at a time.
Once entered, this will be the goal for that day of the week until it’s changed again.
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.
Apple’s emergency SOS feature has proven useful for a fair number of people whose cars break down (or tumble down) in areas with no signal.
Soon you’ll be able to use iMessage and SMS as well — though it’s not clear what the limitations on the service may be.
Announced at Apple’s WWDC 2024 keynote on Monday, “Messages via Satellite” works much like the SOS feature did.
When you have no signal — otherwise the phone will use that — you’ll be given the option to find a satellite to relay the data.
Apple did not say when the new feature will be available or whether it’s restricted to certain phones or plans.
Greptile, an early stage startup from a group of recent Georgia Tech grads, decided to take a different approach: using AI to help developers understand the code base.
Greptile CEO and co-founder Daksh Gupta says the Greptile bot is like having a highly experienced coworker who has a deep understanding of your code.
“So we’re building AI tools that understand large code bases at companies because as time goes on, and multiple programmers work on the codebase, it tends to get very difficult to understand,” Gupta told TechCrunch.
Once the repositories have been indexed by the system, you add a natural language query such as, how does the authentication work in this code base,” he said.
The startup launched last July after the founders came up with the idea for the company at a hackathon.
Building owners are often in the dark about their carbon pollution.
A new algorithm could shed light on itStarting this year, thousands of buildings in New York City will have to start reducing their carbon emissions.
There are plenty of tools out there that can convert an electric bill into estimated carbon emissions, but many are based on rough estimates.
It’s why Nzero, a carbon-tracking startup, developed a new algorithm, giving building owners reports that estimate carbon pollution down to the hour.
From there, the company’s software helps building owners identify upgrades and retrofits that will reduce emissions while also being the most cost effective.
Companies that offer role referral bonuses do so with the assumption that their employees know their work culture — and a role’s requirements — best.
But what if companies were to open up those referral bonuses to people outside the organization?
Draftboard lets employers post referral bonuses and have referrers compete to earn them by scouring their networks for talent.
Free for companies, Draftboard notifies its roughly 1,000 referrers — in Draftboard’s parlance, “scouts” — as referrals move through the different stages of companies’ recruiting processes.
Referrers are graded on the quality of their referrals, and Draftboard takes a 20% cut of each referral bonus.
X is giving blue checks to influential users (which is what blue checks were supposed to be all along)X is giving free blue checks to users who have more than 2500 “verified” followers (or, people that subscribe to X Premium).
So, basically this means that if you are a popular poster, you will get a blue check.
This also means that these lucky people are frantically posting to make it clear that they didn’t buy a blue check — the blue check was foisted upon them.
Back in days of yore, Twitter’s blue check indicated that a user was influential in some way.
Back then, blue checks actually helped us determine if public figures are who they say they are.
Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space.
“SpaceX has made rockets reusable, Orbit Fab makes satellites reusable,” he said.
“In this world today, if you’re running a rocket company, and you’re not working towards reusable rockets, you’re working to a dead end.
The same is true of satellites: If you’re not making your satellites reusable, you’re just putting preordained junk into orbit.”I learned a lot from this deep dive into China’s struggles to bring on international partners to its International Lunar Research Station initiative.
On April 1, 1960, THE VERY FIRST weather satellite was launched by NASA.
OpenAI is making its flagship conversational AI accessible to everyone, even people who haven’t bothered making an account.
Instead, you’ll be dropped right into conversation with ChatGPT, which will use the same model as logged-in users.
You can chat to your heart’s content, but be aware you’re not getting quite the same set of features that folks with accounts are.
You won’t be able to save or share chats, use custom instructions, or other stuff that generally has to be associated with a persistent account.
OpenAI offers this helpful gif:More importantly, this extra-free version of ChatGPT will have “slightly more restrictive content policies.” What does that mean?
