Author: admin

At its annual Made on YouTube event this week, YouTube unveiled tons of new updates, features, and tools geared toward creators, including updates to YouTube Live, new ways to monetize, and more. Studio updates include “likeness” detection and lip-synced dubs, and the company is offering new AI tools for podcasters to help promote their shows. Here’s everything announced at Made on YouTube. A new Studio YouTube CEO Neal Mohan at Made on YouTube 2025Image Credits:YouTube The company showed off new and updated tools to Studio, which creators use to manage their channels and track analytics. Updates include an inspiration tab,…

There’s a new buzzy fashion startup in town. Meet Phia, the shopping app founded by Bill Gates’ daughter Phoebe Gates and her Stanford roommate-slash co-founder, Sophia Kianni.  Phia searches the web to help users compare the price of fashion items. It’s a mobile app and browser extension that’s essentially “Google flights for fashion,” as the company bills itself. “As we think about what the future of fashion is going to be like five years ago now, it’s all going to be about making access a lot easier to things that people haven’t had access to before,” Gates told TechCrunch. The…

Large tech companies have responded to President Donald Trump’s dramatic changes to H-1B visa applications by telling employees with those visas to remain in the United States, according to multiple media reports. The White House announced Friday that Trump had signed a proclamation requiring employers to pay a $100,000 fee for H-1B visa applications. In response, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft reportedly emailed their employees telling those with H-1B visas to stay in the United States and avoid foreign travel for now — and if they’re already traveling, to try to return before the proclamation takes effect at 12:01am Eastern on…

President Trump just made it a lot more expensive for companies to hire foreign workers through the H-1B program. The White House announced Friday that Trump signed a proclamation requiring employers to pay a hefty $100,000 fee for new H-1B visa applications, an enormous jump from the current $215 lottery registration fee. H-1B visas allow U.S. companies to hire foreign workers in fields that typically require technical expertise like IT, engineering, mathematics, or medicine. The program is capped at 65,000 new visas annually, plus an additional 20,000 for foreign graduates with advanced degrees from U.S. universities. The visas are awarded…

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared on Fox News today and said that an agreement has been reached — but not signed — that would see TikTok’s U.S. operations spun out under majority American ownership. Leavitt said Americans will hold six of seven board seats in the restructured TikTok, and the short-form video app’s algorithm will be U.S.-controlled, according to Bloomberg. “So all of those details have already been agreed upon, now we just need this deal to be signed and that will be happening, I anticipate, in the coming days,” Leavitt said. Bloomberg also reports that a senior…

The Pentagon says it will require credentialed journalists at the military headquarters to sign a pledge to refrain from reporting information that has not been authorized for release — including unclassified information.Journalists who don’t abide by the policy risk losing credentials that provide access to the Pentagon, under a 17-page memo distributed Friday that steps up media restrictions imposed by the administration of President Donald Trump.“Information must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified,” the directive states. The signature form includes an array of security requirements for credentialed…

It’s official! We are in the final week to lock in your TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 pass and save up to $668. If you have been on the fence about joining one of the biggest tech gatherings of the year, where we will also celebrate 20 years of TechCrunch, now is the time to commit before prices rise. Register here to secure your discount before time runs out. Prices jump on September 26 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Top voices sharing key takeaways We’re bringing the biggest names in tech to San Francisco’s Moscone West this October 27–29. Who’s taking the stage?…

Earlier this year, Apple introduced its Foundation Models framework during WWDC 2025, which allows developers to use the company’s local AI models to power features in their applications. The company touted that with this framework, developers gain access to AI models without worrying about any inference cost. Plus, these local models have capabilities such as guided generation and tool calling built in. As iOS 26 is rolling out to all users, developers have been updating their apps to include features powered by Apple’s local AI models. Apple’s models are small compared with leading models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or Meta.…

When Vietnamese singer Duc Phuc held aloft the crystal cup trophy in Moscow’s Live Arena on Saturday night, he became the inaugural winner of new song contest Intervision — a Russian answer to Eurovision that some say is as much about politics and power as it is about performance.In a show overflowing with thundering vocals and pyrotechnics, Duc Phuc’s song “Phu Dong Thien Vuong,” a heady mix of pop, rap and dubstep, saw off second-place Kyrgyzstan to take home the grand prize of 30 million rubles (about $360,000).The final also brought the unexpected. Moments before the U.S. entrant, Australian-born Vassy,…

British renewable energy provider Octopus Energy said this week that it’s spinning off Kraken, its tech platform for utilities, spurred in part by $500 million in committed annual revenue from other utilities and energy providers. An eventual Kraken IPO could be valued at $15 billion and could occur within a year, according to The Wall Street Journal. Kraken was actually the company’s initial product, per Octopus CEO Greg Jackson. “We created Octopus as the ‘demo client,’” he told the Journal earlier this year. That demo client has since grown to provide power to more than 7.7 million households in the…