Ember’s journey from hot coffee to medication transport

Ember’s first Indiegogo campaign drew sideways glances when it launched in 2015. Would anyone actually buy a $129 heated coffee mug? Nearly a decade later, however, it’s clear that the initial pitch was merely the tip of the startup’s heating/cooling iceberg. TechCrunch recently sat down with Clay Alexander, the firm’s founder and chairman, to take […]

Why AWS, Google and Oracle are backing the Valkey Redis fork

The Linux Foundation last week announced that it will host Valkey, a fork of the Redis in-memory data store. Valkey is backed by AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson and Snap. AWS and Google Cloud rarely back an open-source fork together. Yet, when Redis Labs switched Redis away from the permissive 3-clause BSD license on March […]

The market is forcing cloud vendors to relax data egress fees

In recent months, the big three cloud vendors — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — have relaxed their egress fees, which are a tax of sorts that the cloud companies charge customers to move their data to another vendor. It’s a way to keep existing customers in the fold, but it’s kind of a ham-handed way […]

Women in AI: Brandie Nonnecke of UC Berkeley says investors should insist on responsible AI practices

To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Read more profiles here. […]

TikTok ban could harm Amazon sellers looking for alternatives

In March, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that could force ByteDance to divest TikTok or face a ban in U.S. app stores. Much of the related discussion and debate has centered around American data security and speech rights, but a potential move also highlights something else: TikTok is growing its focus […]

Iron Sheepdog is fixing short-haul trucking from the bottom up

Will Lawrence, the co-founder and CTO of Iron Sheepdog, likes to say that sometimes building something simple is actually really hard. Building simple-to-use technology for the short-haul trucking industry is Iron Sheepdog’s goal. That approach is also why the company thinks it has been able to see a level of adoption from the industry its […]