Shortly after bringing back the Pebble smart watch and launching a low-cost AI smart ring, Pebble is readying yet another new product: the Pebble Round 2. As the name suggests, this latest device is another version of the Pebble smartwatch, but with a rounded screen, giving it a more upscale look. But like other Pebble devices, the new watch is still an affordable purchase at $199. Pebble keeps its smartwatches’ cost down by limiting what they can do. In the case of the new Pebble Round 2, the device offers basic health and activity tracking, like steps and sleep, but…

Clicks Technology, a company known for making physical keyboards for smartphones, is launching two new devices ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week. In addition to a new, $79 slide-out keyboard for smart devices, the company is also unveiling its first smartphone: the Communicator, a smartphone with a physical keyboard, designed to be carried as your second device. Yes, it looks a lot like a BlackBerry. (Quick, someone tell Kim Kardashian, famous BlackBerry hoarder.) The $499 smartphone is described as being “purpose-built” for people who carry two phones — one for work and one for personal…

Arya.ag, an Indian agritech company offering storage facilities near farms and offering lending services to hundreds of thousands of farmers, has drawn investor interest and remained profitable even as global crop prices continue to fall in a volatile commodities market. The investor interest has taken shape in the latest all-equity Series D round from GEF Capital Partners, totaling $81 million, of which more than 70% was primary capital and the rest secondary share sales, according to the company. Globally, agricultural commodity prices are falling. Risks from extreme weather, input costs, trade disruptions, and biofuel policy shifts continue to weigh on…

This year, Apple released three new Apple Watch models: the Apple Watch Series 11, Apple Watch SE 3, and Apple Watch Ultra 3. Whether you’re looking to get one for yourself, buying a last-minute holiday gift, or exploring the different models, we can help point you in the right direction. With its $799 price tag, the Apple Watch Ultra 3 is clearly aimed at a niche, high-end market and athletes. For most consumers, the purchasing decision likely lies between the Apple Watch SE 3 and the Apple Watch Series 11, starting at $249 and $399, respectively. Despite its lower price…

Europe’s banking sector is about to get a tough lesson about efficiency. According to a new Morgan Stanley analysis reported by the Financial Times, more than 200,000 European banking jobs could vanish by 2030 as lenders lean into AI and shutter physical branches. That’s roughly 10% of the workforce at 35 major banks. The bloodletting will hit hardest in back-office operations, risk management, and compliance, the unglamorous guts of banking where algorithms are believed capable of tearing through spreadsheets faster and more effectively than humans. Banks are salivating over projected efficiency gains of 30%, according to the Morgan Stanley report.…

Unless if you’re really in the know about nascent platforms, you probably didn’t know what Mastodon was until Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X. In the initial aftermath of the acquisition, as users fretted over what direction Twitter would take, millions of users hopped over to Mastodon, a fellow microblogging site. As time went on, users would also try out Bluesky, or Instagram’s Threads app — but because Mastodon was founded in 2016, it had years to develop its own identity as more than just an alternate Twitter. What is Mastodon? Mastodon was founded in 2016 by German…

OpenAI is betting big on audio AI, and it’s not just about making ChatGPT sound better. According to new reporting from The Information, the company has unified several engineering, product, and research teams over the past two months to overhaul its audio models, all in preparation for an audio-first personal device expected to launch in about a year. The move reflects where the entire tech industry is headed — toward a future where screens become background noise and audio takes center stage. Smart speakers have already made voice assistants a fixture in more than a third of U.S. homes. Meta…

Every year, TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield pitch contest draws thousands of applicants. We whittle those applications down to the top 200 contenders, and of them, the top 20 compete on the big stage to become the winner, taking home the Startup Battlefield Cup and a cash prize of $100,000. But the remaining 180 startups all blew us away as well in their respective categories and compete in their own pitch competition. Here is the full list of the media/entertainment Startup Battlefield 200 selectees, along with a note on why they landed in the competition.  Alltroo  What it does: Helps celebrities manage their charity giveaways and…

Fizz is betting that Gen Z is tired of performing their lives on Instagram and TikTok.   What started as a pandemic-era group chat frustration has turned into the dominant social platform on college campuses across the US, focused on the 99% of life that doesn’t make it into a highlight reel. Capturing the attention of a demographic typically glued to Instagram and TikTok, the app’s hybrid anonymous model and hyperlocal focus has made it what Solomon calls “the biggest college social app since Facebook.”   Today we’re bringing you a conversation that Dominic Madori Davis had with Fizz’s co-founder and CEO Teddy Solomon from this year’s Disrupt, digging into why…

The tech industry moves so fast that it’s hard to keep up with just how much has happened this year. We’ve watched as the tech elite enmeshed themselves in the U.S. government, AI companies sparred for dominance, and futuristic tech like smart glasses and robotaxis became a bit more tangible outside of the San Francisco bubble. You know, important stuff that’s going to impact our lives for years to come.  But the tech world is brimming with so many big personalities that there’s always something really dumb going on, which understandably gets overshadowed by “real news” when the entire internet…