• Apple’s Mac mini M4 is back on sale for $499

    January 13, 2026

    The holiday season is fully in the rear view mirror and real life is here to stay. But that doesn’t mean the time for gifts is over — especially ones for yourself. You can still take advantage of great January sales on some awesome tech products. Take the Apple Mac mini M4, which is down to $500 from $599. The 17 percent discount gives you 16GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD for only about $20 more than the computer’s Black Friday sale. Its beefier models are also on sale: opting for 512GB of SSD will cost you $690, down…

  • Pebble founder says his new company is ‘not a startup’

    January 13, 2026

    Pebble’s founder, Eric Migicovsky, is doing things differently with his reboot of the Pebble smartwatch brand and an AI ring. The team is small, inventory isn’t being manufactured before it’s sold, and there’s no outside funding. Most importantly, he says, the new company, Core Devices, is “not a startup.” “We’ve structured this entire business around being a sustainable, profitable, and hopefully, long-running enterprise, but not a startup,” Migicovsky told TechCrunch on the sidelines of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. Image Credits:Pebble “Startups are good for the world,” he clarified. “You need to have money in order…

  • Google AI Releases Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP): An Open-Source Standard Designed to Power the Next Generation of Agentic Commerce

    January 13, 2026

    Can AI shopping agents move beyond sending product links and actually complete trusted purchases end to end inside a chat? Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP, is Google’s new open standard for agentic commerce. It gives AI agents and merchant systems a shared language so that a shopping query can move from product discovery to an authenticated order without custom integrations for every retailer and every surface. https://developers.googleblog.com/under-the-hood-universal-commerce-protocol-ucp/ What problem is UCP solving? Today, most AI shopping experiences stop at recommendation. The agent aggregates links, you handle stock checks, coupon codes, and checkout flows on separate sites. Google’s engineering team describes…

  • Meta appoints ex-Trump and Bush official as its new president and vice chairman

    January 13, 2026

    Meta has appointed Dina Powell McCormick, a banking executive and former Republican White House official, as its new president and vice-chairman. The company said McCormick will help guide its overall strategy and execution as a part of the management team. “Dina’s experience at the highest levels of global finance, combined with her deep relationships around the world, makes her uniquely suited to help Meta manage this next phase of growth as the company’s president and vice chairman,” said Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. McCormick was a partner at Goldman Sachs and ran its Global Sovereign investment banking business. She…

  • Meta-backed Hupo finds growth after pivot to AI sales coaching from mental wellness

    January 13, 2026

    When Justin Kim, co-founder and CEO of Hupo, first launched his company about four years ago, it wasn’t selling AI-powered sales coaching to banks, finance services, or insurance companies. The company originally began as Ami, a mental wellness platform focused on how people manage pressure, form habits, and change behavior over time. “I’ve always been a big sports fan – basketball, football, Formula One, MMA – and what draws me to all of them is performance. In my free time, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what actually drives human performance. People are very different, but across sports,…

  • Monarch Money is offering 50 percent off its budgeting app for new users

    January 13, 2026

    The start of the new year is a great time to get your finances in order, and a good budgeting app can help with that. Instead of laboring over a spreadsheet, you can try one of our favorite budgeting apps for less than usual. Monarch Money is running a sale that gives new users 50 percent off one year of the service, bringing the final cost down to just $50. Just use the code NEWYEAR2026 at checkout to get the discount. Monarch Money makes for a capable and detailed budgeting companion. You can use the service via apps for iOS,…

  • Hands-on with Bee, Amazon’s latest AI wearable

    January 13, 2026

    In early tests with a review unit of Bee, we found the device itself was easy to use. It’s just a press of a button to turn recording on or off. In the app, you can configure whether a double press bookmarks a section of the conversation, processes the current conversation, or both, and you can set whether a press and hold gesture lets you leave a voice note or chat with the AI assistant. (Bee’s companion app currently reminds you to enable voice notes, so we did.) Like many other AI products and services, such as Plaud, Granola, Fathom,…

  • More Ford Raptor models are coming soon

    January 13, 2026

    Ford is readying new Raptor variants for its high-performance off-road sub-brand as it works to become “the Porsche of off-road”. Currently, Ford produces hardcore Raptor variants of just three models – the Ranger, Bronco and F-150 – but just one of this trio is sold in Australia: the Ranger Raptor, which routinely accounts for up to 15 per cent of demand for the country’s top-selling model over the past three years. However, the American automaker is planning a fresh assault on a growing market niche it wants to own. Speaking at this year’s Dakar Rally, in which Ford has fielded…

  • MG 4 deal sees prices slashed by thousands following sales slump

    January 13, 2026

    MG is offering deals across almost its entire model range, but it’s the MG 4 electric hatchback that’s getting the largest discounts. The Chinese brand’s Summer Savings campaign, which ends on January 31, 2026, includes discounts of $2000 on HS Hybrid+ and Super Hybrid mid-size SUVs, and between $500 and $1000 off certain variants of the MG 3 hatch, ZS small SUV, HS, and QS large SUV. However, the MG 4 is being offered for between $4000 less than its recommended drive-away price in all bar top-spec XPower trim, which receives a $5000 discount. The discounted pricing is available on…

  • Two-year plans are up to 78 percent off

    January 13, 2026

    If you’re looking to up your privacy game on the internet in the new year, you can do so for a little less than usual thanks to ExpressVPN’s latest deal. Its two-year plans are up to 78 percent off right now: the Advanced tier is on sale for $101 for two years, plus four additional free months. That works out to $3.59 per month during the promotional period. We’ve consistently liked ExpressVPN because it’s fast, easy to use and widely available across a large global server network. In fact, it’s our current pick for best premium VPN. One of the…