The Truecaller TRAI dispute has moved from back-channel grumbling to a full public row, with Truecaller’s CEO taking to X to accuse India’s telecom regulator of making consumers less safe, not more. It’s the kind of spat that regulators usually win quietly. This one isn’t going quietly. CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala’s complaint centres on the 1400 and 1600 number series: a dedicated range India’s Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) introduced in 2024 to separate legitimate business calls from spam. Telemarketing uses the 1400 series; service and transactional calls use 1600. The idea was that a dedicated, identifiable range would rebuild…
Author: Marcus Hale
Marcus Hale
Marcus Hale has been filing general news for the better part of fifteen years. He started at a regional evening paper, moved to a mid-sized digital outlet covering UK news, and spent three years as a general assignment reporter before going freelance. He has covered inquests, council elections, infrastructure announcements, and the kind of stories that sit on page five but matter on page one. He writes about public services, housing, local government, and the institutional stories that take six months to develop and thirty seconds to read. He prefers facts to angles and considers that unfashionable. Marcus lives in Bristol. He still reads the local paper and thinks that makes him an endangered species.
Google Photos Video Remix is Google’s latest move to make generative AI feel less like a lab experiment and more like something you’ll actually use on your phone. Announced on Wednesday, the feature lets users transform videos in seconds, applying cinematic relighting, background swaps, and artistic styles such as watercolour, raw sketchbook, and oil painting effects, all from the app’s Create tab. The tool is powered by Gemini Omni Flash, Google’s recently released model that promises to ‘create anything from any input.’ Before landing in Google Photos, the model initially rolled out to the Gemini app, Google Flow, and YouTube…
Vermilion Cliffs Ventures Fund II has closed at $25 million, with solo GP Ashley Smith targeting AI infrastructure, security, and developer tools through cheques of $500,000 to $1 million per company. The Delaware-registered vehicle, filed with the SEC, is the follow-on to a $13 million debut fund that punched above its weight before anyone was paying close attention.Smith told TechCrunch she raised the new fund in around four months, with the bulk of capital coming from existing investors. Make of that what you will: re-ups from LPs who already know your portfolio is usually the most honest signal a manager…
The ZML LLMD inference server launched this week as a free product, promising to run open-source large language models across a range of chips, from Nvidia and AMD to Google’s TPU, Apple Metal, and Intel Arc, without forcing enterprises to commit to any single vendor’s hardware stack. ZML, the Paris-based AI startup backed by Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, wants to make chip-agnostic inference a practical reality rather than a conference-circuit talking point. That’s a reasonable ambition. Whether a team of 20 can deliver it at scale is the part worth watching. What the ZML LLMD Inference Server Actually Does…
Startup Battlefield Australia applications close on 20 July, and TechCrunch has confirmed there will be no further extensions beyond this one. The deadline shift follows what the programme describes as overwhelming interest, but the window is genuinely narrow now. Eight selected startups will pitch live at Stripe Tour Sydney on 19 August 2026. The top three walk away with up to $15,000 in Stripe fee credits. The real prize, though, sits above that: automatic entry into Startup Battlefield 200, and potential eligibility to present at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco on 13–15 October. No separate application, no qualifying round.…
Made by Google 2026 is locked in for 12 August in New York City, with Google confirming the date via email invites sent to outlets including The Verge and Bloomberg. That’s a week earlier than last year’s equivalent event, which landed on 20 August. Progress, of a kind. One detail buried in the logistics: the event kicks off at 6:00 p.m. ET, an evening slot that breaks from the morning keynote format Google has typically favoured, according to HotHardware. Whether that signals a more theatrical presentation or just a venue preference is anyone’s guess, though last year’s outing, which featured…
The X video editor launch announced by head of product Nikita Bier is a genuine addition to the platform’s toolkit, but it arrives against a backdrop of structural challenges that a new green-screen tool alone cannot fix. Bier, who joined X as head of product having previously worked as a venture partner at Lightspeed and as an adviser to the Solana Foundation, outlined the update in a post on the platform. ‘One of our biggest priorities is to give creators the tools to create original content [and] reward those creators,’ he wrote. ‘We have plenty more updates coming to the…
Forterra Lancer autonomous vehicles have completed more than 1,100 combat-support missions in Ukraine, the company confirmed, in what it describes as the largest deployment of autonomous ground vehicles in combat by any US defence-tech firm. That’s a bigger claim than most keynotes produce, and this time there are live-fire receipts to back it up. According to Forterra’s official press release, exactly 105 Lancer vehicles were manufactured and delivered under a US government programme, with full delivery completed in under six months. The Lancer is built on the Polaris RANGER XD 1500 platform and fitted with Forterra’s AutoDrive autonomy platform and…
The Netflix binge model (the full-season drop that turned casual viewers into all-night consumers) is starting to look like a solution to a problem nobody has anymore. A Bloomberg report citing Netflix’s own data suggests viewers are ditching popular shows before season two ever loads, and the reasons reach well beyond cancellation anxiety or long waits between series. The deeper issue is structural. Netflix built its identity competing against broadcast and cable television. That fight is largely over, and Netflix won it. The Netflix Binge Model Was Built for a Different Enemy When Netflix dropped the entire first season of…
Xbox restructuring layoffs totalling 1,600 roles landed on 7 July 2026, the sharpest cut inside a broader Microsoft reduction of around 4,800 positions, or roughly 2.1% of its global workforce. Xbox chief executive Asha Sharma called it ‘the most significant restructure in Xbox history,’ and the details behind that claim are hard to argue with. Sharma’s memo to staff was blunter than most executive communications manage to be. ‘Our business today is not healthy,’ she wrote. ‘We are operating at margins that are 3 to 10 times lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses.’ Bets on Game Pass, multi-platform expansion,…