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To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here . TikTok just can’t dodge the watchful eyes of the watchmen: Earlier this year, Taylor reported that a string of universities banned TikTok from devices . Last week, Paul reported that the European Commission threw the kibosh on having TikTok on work devices , and today, Amanda reported that Canada followed suit for its government devices . The bans are coming down over concerns that China-based TikTok can be used to spy on its users. — Christine and Haje The TechCrunch Top 3 Raise the roof : Continuing to work remotely in 2023 remains a hotly contested issue in today’s workplaces. What if we told you that Gable can give your company better remote working options? Still with us? Okay, Haje writes about how Gable raised $12 million to not only show your remote employees a nearby workplace, but also show them if any of their colleagues are there s

Air Company , a startup that turns carbon dioxide into things like perfume, vodka , hand sanitizer and aviation fuel, is now on the U.S. Defense Department’s payroll, so to speak. The JetBlue and Toyota-backed company struck an up-to $65 million deal to help the Air Force capture CO2 and turn it into “sustainable” aviation fuel on base. Air Company said the carbon will initially come from industrial facilities — which is how the startup currently makes fuel at its “pilot plant” in Brooklyn, New York. But the startup also has its hands in direct air capture , which is “part of the technology that Air Company would be building out on site,” a spokesperson for the firm said. The goal is not for Air Company to supply fuel but to provide the Air Force with tech to make the fuel itself. The company called this “harm reduction” to “avoid fuel transportation as a target for explosives.” “The contract is tiered out over the next several years,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch, and Air Compa

Mammoth, a recently launched Mastodon app that’s trying to make it easier on users who want to join the decentralized social web, has a notable financial backer. The company confirmed that its leading pre-seed investor is Mozilla, a proponent of the open web, who invested in the company’s first general round alongside others, including Long Journey Ventures and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff. The company has a unique founding story as well. The app was originally built by iOS developer Shihab Mehboob, the creator behind a number of apps including the whimsical music app Vinyls and the Twitter client Aviary 2 . The latter was impacted by Elon Musk’s Twitter API changes which put an end to third-party Twitter clients , prompting Mehboob to turn his attention to the decentralized and open source Twitter alternative Mastodon. Mammoth was the result of those efforts, but it has since been acquired by the company that’s now running the project, led by principal developer Bart Decrem. Now, t

Bluesky , the Twitter alternative backed by Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, has hit the App Store and more testers are gaining access. Though the app is still only available as an invite-only beta, its App Store arrival signals that a public launch could be nearing. We haven’t heard much from Bluesky since October 2022 , when the team behind the project shared an update on the Bluesky blog, detailing the status of the social protocol that powers its new Twitter-like app, also called Bluesky. AT (originally called ADX, or “Authenticated Transfer Protocol,”) is Bluesky’s main effort while the Bluesky mobile app serves to showcase the protocol in action. Similar to the ActivityPub protocol that powers Mastodon, AT offers the means of creating a federated and decentralized social network. However, there’s been some criticism of the project, notably from Mastdon and other developers, who pointed out that ActivityPub — a  recommended W3C standard — already powers a large and g

U.S. satellite television provider Dish confirmed that a ransomware is to blame for an ongoing outage and warned that intruders exfiltrated data from its systems. The multiday outage , which began last Thursday and was confirmed by Dish on Monday, is affecting Dish’s main website, apps, and customer support systems, along with the company’s Sling TV streaming and wireless services. Now, in a public filing published Tuesday, first spotted by Bleeping Computer , Dish said it had “determined that the outage was due to a cyber-security incident and notified appropriate law enforcement authorities.” Dish initially blamed the outage on “internal systems issues.” The company goes on to say that the filing relates to expectations “regarding its ability to contain, assess and remediate the ransomware attack and the impact of the ransomware attack on the corporation’s employees, customers, business, operations or financial results.” Dish said in the filing that the attackers extracted “cert

Tesla plans to build a new factory in Monterrey, Mexico, the country’s president said Tuesday confirming speculation that the automaker would set up shop there. Notably, Tesla has agreed to use recycled water, addressing a major environmental concern in northern Mexico, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said. Tesla will share more information about the new factory during its investor day event scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, said López Obrador who is also known as ALMO. Tesla CEO Elon Musk is expected present the long-awaited and often teased Master Plan 3 during the company’s investor day that will be held at the company’s Gigafactory Texas located near Austin. Investors will be able to see its production line and discuss with its leadership team topics like the company’s long-term expansion plans, generation 3 platform and capital allocation, according to the company . Tesla has several factories in the United States, including in Fremont, California, where vehicles are

While the chatter around the metaverse has slowed down, both social media companies and phone manufacturers have been experimenting with tech that could lead to commercial AR glasses. At the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Xiaomi unveiled its new prototype Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition, which weighs 126 grams and has a “retina-level” display. Xiaomi has used a pair of MicroLED screens with a peak brightness of 1,200 nits and free-form light-guiding prisms to recreate an image. The company said that when PPD (pixels per degree) reaches 60, humans can’t perceive individual pixels. The Xiaomi AR glass display boasts 58 PPD, so that’s close enough. Xiaomi said it is using electrochromic lenses to adjust viewing in different light conditions. The glasses also have a complete blackout mode for a fully immersive experience — kind of making it like a VR headset. The new AR glasses connect wirelessly to your phone, which should be a Xiaomi 13 series phone or any other Snap

Qualcomm announced at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) that multiple phone makers including Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Motorola, Nothing and Honor are bringing satellite communication capabilities to their phones. However, manufacturers didn’t provide details about what devices will first have these features and when the companies would launch them. Qualcomm unveiled its Snapdragon Satellite tech in partnership with satellite service provider Iridium at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last month. Using this solution, smartphones can have capabilities of two-way texting and other messaging applications using satellites in emergency situations. The chipmaker said that Snapdragon Satellite will be available across upcoming RF modems and multiple models of 8 and 4 series processors for smartphones. “ By incorporating Snapdragon Satellite into next – generation devices, our partners will be able to offer satellite messaging capabilities thanks to a mature and commercially available

APIs are the building blocks of how the world of technology works: used to integrate applications with each other, API calls make up the majority of global internet traffic these days. Now, telecoms carriers, often cut out of the march of tech but now looking for more ways to monetize next-generation networks like 5G, want to get in on he act. Today the GSMA — the association representing the world’s major mobile operators — announced a new initiative with 21 carriers called Open Gateway, a framework to provide universal, open-source-based APIs into carrier networks for developers to access and use a variety of mobile network services like location or identity verificaiton and carrier billing, which previously would have been more complicated or more expensive (if not impossible) to integrate and use. The plan is to be able to kick off more development using APIs in applications like immersive mixed-reality experiences and web3 applications that will in turn give more 5G business to

CRED is rolling out a buy now and pay later service and a tap to pay feature as the Indian fintech platform broadens its offerings to boost engagement and monetization on the platform. Cred flash, the Bengaluru-headquartered startup’s foray into buy now and pay later category, will allow customers to make seamless payment on the app and across over 500 partner merchants including Swiggy, Zepto and Urban Company and clear the bill at no charge in 30 days. The customized credit extended to customers will allow them to make bill payments and recharges and other expenses with a single swipe and without having to wait for an OTP authentication code, said the startup, which is valued at over $6 billion . The feature will initially roll out to a select group of customers, the startup said. The BNPL product is the latest in a series of new offerings from CRED in recent years as it moves to make its eponymous fintech app a bigger part of its customers’ lives. The startup, which also offers

New smartphones may get most of the headlines at MWC, but at its core, the annual trade show is still a telco event. It’s maybe no surprise then that the large cloud providers, who are all vying for the lucrative telco market, also made a few announcements ahead of the event. AWS jumped ahead of its competitors by announcing its news a week early and today, it’s Microsoft’s turn. The new features the company today announced for telco’s using its Azure cloud services focus on four areas: network transformation, automation and AI, network-aware applications and what Microsoft calls “ubiquitous computing from cloud to edge.” “The future hyperscale cloud is going to look a lot different than the cloud we have today,” Jason Zander, Microsoft’s EVP for Strategic Missions and Tech, told me. “Our expectation is that it’s going to expand; it will be a highly distributed fabric; it’s going to span from 5G to space. That future — this intelligent cloud, this intelligent edge — has to be powered

Twitter has laid off at least another 50 employees, according to a report from The Information and posts on social media from former workers. And apparently not even Elon Musk loyalist Esther Crawford, the chief executive of Twitter payments who oversaw the company’s Twitter Blue verification subscription, was spared, according to Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer . Alex Heath of The Verge also confirmed that Crawford and most of the remaining product team were laid off this weekend, leading many to speculate that Musk is cleaning house to redecorate with a new regime. Recall that Crawford had been swept up by Musk’s hardcore takeover of Twitter last year, even boasting on the platform about sleeping at the office to handle round-the-clock demands from her new boss. When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork https://t.co/UBGKYPilbD — Esther Crawford (@esthercrawford) November 2, 2022   The layoffs came this weekend after Twi

The Xiaomi 13 Pro flagship made a global debut today at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) being held in Barcelona. With this device — which was launched in China in December — the company is banking on a 1-inch main sensor, Leica lenses, and 120W fast charging to make it a Samsung Galaxy series competitor. With Android devices cutting close to each other in performance and display sections, the camera has been a major differentiating factor in today’s flagships. Xiaomi is using a massive 1-inch Sony IMX989 50-megapixel sensor with f/1.9 aperture to get the best and brightest photos in all lighting conditions. A couple of phone manufacturers including Xiaomi, Vivo, and Sharp have included this sensor in a few devices. The camera is capable of video recording in 8K resolution — 4K resolution at 60 fps if recording in Dolby Vision. There is also a 50-megapixel telephoto camera with a “floating lens” element, which results in a 3.2x lossless zoom. Plus, the device has another 50-megapixel

Welcome to  The Interchange ! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up  here  so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. This will include everything from funding rounds to trends to an analysis of a particular space to hot takes on a particular company or phenomenon. There’s a lot of fintech news out there and it’s my job to stay on top of it — and make sense of it — so you can stay in the know. —  Mary Ann Storied venture firms Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) invested more in fintech than any other category in 2022, according to research from CB Insights. I’m not going to lie — upon learning this, my fintech-loving ears perked up. Sequoia apparently was fairly active overall last year despite the global downturn, with over 100 investments. And fintech represented nearly a quarter of