As Tesla gears up to report what will likely be unimpressive financial results for the first quarter on Tuesday, the company is making more moves to go “balls to the wall for autonomy,” as CEO Elon Musk put it last week in a post on X. Over the weekend, Tesla dropped the price of its Full Self-Driving (FSD) advanced driver assistance system to $8,000, down from $12,000. That price cut is in addition to last week’s drop of the FSD monthly subscription to $99, from $199. The push to get FSD into more cars cou ...

Tesla is not having a good start to the week. In its defense, it didn’t have a very good end to last week, either.Today the news is that recent price cuts have irked Tesla investors, who sent its shares off around 4% in early trading today. Those losses have extended Tesla’s total share-price declines to around 43% for the year. Which is, as they say, a lot.But those price cuts are hardly the only issues needling the U.S.-based EV company. Tesla’s last week saw the company slash its staffing, including high ...

Informatica makes a point to say it’s not for sale – to Salesforce or anyone elseNothing gets us going like a big M&A rumor, and history has shown where there’s smoke there has often been fire, but that’s not always the case. Last week the big rumor involved Salesforce acquiring Informatica in a deal amounting to somewhere between the $6.5 billion 2018 Mulesoft deal and the $15.7 billion Tableau acquisition the following year.It would have been a big deal, except it reportedly fizzled over the weekend – if ...

When a significant rumor emerged last weekend that Salesforce was interested in buying Informatica, a legacy data management company that predates the cloud, it didn’t take long for investors to express their negative feelings on the idea. In fact, since the start of business on Monday, stockholders on both sides of the equation have been making it clear that they aren’t happy with a potential coupling between the two companies.After the story broke that Salesforce was the suitor, the company’s stock price ...

Meta’s making several big moves today to promote its AI services across its platform. The company has upgraded its AI chatbot with its newest Large Language Model, Llama 3, and it is now running it in the search bar of its four major apps, Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp across multiple countries. Alongside this, the company launched other new features, such as faster image generation and access to web search results.This confirms and extends a test that TechCrunch reported on last week, when w ...

Serve Robotics, the Uber and Nvidia-backed sidewalk robot delivery company, debuted publicly on the New York stock exchange Thursday, making it the latest startup to choose going public via a reverse merger as an alternative path to capital needed to fund growth.The company, which spun out of Uber’s acquisition of Postmates in 2021, hits the Nasdaq under the ticker “SERV” with gross proceeds of roughly $40 million — “prior to deducting underwriting discounts and offering expenses,” per regulatory filings — ...

Google has terminated the employment of 28 employees following a prolonged sit-in protest at the company’s Sunnyvale and New York offices.The protests were in response to Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract inked by Google and Amazon with the Israeli government and its military three years ago. The controversial project, which also reportedly includes the provision of advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning technology, allegedly has strict contractual stipulations that prev ...

The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has published new guidance which has major implications for adtech giants like Meta and other large platforms.The guidance, which was confirmed incoming Wednesday as we reported earlier, will steer how privacy regulators interpret the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in a critical area. The full opinion of the EDPB on so-called “consent or pay” runs to 42-pages.Other large ad-funded platforms should also take note of the granular guidance. But Meta l ...

Palo Alto Networks urged companies this week to patch against a newly discovered zero-day vulnerability in one of its widely used security products, after malicious hackers began exploiting the bug to break into corporate networks.The vulnerability is officially known as CVE-2024-3400 and was found in the newer versions of the PAN-OS software that runs on Palo Alto’s GlobalProtect firewall products. Because the vulnerability allows hackers to gain complete control of an affected firewall over the internet w ...

Incoming guidance by an expert steering body for European Union data protection law could have major implications for Meta’s surveillance advertising business model: Large platforms such as Facebook and Instagram cannot force a “binary” pay or consent choice on users, according to a Politico report Wednesday, citing two people with direct knowledge of the decision. Yet a binary choice (aka “consent or pay”) is exactly what Meta is currently forcing on users in the region.The decision looks set to leave Meta ...