TechCrunch hardware review: 'The dock is what makes the Pixel Tablet interesting'

I’m baaaack to deliver your Daily Crunch for Tuesday! If you haven’t gotten your tickets to join us at TC Disrupt 2023, perhaps knowing Shaquille O’Neal will be there might sweeten the pot for ya.

Today, TechCrunch reviewed the Google Pixel Tablet and found that it is all about the dock, ’bout that dock, no swivel.

After what happened Sunday, OceanGate is probably a familiar name right now. Here are some red flags that were raised about the missing Titanic-seeking submersible.

Meanwhile, if you’re getting a lot of WhatsApp calls from unknown numbers, Meta is now giving users an option to automatically silence those calls.

And Vimeo has a trio of AI-powered editing features that make it even easier to create and share videos.

More top stories for ya

Plugged in: Find out who’s the latest automaker to adopt Tesla’s North American Charging Standard.

And the duck said, “Put it on my bill!”: Hyperline’s approach to helping SaaS companies handle pricing and billing earned it a cool $4.4 million in new funding.

You heard right: Learn how Gladia is turning any audio into text in near real time, while ElevenLabs just raised $19 million to create synthetic voices. Meanwhile, Parrot raises $11 million for its transcription platform that turns speech into text.

Live from Oracle, it’s the sovereign cloud!: Oracle launched its “sovereign cloud” for customers in the European Union.

Spot the new features: Spotify released a new feature today, a revamped desktop app, and we heard that the company will reportedly launch hi-fi audio through a costlier premium subscription.

Big rounds across the ocean: Abu Dhabi gives China’s Tesla challenger Nio a $738.5 million boost, while Go-Ventures closes $240 million for its second fund and rebrands as Argor Capital.

On cloud nine: Find out who is taking the helm of Alibaba after CEO Daniel Zhang decided to focus on the cloud.

From winner to even bigger winner: After taking the top prize in the 2019 Startup Battlefield competition, cloud platform company Render raised $50 million.

Monitor this: Cloudflare is taking on the web observability competitors with the launch of Observatory, a tool to beef up web monitoring.

More concern for AI: The European Union’s largest consumer group is calling on the government to urgently investigate “the risks of generative AI.”

Gadgets and gizmos aplenty: In hardware news, check out the first Denon-branded Nura headphones. And be delighted to learn that iPhone 14 and M2 Macs are now part of Apple’s Self Service Repair program.

Upgrading AI-powered travel products to first class

When it comes to AI travel tools, what are investors looking for right now?

“At this early stage, our firm and other investors in the space we work with don’t have an expectation of perfection,” write Eric Crowley and Adam Segall of global investment bank GP Bullhound.

“We’re more focused on how companies are shaping and augmenting this technology for travelers, and the market segments within the travel industry they are positioned to capture.”

Two more from the TC+ team:

Volkswagen’s breakthrough could spark a battery manufacturing gold rush.

Tiger Global’s search for liquidity illustrates how busted the late-stage market is.

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