Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices…
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E-bike startup Cowboy has launched the Cowboy 4, its newest generation of urban electric bikes. The bike will come in two different frames, a traditional frame, and a step-through.The C4 is basically an upgrade on the previous version 3, while the ‘C4 ST’ is a step-through model which the company is predicting will appeal to…
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The internet is now our nervous system. We are constantly streaming and buying and watching and liking, our brains locked into the global information matrix as one universal and coruscating emanation of thought and emotion. What happens when the machine stops though? It’s a question that E.M. Forster was intensely focused on more than a…
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The president of the European Council has said the Biden administration’s calls for vaccine patent waivers will not be a “magic bullet” for poorer countries needing access to live saving-jabs as EU leaders showed a united front in demanding more exports from richer countries. Speaking after the first day of an EU leaders meeting in…
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Before becoming president, Joe Biden pledged to upend the US government’s approach to the pharmaceutical industry by backing a move to end companies’ rights to enforce their intellectual property on Covid vaccines. “This is the only humane thing in the world to do,” he said during a campaign event in July 2020. But until the…
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Joe Biden last year pledged to upend the US government’s approach to the pharmaceutical industry by backing a move to end companies’ rights to enforce their intellectual property on Covid vaccines. “This is the only humane thing in the world to do,” he said during a campaign event in July 2020. But until the moment…
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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. PDT, subscribe here. Our thanks to everyone who wrote in this week about the format changes to the newsletter! Feedback largely sorted into two themes: Some people really like the more narrative format, and some…
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The coronavirus pandemic was meant to propel the Serum Institute of India and its chief executive Adar Poonawalla from an obscure drug manufacturer into the world’s vaccine saviour. Poonawalla, the suave billionaire “vaccine prince” who took over the business from his father Cyrus 10 years ago, embraced the spotlight, extolling his company’s role at the…
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The coronavirus pandemic was meant to propel the Serum Institute of India and its chief executive Adar Poonawalla from an obscure drug manufacturer into the world’s vaccine saviour. Poonawalla, the suave billionaire “vaccine prince” who took over the business from his father Cyrus 10 years ago, embraced the spotlight, extolling his company’s role at the…
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What Tesla CEO Elon Musk says publicly about the company’s progress on a fully autonomous driving system doesn’t match up with “engineering reality,” according to a memo that summarizes a meeting between California regulators and employees at the automaker. The memo, which transparency site Plainsite obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request and subsequently…
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