For $20 a month, you can host meetings in Mozilla’s mini metaverse

Mozilla’s Hubs offering has been kicking around for several years now. Lucas described a 2018 preview of the service thusly, “It’s not Second Life, or even Facebook Spaces; it’s pretty low-key. You’re just a humble robot hanging with other robots who are hopefully your friends.” The service has expanded features since then (including the arrival…

TechCrunch+ roundup: Fundraising under scrutiny, optimizing LTV, visa bulletin update

Plenty of companies that launched during downturns went on to be phenomenally successful. During the Great Depression, Stanford grads David Packard and William Hewlett famously set up shop in a Palo Alto garage. Microsoft was founded as the U.S. was recovering from a years-long oil embargo that hobbled the economy. Slack, Airbnb, Uber and Square…

AWS now supports natural language forecasting queries in QuickSight Q

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced some notable new natural language querying capabilities that enable non-analysts to forecast future business outcomes. By way of a quick recap, AWS first introduced its QuickSight business intelligence service back in 2015, allowing customers to visualize their data through dashboards and reports without requiring the technical prowess of a…

AWS SimSpace Weaver can run city-sized simulations in the Cloud

At this morning’s Re:Invent keynote in Las Vegas, Amazon unveiled AWS SimSpace Weaver, a computing service that allows developers to run city-sized simulations at scale in the cloud. The service is designed to free simulation developers from the constraints of their own hardware. Amazon’s proposed applications here are city managers simulating a natural disaster to…

Google’s security team says companies need to get better at patching Android

Google is warning that Android smartphone manufacturers need to get better at patching their devices. In a blog post published by Google’s cybersecurity arm, Project Zero, the researchers explain how Android’s biggest strength – the decentralization if its ecosystem – is also its greatest weakness.  As things stand now, it says the patching process is…