Ivan Mehta

Ivan covers global consumer tech developments at TechCrunch. He is based out of India and has previously worked at publications including Huffington Post and The Next Web. You can reach out to him at im[at]ivanmehta[dot]com

Ivan Mehta

Latest from Ivan Mehta

If you visited the Wikipedia website on mobile this week, you might have seen a pop-up indicating that dark mode is ready for prime time.

How to enable Wikipedia’s dark mode

Seeking mental health support is a complex process, but some founders believe that using AI to formalize techniques like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can help folks who might not have…

Feeling Great’s new therapy app translates its psychiatrist co-founder’s experience into AI

Apple’s Writing Tools feature will show a message notifying you that AI-generated suggestions might not be of the highest quality when tackling certain topics.

Apple Intelligence’s writing tools stumble on swears and controversial topics

PayPal said on Tuesday that it is making its quick guest-checkout solution, Fastlane, available to all U.S. merchants after testing it with select businesses for a few months. Businesses will…

PayPal makes quick guest-checkout solution Fastlane available to US businesses

Safari’s newest feature, Distraction Control, can remove distracting elements from a website. The feature follows Arc Browser’s addition of Boosts last year, which similarly lets users remove features from a…

Apple’s new Safari feature removes distracting items from websites

In a big move, Character.AI co-founder and CEO Noam Shazeer is returning to Google after leaving the company in October 2021 to found the a16z-backed chatbot startup. In his previous…

Character.AI CEO Noam Shazeer returns to Google

When the developers replied to the July 19 email, Yelp sent a deck of pricing tiers with base pricing starting from $229 per month for a limit of 1,000 API…

Yelp’s lack of transparency around API charges angers developers

A day after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about his newest social media experiment Threads reaching “almost” 200 million users on the company’s Q2 2024 earnings call, the platform has…

Meta’s Threads crosses 200 million active users

Google Thursday said that it is introducing new Gemini-powered features for Chrome’s desktop version, including Lens for desktop, tab compare for shopping assistance, and natural language integration for search history.…

Google brings Gemini-powered search history and Lens to Chrome desktop

Meta, which develops one of the biggest foundational open source large language models, Llama, believes it will need significantly more computing power to train models in the future. Mark Zuckerberg…

Zuckerberg says Meta will need 10x more computing power to train Llama 4 than Llama 3

WhatsApp’s massive 500 million users in India have supercharged Meta’s AI ambitions. Meta CFO Susan Li said Wednesday that India is the largest market in terms of Meta AI usage,…

Meta says India is the largest market for Meta AI usage

If you are on the developer beta, you can only use Apple Intelligence features if your language is set to U.S. English and region is set to U.S.

How to enable Apple Intelligence on your iPhone

Bending Spoons said that it will continue reserving 30% of WeTransfer’s advertising space to give back campaigns and editorial content.

Bending Spoons acquires file transfer service WeTransfer

You can even upload a screenshot of a ticket, or a list of cities you are visiting and ask Mindtrip’s assistant to suggest places to visit, bars and restaurants.

Travel startup Mindtrip’s new feature lets you build an itinerary from a screenshot, YouTube or TikTok video

Threads users in the U.S. can now see a label that highlights related trending topics above posts.

Threads now highlights relevant trending topics above posts

AI hardware is all the rage in startup land — though receptions have thus far been mixed. Two notable examples, Rabbit and Humane, released devices to disappointing results. a16z-backed Limitless…

Friend’s $99 necklace uses AI to help combat loneliness

Meta said Monday that it is rolling out its AI studio to all creators in the U.S. to let them make personalized AI-powered chatbots. The company first announced the AI…

Meta is rolling out its AI Studio in the US for creators to build AI chatbots

Users who have signed up for iOS 18’s developer beta can now get the first taste of Apple Intelligence as the company has released some features of its AI suite…

Apple brings Apple Intelligence with iOS 18.1 dev beta, but there are a lot of limitations

The promise of AI and large language models (LLMs) is the ability to understand increasingly wider amounts of context and make sense of that information easily, so it makes sense…

Bee raises $7M for its wearable AI assistant that learns from your conversations

WhatsApp has recently ramped up its marketing push in the U.S.

Mark Zuckerberg says WhatsApp has 100M monthly active users in the US

The Board wants Meta to change the terminology it uses for labeling explicit, AI-generated images from “derogatory” to “non-consensual.”

Oversight Board wants Meta to refine its policies around AI-generated explicit images

Google Maps is improving navigation through flyovers and narrow roads in India through new feature updates.

Google Maps adds a slew of features to entice Indian drivers, commuters and travelers

Since launching xAI last year, Elon Musk has been using X as a sandbox to test some of the Grok model’s AI capabilities. Beyond the basic chatbot, X uses the…

X launches underwhelming Grok-powered ‘More About This Account’ feature

Platforms like TikTok and Spotify have experimented with events on their platforms. But rather than concentrating on concerts and large gatherings, event startup Posh is focusing on intimate gatherings of…

Posh raises $22M to become TikTok for small events

Messaging app Telegram has reached 950M active users, and it aims to cross the 1 billion mark this year, founder Pavel Durov said.

Telegram’s user base climbs to 950M, plans to launch app store

Indian food delivery and quick commerce startup Swiggy is pivoting one of its smaller businesses, Swiggy Minis, into a link-in-bio service.

Swiggy turns Minis into a link-in-bio platform

TikTok is partnering with the music distribution service DistroKid to fast-track the creation of artist accounts for members. The ByteDance-owned short video platform introduced an Artist Account feature last year…

TikTok fast-tracks artist account creation for DistroKid members

Amazon’s Prime Day event clocked record sales this year, as U.S. consumers spent $14.2 billion across July 16 and 17, according to Adobe Analytics. This marks an 11% jump from…

Amazon Prime Day 2024 sales hit record $14.2 billion

Adobe’s report noted that consumers spent $7.2 billion on the first day as compared to $6.4 billion on the first day in 2023.

US buyers spent $7.2B on the first day of Amazon’s Prime Day sales event

Instagram just announced that it will allow users to add multiple audio tracks to their Reels worldwide. The company noted that users can add up to 20 tracks in a…

Instagram now allows users to add multiple audio tracks to Reels