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. Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by the pandemic has slowed down. But overall, the app economy is continuing to grow, having produced a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google ...read more

Amazon gave police 11 Ring doorbell videos without consent in 2022 so far, per a US Senator probe. It shares videos after determining there is "imminent danger of death or serious physical injury." In the first six months of 2022 Amazon shared 11 Ring doorbell videos with law enforcement without first receiving consent from the owner, a probe into the technology by US Senator Ed Markey found. In each of the 11 instances, Amazon's vice president of public policy Brian Huseman said that Ri ...read more

Cruise, the San-Francisco–based designer and operator of all-electric self-driving cars, employs nearly 2,000 engineers, including somewhere between 300 and 900 engineers with Ph.D. degrees. They work in hardware and software. They specialize in AI, security, and safety. And though, indeed, some have robotics, automation, or automotive backgrounds, many don’t. Instead, they come from an incredibly long list of different technical fields—e-commerce, finance, game development, animation, ca ...read more

(Amazon Prime Video screenshot via YouTube) Amazon released the first full-length trailer Thursday for its upcoming Prime Video series “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” and it appears to check all the visual boxes for fans of fantasy television. We’ll have to wait to see how the story holds up. “The Rings of Power” is set in the Second Age of Middle Earth, thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.” “Be ...read more

In brief: It's been a big week for NASA and the James Webb Space Telescope as the agency publicly shared the first full-color images from the groundbreaking observatory. Now, NASA has started releasing images and data that was captured during the scope's commissioning period. Webb reached its planned orbit back in January but had to go through a six-month commissioning period to make sure all of its instruments were functioning properly. During this period, Webb homed in on "local" targets in ...read more

from the is-that-8-cop-feet-or-8-civilian-feet? dept Courts (with the rare exception) are in agreement: there’s a First Amendment right to film cops. With every citizen carrying a camera these days, there’s a lot more filming happening. And those recordings have often proven key when cops face criminal charges for violating rights or, you know, murdering people. It’s little wonder cops aren’t thrilled about the recordings they can’t control. But that should be a cop problem that g ...read more

(Starbucks Image) Starbucks and Amazon have teamed on their second “Starbucks Pickup with Amazon Go” location in New York City. The physical retail partnership between the tech and coffee giants features a Starbucks counter for picking up mobile orders; an Amazon Go market that uses the company’s “Just Walk Out” cashierless checkout system; and a lounge with individual workspaces, tables, power outlets and USB ports. The new space is located in The New York Times Building at 40t ...read more

Forward-looking: Intel has announced a partnership with Green Revolution Cooling (GRC) to develop sustainable immersion cooling for data centers. The first fruits of their partnership are findings on the usefulness of immersion cooling, described within a newly published whitepaper. According to two estimates from 2020, data centers consume anywhere from 1.5% to 2% of the world's energy and could be consuming as much as 13% within ten years. Around half of that energy is used by the computers ...read more

Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. This will include everything from funding rounds to trends to an analysis of a particular space to hot takes on a particular company or phenomenon. There’s a lot of fintech news out ther ...read more

Billionaires, satellite links, political chicanery: a present-day, oligopolistic game of jockeying for prime placement in the 12-gigahertz spectrum has at least a few of the ingredients of a thriller. Or—given the outsize personalities involved (including Elon Musk and Michael Dell) and the epic, five-year duration of the dispute to date—maybe more like a space opera.At issue is a set of frequencies where Musk’s SpaceX sets its Starlink Internet service, the company's well-publicized play ...read more