The Justice Department has launched a probe into Andreessen Horowitz regarding the firm’s partners serving on the boards of competing companies, Bloomberg reported.

The nearly year-long investigation focuses specifically on the firm’s board seats at Databricks, which is valued at $190 billion, and Fivetran, which combined with dbt Labs in June. The firm’s co-founder, Ben Horowitz, serves on the board of Databricks, while partner Martin Casado serves on the board of Fivetran.

Several VCs told TechCrunch they were surprised by news of the probe. Databricks and Fivetran are competitors now, but the two companies weren’t rivals when a16z invested in the startups, according to another Databricks investor who spoke on condition of anonymity. Databricks is largely known for its cloud storage products but, with its Lakeflow product, has expanded into AI data pipelines and application connectors. That’s Fivetran’s main business.

Given that Andreessen Horowitz has backed hundreds of companies, it’s almost inevitable that some startups will pivot or expand into the same markets, becoming competitors.

While backing direct rivals has become more acceptable recently, as evidenced by the many VCs that funded both Anthropic and OpenAI, holding a board seat on competing startups creates a far greater conflict of interest. Directors are generally privy to much more sensitive strategic information than non-board investors ever see.  

Such conflicts can be resolved by having a partner step down from one of the boards. However, because Databricks and Fivetran have different individuals from the same VC firm on their boards, a16z can institute a so-called Chinese wall between Horowitz and Casado, which would prevent the two partners from sharing confidential information about the two companies with each other, one investor said.

The investigation invokes Section 8 of the Clayton Act, a 112-year-old law stating that an individual or entity is barred from serving on the boards of competing companies. Since regulators have rarely targeted venture capital with this rule, the industry is watching the DOJ’s probe closely. If a16z is forced to surrender a seat, founders may place less value on board commitments from top-tier VCs, given that those investors might be forced to step down if a portfolio overlap creates a future conflict.

Andreessen Horowitz did not immediately respond to our request for comment, nor did it respond to Bloomberg. Databricks and DOJ declined comment.

Picture this. Meta flies parenting influencers to a waterfront venue overlooking Sydney Harbour, hands out personalized scout badges and gourmet s’mores, then asks them to tell their followers that blanket bans on teen social media use are a bad idea.

That’s what happened, according to a new Tech Transparency Project investigation, which found Meta staged the Sydney event in July 2025, five months before Australia’s landmark under-16 ban took effect. TTP’s report shows that this exact playbook has now spread to more than a dozen countries where governments have started weighing similar restrictions.

How Meta’s influencer playbook works

The pattern repeats itself almost identically everywhere, per TTP’s findings. Meta hosts polished branded events, often called Instagram Safety Camp or Screen Smart, then recruits actors, radio hosts, psychologists, and parenting influencers to promote its Teen Accounts as proof that bans are unnecessary.

In Indonesia, actor Darius Sinathrya told his 1.8 million followers to try the safety features. In India, actress Juhi Parmar reassured parents their teens were safer online, just months after Instagram was found approving child abuse advertisements in the country. In Brazil, actor Douglas Silva, with three million followers, did the same.

Many posts use vague hashtags like #instagrampartner rather than clear ad disclosures. Meta also funds youth safety nonprofits and think tanks that echo its anti-ban talking points without always disclosing that funding.

Why does this matter?

Independent testing tells a story different from the influencer posts. The Washington Post previously found Teen Accounts fail to protect kids from harmful content, and TTP confirmed similar gaps, echoing a separate investigation that found Instagram was serving sexual content directly to Teen accounts despite Meta’s own safety promises.

Speaking to The Guardian, Meta spokesperson Edward Patterson disputed that its influence efforts are misleading, saying blanket bans simply push teens toward less safe, unregulated corners of the internet. However, TTP director Katie Paul sees it differently, telling The Guardian that Meta’s reliance on paid messengers proves what the company itself knows, in her words, that “the brand has become a problem.”

The Framework Laptop 12 now ships with Intel’s Core Series 3 chips and other hardware upgrades.

The big picture: Several major US automotive and heavy equipment manufacturers are reportedly modifying their business models to capitalize on the exploding demand for power equipment in AI data centers. Caterpillar, Cummins, Eaton, and Ford are among the major US industrial companies benefiting from the AI boom.

Caterpillar is the world’s largest construction equipment manufacturer, ahead of rivals Komatsu, Volvo CE, Hitachi, and JCB. However, its engine and turbine sales surpassed its construction equipment revenue for the first time last year, as AI data centers turn to jet engines and diesel generators for power.

According to CEO Joe Creed, the company began “modernizing and investing” last year to meet burgeoning demand from data centers. A major part of that investment went toward expanding capacity at its factory in Lafayette, Indiana. The expansion is expected to cost around $275 million and create 100 new jobs.

Earlier this year, Caterpillar won contracts from Nscale to supply G3516 natural gas generators for the proposed 2,250-acre Monarch Compute Campus in Mason County, West Virginia. The facility will provide 1.35GW of power for a Microsoft data center featuring a large-scale deployment of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL72 GPUs.

The Mason County facility is expected to reach a total power capacity of up to 8GW by 2031, potentially becoming “one of the largest dedicated AI compute installations in the world.” The plant will be built in phases, with the first phase expected to come online by 2028 with a capacity of 2GW.

Cummins is also reaping the rewards of the AI boom, with demand for its diesel, natural gas, and hydrotreated vegetable oil generator sets reaching record highs. According to CEO Jennifer Rumsey, the company’s Power Systems segment earned record profits in Q1 2026, fueled by “continued strong demand for data center backup power.”

The company is now expanding its product portfolio to include larger generators that can be used as the primary power source for data centers. The new generators will use 130-liter engines powered by natural gas and produce 4MW of electricity.

Ford is also looking to data centers to supplement its automotive revenue. The company reportedly plans to supply its excess EV batteries to AI data centers and other large factories amid declining demand for electric cars.

Eaton, an Ohio-based manufacturer of circuit breakers, switchgear, and other electrical equipment, has also expanded its data center business. The segment accounted for 21% of the company’s revenue in the last fiscal year, up from 14% in 2023.

Rehlko, Johnson Controls, and a host of other major US heavy equipment manufacturers are also capitalizing on the AI data center boom. The trend has partly contributed to US manufacturing output rising in July to its highest monthly level since the Covid-fueled growth of 2021 – 22.

For as long as anyone can remember, Github has been the de facto code host preferred by a majority of developers. However, in recent times, the platform has struggled with widely reported outages and performance degradation and, as it drops the ball, Cursor is waiting to pick it up.

The AI startup, which is now officially a part of SpaceXAI, launched Origin this week — a new code hosting platform designed to do all of the things that developers typically use Github for: collaboratively work on codebases, browse and edit them, handle pull-requests (edits made by others asking to be added to the main codebase) and store them in repositories.

This seems like a natural next step for Cursor, whose primary focus up until this point has been selling automated web development services through its AI Code Editor. Cursor has also said that “agent native” features will soon be available for Origin, although hasn’t shared many details yet. The company also says it is building a wider “app ecosystem” to support broader coding efforts within Origin.

Interestingly enough, using Origin doesn’t require a user to stop using Github. Indeed, Origin is designed to allow developers to work alongside Github and pass code back and forth between the two in an interoperable manner.

“Your GitHub repos can sit alongside the ones Cursor hosts,” Cursor says in its blog. “Connect GitHub to Cursor, pick your org, and you’ll see the repos you can sync. Select one and Cursor pulls it in.”

The launch of Origin coincides with ongoing frustration over a perceived dip in Github’s services. Indeed, on the same day that Cursor launched its new platform, Github suffered a quite lengthy worldwide outage. For over six hours, the site’s functions were reportedly degraded, with a nearly 20 percent error rate worldwide.

This isn’t the first time in recent times when this has happened either. Earlier this year, after a rash of outages, Github announced new actions to sate unhappy coders as its availability problems seemed to escalate. More broadly, the platform has suffered 257 outages over the past year, a recent analysis by LeadDev states. Such persistent issues have led to “a visible exodus of high-profile users” writes LeadDev’s reporter Charles Humble.

Still, if Cursor wants to compete with Github, it will have its work cut out for it. According to Github’s own metrics, some 180 million developers use its platform as of last October. The platform, which was founded in 2007 and was acquired by Microsoft in 2012, continues to be the largest source code hosts in the world.

Spotify’s Car Thing has already died twice.

The first death came in July 2022, when Spotify stopped manufacturing its first hardware product only five months after putting it on general sale in the U.S. The second arrived on December 9, 2024, when Spotify remotely made the remaining devices non-operational and advised owners to recycle them. Refunds were eventually offered to eligible purchasers.

Apparently nobody informed the corpse.

A new free, open-source firmware called Mira 1.0 has brought Car Thing back to life without Spotify’s original Car Thing software or companion infrastructure. Flash Mira onto the device, tether it to a phone over Bluetooth or a computer over USB for internet access, sign into Spotify and the little dashboard screen becomes useful again.

There is something wonderfully awkward about volunteers accomplishing that after Spotify told customers to find an electronics recycling bin.

What Was Car Thing Again?

Spotify originally developed Car Thing for drivers whose vehicles lacked modern infotainment systems such as Apple CarPlay or Android Auto.

The four-inch touchscreen connected to a smartphone and offered Spotify playback using touch controls, a large physical dial, preset buttons and “Hey Spotify” voice commands. It still needed a phone for data and originally required Spotify Premium, so Car Thing was essentially a very attractive $89.99 Spotify remote for your dashboard.

And yes, Spotify actually sold them.

What Spotify has never publicly disclosed is how many. Reports at the time claimed roughly 2 million people had joined the waitlist, but that clearly did not translate into two million purchases. Spotify stopped production in July 2022 and recorded a €31 million charge associated with the decision.

Two million people apparently wanted to know what Car Thing was. Considerably fewer appear to have wanted one badly enough to hand Spotify $90.

What Does Mira 1.0 Actually Do?

Quite a lot.

Mira restores playback controls and the physical volume knob, four preset buttons, album artwork and lyrics, podcast support with synchronized transcripts and device selection. It also adds its own “Hey Mira” voice control for playing music, changing volume, skipping tracks and managing queues. Multiple Bluetooth phones can be paired with the device.

Mira itself requires no companion app, additional account or paid subscription. It does, however, work only with Spotify, requires a Spotify sign-in and needs an internet connection supplied through Bluetooth or USB tethering.

This is not a one-click firmware update for your father-in-law. Installation requires a computer, USB-C cable and flashing the replacement firmware, which wipes the original software. The developers also acknowledge occasional problems waking from sleep and Bluetooth not always reconnecting automatically.

Why Is This Unique?

Because Mira changes the Car Thing story from failed gadget to an uncomfortable lesson about who controls hardware after you buy it.

Spotify did not merely stop making Car Thing or end technical support. It made functioning hardware stop functioning. Owners were initially told to reset the devices and dispose of them through appropriate e-waste channels. No refund of any kind was provided to customers who stupidly took the plunge.

Mira demonstrates that those screens, knobs, buttons and processors were still perfectly capable of doing something useful. What disappeared was Spotify’s willingness to support them. That should concern anyone buying hardware whose basic functionality depends on a manufacturer’s servers remaining interested in its continued existence.

Who Is This For?

Mira is primarily for existing Car Thing owners, tinkerers and anyone who kept one in a drawer rather than following Spotify’s recycling advice.

It also gives the device a reason to exist beyond the car. Car Thing can serve as a desktop Spotify controller with physical controls, album art, lyrics and voice commands without requiring the main Spotify application to dominate another screen.

What Mira does not do is turn Car Thing into CarPlay, Android Auto or a general-purpose infotainment system. There is no Apple Music or TIDAL support, navigation remains somebody else’s problem, and this still requires more fiddling than mounting your phone on the dashboard.

The Bottom Line

Spotify deserves exactly zero victory lap here. This is the company that announced lossless audio in 2021 and did not actually begin delivering it until September 2025, years after Apple Music, Amazon Music and others had moved on. More recently, its approach to AI and music has looked less like a philosophy than a moving target: stronger rules against impersonation and AI spam in 2025, AI-powered covers and remixes with Universal in 2026, and now new labels designed to keep AI personas out of recommendations. Spotify certainly knows how to change lanes; signaling first would be nice occasionally.

Car Thing belongs in the same conversation because Spotify sold customers a piece of hardware, lost interest in it, and ultimately rendered it useless through a software shutdown. The embarrassing part is that the hardware itself did not suddenly become obsolete. A group of software developers looked at the same discarded screen, knobs and buttons and saw something Spotify apparently did not: a perfectly usable product that did not need to become electronic waste just because the corporate strategy changed.

So the people worth celebrating here are the software geeks behind Mira, not Spotify. They have given Car Thing what amounts to a third life and, in the process, made Spotify’s decision to kill it look even worse. Companies love talking about sustainability, ownership and putting users first. Sometimes the most convincing rebuttal is a few developers with GitHub accounts refusing to accept that a working piece of hardware belongs in the trash.

For more information: github.com

You’ll be glad to know if you’re buying used.

What the health numbers actually mean

Filipe Espósito for Engadget

How to check your cycle count and why it matters

If you are a regular reader, then the odds are you have taken apart an electronic gadget, either for a fix, or simply because your curiosity got the better of you. Once inside, it’s all but impossible to help yourself from doing at least a little reverse engineering. That’s what happened when [PRBS23] took a look inside a Gravity 800 Grill for a simple wire fix. But one thing led to the next, and now open source firmware for the grill is freely available!

The first order of business in creating the firmware is reverse engineering the original controller. Opening it up immediately reveals an ESP-32 and a well-labeled programming port. The rest of the control board is equally simple, including connectors for four thermistor temperature sensors, lid open/close switch, fan driver, 16 segment LCD, piezo buzzer, and some physical inputs.

The thermistor along with the physical inputs are connected to a 16 pin chip, interfacing with the MCU over a 9600 baud UART connection. [PRBS23] cannot determine an ADC chip meeting these specifications, so the most likely answer is a cheap MCU programmed to act as a simple analog fronted.

The neatly labeled programming header is used to quite easily dump the firmware with the espflash utility. Analyzing this dump reveals a rather strange ADC correction function used by the original firmware. The necessity and overall utility of this function remains unclear, as it only corrects by a maximum of two or three degrees Fahrenheit.

Most of the other features ended up being at least somewhat easier. The CS1621 segmented display driver is reasonably well documented with datasheets making its implementation far easier. Likewise, the other odds and ends were implemented in a far more normal manner compared to the thermistors.

All this reverse engineering work got tied together into a neat little firmware package. It comes with over the air updates PID controlled temperature, and a real-time web interface. This also isn’t the first time we have seen an IoT device liberated from proprietary firmware, and this remains one of our favorite uses of reverse engineering!

Live commerce is taking off almost everywhere in Asia but in Singapore

On paper, Singapore’s live commerce scene appears to be growing.

TikTok Shop Singapore’s livestream GMV grew 85% by Apr 2025 compared to a year earlier, while social commerce is expected to account for roughly a third of Singapore’s e-commerce market.

Yet if you’ve ever stumbled into a local TikTok livestream, the reality often looks very different.

Instead of thousands of viewers piling into a show, many sellers find themselves talking to a few dozen people waiting for the next voucher code before scrolling away.

That gap matters because live commerce has exploded almost everywhere else in Asia, from China’s billion-dollar livestream stars to Malaysian creators earning full-time incomes from daily broadcasts.

The format has become almost routine across Southeast Asia. In 2023, nearly five in 10 consumers watched livestream sales at least once a week, and 63% of viewers went on to make a purchase.

In Singapore, that figure was just 40%. Still, a handful of local brands have managed to make livestreaming work.

The brands that have made it work

The three brands Vulcan Post spoke to—Tasty Toastys, Tap Space, and Emporal Co.—operate in completely different categories.

One sells bread-themed plushies, another sells MRT-inspired collectibles, and the third sells candles and haircare.

Yet they’ve all found growth through livestreaming.

1. Make the livestream itself entertaining

For Tasty Toastys, livestreams became less about pitching products and more about giving fans something fun to watch.

Founder Chanel Lee discovered that her bread-character collectibles naturally created “watchable” moments—whether it was unboxing plushies, showing new designs, or letting fans react together in real time.

That communal experience helped the brand grow beyond local consignment shelves into 12 Toys “R” Us outlets and even a dedicated US TikTok Shop.

If the product creates anticipation on screen, viewers stay longer.

2. Consistency pays off

Transport-collectible brand Tap Space arguably had one of the toughest starting points. Founder Danial Sim launched with zero followers and a marketing budget of just S$50.

His solution wasn’t clever growth hacks—it was consistency.

Every night after dinner, he livestreamed himself showing the MRT station keychains he’d made.

Those sessions gradually brought in a few hundred followers each day, eventually snowballing into a business capable of selling 1,500 products in a single day at a Takashimaya pop-up before selling out by day three.

Consistency compounds, even when early audiences are small.

3. Putting a face behind the brand

The sisters behind skincare and candle brand Emporal Co., Grace and Lena Lim, spent two months making zero sales.

Then, one TikTok video went viral.

Instead of relying solely on that lucky break, they kept posting daily content featuring themselves and their products, turning followers into customers who later showed up in real life. Grace has even been recognised in public by people who’ve supported the brand for years, with one customer stopping her to ask for a selfie.

Today, the business generates six-figure annual sales, has sold over 17,000 bottles of leave-in hair conditioner in two years, and attracted around 400–450 people to a warehouse sale built largely through TikTok.

Their biggest advantage was familiarity.

A different playbook for live commerce

None of these brands relies on the tactics commonly associated with livestream commerce elsewhere.

Instead of aggressive countdown timers or endless discounts, they lean on three key pilars: Consistency, a strong visual hook, and a founder whose personality is the product.

That matters because Singapore’s structural reality is very different from its neighbours’.

The single most important reason live commerce exploded across Asia is one Singapore simply doesn’t have: large populations living far from physical retail.

Indonesia’s rural population sits at around 41%, but is spread across over 17,000 islands. That means hundreds of millions of people live without convenient mall access. In Vietnam and the Philippines, rural populations exceed 60% and 50% respectively.

Livestreaming doesn’t just entertain these consumers, but brings the market to them. And in a way, residents in rural areas have become micro-retailers in their own homes. Farmers and artisans in rural China now sell directly to urban consumers through live broadcasts, bypassing the physical retail infrastructure they never had. 

Unlike Indonesia or Vietnam, where millions of consumers live far from physical retail, Singapore has one of ASEAN’s highest concentrations of shopping malls. Most people can reach a mall within minutes.

Whereas in Singapore, the city-state has the highest retail space per capita in ASEAN, at 1.08 square metres per person — nearly double Bangkok’s 0.8 sqm and significantly above Kuala Lumpur’s 0.71 sqm. Total retail space on the island stands at 6.1 million square metres, making Singapore one of the most mall-dense cities in the world.

The urgency that drives impulse purchases on a livestream—”I can’t get this anywhere near me”—simply doesn’t apply in Singapore.

And vouchers, which dominate many local TikTok streams, don’t necessarily solve that problem. They can give viewers a reason to tune in briefly, redeem a code, and leave.

The brands succeeding in Singapore have therefore had to solve a different problem: not how to make people buy, but how to make them want to stay.

Trust is also a barrier

Trust is the foundation of live commerce. You’re buying from a person you’ve watched for 20 minutes, often without seeing the product in person first. And many viewers who find trust in a livestreamer will often return for more.

In markets where livestreaming took off early, before bad actors moved in, that trust was established before it could be eroded. However, Singapore got the livestream scams before the culture could concretise.

TikTok-related scam cases in Singapore rose nearly 38% in 2025, according to the Singapore Police Force’s Annual Scam and Cybercrime Brief, making it the only major platform where scam cases increased, even as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Carousell all saw declines.

A famous jade stones livestreaming scam in 2023 even caused losses of at least S$95,000. 

On the bureaucratic level, TikTok itself rejected 1.4 million seller applications and removed 700,000 sellers for policy violations in H1 2025 alone, which tells you both how aggressive TikTok enforcement has become and how serious the underlying problem of scams really is.

When shoppers become wary of livestream sellers, every legitimate creator has to work harder to earn credibility.

Singapore’s version of live commerce may look smaller, but more personal

As Singapore’s live commerce ecosystem develops, some businesses are looking overseas for answers.

Some retailers have travelled to Hangzhou for livestream training, while others are experimenting with AI avatar hosts— already big business in China, with the market projected to hit US$90.1 billion (S$115.2 billion) this year, with over 993,000 companies using digital avatars.

But importing the mechanics of a more mature market doesn’t necessarily mean importing its success.

The biggest takeaway from the brands that have made livestreaming work here is that Singapore may need its own version of live commerce.

The winning formula isn’t necessarily bigger audiences, more frequent streams, or deeper discounts. It’s giving a relatively small audience a reason to keep coming back.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.