Now is the time to save a big chunk of money on a brand-new TV if you’ve yet to reward yourself with a TV upgrade, and thanks to this Best Buy deal on the Hisense QD7, you can have that reward.

Normally this TV would cost you $1,199.99 if it was available at its full retail price. However, Best Buy currently has it on sale for $799.99, saving you a total of $400. This is the lowest price this TV has ever been as well, with the price sitting around $900 throughout most of this month and parts of September, August, and July.

Aside from the price, there are tons of things to love about this TV. It’s an 85-inch TV for one. Watching TV and movies on a screen that big is a whole other kind of entertainment experience that you just have to see to believe. It’s not all about the screen size though. The Hisense QD7 is also a smart TV that runs on the Google TV platform. That’ll make it really easy to find stuff to watch, because you’ll have the Play Store on the TV with access to all your favorite streaming apps like Netflix, Hulu, Max, Disney Plus, and more.

My favorite things about this TV are the Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision, as well as the Game Mode Pro, all three of which make for some really immersive entertainment. Game Mode Pro sets your TV up with a variable refresh rate of 48Hz to 144Hz so your gaming is smooth, and the Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision amp up the audio quality and picture quality to be more lifelike and vivid.

This is also a 4K TV with hands-free controls, four HDMI inputs, and a voice remote.

Buy at Best Buy

Google Wallet for kids will roll out in 2025. “Following the positive response of tap-to-pay on Fitbit Ace LTE devices, we’re expanding tap-to-pay for kids to Google Wallet,” Google wrote in a statement to 9to5Google, which first reported on it. Parents could approve credit and debit cards added to children’s phones, and Google’s Family Link would let them view transactions and easily approve or remove cards.

The service would build on the tap-to-pay functionality in Google’s Fitbit Ace LTE kids’ activity tracker. The expansion would make the Google Wallet app available for Android phone-using children whose parents have set up Family Link and approved access.

Any of the parents’ existing payment cards in Google Wallet could be used for the kids’ spinoff. When paying, children would have to approve tap-to-pay purchases using standard authentication options (fingerprint, facial recognition, PIN or password). At launch, the service is said to support gift cards and event tickets but not online purchases, identification or health cards.

Apple already has a similar take on children’s purchases. Families in the company’s ecosystem can let their kids use Apple Pay in stores and online or send money through Messages with Apple Cash Family.

9to5Google says Google’s kids’ payments feature will roll out next year for “some Google Wallet users in several countries,” including the US. A wider rollout is expected at some point after that.

Estonia-based startup Modash has raised a $12 million Series A led by henQ, a Dutch VC firm that prides itself in “funding the odd ones.” And what’s odd about Modash, according to CEO Avery Schrader, is that its team “has a really strong opinion in a space that nobody really has much faith in anymore.”

The space in question is influencer marketing. Like competitors CreatorIQ and Upfluence, Modash helps brands like Farfetch discover people who can promote their message. But instead of focusing on content creators with big followings, Modash scrapes open data to let its clients find matches among the long tail of the 250 million creators it says it lists (unless they opt out.)

This means brands are being connected with relatively niche content creators through Modash’s platform. But — the founders’ theory is — these are individuals who can pack a marketing punch as their smaller follower bases may be more engaged with, and put a higher store on, what they’re saying.

Essentially, it’s a flipping of the usual influencer marketing script which could help circumvent some of the cynicism that’s sprung up around highly paid influencers shilling products. Not having creators sign in also makes it easier to scale, in a space where pure marketplaces have struggled.

This is why Modash remains bullish on the creator economy — even as Schrader understands why others might not be. “The whole VC class has already placed one or two bets that have already gone down the drain in the space,” he told TechCrunch.

“[But] people miss the point that the creator is the atomic unit of the internet, and [creators] will just keep making stuff,” he went on, explaining why he and his team believe in the marketing power of content creators and in the market opportunity of helping them monetize. 

“Whatever you immediately think of when you think ‘influencer’… I think it really has a negative connotation… Whatever you don’t consume is what you think of an influencer as, and then whatever you consume, whatever is in your own YouTube search history, that’s who we support,” he added. “It’s like the small creators doing the weirdest stuff, talking about the things they really love.”

The 26-year-old Canadian fits the bill himself; originally from Nova Scotia where he tinkered with videos and forums, he made his way to Estonia after reading that it was becoming “the Silicon Valley of Europe.” There, he soon found himself recording podcast episodes with the Baltics technorati, while trying his hand at influencer marketing for clients like Estonian scale-up Bolt.

The client side of the problem is key to Modash. The startup’s vision is that brands want an end-to-end platform that lets them source creators, but also analyze campaigns, manage payments, and more. That’s what it monetizes, with plans starting from $199 a month up to a custom enterprise tier.

With Bolt and an Estonian agency among its first clients, Tallinn proved to be a great launchpad for Modash. Whether or not the comparison with Silicon Valley stands, network effects were clearly at play and several Estonian founders became Modash’s first mentors and angels, some of whom have returned to join its latest round too. 

The capital city is also where Schrader met his co-founder and CTO, Estonian software engineer Hendry Sadrak (on the right in the picture above) and the rest of their founding team. “Even today, 40% or 50% of the company is in Estonia,” said Schrader. “Lots of them from Bolt, Pipedrive, Transferwise… — the Estonian mafia.”

If Schrader sounded unsure about the exact percentage of local staffers it’s a reflection of how much the team has grown over the last few months. “We were like 25 [people] in the beginning of the year, we’re now 60, and we’ve set a cap for next year that we won’t go beyond 99, because it’s really important to keep the team as small as we can.”

Many of Modash’s new hires will focus on data engineering, as AI-enabled discovery features are a big part of its product roadmap.

In addition, the startup plans to recruit people for customer-facing roles in North America to be closer to its clients there.

Schrader himself was back in Canada when he talked to TechCrunch, and he told us he plans to spend at least half his time in the country going forward. International expansion and an increased focus on e-commerce will be the startup’s priorities leading up to its Series B round, he said.

The 6.3-inch size would make it larger than the past few generations of A-series Pixel phones, including the 8A, 7A, and 6A — all of which came with a 6.1-inch display. Along with a screen size increase, the Pixel 9A is also rumored to come with a top refresh rate of 120Hz, Google’s Tensor G4 chipset, 8GB of RAM, and up to 256GB of storage.

Renders of what appears to be the Pixel 9A suggest that Google is making some big design changes to the phone as well. The Pixel’s prominent camera bar is absent from the rear of the phone, while the two camera sensors are placed in pill-shaped housing instead. According to Android Headlines, the Pixel 9A could feature a 48-megapixel (MP) primary camera, a 13 MP ultrawide camera, and a 13 MP front-facing lens. It’s also rumored to have a 5,000mAh battery — slightly larger than the 4,492mAh battery in the Pixel 8A.

We still don’t know when Google will reveal the Pixel 9A, but Android Headlines reports that its launch will be held in March. The phone will also reportedly retain the same $499 price as the Pixel 8A.

Users of this best VPN app can now secure their online identity with a new suite of protection tools – and it can be yours without spending a penny.

ExpressVPN has just launched Identity Defender, a security bundle that includes three distinct solutions: an identity theft alert, cyber insurance, and data removal service. These tools are only available for the US market at the time of writing.