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AI NewsStartup Battlefield 200 applications close in 1 week: Window to nominate and apply for the most promising startups closes May 27

Startup Battlefield 200 applications close in 1 week: Window to nominate and apply for the most promising startups closes May 27

2:53 AM IST ¡ May 21, 2026

Startup Battlefield 200 applications close in 1 week: Window to nominate and apply for the most promising startups closes May 27

Your shot at VC access, global visibility, TechCrunch coverage, and $100,000 in equity-free funding is gone in a week. Startup Battlefield 200 applicationsclose May 27. If you’re building a breakout startup — or know a founder who is — this is the moment to act. Apply todayfor the opportunity to take the stage atTechCrunch Disrupt 2026, taking place October 13-15, alongside 200 of the world’s most promising early-stage startups. Pre-Series A founders, consider this your final countdown reminder: The strongest startups are already entering the arena, and theapplication window is closing fast. If your startup has already been nominated,don’t wait to complete your application. This final week moves quickly, and last-minute submissions risk getting buried as applications surge ahead of the deadline. Know a startup that deserves the spotlight?Nominate them nowso they still have time to apply before May 27. Some of the most consequential companies in tech history didn’t launch with splashy fundraising announcements. They started with a pitch. Dropbox demoed to a room full of skeptics. Cloudflare took the stage before most people understood what edge networking meant. Discord was still a scrappy gaming startup called Hammer & Chisel. They all passed through the same crucible: Startup Battlefield 200. That’s not a coincidence — it’s a pattern. And it starts with an application. Startup Battlefield 200has never been a competition for the most polished companies. It’s a competition for the most promising ones. Pre-launch is fine. No revenue is fine. What matters is whether what you’re building genuinely changes something — not incrementally, but meaningfully. If you or a founder you know is building something impactful, then the application itself becomes the first pitch.Apply before May 27. Startup Battlefield 200is where breakout companies get discovered. Selected startups will showcase live on the Disrupt Stage in front of 10,000+ attendees, leading VCs, global media, and the broader TechCrunch audience. This is your opportunity to gain investor exposure, receive direct VC feedback, and prove your company belongs among the next generation of category-defining startups. Every one of the 200 selected companies receives: And every selected company pitches, whether on the Disrupt Stage or the Pitch Showcase Stage. Both put founders in front of the investors, media, and partners who attend Disrupt specifically to find what’s next. You don’t need to make the top 20 for this experience to change your trajectory.Get started by nominating and applying here. More than 1,700 companies have competed in Startup Battlefield 200. Together, they’ve raised over $32 billion and generated more than 250 exits, including acquisitions by Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Uber, and Amazon. The network runs so deep that alumni have even acquired each other: Dropbox acquired fellow Battlefield 200 alum DocSend in 2021. This is also the same launchpad that helped accelerate companies like Fitbit, Trello, and Mint. Behind every one of those outcomes was a founder willing to make a bet on themselves publicly, in front of people who were paying attention.Apply and learn more here. We’re looking for ambitious early-stage startups building innovative, potentially category-defining products. Applications are open globally across all industries. Most selected companies are pre-Series A, though select Series A startups may qualify on a case-by-case basis. To apply, startups should have: Thousands apply every year. Only 200 are selected. Just 20 finalists pitch live on the Disrupt Stage. One startup takes the crown and wins $100,000 in equity-free funding. The founders who wait until they feel ready often wait too long. You do not need to be polished. You need to be promising. If you’ve been sitting on this, here’s the reality: The worst outcome is you don’t get selected this cycle — and you come back next year with a stronger application because you went through the process. The stage matters. The community lasts. The milestone is real. But the deadline is now one week away. If you’re building something category-defining — or know a startup that deserves the spotlight —submit your nomination and complete your application before May 27.

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Linkdaze’s smart calendar is built to run a household, not just track a schedule

Linkdaze’s smart calendar is built to run a household, not just track a schedule

With back-to-school season approaching (or already here in some places), keeping track of everyone’s schedules can get pretty chaotic. Between work, school, appointments, sports, chores, and everything else going on, a regular paper calendar just doesn’t cut it. That’s whereLinkdaze’ssmart digital calendar comes in — a touchscreen tablet built specifically to organize a household rather than a single person. One of Linkdaze’s biggest strengths is its calendar compatibility. The system can synchronize calendars from popular services, including Google, iCloud, Outlook, Yahoo, and Cozi, which is a dedicated family-organizing app. This is particularly useful for families where different members use different platforms. Instead of asking everyone to switch to a single calendar app, Linkdaze brings multiple schedules together and uses color coding to make individual family members easy to identify. Launched last December, Linkdaze is available in 15.6-inch and 10.1-inch models, giving you some flexibility depending on how much wall space you have. Beyond calendars and appointments, you can use it for chores and rewards, meal planning, shopping lists, and other family organization. It can even double as a digital photo frame for displaying family photos. The most interesting feature, however, is Linkdaze’s AI meal planner with “Snap-to-Sync.” Instead of manually entering everything into a meal-planning app, you can take a photo of a paper recipe or your kid’s school lunch menu. Linkdaze will turn that information into a digital meal plan and generate a shopping list from it. While not an entirely new idea, it’s a useful feature that helps Linkdaze stand out from a basic digital calendar. Another big plus is that Linkdaze doesn’t require a monthly subscription for its main features. It’s an interesting choice in a category where recurring revenue has become the default. Skylight, a competing smart-calendar brand, offers additional features through its $79 per year subscription. For a hardware company entering a crowded smart-display market, that decision is either going to differentiate its product or look like a lost revenue stream. Linkdaze is also less expensive up front, with the 10.1-inch model priced at $119.99 compared with Skylight’s 10-inch model starting at $149.99 (if you pay for the subscription.) Overall, this device could make a practical gift for busy parents who are trying to keep everyone’s schedules in one place. It could also be a great fit for college apartments, where roommates can use it to coordinate chores, study schedules, shared meals, and other household responsibilities. It’s also very helpful for those of us juggling interviews, deadlines, meetings, and story assignments. This post was first published on August 20, 2026.

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Is it legal to train AI models on copyrighted books? It’s complicated

Is it legal to train AI models on copyrighted books? It’s complicated

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What Alsup penalized Anthropic for was pirating these books from illegal online shadow libraries. “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” the judge wrote, comparing the way an LLM ingests trillions of words to a writer’s study of literature. Gellis thinks the ruling is more advantageous for AI companies. What’s a $1.5 billion fine to a company projecting about$200 billionin annual revenue by 2028? “I think it is generally good news for AI training that he looked at what was going on and really sort of thought it analogous to reading a copyrighted work as opposed to copying a copyrighted work,” Gellis said. “Copyright law hinges on copying, but it doesn’t hinge on using the work or experiencing the work, consuming the work, reading the work.” Copyright lawhasn’t been updatedsince 1976, which means that judges have to figure out how to interpret guidelines from 50 years ago when confronting legal questions that have the potential to shape the future of the AI industry. “Everybody is very worried right now because the law is all over the place, and it’s because of this question,” Jason Henderson, Senior Attorney and Founder of the IP & Media Practice at JWL International, told TechCrunch. “They know that the AI model has been trained on so much stuff, and the law has not really caught up to that question.” These questions often hinge on fair use law — namely, whether use of a copyrighted work is “transformative” enough to be considered legally permissible. 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