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The smartphone era created an attention crisis. Slowtech is fixing it
When Tony Fadell entered New York City’s 28th Street Subway Station, he did not expect to come face-to-face withan advertisementfor a product he designed over 20 years ago. But there it was: a five-by-four-foot poster promoting the iPod Shuffle, luring passersby with the promise of “Zero screen time.” “The first thing was, I thought, ‘Wait a second, did somebody not change the ad?’” Fadell, known as the father of the iPod, told TechCrunch. “For somebody like me who knows that thing intimately, it’s like seeing your kid’s picture.” As Fadell stood in the train station, he was surrounded by people wearing wireless Bluetooth headphones to stream music on their phones, effortlessly accessing music libraries with over 100 million songs. This technology that we take for granted makes Steve Jobs’ early iPod tagline —“one thousand songs in your pocket”— sound antiquated. The postage-stamp-sized iPod Shuffle, which relied heavily on shuffle playback and offered little control compared to today’s streaming apps, should not appeal to a modern audience. But we have become so entrenched in technology that our various devices, apps, and algorithms mediate our every experience, from grocery shopping to dating. We’ve built smartphones that can do almost anything, but we’ve also created a constant connectedness that has become more exhausting than enriching. “People are very oversaturated and overstimulated, and they really want to have a more mindful approach to what they’re doing with their tech,” Joy Howard, CMO ofBack Market, an online marketplace for refurbished tech, told TechCrunch. “There’s this fatigue that we have with the need to optimize every single aspect of our life.” Howard and her team were responsible for the iPod Shuffle ad that Fadell was so shocked to encounter. But Howard says that demand is growing for this supposedly obsolete tech — if these devices weren’t driving sales, the company wouldn’t have shelled out for a premium ad placement in a hectic New York City subway station. For younger generations who have never known a world without social media and smartphones, there’s a certain magic to wired headphones, retro gaming consoles, CDs, and digital point-and-shoot cameras. They crave experiences that aren’t trying to monopolize their attention. Old-school cameras can’t upload photos to your Instagram story, retro games don’t spam you with gambling ads, and iPods can’t automatically play music that you’re algorithmically destined to enjoy. That’s the whole point of this movement, which Howard calls “slowtech.” “The ‘fast tech’ up until now has been all about eliminating friction… [Now], people are seeing friction as a way to create boundaries for themselves,” Howard said. “It’s so stunning to me that now people are wanting to bring friction back into their lives, and see that as a feature, rather than a flaw.” Around the same time that Fadell first pitched the iPod to Steve Jobs,Austin Murrayfounded JAMDAT, one of thefirst mobile gaming companies, which quickly went public and was sold to Electronic Arts for $680 million. “When we were pitching our company back in 2000, 2001, people were laughing at us, saying, ‘Why would anyone play games on their cell phone?’” Murray told TechCrunch. Now, investors are just as incredulous when he pitches them on hisscreen-time reduction app, MOQA, which he is building to counteract the very phenomenon he helped create. “It’s watching what happened to my kids and the people around me that hurts my soul the most,” Murray said. “When everyone is doing the same thing — meaning everyone, the average screen time is like five hours probably on a phone every day — it’s not a willpower problem. It’s a product design problem.” This desire to cut back on the time we spend using our phones, computers, and TVs has become ubiquitous —about 53%of American adults say they want to reduce their screen time. “At a certain point, I realized that willpower was insufficient to not waste time on my phone,” said writerCalvin Kasulke, whose novel “Several People Are Typing” imagines workers trapped inside a Slack workspace. He now pays forOpalandFreedom, two apps designed to limit his screen time and social media use. “I don’t need to limit my time on iMessage — that’s people who I really know! But I certainly don’t want to be wasting my time doomscrolling.” “I want to be very clear… I don’t feel smug about this. It’s embarrassing to have two different apps to limit how I use this,” Kasulke said. “I don’t think screens are inherently bad. I just think the way I was using [my phone] was worse and dumb, and now it’s a little bit less dumb.” Others have given up their iPhones altogether, opting instead for flip phones,e-ink devicesthat run Android software, or minimalist touch-screen hardware like theLight Phone. “Our customers for the last 10 years are telling us how they feel more free after switching to the Light Phone,” Light co-founder Kaiwei Tang told TechCrunch. “It’s getting more and more attention, especially among young people. We have quite a lot of the community using Light Phone as 20- to 35-year-olds, which surprised us.” Murray isn’t as optimistic about the future of “dumb phones,” though. “There’s certainly a movement of people who are just kind of anti-tech and ‘get it out of our lives,’” he said. “That’s really hard though, because then you realize you can’t do things that are now assuming you have a smartphone, like banking, or going into a hotel, or [using] credit cards.” Kasulke said if Apple ever made an e-ink iPhone, he would “f–ing donate plasma to be able to afford it.” But that’s unlikely, so he’s not particularly interested in downgrading his phone. “I’m not like a, ‘I wish I could throw this thing in the toilet and go live in the woods’ kind of guy,” Kasulke said. “My phone has some utility for my personal and professional life, but it also lives in your pocket, and it is very, very easy, and in fact, designed in some ways to be addictive and to mindlessly waste time on it.” Screen time isn’t universally bad. We’re accumulating screen time when we video chat with our family, text our friends, read news articles, maintain our Duolingo streaks, or play Wordle. But for as much as tech brings us closer to one another, it also yanks us out of the present moment. “It’s clear people want the convenience of digital, but they don’t want the annoyance of being always connected,” Fadell said. “I’ve always been like, ‘We need less screens, not more of them.’ So to have an Apple Watch with everything, like, no, no, no — I don’t want more, I want less.” It’s not surprising that Fadell’s preferences are a bellwether for the market — he’s a veteran product designer, after all. American spending on fitness trackersgrew 88%year-over-year, according to market research firm Circana, which credits screenless wearables like the Oura ring and Whoop wristband as key sales drivers. Even though these devices don’t have screens, you have to use your smartphone to see your data, which would make it even harder for Oura and Whoop users to try out something like the Light Phone. But most consumers aren’t looking to make such an extreme change as pivoting to a flip phone — instead, some are embracing even more sophisticated hardware that relies on their smartphone, but cuts down their overall screen time. Mark, a $159 AI bookmark, advertises itself as a tool to help users stop pulling out their phone to take notes while they’re reading. While some readers might find the idea of an AI bookmark to be symptomatic of the same problem that pushes people toward a digital detox, Mark founder Eason Tang sees it differently. “The way we try to brand it now is this sort of analog tool, very culturally integrated with design, film, books, and literature,” Tang told TechCrunch. We raised $1M dollars to reinvent how people read. Introducing Mark II – a $159 AI bookmark. Thread belowpic.twitter.com/eL0XsyRlgC There’s something undoubtedly absurd about using an AI bookmark to mediate your relationship with your phone, yet there is a bit of truth to Tang’s pitch — when you stop reading to take notes or snap a photo of a key passage on your phone, you’re bound to encounter some other distracting notification that interrupts your reading. Though AI developments are almost synonymous with “fast tech” culture, there’s a clear allure to the promise that AI agents could simplify our lives and give us more time away from screens. “I think that this idea that people want tools to serve them and not to dominate them is very profound,” Howard said. “I think what the ‘slowtech’ movement is about is people pushing back against the constant digital fatigue, distraction, overwhelm, so if you can use AI to do that, to kind of protect yourself… That’s what people want: more control.” The ubiquity of AI turns some consumers off from the latest products, but this isn’t their sole grievance with big tech. People are also disillusioned by these companies for continually bricking perfectly good hardware just to make us buy the latest model. Back Market, for example, rehabsdiscontinued laptopsand resells them with USB keys that can install ChromeOS Flex, which turns supposedly obsolete hardware into functioning Chromebooks. “One of our developers started finding a way to hack things that had their OS sunsetted to bring it new life. And so one of the first things he hacked was a rice cooker,” Howard said. “His rice cooker didn’t have support anymore! This is actually a really cool use of AI — like, vibe coding your own app to keep your hardware alive longer.” While slowtech adherents may not all agree about AI use, the debate is secondary to the bigger problem at play: We’ve created an ecosystem where we are so dependent on smartphones and our various apps that the whims of the tech industry can control how we cook rice. In this reality, it’s no wonder that people are so eager to disconnect that they want to downgrade to an iPod Shuffle. “People just really want to take back control of their time, their lives, their attention,” Howard said. “They’re down for whatever helps them do that.”
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AI data centers just got a government-mandated fast lane to the grid
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)told grid operatorson Thursday to fast track interconnection requests from data centers and other large electricity users. Under the orders, six major grid operators have to show that data centers are “able to connect to the transmission system in a timely and orderly manner.” Data centers will be responsible for paying the costs of the interconnection. Commissioners approved the orders unanimously. FERC also provided an opening to grid tech startups, directing grid operators to consider “alternative transmission technologies.” The commission didn’t name specific technologies, but the directive could include things likesolid-state transformersorsuperconducting transmission lines. Grid operators now have 30 days to submit a report detailing how much generating capacity they have to spare, if any. They also have 60 days to “defend or revise” electricity rates within their regions. FERC also directed grid operators to be more accommodating to behind-the-meter power for data centers. While FERC’s directives gave data centers a fast lane to connect, they did not address the shortage of generating capacity. Grid connections have been slow to materialize in part because new power plants are also having problems connecting. At the end of 2023, grid connection requests for power plantsexceeded the total capacityof the existing power plant fleet, meaning the line to get on the grid was longer than the grid itself could theoretically serve. Against this backdrop, electricity demand from data centers is expected tonearly triplethrough 2035. Grid operators, which had grown accustomed to near-zero demand growth over the last two decades, have strained under the load. Some, like PJM, the country’s largest grid operator, have descended into something resembling chaos, with major utilitiesthreatening to withdraw. Tech companies and developers, unable to connect to the grid in a timely manner in many locations, have been turning to on-site, or behind-the-meter, power (which is typically more expensive and complicated) out of desperation. Still, enough projects have been able to connect that electricity prices have soared in many regions. Wholesale electricity rates are up as much as 267% compared with five years ago,accordingto Bloomberg. FERC was prodded to take on the issue by Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, who in October said delays in data center grid connections had threatened to undermine U.S. competitiveness in AI. Since then, public sentiment toward AI and data centers hassoured considerably. Meanwhile, the Trump administration on Wednesday said it wouldpay $765 millionto wind developer Invenergy to cancel offshore wind leases near California, Maine, and New York. The company said it would use the money to build natural gas plants in the Midwest and geothermal projects in the West. One of Invenergy’s wind projects would have generated as much as 2.4 gigawatts of power — enough, at peak output, to supply roughly 1.8 million homes. Altogether, the Trump administration has now spent about $2.6 billion to scuttle offshore wind developments.
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Amazon hopes to challenge Nvidia more directly by selling its AI chips
If Amazon Web Services has its way, the cloud giant is going to push even deeper into Nvidia’s market, in what might be one of the biggest challenges to Nvidia’s AI chip dominance we’ve seen so far. Amazon’s AI chief Peter DeSantistold Bloombergthat AWS is in talks to sell its AI chip Trainium to other companies for use in data centers. DeSantis declined to specify which companies could be the buyers of such chips. Such talks about selling chips are in the early stages, the company tells TechCrunch, and stem from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’sannual shareholder letterin early April, in which he said the company’s homegrown AI chips were so coveted that he was thinking about selling them. “If our chips business was a standalone business, and sold chips produced this year to AWS and other third parties (as other leading chips companies do), our annual run rate would be ~$50 billion. There’s so much demand for our chips that it’s quite possible we’ll sell racks of them to third parties in the future.” How much of a challenge to Nvidia could Amazon be? A $50 billion competitor wouldn’t exactly tank Nvidia — which is currently on a $326 billion revenue run rate —if it keeps delivering quarters like the last one. But it’s akin toIntel’s annual revenues. AWS has so far resisted selling its AI chips for a lot of reasons. The biggest is that the money AWS actually makes on its chips is a waterfall effect. Sure, it charges customers directly for the AI tokens those chips process on its cloud, but it also gets to charge for a host of other services companies need for their AI apps, including storage, security, networking, and monitoring services. Equally importantly, Amazon has touted the capacity of its chips has been selling out faster than it can produce them. In that same shareholder letter in April,Jassy saidthe current Trainium chip capacity had sold out almost instantly. So too, he said, had the capacity for the next one, Trainium4, which won’t even be available for more than a year. This was before AWSformally added OpenAI to the models it was serving up. So selling its chips to others means it would likely have to leave current customers on waiting lists, unless it could somehow manufacture a surplus of chips through its manufacturing partners such as TSMC. But it would have to miraculously elbow Nvidia out of the way to do that with TSMC, which has recentlysupplanted Appleto become the foundry’s largest customer. AWS spokesperson Doron Aronson (who hosted me during a recent private tour of the AWS chip design facility) also confirmed that AWS may sell these chips. “While we’ve historically declined requests to sell chips directly, Andy noted it’s quite possible we’ll sell racks of them to third parties in the future.” So while Nvidia’s founder and CEO Jensen Huang recently declared thathe’s found a brand new $200 billion market for Nvidiain selling CPUs for AI, not just GPUs — thereby moving into Intel and AMD territory — Jassy clearly has his own chip ambitions: a $50 billion market that would put elbow more directly into Nvidia’s world.
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Pixi’s new iOS app turns text messages into interactive AR experiences
Forget stickers, GIFs, and emoji reactions.Pixiis betting that the next evolution of messaging is interactive augmented reality (AR). The startup launched its messaging-native app on theApp Storeon Wednesday, allowing users to send AI-powered AR characters through iMessage. Instead of appearing as static media, the characters come to life through the recipient’s iPhone camera, where they can react to their surroundings, interact with people, and respond in real time. While AR isn’t new and shiny anymore—companies likeSnaphave created AR filters and lenses for years—Pixi believes its approach is different. By combining AR with on-device AI, its characters can understand what’s happening around them and behave accordingly. A virtual cat, for example, reacts when a real dog walks past. (According to the company, all visual and audio processing remains on the device to preserve user privacy.) Pixi founder Mark Drummond (ex-DreamWorks Animation and ex-Apple) says the app is designed to bring a greater sense of presence and spontaneity to digital conversations. Rather than sending a text to wish someone a Happy Birthday, users can send characters that create a shared experience, turning a simple message into something closer to a digital gift or playful interaction. “The consumer problem we’re solving is thinking of a friend when they’re not present,” he told TechCrunch. “Sometimes the psychology is called pebbling or creative gifting. You’re sharing tokens of affection, basically cards, e-cards, and gifts. That’s your dad, or, in some cases, your granddad’s media. We can do better. We can do something that’s digitally native, and that uses everything we learned about AR on the iPhone.” Earlier this week, Drummond demonstrated the app for us, selecting the cat character, which performed a series of stand-up jokes on his desk. Notably, the cat appeared to respond to Drummond’s facial expressions. For instance, the experience concluded when he smiled, showcasing the character’s ability to perceive emotional cues. At launch, users will have access to a robot, a cat, and an animated envelope character that can react to their voice and “attack” their friends in a playful way. If they move, the envelope will chase them. There are also games like tic-tac-toe and whack-a-mole. Pixi plans to expand beyond just a few characters. The goal is to create a marketplace where studios, brands, and independent creators can share their unique characters for users to choose from. The company envisions this being used for events like movie premieres or product launches, allowing characters to generate excitement, such as when M&Ms release a new flavor. Drummond also mentioned introducing Alice in Wonderland as a character option, as she is an open intellectual property. He pointed out that “our Alice character needs to react to objects that she sees on your desktop in an ‘Alice-consistent’ way,” to demonstrate to partners how their creations will interact with the technology. In the future, Pixi hopes to allow users to create their own characters and personalities. “Part of our plan is to open up those generative AI capabilities to our [users], so they can prompt their way to say something, like, ‘I want a blue blob that threatens my friend and growls at them and keeps chasing them on the phone,’” Drummond explained. To send a character to your friend, download the app on iOS and use iMessage by tapping the plus sign button in the lower left corner. No installation is required to receive a Pixi message. Initially, the app will be available only for iPhone models 11 and newer, but there are plans to expand to Android devices and messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Instagram in the future. Also, while the app is free for users, brands will have the option to charge for their characters if they choose. “We’re going to encourage people to do it for free, because then people become your own brand ambassadors. You’re putting them in charge of using your characters to tell their own stories,” Drummond said.
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Inside Indian Hospitals' Multi-Billion Dollar AI Pivot
Hospitals across India are integrating AI into clinical and administrative workflows, but adoption remains uneven.
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Pramaana Labs Raises $27 Million in Seed Round Led by Khosla Ventures
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Niqo Robotics To Represent India at Bharat Innovates 2026 in France
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Midjourney Enters Healthcare With 60-Second Full-Body Scanner and Spa Concept
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Mistral AI Wants to Help India Build Sovereign AI, Says CEO After Meeting PM Modi
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Indian IT is Tearing Up Its Billing Manual, But Unsure What to Charge Next
As AI strips away the visible effort behind a line of code or a closed ticket, Indian IT is busy figuring out whether outcome-based pricing is the best fit.
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Reliance Taps Databricks to Build Intelligence as Ambani Commits to Democratising AI
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How Avataar.ai Built an AI Video Model That Costs Just 48 Paise Per Second
Built on Alibaba’s Wan 2.2, Varya cuts video generation time from roughly 1,230 seconds to 45 seconds through a novel distillation approach.
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