# eBay Cuts, Samsung AI, and Dating App Strategies

**Podcast:** TechCrunch Daily Crunch
**Published:** 2026-02-27

## Transcript

This is TechCrunch.
This episode is brought to you by Modulate.
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Berliner Stadtwerke.
Good for dich.
Good for Berlin.
Let's talk about Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked Event and what was announced.
I'm Emran Shaking Your Friday Daily Crunch, featuring three big tech headlines.
Starts right now.
EBay is looking to cut around 800 jobs, or six percent of its full-time employees.
We are taking steps to reinvest across our business and align our structure with our strategic priorities, which will affect certain roles across our workforce, the company said in a statement.
It continued, we are grateful for the contributions of the employees impacted and are committed to supporting them with care and respect.
Bloomberg first reported the news.
The move comes a week after eBay said it would acquire Depop, a secondhand clothing app popular with Gen Z and millennials, from Etsy for $1.2 billion in cash.
eBay reported last week fourth quarter results, with revenue rising 15% to $3 billion, exceeding analysts' expectations.
Into lasting connections, including those that offer feedback and guidance on users' bios, photos, and prompts.
The dating app's new AI suggested profile guidance tool will roll out globally and give personalized, actionable feedback on users' bios and prompts.
For users in the good old US of A, the profile guidance feature can be augmented with an AI photo feedback tool, which can help you choose the best photos and show up as your most authentic self.
Catfishing be gone.
According to Bumble's blog post, explaining these features, it doesn't seem like the insights from these AI tools are particularly, well, how can I put this, groundbreaking?
For example, Bumble says that its AI photo tool might encourage you to ditch photos where you're wearing sunglasses that cover your face and add a wider variety of photos, like ones taken outdoors or with friends, or you know, just looking like a human being.
Okay, I added that one.
But either way, it's advice you could have easily gotten from a friend like 10 years ago.
But, well, it's still new information to many users, I guess.
In Canada, Bumble is testing another non-AI feature called suggested date.
Now, for this one, when a conversation stalls, a user can signal that they're open to meeting in person, which the company says is a simple way to signal that they're ready to connect offline.
Of course, another way for people to signal that they're ready to connect offline is to, I don't know, literally ask someone out on a date.
But okay, realistically, it doesn't seem like users are taking the plunge.
So having an in-app way to indicate interest may motivate some potential couples to move their conversation IRL.
And this is why I'm no longer on dating apps, because I still say things like IRL.
Bumble and other popular dating apps like Match Groups, Tinder, and Hinge, have all embraced our AI overlords with their own AI-powered features in recent months.
For instance, in December, Hinge introduced a tool to help generate more interesting conversation starters than the old standby.
How are you?
Samsung Galaxy's unpacked event in San Francisco on Wednesday saw the Korean Tech Giant unveil its new S26 series of Galaxy smartphones, a pair of new earbuds, and talk a lot about AI assistants and agents.
Here's a quick recap of everything announced at the event.
The South Korean Tech Giant has lined up three new smartphones for the year Galaxy S26 Ultra, Galaxy S26 Plus, and Galaxy S26, all of which feature iterative updates compared to their predecessors.
As the flagship, the S26 Ultra comes with Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor, a 6.9-inch QHD plus display, and a 5,000 milliamp hour battery.
Samsung says the phone can charge from 0% to 75% in 30 minutes with a 60-watt charger and supports the S Pen stylus.
Samsung said while the S26 Ultra's wide, 200 megapixel and telephoto, 50 megapixel lenses retain the same pixel count as its predecessor.
The new wide camera has a bigger aperture of F1.4, as does the telephoto lens with an aperture of F2.9.
The other two phones have the same processor as the S26 Ultra, but Samsung is using its own Exynos 2600 processor for these devices in some geographies.
The smaller Galaxy S26 gets a battery bump from last year's phone, and the S26 Plus can charge wirelessly at 20 watts.
The Galaxy S26 starts at $899, 100 more than last year's model.
The Galaxy S26 Plus starts at $1,099, also 100 more than last year, and the Galaxy S26 Ultra starts at $1,200.
Now, besides the hardware upgrades, Samsung's made a neat update to the S26 Ultra's display that prevents people around you from reading what's on the phone's screen.
Users can choose to hide certain parts of the screen, like the notification area or the password field in login forms, or all of it.
The privacy display can be configured for each app.
Samsung said there is a maximum privacy protection feature as well, which tones down bright areas and lifts up dark parts of the screen.
Google also made two significant announcements at Samsung's event.
First, the Search Chine previewed a new agentic version of Gemini that can perform tasks on your behalf, such as hailing a cab from Uber.
Samir Samat, head of Android ecosystem at Google, showed a demo where Gemini looks at a group chat and figures out the meal order that it should place on Grubhub.
The company also introduced a new version of Circle to Search that uses multi-object recognition to search for anything that you highlight on your phone's display.
Earlier this week, Samsung said it was partnering with Perplexity to preload the AI company's app on its smartphones and use its APIs to do stuff like set alarms or take notes, as well as power its browser's search capabilities.
The Buds.
We'll see you here tomorrow.
Same tag time, same crunch channel.
And until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.
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