Betabet, the company that owns Google, may be about to make its biggest purchase ever. The Wall Street Journal says Alphabet is close to agreeing to pay about $23 billion to buy Wiz. The WSJ says the deal might go through soon, but it’s not official yet. Wiz is an all-in-one cloud security solution that takes in data from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and other cloud systems and checks it all for security holes. Alphabet officials probably see the deal as a way to strengthen Google’s cloud business, which grew 28% in the first quarter of this…
Author: David
Starting August 5, Bytedance’s CapCut app for changing videos will no longer offer free cloud storage to store creative files. Users have been told in the past few days that Capcut has changed the rules for the free plan. The company used to offer 1 GB of free cloud storage, but that’s no longer the case. You’ll have to pay now to store things in the cloud on Capcut. There are two plans with CapCut: one costs $2.49 a month for 100GB of storage and the other costs $7.49 a month for 1000GB. They will have to either pay for…
In robots, generative AI has already shown a lot of promise. Natural language interactions, robot learning, no-code writing, and even design are all uses for it. This week, Google’s DeepMind Robotics team is showing off guidance as a possible area where the two fields could work well together. The team shows in the paper “Mobility VLA: Multimodal Instruction Navigation with Long-Context VLMs and Topological Graphs” how they used Google Gemini 1.5 Pro to teach a robot how to follow directions and move around an office. Naturally, DeepMind used some of the Every Day Robots that have been lying around since…
Millions of AT&T customer phone numbers, call and text records, and location-based info were stolen. A spokesman for AT&T told on Friday that the company will start telling millions of customers about a new data breach that let hackers steal the phone records of “nearly all” of its customers. The company said in a statement that the stolen information includes the phone numbers of both cell phone and landline users, as well as AT&T records of calls and text messages from May 1, 2022, to October 31, 2022. This information includes things like who called or texted whom. AT&T said…
To end a long-running competition review, the European Union has agreed to what Apple said about how it runs Apple Pay. In a news conference Thursday, Commission EVP Margrethe Vestager, who is in charge of the EU’s competition division, talked about the change. She said that Apple has until July 25 to make changes that will let makers of competing mobile wallets offer contactless payment using NFC, which is the most common technology used in the EU. This will let their users “tap and go” with their payments. A double-click to open apps, Face ID, Touch ID, and passcodes for…
With the recent addition of comments to podcasts, Spotify is taking another step toward making its app, which is mostly known for music, more like a social networking site. Commenting lets podcasters interact with their fans right in Spotify, just like Polls and Q&As let them do with other features. The 2023 update to the app added a discovery feed like on TikTok, artist profiles where creators can sell merchandise and concert tickets, and the ability to post to stories. This makes Spotify’s app more like a social network for all things audio, not just a music-streaming app. This week,…
Elon Musk is being sued for firing more than 6,000 Twitter workers, including Parag Agrawal, who was CEO at the time, after Musk took over the social media site in 2022. On Tuesday, Musk won one of those lawsuits when a federal judge said X Corp. doesn’t have to pay the former workers any more severance pay. People who used to work for Twitter and one of its managers filed the lawsuit, saying that X Corp. did not pay fired Twitter workers as much severance as the contracts said they would. According to the lawsuit, Twitter gave these 6,000 fired…
After getting an observer seat on OpenAI’s board for a few months, Microsoft is now leaving that place without voting. Axios reports that Microsoft told OpenAI in a letter sent on Tuesday that the company is confident in the AI company’s direction because it has seen enough progress. They told us that there will no longer be any monitors on the board after this change. That likely puts an end to rumors that Apple will get an observer place. OpenAI told TechCrunch in a statement, “We’re grateful to Microsoft for putting their faith in the Board and the direction of…
Henrik Fisker and his wife Geeta Gupta-Fisker, co-founders of Fisker Inc., are lowering their salaries to $1 to keep their failed electric vehicle (EV) startup’s bankruptcy proceedings funded while lawyers work to finish a sale of its leftover inventory. John DiDonato, Fisker Inc.’s restructuring officer, said in a filing Tuesday morning that the couple, who co-founded the company in 2016, made the choice on July 8. This was only five days after Linda Richenderfer, a lawyer for the U.S. Trustee’s office, questioned him about the matter. That meeting on July 3 was when Richenderfer asked DiDonato if the Fiskers were…
Hebbia, a startup that uses generative AI to search through big documents and find answers to complex questions, has raised $130 million in Series B funding. Andreessen Horowitz led the round, which was worth about $700 million, and Index Ventures, Google Ventures, and Peter Thiel also contributed. Its funding shows that 50x annual recurring revenue (ARR) is now the rule for AI startups, especially those that have already made millions of dollars in profit early on. Already reported on most of the details of the formal funding announcement. However, Hebbia continued to raise more money, this time another $30 million,…
Poe is Quora’s cross-platform, subscription-based collection of AI-powered chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT-4o. They just released a new tool called Previews that lets users make interactive apps right in chats with chatbots. When Poe users type things like “Analyze the information in this report and turn it into an easy-to-understand and interactive presentation to help me understand it,” Previews lets them make data visualizations, games, and even drum machines. The apps can be made with more than one chatbot, like Meta’s Llama 3 and GPT-4o. They can use information from uploaded files, like movies, and send a link…
A complaint has been filed against an adtech company owned by Microsoft. The case was backed by the European privacy advocacy group noyb, a non-profit that does a lot to take down tech giants that break data protection laws. As its most recent move, noyb is helping a person in Italy who has not been named file a complaint against Xandr with that country’s data protection authority. The protest was made under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union. If it is upheld, the company could be fined up to 4% of Microsoft’s global annual turnover. People…
VPN makers say that Apple took down a number of VPN apps from its Russian App Store at the request of the government’s communications body. Last week, the Russian news agency Interfax said that Apple had taken down 25 VPN apps from its Russian App Store because Roskomnadzor, the government agency that controls the internet and what Russians can access, asked them to be taken down. Russia’s internet is heavily censored and controlled, so people who use it often use VPNs to get around restrictions and access material that is blocked. Two VPN services, Le VPN and Red Shield VPN,…
The latest fight between Apple and Epic Games, the company that makes Fortnite, doesn’t seem to be over yet. Apple’s rules about how to split profits in the App Store have been a problem for Epic for years. Apple was sued by Epic for antitrust violations last year, but that case was thrown out. In March, the Department of Justice and 17 state attorneys general filed a new claim against Apple that shared many of the same complaints. In Europe, the new Digital Markets Act seemed to let Epic open its own Epic Games Store on iOS and bring Fortnite…
In the past few years, it has become more common for media companies to add games to their services. Streaming services and apps are looking for ways to keep their users’ attention in a world where users are becoming more competitive and their attention spans are getting shorter. To keep people on their site, it makes sense for businesses to branch out into gaming: The gaming business is worth about $221 billion around the world, which makes it an appealing way to make money. Here are the newest companies getting into the gaming business, along with information about what they’re…
Dylan Field, CEO of Figma, said this week that the company will temporarily turn off its “Make Design” AI feature after being accused of “heavily” teaching the tool on other apps. The new feature, shown off at the company’s annual Config conference, was meant to speed up the design process by creating UI layouts and components from text prompts. However, it was criticized for looking too much like Apple’s Weather app. YouTube changed its rules in a quiet way this week, letting users ask for the removal of AI-generated or other fake content that imitates their voice or face. The…
Stars are a digital currency that Telegram added last month that can be used inside the app. The company is now adding paid material to its list of uses. Toncoin is the cryptocurrency that Telegram uses over The Open Network (TON) blockchain. The chat app also lets channels turn the stars they have into Toncoin. They can also use them to get channel deals at a discount. At first, Stars were only used to pay for digital things sold by bots and apps in Telegram. Now, people who make content can post it, and users can access it with starts.…
Dylan Field, CEO of Figma, says the company will briefly turn off its “Make Design” AI feature, which was accused of copying the looks of Apple’s own Weather app. Andy Allen, founder of NotBoring Software, was the first person to notice the problem. NotBoring Software makes a suite of apps that includes a famous Weather app that can be customized and other useful apps. He tested Figma’s tool and found that when it was used as a design aid, it would constantly copy Apple’s Weather app. Allen went on X, which used to be Twitter, to say that Figma was…
Some of SpaceX’s rivals are upset about its big plans to launch its Starship mega-rocket up to 44 times a year from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Late last month, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance sent comments to regulators asking them to make sure that other launch providers in the area were affected as little as possible. Blue Origin even suggested that Starship operations should be limited to certain times and that other launch providers should have the right to refuse launches that would conflict with Starship’s operations. But SpaceX might have even bigger plans for Space Launch Complex (SLC)-37…
Meta isn’t the only business that has to deal with the rise of material made by AI and how it impacts its platform. In June, YouTube also quietly changed its rules so that people can ask for the removal of AI-generated or other fake material that uses their voice or face. With this change, people can use YouTube’s privacy request process to ask for this kind of AI material to be taken down. This is more of what they had planned when they first talked about their approach to responsible AI in November. YouTube wants people who are touched by…
At its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) last month, Apple showed off iOS 18. Since then, the company has put out two developer betas in the past few weeks that add support for more languages in iOS 18’s lock screen, Siri, keyboard, and search. Because of the new update, you can now change the time on the lock screen to show it in 12 different languages, including Arabic, Arabic Indic, Bangla, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Meitei, Odia, Ol Chiki, and Telugu. A lot of changes are made to the iOS keyboard, and now it supports predictive typing in three languages…
Podcasts, music, and audiobooks…and emergency alerts? The latest test for the streaming app Spotify is of an emergency warning system in Sweden, which is new ground for the company. There are code references in the Spotify app that show the company is thinking about a way to help get the word out about “accidents, serious events, or disruptions of important services.” Spotify was told that the company is trying this kind of system, but they didn’t say why they would want to offer this kind of service to their people. The Swedish law doesn’t require the app to do that,…
A cloud-based human resources and labor management software startup called SmartHR announced on Monday that it had raised $140 million in funding. The round was led by KKR and included current backers as well as Teachers’ Ventures Growth, an investment arm of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. Three years ago, the company raised a $142.5 million (15.6 billion JPY) Series D round, which gave it a value of $1.6 billion. The Series E round is the latest sign that investors are still interested in tech that helps businesses better handle their biggest cost–staff. The Company Wouldn’t Say Anything About Its…
The European Commission is looking into whether the controversial decision that Meta has made regional users of its social networks, Facebook and Instagram, since last fall does not follow the Digital Markets Act (DMA) of the EU. Meta and other so-called “gatekeepers” have had to follow the ex ante market contestability rule since March 7. If the adtech giant doesn’t, it could cost them a lot of money. If there are proven breaches, the fines can be up to 10% of the company’s total world income, or 20% if the same thing happens again. More importantly, Meta might finally have…
One of the best things about Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro and 1.5 Flash generative AI models is that they can supposedly handle and study a lot of data. In press conferences and demos, Google has said over and over that the models’ “long context” lets them do things that weren’t possible before, like reviewing several hundred-page papers or looking across scenes in film footage. But new study shows that those things aren’t really what the models are good at. Two different studies looked at how well Google’s Gemini models and others can make sense of huge amounts of data, like…
This week, Crunchbase released new numbers that show investments in robotics are once again going in the right way. After a record year in 2021, when the pandemic caused a lot of people to lose their jobs, the number of people generally steadily dropped over the next two years. As the second part of the year starts, 2024 is on track to do better than 2023. So far this year, $4.2 billion has been invested in this area in the first six months. This year is on track to beat 2023’s total of $6.8 billion for the whole year. It’s…
In an interview that came out Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, talked about his hopes for the future of AI. He said that he strongly thinks there will not be “just one AI.” While talking about how open source can help many people get AI tools, Zuckerberg took a moment to criticize the work of rivals who he didn’t name because he thinks they aren’t being open. He said that these competitors seem to think they are “creating God.” In a new YouTube interview with Kane Sutter (@Kallaway), Zuckerberg said, “I don’t think that AI technology should be kind…
That was the salad days of fresh food delivery startups. But those that stuck with it and built businesses that are making money are still here and want to grow even more. One of these companies, the Czech food delivery service Rohlik, announced on Friday that it would be getting an extra $170 million. Rohlik, whose name comes from the Czech word for “baker” or “little roll that a baker might make,” has tried to stand out. Its main goal has been to run smaller stores and build relationships with local sellers and producers, like butchers and fishmongers, instead of…
Amazon is being sued again in the UK for unfair competition. The most recent claim, which was made on Thursday, asks the UK’s Competition Appeals Tribunal for more than £2.7BN in damages, which is about $3.4BN at the moment. The case is being taken by Andreas Stephan, who is a professor of competition law and the head of the Law School at the University of East Anglia. More than 200,000 UK-based Amazon third-party sellers are supporting him. According to the lawsuit, Amazon has abused its dominant position in the marketplace services it provides to third-party sellers in order to reach…
Just this month, TikTok released a brand-new social app called Whee. It’s like Instagram and lets you take pictures to share with your friends. Whee lets you use picture filters and send messages, just like Instagram. But it’s not clear what the company has planned for Whee because the app hasn’t been promoted on Apple’s Search Ads yet and doesn’t have many users, according to new data from app intelligence firm Appfigures. Without help with promotion, new apps on the App Store today aren’t seen by many people. That also seems to be the case for Whee, which quietly came…
NASA announced Wednesday that it has chosen SpaceX to build a spacecraft that will leave orbit around the International Space Station in 2030. The deal is worth up to $843 million. The International Space Station (ISS) is almost done with its useful life. As plans for new space stations owned by businesses heat up, the first one will have to be safely thrown away at the end of the decade. NASA calls the craft the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle, but not much else is known about it yet. NASA made it clear, though, that the vehicle will be different from SpaceX’s…
It has been common for years, even centuries, to give robots skin that looks like human skin. But giving them real, live skin that can be changed into horrifying, slimy faces? That’s different. There is a new paper in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science that is mostly just an experiment. This won’t be the front of your next smart home hub or cleaner. But the clever machines that have been built up over billions of years of evolution might be better in some cases than artificial skin (which is still being worked on) or surfaces that aren’t as complicated.…
When you first start making climate tech software, it might make sense to work on something related to carbon accounting. This is because the most popular climate tech software companies are working on accounting, offsetting, removing, or telling regulators about climate change. It’s easy to see where funders are interested by looking at the startups in the area: The accounting firm Persefoni in New York has raised $164.2 million so far, while Plan A in Berlin has raised $43 million, Supercritical raised $15.8 million, and CUR8 raised $6.7 million. But there was a short period of growth in this sector…
On Tuesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, made it clear that he looks up to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. Using the example of winning a bike race, CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin asked what the plan is for when Microsoft’s huge AI future isn’t so dependent on OpenAI. But Suleyman stepped aside. “I don’t believe the metaphor that there is a finish line.” “This is yet another false frame,” he said. “Everything must no longer be seen as a dangerous race.” Then he told the official Microsoft line about his company’s deal with OpenAI,…
Though the COVID-19 pandemic is over, the need for quick and safe ways to send valuable, fragile drugs and their parts around the world is still very much alive. SkyCell says it has made hardware and software that will make the transportation process better and cleaner than before. It has also raised a lot of money to keep growing its business. The Swiss startup has finished its $116 million Series D round. It will use the money to work with more companies in Asia and the U.S. Tybourne Capital Management and CCI are each putting in $59 million. This is…
A few days after the Wall Street Journal said that Apple and Meta were in talks to combine Meta’s AI models, Mark Gurman of Bloomberg said that the iPhone maker had no plans to do so. Bloomberg says that Apple and Meta talked for a short time in March about the chance of working together. At this point, Apple was in talks with a number of companies to see if their models could work with their products. Bloomberg said that the company dropped the plan to put Meta’s AI models on iPhones because they were worried about privacy. It was…
A short video clip from a recent conversation with Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, went somewhat viral on X (formerly Twitter) over the weekend. Durov tells Tucker Carlson, a right-wing talk show host, in the video that he is the only product manager at the company and that he only works with “about 30 engineers.” When Durov bragged that his company in Dubai was “super efficient,” security experts say that what he said should have raised red flags for users. “Without end-to-end encryption, there are a lot of targets that are easy to attack, and the servers are in…
Streaming is going through a change—the number of users is going down and the big players are trying to get together—but the long-awaited dream of making money finally seems possible (especially for Netflix). So now is a great time for The New York Times to talk to some of the biggest names in the business about what they think will happen next. These people include Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, Mike Hopkins, head of Amazon Prime Video, and Barry Diller, chairman of IAC. A lot of people seemed to agree on the main points: there should be more ads, higher…
A big investor in Byju, Prosus, said on Monday that its once-$2.1 billion stake in the Indian edtech startup is now worth nothing. However, it is still hoping that the once-most-valuable Indian startup can be saved. Prosus, which has a 9.6% stake in Byju’s and is the other big outside investor, said in its quarterly report that its stake in the startup is now worth nothing “due to the significant decrease in value for equity investors.” Erwin Tu, CIO of Prosus Group, said on an earnings call that the company is still optimistic about Byju’s future, but that the Indian…
Meta is now letting all users in India use its Llama-3-powered AI robot. It was tested for a few months during the general elections. However, Meta AI only works with English right now and not any other languages. To try Meta AI in India, the company began rolling it out to a small group of users on WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook in April. After a few days, the company took the bot live in more than a dozen countries. It wasn’t in India, though, probably because that country was having its general elections at the time. Meta is letting…