After a successful first flight, Apex, a company that makes satellites, has raised $95 million to grow its business. The Los Angeles-based company launched and took delivery of its first spacecraft, a model named Aries, in March. That mission seems to have gone off without a hitch, which doesn’t happen very often in the space business. Now that the company has a history of successful flights, it is fully focused on growth. Among other things, that means making more of the Aries car and putting money into making Nova, a spaceship that weighs about twice as much as Aries. Ian…
Author: David
The most important changes to Apple’s iMessage and Messages app in iOS 18 aren’t the Genmoji or AI emoji or even the option to send texts via satellite. Texting with Android users will be a lot easier now that you can finally plan messages to go out at a later time and date. You will also be able to use RCS, the next generation of messaging that will replace SMS. These messaging tools will have a big effect on how people talk to each other every day, even though they were announced at WWDC 2024 along with AI and other…
In a WWDC 2024 keynote speech, Apple Intelligence was introduced, and a deal with OpenAI made it possible for Siri to use ChatGPT. SVP Craig Federighi then stated that Apple will be working with more third-party models. The first company the executive used as an example was one that Apple was looking to work with. “In the future, we’re looking forward to integrating with other models, such as Google Gemini,” Federighi said in a chat after the keynote. He quickly added, “We have nothing to announce right now, but that’s our general direction.” By the end of the year, OpenAI’s…
Elon Musk says that all of his companies will not be able to use iPhones because of the new OpenAI features that Apple announced at WWDC 2024 on Monday. The executive from Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI wrote on X that “if Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level,” Apple products would not be allowed in his businesses. Instead, guests would have to check their Apple products at the door and be “stored in a Faraday cage.” His posts either don’t understand the link between Apple and OpenAI that was announced, or they try to raise privacy concerns about users. Both…
Apple finally showed off Apple Intelligence at WWDC 2024 on Monday. This is the company’s long-awaited push into generative AI across its whole environment. The new function is called Apple Intelligence (AI, get it?) as earlier rumors said. The company said that the feature would be made with safety and totally unique experiences in mind. “Most importantly, it has to understand you and be rooted in your personal context,” said Tim Cook, CEO of Apple. “This includes your routine, your relationships, your communications, and more.” “Of course, it has to be built from the ground up with privacy in mind.”…
A bill has been passed in New York’s state senate that says social media companies can’t show kids under 18 so-called “addictive feeds” without getting permission from their parents. The Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act says that a feed is addictive if it suggests or ranks content based on details about the user or the user’s device. This is a lot like how most social apps use artificial news feeds. It would still be possible to have “non-addictive feeds,” which includes “feeds listed in chronological order.” The bill is likely to be signed by New York Governor…
BlackRock, an investor in Byju’s, says that its $22 billion share in the Indian edtech giant is now worth nothing. Its estimates were lowered, which was made public in an SEC filing. This makes Byju’s one of the most impressive startup slides in recent memory. BlackRock’s report for the year ending in March comes after a rough year for the Bengaluru-based startup, which wasn’t long ago India’s most valuable company. Last year, Byju’s had a hard time meeting its financial reporting dates and ended up missing its revenue goals by more than 50% because of problems with its governance. Problems…
Google and Microsoft have used their developer conferences to show off their creative AI skills. Now, everyone is looking forward to next week’s Worldwide Developers Conference, where Apple Intelligence is likely to make its debut. The company in Cupertino is under a lot of stress. It’s likely that Apple feels like it needs to do everything it can to impress its fans and owners now that it’s behind its competitors in AI. But that shouldn’t mean making too many features promises. First Put Reliability Apple makes some of the most well-known electronics in the world, and its AI features should…
Threads.com, the option to Slack backed by Sequiuoa, said on its website that Shopify had bought it. The companies didn’t say what the deal was, but they did say that the Threads.com team would be joining Shopify. Threads also said that the startup had “the chance to sell our domains” after Meta’s social network with the same name went live last year. It’s not clear if the company sold the domain name to Meta, Shopify, or someone else, but the note does say that if it had stayed independent, it would have had to change its name from Threads. Everyone…
The e-commerce giant Amazon recently made a settlement with the U.K.’s competition watchdog over how it uses the data of Marketplace sellers. Going forward, Amazon promises to be more open and fair in how it does business. The company is still in trouble with these problems, though. The British Independent Retailers Association, which has thousands of members, said Thursday that it is suing Amazon for damages worth £1.1 billion ($1.3 billion today). The claim is that Amazon illegally used members’ private data for competitive purposes. BIRA also criticizes Amazon’s “Buy Box,” saying that the company rigged the process to choose…
Two top police officers are accused of giving thieves personal information about citizens that they got from a secret government database. learned that two high-level anti-terror police officers in Bangladesh are accused of keeping secret and selling private information about citizens to crooks on Telegram. A letter signed by a top Bangladeshi intelligence official that saw says that the data that was sold included cell phone call records, national identity details of citizens, and other “classified secret information.” Brigadier General Mohammad Baker wrote the letter on April 28. He is in charge of Bangladesh’s National Telecommunications Monitoring Center (NTMC), which…
This is a big step toward making the “fediverse,” which is the larger network of decentralized social media apps like Mastodon, Bluesky, and others, work better together. It’s now easy for people who use decentralized apps like Bluesky’s AT Protocol-powered Mastodon to follow people on other networks and see their posts. They can also like, reply to, and share them. The same people will also be able to see the posts of the other people. Bridgy Fed is the technology that makes this possible. It is one of the projects that aims to connect the fediverse to the web, Bluesky,…
For an undisclosed sum, Google bought Cameyo, a business that makes virtualization tools for running Windows apps on ChromeOS devices. Cameron Miller, CEO of Cameyo, and Naveen Viswanatha, product lead at Google, wrote in a blog post that the purchase will help ChromeOS, Google’s light Linux-based operating system, by letting ChromeOS users use Windows apps more easily and without having to deal with complicated installs or updates. “We are giving businesses the power to update their IT infrastructure while protecting their investments in existing software by combining the power of ChromeOS with Cameyo’s cutting-edge virtual application delivery technology,” Miller and…
The Indian media giant Times Internet has decided to sell Amazon parts of the video streaming service MX Player. This is the latest move by the e-commerce giant to make its services and brand more well-known in smaller cities and towns in a key overseas market. A person familiar with the situation told TechCrunch that the two companies finalized the deal on Wednesday evening. A source told TechCrunch that the deal values MX Player at less than $100 million, which is a lot less than the $500 million price at which the streamer raised its last round of funding. The…
Hackers were able to get into the accounts of Paris Hilton, CNN, and Sony, among other famous people and brands on TikTok’s video platform. The company’s security team is now fixing the problem. The video app maker, which is owned by ByteDance, didn’t say anything about the attack or how it was stopped. Instead, it only said that it had taken steps to stop the attack and make sure it wouldn’t happen again. As Semafor and Forbes already said, the attack seems to have involved malware sent through TikTok’s direct messages, which may have made it harder for account owners…
India’s 2024 general election was won by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), but with a smaller majority than in 2019. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, CLSA, UBS, Bernstein, and Citi all did research after the election that suggests this smaller mandate may push the government, which is known for making India a global manufacturing powerhouse and investing in areas that make the country less dependent on Western countries, to take a more populist stance in its third term, putting the needs of lower-income groups and rural development first. The NDA is likely to win, which means that policies will stay the…
René Laennec, a French doctor, made a tool in 1816 that let doctors listen to people’s hearts and lungs. The stethoscope went from being a simple wooden tube to a light version with two earpieces that most doctors wear around their necks today. A company called Eko Health, which was formed in 2013, is bringing this common medical tool into the digital age by adding AI to it. The stethoscope was made by Eko and has been sold to more than 500,000 doctors and other health care workers over the past ten years. Because they’ve been used on millions of…
Everyone knew that the internet had all sorts of things for a long time, so it wasn’t a surprise when people started tweeting porn at each other. Many active NSFW (not safe for work) communities have been on X (formerly Twitter) for a long time. The social network unofficially let people post adult material, but its rules have never explicitly allowed or forbidden it. That is now changing. These past few days, X added some parts to its rules that make it official for users to post adult and violent content on the platform, though there are still some restrictions.…
On June 10, at 10 a.m. ET/7 a.m. PT, Apple will hold its opening address for the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), which will last for a week. The talk will be mostly about the company’s software products and the workers who make them, like the newest versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, visionOS, and watchOS. You can watch the stream on the events page for Apple. It’s also possible to watch the stream on YouTube, though it sometimes lags. Some critics have said that the company is behind Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI in creative AI research. This has been…
Reid Hoffman, Richard Branson, and the Chainsmokers are among the people who have backed the company. Learned that LoanSnap, an AI mortgage startup, is being sued by many creditors and has been kicked out of its headquarters in Southern California. This has made workers worry about the future of the company. LoanSnap was started by Karl Jacob (pictured above) and Allan Carroll, who are both experienced business owners. The company has raised about $100 million since its seed round in 2017, with $90 million coming in between 2021 and 2023, according to PitchBook. LoanSnap says that investors include Reid Hoffman,…
Spotify has raised the price of its services for people in the U.S. This is the second time in a year that the prices have gone up. The big music streaming service says that premium prices will go up from $10.99 to $11.99 in July, which is a rise of almost 10%. Prices for the Duo and Family plans will go up by $2 and $3, respectively, to $16.99 and $19.99 per month. The price for the student plan will stay the same at $5.99 per month. Spotify recently reported a 20% rise in income, a 14% rise in premium…
People have said that the first efforts to make hardware specifically for artificial intelligence were, well, not very good. On the other hand, here’s an AI tool that’s just plain rubbish: A Finnish company called Binit is using the picture processing power of large language models (LLMs) to keep track of trash around the house. Business people have been interested in using AI to sort the trash so that recycling is more efficient at the municipal or business level for a while now (see Greyparrot, TrashBot, and Glacier). But Borut Grgic, the founder of Binit, thinks that tracking trash is…
The factories that Apple uses in Austin, Texas. The business has built its Mac Pro desktop about 20 minutes north of downtown since 2013. The building is 400,000 square feet and is in a maze of industry parks. It’s only a short drive south from the company’s still-under-construction main campus. In recent years, the capital city has become a hub for tech innovation. This is mostly because of the University of Texas at Austin, which is close and has a huge pool of talented people. In 2019, work began on a new site worth $1 billion. Soon after the first…
Spotify is still getting bad feedback about its choice to stop supporting Car Thing, its in-car streaming device, which it announced in May. The company said that the gadget will stop working on December 9, 2024. Gen Z users are making videos on TikTok to say they don’t like what Spotify did and what it suggests they do, like switching to Android Auto or CarPlay. Users say that they often couldn’t use the infotainment systems that came with their cars, which makes them a good fit for a specialized player like Car Thing. The streaming service’s car kit hadn’t been…
It’s possible that fake audio and video of candidates will play a big role in the 2024 election. As election campaigns heat up, voters should know that AI companies don’t really fight back against voice clones of famous politicians, from the President on down. This is what a new study shows. Six speech cloning services were looked at by the Center for Countering Digital Hate. These were Invideo AI, Veed, ElevenLabs, Speechify, Descript, and PlayHT. For each, they tried to get the service to copy the sounds of eight well-known politicians and say five lies in each voice. 193 of…
On June 5, SpaceX’s huge Starship rocket could take to the sky for the fourth time. The main goal is to test the second stage’s reusable heat shield as the vehicle tries to safely return the atmosphere for the first time. Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, wrote on his social media site X, “There are many tough problems to solve with this vehicle. But the biggest problem is making a reusable orbital return heat shield, which has never been done before.” He said earlier this month that the main goal of the next Starship test was to “get through max…
Everything in society, from standardized tests to AI programs, can feel like it’s trying to be the best it can be. It’s taught that you should know what you want and then figure out how to get there. Ken Stanley, a former researcher at OpenAI and co-founder of Maven, a new social media platform, has been saying for years that this way of thinking is not only useless but also damaging. Stanley says that instead of putting goals first, we should put chance first. Stanley told TechCrunch in a video interview, “Sometimes we have to get off the path of…
The shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, killed several people. Their families are fighting Activision, Meta, and Daniel Defense, the company that made the guns. Josh Koskoff, an attorney, is representing the families who are suing. He earlier got Remington to pay the families of Sandy Hook shooting victims a settlement. The suit against the tech companies says, “Over the last 15 years, two of America’s largest tech companies have worked with the firearms industry in a scheme that makes the Joe Camel campaign look almost cute and harmless.” The lawsuit specifically mentions Activision’s popular “Call of Duty”…
Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review, an email that goes over the biggest news stories of the week. Want it sent to your email every Saturday? Click here to sign up. This week, OpenAI said it would be removing Sky, one of the sounds its new GPT-4o model used, because users said it sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson’s AI character in “Her.” In a statement, the actor said that she had hired a lawyer to find out how the voice was created. The company says the voice wasn’t based on Johansson’s, but the actress said OpenAI had asked…
Lucid Motors is letting go of about 400 workers, or about 6% of its staff, as part of a reorganization that will happen before the release of its first electric SUV later this year. The company told the government on Friday morning that the restructuring should be finished by the end of the third quarter and will cost between $21 million and $25 million. It’s been a little more than a year since Lucid Motors cut 1,300 jobs. CEO Peter Rawlinson told the company in an email, “I’m confident Lucid will deliver the world’s best SUV and dramatically expand our…
The US Department of Justice and 30 state attorneys general sued Live Nation Entertainment, which owns Ticketmaster, for what they say are unfair business tactics. When Live Nation and Ticketmaster joined in 2010, they made a powerful entertainment company that handles most of the country’s ticket sales and venue bookings. But Taylor Swift fans’ experience buying tickets for the Eras tour in late 2022 was so bad that lawmakers looked more closely at how much power the entertainment giant had over the business. The presale was full of bugs and people had to wait hours to get tickets, and the…
Elon Musk’s company, X, is planning to make social network “likes” private. This could make it hard for users to tell the difference between something they’ve saved and something they’ve favorited. New posts from employees of the company say that the decision to hide likes is meant to protect their public image and encourage people to interact with the site by letting them like “edgy” material. It is not clear that this is the best way for X to solve the problems it wants to fix, like giving its algorithm more information so it can better tailor your material to…
It’s not a joke—a job posting says that President Joe Biden’s campaign for reelection needs someone to handle jokes. It is said that the new “Partner Manager, Content and Meme Pages” will “start and manage day-to-day operations in engaging the internet’s top content and meme pages.” It can pay up to $85,000. Yes, it’s silly to make a living managing memes. But these days, planning online is just as useful as getting to know people in person at a farmers market. If a politician wants to meet voters where they are, they need to be online. If something goes viral,…
Big Tech still doesn’t see enough women as AI leaders. Meta said on Wednesday that it would be making an AI advisory council with only white guys. What else do you think we should expect? Women and people of color have been complaining for decades that they are ignored and left out of the world of AI, even though they are qualified and have played a big part in its development. Meta didn’t answer right away when we asked them to say something about how diverse the advisory board is. The Oversight Board and Meta’s real board of directors are…
A remote access app is being used on the computers at check-in at a number of hotels in the US. This app is leaking photos of guest information to the internet. Learned that at least three Wyndham hotels across the United States have spying apps for everyday use running on their check-in systems. The app, pcTattletale, constantly and quietly took screenshots of the hotel booking systems, which showed information about customers and guests. Because the spyware has a security hole, these screenshots can be seen by anyone on the internet, not just the people who are supposed to use the…
It began with a sketch on a napkin. TechCrunch has heard that AirLoom Energy is now raising an extra $12.7 million. A statement with the government says that the money came from 21 investors, but it doesn’t name the backers. A request for word from the company did not get a response right away. The new company in Wyoming has a unique way of using wind power. Instead of putting huge turbines on top of towers that are more than 100 meters tall, it connects vertical blades to wires that run along an oval-shaped track 25 meters (82 feet) above…
The Indian budget hotel group Oyo, which used to be very successful, has pulled its IPO application from the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) for the second time. This is a big setback for the company, which already didn’t have high hopes. According to a notice on the regulator’s website, the Gurugram-based startup, which was worth $10 billion at its peak, scrapped its plans to go public on May 17. Oyo first sent paperwork to SEBI in 2021 to become public, but later took it back and sent it again in 2023. SEBI has not yet approved either…
A recent spam attack on Bluesky shows that even decentralized social networks can be hit by spam sent by botnets. Earlier this month, Bluesky’s network saw a lot of posts that said “remember to always vote Trump.” These posts came from users with random names and default avatars. The scam didn’t come from Bluesky, though. Instead, it went through Mastodon and Nostr, two other autonomous networks, on its way to Bluesky. The botnet used “bridges,” which are paths that were built between networks so that they could work together, to do this. The spam attack happened on May 11, but…
You can now get Google Play Store apps promoted in places other than the Play Store. It was released last week at Google’s I/O 2024 developer conference. The company talked about a plan to get people to use apps they already have on their phones again, as well as new ones, by giving app writers a place to show off their work in a new way. More than 35 software partners have already signed up to test the new service. Companies like Shopify, Spotify, Pinterest, and Tumblr are just a few of them. The company went into a bit more…
Microsoft wants to make creative AI a big part of Windows and the PCs that run it. This week, at an opening event before its annual Build developer conference, the company showed off a new line of Windows computers it calls Copilot+ PCs. The computers also have generative AI-powered features like Recall that help users find apps, files, and other content they’ve seen before. Copilot is Microsoft’s brand of creative AI, and it will soon be a lot more built into Windows 11. Also, new Microsoft Surface gadgets are on the way. All the important news has been put together…