Apple said Thursday that Final Cut Pro for iPad 2 and Final Cut Camera are now available. The company first talked about both apps at an iPad show in May. Apple also put out changes for Mac Final Cut Pro. New features have been added to the iPad version so that it can work with the new iPad Pro with an M4 chip. Apple says the new chip can render up to two times faster than the M1 and can handle up to four times as many ProRes RAW streams. When it comes out, Final Cut Pro for iPad 2…
Author: David
As soon as it opened, Paris quickly became a major hub for AI startups in Europe. A new deal could make that situation even stronger. Poolside.ai is a creative AI company based in Paris that is making tools to speed up software development. Sources tell TechCrunch that the company is raising at least $400 million and will be worth $2 billion after the money is raised. Sources tell us that Bain Capital Ventures and DST are currently talking about how to co-lead the round. BCV has backed the company before, and DST is a new partner. It was already known…
Zepto raised a huge $665 million in new funding, bringing its value from $1.4 billion to $3.6 billion, which is more than doubling in less than a year. The Mumbai-based startup is now putting even more effort into taking over India’s competitive quick commerce market. People in towns in India can quickly buy and get delivered anything from groceries to electronics through Zepto. India is a great place for the rapid-delivery model to work, but most startups in developed markets have failed in this area. It was led by Glade Brook, Nexus, and StepStone Group, and Zepto said it was…
Like many other highly valued startups, SpaceX lets its workers sell some of their shares to outside investors approved by the company as a way to cash out. Has seen an internal SpaceX memo from May 2022 that talks about a job offer like this. Musk wrote on X last month that SpaceX has sales like this for its workers about every six months. It’s interesting to read about the buyers who are allowed to buy these secondary shares and the great deals they get. It shows that investors paid employees $70 per share in this deal. Compared to the…
It’s becoming easier for bad people to hack computers, which is causing a clear trend in security technology. To keep people and businesses safe, security needs to keep getting more complicated. This idea was first thought of by the security company PQShield, which focuses on “post-quantum” cryptography. These are software and hardware solutions that, in theory, are future-proof and can withstand hacks done with the most powerful quantum computers in the future. Now, the company is saying that it will be getting an extra $37 million to meet the demand from the industry to build hardware and other systems based…
AI, especially creative AI, is the big story in technology in 2024, whether you like it or not. With the billions of dollars it has raised and the popularity of its services like ChatGPT, OpenAI may have gotten most of the notice and money so far. But a new study from top VC Accel and the analysts at Dealroom says that a new wave of people who want to make their mark is coming up in Europe and Israel. Europe and Israel together usually bring in about 45% of all venture capital funding each year. But when it comes to…
Today, artificial intelligence (AI) is all the rage in technology. To get more people to use and join LinkedIn, the company unveiled a bunch of new AI-powered services on Thursday. The company is betting a lot on AI and people’s desire to see it woven into the platform. They’re adding tools that can help people look for jobs and then apply for them (yes, there’s a tool that can write your whole application and cover letter), find relevant learning material (of course, it’s about AI), and search all of LinkedIn faster to find what you need. First, let’s talk about…
This is how VC A lot of other venture capitalists tried to get the deal, but Nikhil Basu Trivedi beat them all. There are a lot of young AI startups that venture capitalists are chasing hard these days. GPTZero has already made millions of dollars in its first year and a half of life. GPTZero was started by Edward Tian, 24, and Alex Cui, 26, who have been friends since high school. They give a detection tool that helps people figure out if a piece of content was made by AI. Team Footwork co-founder Nikhil Basu Trivedi led a $10…
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, has gotten enough votes from shareholders to get his 2018 stock option pay package accepted. Shareholders also agreed with the company’s plan to re-incorporate Tesla in Texas, moving it away from Delaware, which is where Musk’s pay package was thrown out. At Thursday’s annual meeting of shareholders, which took place at Tesla’s gigafactory in Texas, people cheered and stood up when general counsel Brandon Ehrhart announced the results of the vote. It wasn’t clear right away what the margin of win was. Musk jumped around on stage Thursday and said, “I just want to start…
There has been way too much drama leading up to Thursday’s yearly meeting of Tesla shareholders. A vote will be held by the company to “re-ratify” the $56 billion pay package that Elon Musk received in 2018. This package was thrown out by a judge in Delaware Chancery Court earlier this year. Also, there will be a vote on whether the company should move its incorporation from Delaware to Texas. People who really support Tesla are telling the company’s “retail army” of owners to vote for both, but to pay Musk more attention when they vote. It’s not clear what…
The opening of a battery materials plant in Finland by BASF had to be put off earlier this year because environmental groups and the court agreed that the company did not have a good plan for how to deal with its trash. As battery factories pop up all over the world, the fear of wastewater could stop their building. One company, on the other hand, says that recycling it is the better option. The wastewater from these plants is full of sodium sulfate, which is made when sulfuric acid and caustic soda are broken down. These are chemicals that are…
A anthropomorphic robot behind the wheel? Is that the key to self-driving cars that don’t hit people or telephone poles? That’s what some researchers at the University of Tokyo think, and they explain their point of view in a scientific paper that came out this week. One of the researchers works as a consultant for Toyota. They made a “musculoskeletal humanoid” named Musashi and taught it how to drive a small electric car on a test track. For Musashi, the road in front of it and the views in the side windows are like human eyes because the car has…
TikTok seems to want to compete with Google’s search power after being the leader in social media. Told by the company that it is testing a feature that will let users take or share a picture to find similar items in TikTok Shop. The first person to notice the function was X user Jonah Manzano. All users in the US and Southeast Asia can use it. The new feature will show up as a camera icon in the search bar in TikTok Shop for users who can see it. Let’s say you like the plate you’re served on a lot…
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…
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…