Screenshots shared by users suggest that the name of TikTok’s upcoming app for sharing photos that will compete with Instagram could be TikTok Notes. TikTok also stated that the app was being made. TikTok users have been getting pop-up messages about a new app called TikTok Notes that lets them share pictures for the past few days. The alert says that TikTok will soon be releasing “a new app for photo posts” called TikTok Notes. Users’ old photo posts will be able to be shared on this app. People can also choose not to share their photo posts on the…
Author: David
Targus, a company that makes bags and mobile gadgets, says that its business is having a “temporary interruption” because of a cyberattack on Friday. Targus’ parent company, B. Riley Financial, told regulators on Monday that “a threat actor gained unauthorized access to certain of Targus’ file systems.” To contain the incident, the company shut down a large part of its network. “Targus is working to get their systems back up and running after the incident,” the statement said.The new rule from the U.S. securities regulator makes public companies report hacks on their subsidiaries or other parts of the business within…
A consulting company in the United States called Greylock McKinnon Associates (GMA) said that hackers stole up to 341,650 Social Security numbers. The breach was made public on Friday on Maine’s government website, which is where the state posts notices of breaches. GMA told people who were affected by a data breach in the mail that it was hit by an unknown cyberattack in May 2023 and “promptly took steps to mitigate the incident.” Companies and U.S. government bodies, like the U.S. Department of Justice, that are involved in civil litigation can get economic and legal help from GMA. GMA…
Apple changed the rules for the App Store on Friday so that emulators for old computer games can be used everywhere and titles can be downloaded. So, the company told the coders that it is their job to make sure they follow copyright rules. There are already a lot of apps for Android that let people play old games on their phones. Some of those makers will probably be more likely to put their emulators on the App Store after Apple’s update. The company said that these emulator apps must have a way to buy digital things inside the app.…
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai spoke at a Stanford event on Wednesday put on by the school’s business school. He shared some small thoughts on how he runs one of the most valuable tech companies in the world. While Pichai has been having a rough go lately, this was a big event for him. Most people think that Google got behind on generative AI and is now behind OpenAI, which was supported by Microsoft. That’s true even though Pichai has been leading the company’s focus on AI for most of the last ten years and Google researchers wrote the groundbreaking paper…
Elon Musk told Reuters that they were “lying” about their plans to stop working on the $25,000 low-cost EV and instead focus on a robotaxi. A few hours later, Musk said that the robotaxi would be shown off at an event on August 8. The news comes at a time when Tesla EV sales have been slowing down and profits have been going down. The company and its CEO are now looking for another product to boost sales or at least the stock price. Three anonymous sources and internal documents shared by Reuters earlier Friday said that Tesla was giving…
Rooms is a 3D design tool that was made by people who used to work at Google. Its beta version was released on the App Store five months ago. The free iOS app is getting a big update today that adds a lot of new features that are designed to help people find new things. These include an activity feed, an explore page, the ability to browse by area, and more. Rooms is an app for decorating your home that is in the cosy game area. From a library of more than 7,500 digital things, players can build and code…
Sachin Bansal, one of the co-founders of Flipkart, is having talks to get money for his new business, Indian bank Navi. The amount of money Bansal wants to raise is about $2 billion, according to three people who know about the situation. Someone who knows him said that he wants to get $200 million to $400 million. Up until now, Bansal has mostly paid for Navi himself. This would be the Bengaluru-based startup’s first big outside fundraising since it began in 2018. The sources warned that since talks haven’t turned into a deal yet, both the terms and Bansal’s desire…
Ghost Autonomy, a startup that worked with automakers to make software for self-driving cars, has shut down. The startup, which had raised almost $220 million, said on its website that it would no longer be doing business anywhere in the world as of Wednesday. About 100 people worked for the company, which had offices in Mountain View, Dallas, and Sydney. “We are proud of the important technical advances and progress the Ghost team made in its quest to provide software-defined consumer autonomy,” the website says in a note. “The way to long-term profitability was unclear because of the current funding…
Everyone, even those who haven’t made an account, will be able to use OpenAI’s most popular talking AI. Of course, all of your chats will still be used for training unless you choose not to, so it won’t be quite the same. You won’t have to log in to chat.openai.com anymore when you visit, at least not right away in a few places. This change will be slowly rolled out to the rest of the world. Instead, you’ll be thrown right into a chat with ChatGPT, which will work the same way for people who are logged in. You can…
In a $28 billion deal in 2021, Slack joined forces with Salesforce. One of the main goals was to give the communications company more power to fight with Microsoft. Company co-founder Stewart Butterfield railed against Microsoft bundling Teams with Office 365 for years, calling it unfair competition. At one point, he said that Microsoft was “unhealthily obsessed with killing Slack.” In fact, the business went so far as to file a case against Microsoft with the EU in 2020. Microsoft finally said this morning that Teams would no longer be grouped with Office 365. Current customers could still use the…
TikTok is under more and more pressure in the U.S. and the U.K., so the company is showing that it wants to encourage educational material on its app. The company said on Tuesday that it is bringing its STEM-focused feed to more countries in Europe, starting with the UK and Ireland. The feed was first introduced in the US last year. For users under 18, the STEM feed will start to show up immediately next to the “For You” and “Following” feeds. In the app’s “content preferences” settings, users over the age of 18 can turn on the STEM feed.…
It Might Be Easier To Switch Clouds Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are the big three cloud providers. In recent months, they have lowered their transit fees, which are like taxes that customers have to pay to move their data to another provider. To keep current users coming back, this is an attempt, but it’s not very friendly and doesn’t really build trust. These companies are starting to see the error of their ways by lowering these fees, though there are a lot of caveats and some problems. This is because of things like the truth of a multi-cloud world, stricter…
What’s going on with the Earth’s climate can be called many things: Warming the Earth. Changes in climate. A climate emergency. World-wide weirdness. All of them try to show in different ways the strange things that happen when the weather systems in our world go wrong. Still, even though there are a lot of words to choose from, it’s still a very hard idea to understand. But scientists at MIT may finally have an answer. Instead of making predictions about Category 5 storms or days with record-high temperatures, they’ve made a tool that lets people see how many “outdoor days”…
Microsoft will release a new version of its Microsoft 365 and Office 365 subscription service that does not include Teams. This is because the European Union regulator and rival Slack have been looking closely at the package and have complained about it. This comes after Microsoft agreed last year to sell the Office 365 suite in the EU and Switzerland without the Microsoft Teams service. Teams was added as a free feature to the Office 365 suite by the company in 2017. Many businesses have said that Microsoft has had an unfair edge by combining the two products. The move…
Cybercriminals have long seen big businesses and organisations as easy and profitable targets. But thanks to better breach techniques and the rise of AI, small and medium-sized businesses are now also very much on the radar. Now, Coro, a startup that makes tools for small businesses, is launching a big round of funding. This comes after its recurring revenues have grown 300% in the last year. A new round of funding for $100 million has been raised. Sources close to the deal tell TechCrunch that it is worth more than $750 million after the money is paid. Since there are…
Amazon put another $2.75 billion into Anthropic, a growing AI company, on Wednesday, following through on a choice it made in September. It must be working because it spent $1.25 billion at the time, or they may have realised that there are no other horses to bet on. The September deal gave the company $1.25 billion in exchange for a small share in it. As part of the deal, Anthropic agreed to keep using AWS for its large-scale computing needs. Amazon was said to have until the end of the first quarter to decide if it wanted to increase its…
Fisker suddenly lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments as it increased delivery rates. This led to an internal audit that began in December and took months to finish. In the end, the EV startup was able to either find most of those payments or ask customers whose payment methods had ended for new ones. Three people who knew about the internal payment problem told TechCrunch that the chaos took people and resources away from Fisker’s sales team at a time when the company was trying to save itself by changing the way it does business. People who…
The snake robot shape has been around for a long time. Besides adding variety to the field of robotics, the design also has a number of useful features. The first is redundancy, which makes sure that the system keeps running even if a part gets broken. The second part is a body that helps the serpentine system get through small areas. Because of this, snake robots are a great addition to search and rescue teams because they can get into places that people and other robots can’t. It can also be used in plumbing and even medicine, with smaller forms…
In 2016, Facebook began a secret project to listen in on and decrypt the network data going between Snapchat users and the company’s servers. Newly released court papers say the goal was to learn about how users behaved and help Facebook compete with Snapchat. Facebook named this “Project Ghostbusters,” which is a clear nod to Snapchat’s image, which looks like a ghost. A federal court in California released new papers on Tuesday that were found as part of the class action lawsuit between Facebook users and Meta, the company that owns Facebook. The recently made public papers show that Meta…
Robinhood launched its new Gold Card today, eight months after buying credit card startup X1 for $95 million. The card has a long list of features that might even make Apple Card users jealous. Robinhood is best known for its brokerage app for regular investors. To get people to use its new card, it is advertising a lot of perks. The card doesn’t charge any fees for using it abroad or once a year. But only Robinhood Gold users will be able to use it. Robinhood Gold costs $5 a month or $50 a year. Gold is a programme that…
Cyera is a cybersecurity startup that thinks AI will be the next big problem in protecting corporate data. As demand for AI grows, Cyera is raising a lot of money. Sources close to the deal say that the company is almost done closing a round of nearly $300 million that will triple its value to $1.5 billion. The tools that the company makes use AI to get accurate pictures of where and how data is being used in organisations’ networks. Sources say that the well-known venture capital company Coatue is in charge of the round of funding. The deal should…
Some of Arrival’s assets, such as advanced production equipment, have been sold to Canoo, another struggling startup that is also trying to make and sell electric cars. Arrival is now bankrupt. The purchase was advertised as a way to save money as it will cut capital costs by 20%. However, Canoo is still having trouble moving from trials to mass production. Canoo said that the bought goods, which will be sent to the company’s plant in Oklahoma in more than 20 container ships, will be used. The business held all of Arrival’s “like-new” and brand-new assets in the United States…
Trading in shares of electric vehicle startup Fisker will stop right away, the New York Stock market said Monday. The company is also being taken off the market. Because the price of Fisker’s stock is “abnormally low,” the exchange said Monday that it is “no longer suitable for listing.” The decision comes a month after the NYSE told Fisker that its stock price had been selling below $1 for 30 days, which was against the rules of the exchange. When Fisker filed on Monday afternoon, it said that it expects its stock to be moved to an over-the-counter market like…
Apple is being accused by the DOJ of acting like a monopoly. This case has a lot of effects beyond just iOS and iPhones. Apple is being closely watched by trade authorities more than ever. The U.S. Department of Justice sued Apple on Thursday, saying that the company was acting like a monopoly by keeping iPhone customers locked in and making it hard for rivals to make hardware and software. There have already been major antitrust cases against Apple outside of the U.S. This lawsuit is very broad and difficult, but we’ll talk about the DOJ’s case, the industry’s response,…
Emad Mostaque, founder and CEO of Stability AI, has quit his job as CEO and from the board of the unicorn startup, the company announced Friday night. This is the second big change at a hot AI startup this week. Some of the investors in Stability AI are Lightspeed Venture Partners and Coatue Management. The company said in a blog post that it doesn’t have a permanent CEO yet but has named its COO Shan Shan Wong and CTO Christian Laforte as temporary co-CEOs. Stability AI has lost more than six important employees in the last few months, and they…
It has made a name for itself in the music streaming, radio entertainment, and audiobook business. Spotify is adding e-learning as a new type of material to its platform in order to get its more than 600 million users to spend more time and money there. Starting with a test run in the U.K., Spotify is looking into the possibility of giving free and paid video courses for education online. Because it was made with help from outside groups like the BBC and Skillshare, at least two lessons will be free. The average price of the whole course is between…
A company earnings call on Thursday said that Intuitive Machines’ second trip to the moon is still on track to launch before the end of the year. This is because the company only needed to make small changes to the design of the lunar lander. This year, the company made history when it was the first business to put a spacecraft on the moon’s surface. There were some problems with that operation, called IM-1. The lander came in a little too hot and flipped over on the surface, but it did test the lander’s main parts, engine, and other systems.…
At a virtual event today, Microsoft showed off two new Surface devices and a bunch of new accessories. The first part of the talk, however, was all about how its AI Copilot is becoming more and more built into Windows. But this event was mostly about hardware, with some business software thrown in for good measure. But that’s how things work at Microsoft these days: even the simplest hardware events have to have a Copilot angle. Microsoft spent a lot of time telling a story about Copilot that was mostly made up of updates that had already been revealed, customer…
A group of 16 state and federal solicitors general, along with the U.S. Department of Justice, sued Apple this morning in federal court for antitrust violations. The lawsuit says that the company has an unfair advantage in the high-end smartphone market and does many illegal things to keep that advantage. You can read the whole lawsuit here if you’re interested in the specifics of those methods and whether they were legal. The case is a lot like the DOJ’s antitrust suit against Microsoft in the 1990s, which I wrote about at Directions on Microsoft from 2000 to 2010. Even Merrick…
Gitai, a company based in Los Angeles, said on Tuesday that its self-driving robotic arm had successfully completed a tech display outside of the International Space Station. Last year, Sho Nakanose, CEO of Gitai, told TechCrunch that the company wants to cut the cost of work in space by 100 times, similar to how SpaceX and other providers have cut the cost of launch by a huge amount. It will still be a while before autonomous robotic systems can do everything that humans can do. This is especially true here on Earth. But in space, where jobs are expensive and…
India-based audio app Pocket FM has raised $103 million in Series D funding. Lightspeed Ventures led the round, and Stepstone Group also participated. Tencent and Times Internet are investors in the company. It wants to grow into Europe and Latin America after seeing success in the U.S. market. This is the first time TechCrunch has heard that the company has raised $196 million in various rounds, putting its value at $750 million. Last year, TechCrunch said that the company was in talks with Lightspeed to lead the funding round that it revealed today. How Does The Site Work? Pocket FM…
An important step forward in the field of artificial intelligence is artificial general intelligence (AGI), which is also called “strong AI,” “full AI,” “human-level AI,” or “general intelligent action.” AGI will be able to do a wide range of cognitive tasks at or above human levels. This is different from narrow AI, which is designed to do specific tasks like finding flaws in products, describing the news, or building you a website. When CEO Jensen Huang talked to the press this week at Nvidia’s annual GTC developer meeting, he seemed really tired of talking about the subject. He says that…
One of the crimes listed is “an act of dishonesty against the company.” Sources and internal documents seen by TechCrunch say that SpaceX makes its workers agree to some strange rules about their stock awards, which makes them less likely to work there. There is a clause in that agreement that lets SpaceX buy back vested shares within six months of an employee quitting the company for any reason. SpaceX also lets itself keep current and former workers from taking part in tenders if, among other things, they are found to have done “an act of dishonesty against the company”…
Truecaller, a caller ID app, stops between 38 and 40 billion spam calls every year for its more than 374 million users. It is now making its screening tech stronger in order to get more people to sign up for its premium plans. TechCrunch has learned that the new “Max” update for Android paid users blocks all calls that aren’t from a permitted contact or that the AI thinks might be spam, even if the caller isn’t already in Truecaller’s database. Before, blocking and other actions were based on how numbers were mentioned in that database and on the person’s…
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, says, “Building foundation models for general humanoid robots is one of the most exciting problems to solve in AI today.” This is hard to disagree with. The humanoid form factor is one of the most controversial topics in robots right now. It’s bringing in a lot of venture capital while also making a lot of people very skeptical. Nvidia wants a piece, of course. In recent years, the chip giant has made a strong case for itself as a leader in robotics innovation through projects like Isaac and Jetson. It is now probably the most…
The EU Data Act says that cloud service providers need to make it easy for people to switch. After AWS and Google made similar moves, Microsoft has now said that it will also let business users move data out of its Azure cloud infrastructure with no “egress fees” attached. Microsoft says that the statement was made voluntarily to help customers, but the fact that it was made public in a short blog post without much fanfare could mean that Microsoft had other goals in mind. In fact, the company said that it supports “customer choice, including the choice to migrate…
The sun is just coming out from behind the clouds, and birds are singing. That can only mean one thing: it’s almost time for developer season. Other people are touching the grass, both figuratively and literally. But developers around the world are crammed into meeting rooms to learn what the next year holds for AI and OSes. The first event is Nvidia’s GTC next week. The next few months have Microsoft Build, Apple’s WWDC, and, of course, Google I/O. For the second one, invites just came out. It will take place on May 14 and 15 at the usual place,…
Bloomberg reported that Apple has added another AI company to its list of purchases. DarwinAI, based in Canada, uses vision-based technology to keep an eye on parts while they are being made to make the process more efficient. Officially, neither Apple nor DarwinAI have said anything about the deal. However, several members of the startup’s team joined Apple’s machine learning teams in January, according to their LinkedIn accounts. Over $15 million had been raised for DarwinAI by backers such as BDC Capital’s Deep Tech Venture Fund, Honeywell Ventures, Obvious Ventures, and Inovia Capital. On its website, BDC Capital says that…
Grok is X’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. You may have heard of it. It’s a robot, so it does what you’d expect it to do: it answers questions about culture, current events, and other things. Grok, on the other hand, has “a bit of wit” and “a rebellious streak,” as Elon Musk, the owner of X, puts it. To make a long story short, Grok is ready to talk about things that other chatbots won’t, like controversial political theories and conspiracies. Sometimes it will use rude language, like when asked “When is it appropriate to listen to Christmas music?” and…