Author: TechBrunch

Apple just released iOS 18.1.1, but it's iOS 18.2 that brings exciting image generation features, including Apple's Image Playground, which creates cartoon-like images from text descriptions. . Here's what you need to know about Apple Intelligence features, including what they are, how to use them, and when they start. What is Image Playground? Image Playground is part of Apple Intelligence, Apple's suite of AI-driven tools. This new feature allows users to enter a text prompt and the AI ​​generates a cartoon-like image. Image Playground can be accessed from a dedicated image creation app or via the Messages app by clicking…

Sequoia is close to closing its first deal in India and the broader Asia-Pacific region since parting ways with its former partner, four people familiar with the matter said. The investor, one of the world's largest venture capital firms, is in talks to back Bangalore-based cross-border payments startup Vance, the people said. The person requested anonymity because the deliberations are ongoing and private. If this partnership goes ahead, it would be the company's first since it ended its alliances with Sequoia India and Southeast Asia in the middle of last year. The former Sequoia division was later rebranded as Peak…

X is full of accounts that imitate real-life celebrities, from politicians to sports experts to artists. Some accounts have “parody” written in their display names, others have “parody” written in their profiles, and some people, such as newscasters, mistake them for real accounts. The platform is developing new labels for parody or fan comment accounts to more clearly identify them as parody accounts, according to several app reverse engineers. If a company deploys a label and a parody account adopts it, the label “parody account” will appear under the username on the user's profile page and in their posts. This…

Indoor climbing is a difficult sport to track. That's why Spanish startup Lizcore caught the eye of TechCrunch at MWC earlier this year. The team of two co-founders, led by CEO Edgar Casanovas Lorente, a climbing instructor and guide turned entrepreneur, is building on the social gamification that climbing gyms already enjoy in all kinds of other sports. They were showing off hardware that they hope will be a precursor to the future. The rise of wearables and activity tracking apps. The system devised by Lizcore only requires climbers to wear a lightweight cloth NFC bracelet to track their sport.…

There is immense power in being in control of your own data. As ownership and governance of apps and online services becomes more consolidated, it makes sense that you will want to consider your options for where your personal data and records of your daily activities are stored. Fortunately, not all services out there seek to monetize personal data, and many are just as good (and often better) than their commercial or ad-supported rivals. (I can't say it's better.) Take a moment and think about what you want to leave behind. Is it a large technology company storing your data?…

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is the second largest driver of internet usage worldwide. Its assets and its billions of users account for 10% of all fixed traffic and 22% of all mobile traffic. Meta's investment in artificial intelligence will further accelerate its use. So, to ensure a reliable infrastructure to support its business, Meta is taking the pipe into its own hands. TechCrunch has confirmed to sources close to the company that Meta plans to build a new, massive fiber-optic submarine cable that will span the globe. The project is more than 40,000 kilometers long…

Large enterprises are grappling with how to incorporate AI into their platforms and processes and are facing challenges. To actually use generative AI, it requires memory and its training data must be constantly updated. This field is now called “Live AI,” and many startups such as Cohere and Writer are working on this field. Another, Pathway, just raised $10 million in a seed round to build a live AI system that thinks and learns in real time, just like humans. The round was led by TQ Ventures with participation from Kadmos, Innovo, Market One Capital, Id4, and angel investors. Other…

Indian food delivery app Zomato has raised $1 billion from institutional investors, completing its first major funding since its 2021 IPO. The food delivery and quick commerce giant issued about 336.5 million shares at a price of 252.62 ₹ ($3) per share in a qualified institutional offering, according to a stock exchange filing on Friday. This funding saw active participation from major Indian investment trusts. Motilal Oswal emerged as the largest investor with his fund family holding 20.81% of the outstanding shares. ICICI Prudential fund secured 12.78% while HDFC and Kotak funds got 8.68% and 5.95% respectively. The $1 billion…

If you've ever used ChatGPT Search or Perplexity, you know that being able to search the web and pull citations inline greatly improves these AI chatbots. Results will be better if timely information is included, and web searches may reduce so-called hallucinations (i.e., when generative AI outputs false information). That's why French startup Linkup is building an API that allows developers to access web content from premium, trusted sources and pass the results through large-scale language models (LLMs) to enrich answers. Many AI developers refer to this workflow as search augmentation generation (RAG). More importantly, the future of bot scraping…

Many startups and large technology companies are building AI agents and programs that can handle multi-step tasks without user supervision. Once available, these agents must work together to complete complex tasks such as booking and paying for flights, hotels, and excursions. /dev/agents is a new company founded by former Google executives who helped develop Android in the early days of the smartphone era, believing that a new operating system was needed to unleash the full potential of AI agents. I am. “Before Android existed, we all understood the potential of mobile, but as developers, it was just too difficult to…