Author: TechBrunch
Sir Chris Hoy, one of the most decorated track cyclists of all time, may not seem like an obvious candidate to support the burgeoning e-bike movement. After all, the common saying is that electric bikes aren't real bikes. But the six-time Olympic gold medalist has done just that, creating a click-on device that allows a push bike to be easily converted to electric and back again with minimal fuss. Invested in a new startup company. The company, called Scalper, has raised £12.8 million ($16.3 million) since its founding in 2020, with Hui contributing to the initial seed tranche. The click-on…
President-elect Donald Trump made it clear during his campaign that he doesn't think the United States should take an aggressive stance on climate change. From leading chants of “drill, baby, drill” to frequent criticism of everything from wind turbines to electric cars, he's poised to cast a shadow over the climate tech sector for the next four years. It seems there is. Or will he? As with many of President Trump's positions, it's difficult to pinpoint his exact position on climate change and technologies that mitigate or adapt to it. Additionally, some of his proposed policies could broadly benefit climate…
On a morning in September 2024, two Jonathan Cohens, one from the Rockaways, Queens, the other from London, stand in an empty 15,000-square-foot parking lot near New York City's Hudson Yards. was. As they walked along the chipped yellow line, they explained how the space will help Joco, a shared e-bike startup for delivery workers, continue to expand. “We're going to get rid of all our cars and focus completely on electric two-wheelers, three-wheelers, four-wheelers and small electric vehicles for charging,” said Cohen, New York, Joko's chief growth officer. he told TechCrunch with a big smile. . They roamed the…
A group of Canadian news and media companies filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on Friday, accusing the ChatGPT maker of copyright infringement and unjust enrichment at its expense. The companies behind the lawsuit, which include the Toronto Star, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and the Globe and Mail, are seeking monetary damages and a ban on further use of their work by OpenAI. I'm looking for it. Media outlets said that OpenAI uses content collected from its websites to train large-scale language models that power ChatGPT. Its content “has been produced at a tremendous amount of time, effort, and cost on behalf…
Welcome to Startups Weekly — a weekly roundup of must-sees from the world of startups. Want it delivered to your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. There are only a few days left in the year, and even with a short work week in the US due to Thanksgiving, there's been plenty of startup news to wrap up since last Friday. Oh, and by the way, thanks for reading. This week's most interesting startup stories Image credit: J Studios If you're looking for some weekend reading, here are some recent insights worth digging into. From time to time: The timing…
As more publishers terminate content licensing agreements with ChatGPT creator OpenAI, a study published this week by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism reveals how AI chatbots generate citations (or citations) for publishers' content. We are investigating whether this is the case, and the results are interesting. Well, for that matter, reading. In short, our findings show that publishers are at the mercy of generative AI tools' tendency to fabricate or otherwise misrepresent information, whether or not they allow OpenAI to crawl their content. It suggests that it continues. The study, conducted at Columbia Journalism School, identified the sources of…
Low literacy skills have plagued the deaf community for decades. According to the National Center for Special Education Research, the median literacy rate for deaf high school graduates has stagnated at the fourth-grade level since the early 20th century. Bringing STEM concepts into the mix, where standard American Sign Language (ASL) has a limited vocabulary, only presents deaf children with additional obstacles to success. That's the problem Illinois-based startup ASL Aspire, one of the startups announced at TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Battlefield 200, hopes to solve with a game-based approach to STEM education. The ASL Aspire team works with Deaf scientists…
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…