Author: TechBrunch
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…
A venture capitalist, a recruiter at a large company, and a newly hired remote IT worker may not seem to have much in common, but they all belong to North Korea, according to security researchers. He was reportedly arrested as a fraudster secretly working for the government. On Friday, security researchers presented their latest assessment of the North Korean threat at Cyberwarcon, an annual conference in Washington, DC focused on disruptive threats in cyberspace. Researchers say North Korea's hackers continue to masquerade as prospective job seekers at multinational companies in order to make money for the North Korean regime and…
Using your phone intentionally is a difficult habit to develop. Operating systems like iOS and Android, along with social media networks like Instagram and TikTok, are building timers, nudges, and controls around the use of their apps and platforms. But sometimes, as a force of habit, you unconsciously unlock your phone and end up doing nothing or scrolling through your timeline. To eliminate this habit, Ukrainian developer Yaroslav Neznaradko has created an Android app called Intenty that prompts you to provide a reason or perform an action such as breathing or stretching every time you unlock your phone. I developed…
Decarbonizing our economy in the fight against climate change requires a major overhaul of all kinds of production processes to make them as sustainable as possible. Environmentally friendly chemicals used as raw materials for all kinds of products are an area of focus for British start-up Deep Blue Biotech. The biotech startup, founded in May 2023, is building a business centered on photosynthesis-based biomanufacturing, which can produce chemicals in a more environmentally friendly way than traditional production methods such as refining fossil fuels. is building. The company also notes that because the genetically modified microorganisms it uses to make chemicals…