Author: TechBrunch

Google's Gemini chatbot can now remember information about your life, work, personal preferences, and more. As reported by posters on X (and Google's official account), the “Memory” feature has started rolling out to certain Gemini users, including this reporter. Similar to ChatGPT's memory, Gemini's memory adds context to the current conversation. For example, you can tell Gemini to remember your favorite foods, and the next time you ask the bot for restaurant recommendations, it may tailor its suggestions to your culinary preferences. According to 9to5Google , the memory is only available to subscribers to Google's $20-per-month Google One AI Premium…

With the rise of AI, having accessible, accurate, and organized data is more important than ever. When making informed strategy decisions or training new LLMs, organizing your information is the first step. This week on Found, we speak with Collibra CEO Felix Van de Maele, who is building data governance infrastructure for the age of AI. In the early days, maintaining organized data started as a niche concept, but now it's the foundation of AI and privacy compliance. In this episode, Van de Meere talks about the challenges of launching a startup in Belgium before there was a serious startup…

Startup Ample is on a mission to transform commercial fleets into believers in the power of electric vehicle battery swapping technology. For the past three years, the company has been piloting electric vehicle battery swapping technology in San Francisco, Madrid and Japan. Ample is currently preparing to convert some of these pilot customers into commercial contracts in 2025. And supporting Ample's growth is new $25 million in funding from new investor Mitsubishi Corporation. Compared to Ample's previous investments, this increase seems modest. In 2021, a year of free-flowing money, Ample successfully raised a total of $190 million in two rounds.…

There are many online platforms for developers that can help you learn new skills or start using a new language, such as CodeCademy, Leetcode, and CodeSignal. Some guide developers step-by-step through the process while teaching them the basics, while others provide detailed video tutorials. Codecrafters is a platform where developers don't want to be shown developer videos or held hands when learning a new language. Instead, we want to provide difficult challenges for advanced developers to build projects, master programming languages, and learn other concepts along the way. The Y Combinator-backed startup was founded in 2022 by Sarup Banskota and…

After building Bonobos and having a solid career advocating for the mental health of its founders, Andy Dunn moved his family to Chicago. Years later, he realized a depressing reality. I hadn't made any new friends. “I don't think it's easy to admit that you don't have any friends,” Dunn told TechCrunch with a laugh. “It's like, 'I don't have any friends!'” Dan's experience is representative of a larger trend: Americans are lonely. This feeling of loneliness reached its peak at the start of the pandemic, but did not completely subside even as lockdowns and restrictions were eased. Dan eventually…

Is the grass greener next door? I'm not sure, but I'm sure the sky is bluer. It's been two years since Elon Musk bought Twitter (now known as X) and people started setting up shop on alternative platforms. Mastodon, Post, Pebble (two of which are no longer in operation), and Spill have been mentioned as potential replacements, but with the exception of Meta's Threads, few companies have achieved the speed of growth that Bluesky achieved. As of November 2024, Bluesky has over 20 million users. Its growth has been attributed to several policy changes in X, including a highly criticized…

Formal is a security startup that came out of stealth on Tuesday with an impressive list of investors and an interesting product positioning. The company designed reverse proxies for its data stores and APIs to make it easier for security teams to secure access to sensitive data. More practically, Formal is a proxy that you deploy in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) that logs all requests made to a data store (for example, a database containing customer information) and enforces access policies. apply. Formal is the brainchild of founder Mokhtar Bacha. He is 24 years old and started his technical…

Bluesky, a social network competitor to X, is benefiting from a surge in people leaving the Elon Musk-owned app, formerly known as Twitter. Today, Bluesky has reached a major milestone by surpassing 20 million users. Additionally, new data shows that the app's rapid growth has narrowed the gap with Instagram Threads, another prominent X rival, in metrics such as daily active users and website visits. Bluesky's user base is much smaller than Threads, but Threads recently reported more than 275 million monthly active users. But if Bluesky maintains its current growth rate, market intelligence firm SimilarWeb believes it could eventually…

When Alex Hawkinson was CEO of SmartThings, a consumer connected device company he co-founded and sold to Samsung for about $200 million, he realized that Internet of Things (IoT) technology could potentially solve bigger problems. I kept thinking that maybe it was. He left SmartThings in 2018 to understand where connected devices can have the greatest impact. He co-founded IoT company BrightAI in 2019 with Nathan Hanks, Douglas Berman, and Robert Parker. When the pandemic hit in 2020, Hawkinson, who is now CEO, said it became clear that infrastructure was where BrightAI's focus should be. “Experiencing that downtime during the…

The US government has secured the extradition of a suspected Russian hacker who allegedly served as the primary administrator of the massive Phobos ransomware operation. Prosecutors announced Monday that Evgeny Putitsyn, 42, was recently extradited from South Korea and appeared in Maryland federal court on Nov. 4. Petitsyn is accused of managing the sale, distribution and operation of Phobos, a type of ransomware operation. Cybercriminals launch a cyberattack that extorts at least $16 million from more than 1,000 public and private victims worldwide. The newly unsealed indictment reveals that these victims include a Maryland-based company that provided accounting and consulting…