Author: TechBrunch

Spotify Wrapped, the streamer's long-awaited annual listening roundup, has arrived. In addition to the usual personalized overviews that detail your favorite artists, songs, podcasts, and more, the company is introducing two new features this year. The most notable of these is 2024 Wrapped's AI-powered podcast, created with NotebookLM, Google's AI summarization tool. . Spotify is also rolling out a new data story called “Your Music Evolution,” which shows how interest in music has changed over the past year. Spotify previously built its Wrapped features in-house, but the addition of podcasts powered by Notebook LM means Spotify will be working with…

Cyberattacks are on the rise and victims are getting more attention. According to research by KPMG, nearly half of companies with annual revenue of $1 billion or more have recently experienced a security breach. Surprisingly, an overabundance of security tools may be contributing to the problem. In another poll, 43% of companies said their teams were overwhelmed by alerts. Piyush Sharma is no stranger to cybersecurity tool overload. As Director of Engineering at Symantec, Sharma was responsible for leading the development of several app control, endpoint security, and unified management products and ensuring that these tools worked well together. “Organizations…

Today, a new company is emerging from stealth to help companies build open-source AI infrastructure and reduce engineering overhead, backed by Google's AI-focused venture fund. Cake provides over 100 products for enterprises, including data source adapters (such as Apache Hadoop), data ingestion (such as Apache Kafka), data labeling (such as Label Studio), vector and graph databases (such as Milvus or Neo4j), and generative AI. Integrate and secure your components. APIs and related tools (such as Anthropic) and many other categories. This suggests why Cake is called so. Cake takes the various “layers” that make up an AI stack and integrates…

A new connected fitness device is in town. Its name is Growl. Inspired by hardware companies like Peloton and Tonal, Growl creates boxing bags that attach to the walls of your home. Users can start an immersive, gamified boxing class from the comfort of their own home. The team also seems to be taking inspiration from boxing classes like Brooklyn Fitboxing. We're just looking at the opportunity to offer users a similarly intense fitness experience without having to go to a studio and sweat it out in groups. “The real purpose of this product is to transform the traditional punching…

Veeam, which helps users protect and recover their data, has seen its valuation soar in a recent secondary sale aimed at bolstering the company's cap table ahead of its eventual IPO. The Insight Partners-backed company said Tuesday it raised $2 billion in a secondary sale of stock worth $15 billion. TPG led the investment, with participation from Temasek, Neuberger Berman Capital Solutions and others. The sale is expected to close in the first quarter of 2025. The sale triples Veeam's price since it was acquired by Insight Partners for $5 billion in January 2020. According to its financial results at…

In this hyper-connected world we live in, it's easier than ever to provide feedback to the companies you patronize. But just because a company offers more ways to contact you doesn't mean they read every comment. According to Productboard's 2020 research, 90% of companies are having trouble collecting feedback from all channels, and one-third have no process at all to collect feedback. Varun Sharma realized this acutely while leading customer success efforts at LinkedIn, analytics software company Amplitude, and startup Scale AI. Despite their best efforts, product and customer experience teams struggled to use customer feedback in decision-making, Sharma said.…

Katsukokoiso.AI is a project by professional photographer Eugenio Marongiu, who is an alpha tester of OpenAI's text-to-video model Sora. Using an unpublished Sola model, Maronge created a piece titled “Surrealistic Elderly People” that aims to balance the absurd with striking realism. Previous users of Sora have noted that the system can be unwieldy and unreliable to release a final product. And of course, the whole technology is controversial, but that hasn't stopped artists like Maronge from experimenting. Marongiu said Sora helped accelerate his typical image-based production process. This process “involves creating images and later animating them.” Thanks to Sora, I…

Chinese open-source AI models have been in the news recently for their superior performance in various AI tasks such as coding and “reasoning.” However, it has also drawn criticism, including from OpenAI employees, for censoring topics sensitive to the Chinese government, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre. Clement DeLang, CEO of Hugging Face, said he has similar concerns. In a recent podcast (in French), he warned of the unintended consequences of Western companies building on top of high-performance open source Chinese AI. “If you create a chatbot and ask people questions about the Tiananmen Square incident, it's not going to…

On Tuesday, cloud business software provider ServiceTitan priced its initial public offering at $52 to $57 per share, expecting to raise between $446.2 million and $514.2 million in the midrange. I am. It also made some other interesting disclosures about what it will use the money for and who it will sell its shares to. In its latest S-1A SEC form, the company revealed that it plans to use significant cash (approximately $311 million) to buy back all of its non-convertible preferred stock at $1,000 per share. Investors paid. In addition, those shareholders will also be paid any accrued dividends…

Today, longtime Founders Fund partner Brian Singerman announced he is taking a step back at X. He will move from honorary partner to partner in order to achieve a better “work-life balance,” but will continue in his role as an “investor and strategic advisor” to the firm. Singerman has been with Founders Fund for more than 16 years. In his farewell post, he wrote that he was attracted to the company, founded by Peter Thiel in 2005, because it was considering a “literal moonshot” investment in SpaceX. Mr. Singerman has since invested in companies including fintech company Affirm and health…