Author: TechBrunch
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the New York State Attorney General's Office allege that Handy, a gig app that allows customers to book jobs such as cleaners and handymen, made false claims about how much workers could earn through its platform. accused of doing so. In a complaint filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the FTC and New York State Attorney General allege that Handy, owned by Angie (formerly Angie's List), advertised earnings that “did not reflect profits.” did. This is the reality for the overwhelming majority of workers on the…
In the US, it is accepted that most startups fail, and when they do, venture capitalists (generally) accept the loss and move on. But that's not the case in China, where VCs are trying to recover their investments in failed startups by going after founders' personal assets in court, the Financial Times reported. As China's economy stalls, the country's VCs are enforcing redemption clauses built into funding terms that were rarely enforced before, according to the FT. As a result, some Chinese founders owe investors millions of dollars and end up on debtor blacklists, preventing them from booking hotels, taking…
Instagram Threads is developing new features that bring the user experience more in line with that of X (formerly Twitter) and the social network Bluesky. The Meta-owned company is internally prototyping the ability to set a display name and add a cover image to your profile. A company spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch on Tuesday that these two features are not currently available to the public. The new addition was first discovered by reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi. He often finds unreleased features during development. Threads is integrated with Instagram, so users cannot change their display name because the social network automatically…
OpenAI rival Anthropic is in talks to raise another $2 billion in a funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, according to the Wall Street Journal. The round, reported by The Journal, values Anthropic at $60 billion and brings Anthropic's total raised to $15.7 billion, according to Crunchbase data. The company will also become the fifth most valuable startup in the United States, behind SpaceX, OpenAI, Stripe, and Databricks. AI companies are under pressure to raise huge sums of money to fund the development and expansion of technology that tends to require incredible amounts of computing power. OpenAI raised $6.6…
South Park Commons, a Silicon Valley collective of engineers, founders and researchers, spent six months after entering the South Asian market in June, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last year. is raising India-specific funds. week. The exact size of the fund has not yet been determined, but the listing has set a goal of $40 million. Founded in 2016 by Ruchi Sanghvi, Facebook's first female engineer, South Park Commons expanded to India last year in partnership with Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal. The Bangalore-based India branch was the first global move for the platform, which…
New data released by messaging app Telegram reveals a sharp rise in the number of data requests the company has fulfilled over the past year for users' data requested by law enforcement agencies. The increase in requests from users comes months after French authorities arrested Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in August. That's partly because the company has long refused to provide user data in response to child exploitation investigations. Immediately after Durov's arrest, Telegram appears to have relaxed its policies on how it handles abuse reports. Telegram's latest transparency data (which can only be requested through your Telegram account and…
At CES 2025 in Las Vegas, Panasonic announced Umi, its next digital assistant that provides families with a personalized AI-powered wellness coach. Created in partnership with Anthropic, Umi uses Claude AI models to help families “care for, coordinate, and connect” with each other, the company says. More specifically, this includes an AI assistant focused on helping families set goals, such as spending more time together or being more active, through an interactive interface. Users can also voice chat with Umi. In a demo of Umi at the company's CES keynote on Tuesday, Umi is now available as a mobile app…
In 2007, Jesse Burgess joined the family's payroll operations. He quickly realized that the company's six payroll clerks were stuck in repetitive, monotonous tasks. So he set out to streamline these tasks by creating a workflow automation tool. After a few years, Burgess saw an opportunity to offer the tools he had developed for his family's business to other corporate clients. In 2011, Mr. Burgess launched OnPay, a startup that develops payroll solutions and software to help manage human resources and benefits. Today, OnPay offers business apps that help employees with payroll deductions and tax assistance, manage their teams, and…
Uber will use Cosmos, Nvidia's new generative world model simulation tool, and DGX Cloud, a cloud-based AI supercomputing platform, to support the development of self-driving car technology, the companies announced at CES 2025. Cosmos is sold to robotics and self-driving companies as a tool to generate physically-based videos from a variety of inputs. It contains 9,000 trillion tokens generated from 20 million hours of (presumably copyrighted) video and can be used for realistic industrial and driving simulations. environment. Nvidia DGX Cloud provides Uber and other companies with access to high-performance AI infrastructure to train, fine-tune, and deploy AI self-driving models.…
3D design app Rooms has raised more funding. Launched in beta in 2023, the app was created by a former Google employee and allows users to build and code interactive 3D rooms and minigames using a library of over 10,000 items, using the programming language Lua. You can use it for further editing. Now, Google itself has invested $1 million into the app as part of a partnership deal, and Rooms will also be given early access to Google's Gemini AI. Founded by former Googlers with experience in AR/VR, gaming, and YouTube, including Jason Toff, Bruno Oliveira, and Nick Kluge,…