Author: TechBrunch
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…
Two months after the self-driving car technology startup changed its business strategy to license its AV technology to automakers and mobility providers, Nuro has , is deploying a test fleet of driverless and passengerless R3 vehicles in the Bay Area and Houston. This large-scale demo expands on the areas Nuro is currently testing and is designed to demonstrate Nuro's technology to potential customers. This startup has two proposals. For OEMs, Nuro hopes to sell self-driving products for passenger cars and commercial vehicles. For companies offering goods delivery or ride-hailing services, Nuro's fully driverless technology (including hardware and software) is on…
Amazon announced Tuesday that Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers will be able to access one audiobook from the Audible catalog for free each month. The move is aimed at countering Spotify's growth in the audiobook space and encouraging some Amazon Music subscribers to buy Audible books and plans. The company said subscribers to its top plan in the US, UK and Canada can listen to audiobooks of their choice. Users can continue listening to their selected audiobooks through subsequent billing cycles or choose new titles. “Today, Amazon Music is introducing the audiobooks category to a whole new audience by making Audible's…
After building Google Lens to make it easier for users to shop online, Google is now helping users shop while in-store by providing product insights, price comparisons, and local availability. We are updating the product to make it possible. Alongside this news, the company is introducing new shopping features to Maps and adding more Google Pay features ahead of the holiday shopping season. The Google Lens update builds on the efforts Google already has through its Google Shopping space. The idea is that people need to make similarly informed shopping decisions in the real world, and Google Lens (Google's visual…
Enabling AI requires creating connections between vast amounts of data. That's where technologies like graph databases come in. Graph databases handle rapidly changing, interconnected data better than traditional databases designed to store strictly structured information. Of course, graph databases require management to take advantage of them. Many companies sell products for this purpose, and one of the leading vendors is Neo4j. Neo4j's roots date back to the early 2000s, when founders Emil Eifrem, Johan Svensson, and Peter Neubauer discovered problems with traditional database technology. The trio developed a prototype of Neo4j, which later became the company's graph database management software…
Microsoft plans to allow Teams users to clone their voices and speak similar to their own voices in other languages during meetings. At Microsoft Ignite 2024 on Tuesday, the company announced Interpreter in Teams, a tool for Microsoft Teams that provides “real-time voice-to-voice” interpretation capabilities. Starting in early 2025, users using Teams for meetings can use an interpreter to support up to nine languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Chinese, and Spanish. You will be able to simulate speech in your language. “Imagine sounding just like you in another language,” Microsoft CMO Jared Spataro wrote in a blog…