Author: TechBrunch

Character AI, a platform that allows users to role-play with AI chatbots, has filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the parents of a suicidal teenager who was allegedly addicted to the company's technology. In October, Megan Garcia filed a lawsuit against Character AI in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida, Orlando, over the death of her son Sewell Setzer III. Garcia said her 14-year-old son developed an emotional attachment to the character AI chatbot, Danny, and started texting him constantly and withdrawing from the real world. Following Setzer's death, Character AI announced…

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The developers of Pixelfed, Loops, and Sup, open source alternatives to Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp, respectively, are currently raising funds on Kickstarter to fuel further development of their apps. The trio is part of the growing open social web, also known as Fediverse, and leverages the same ActivityPub protocol used by the Mastodon X alternative. The latter saw an increase in registrations and usage after the company formerly known as Twitter was sold to Elon Musk in October 2022 and during the X leak following the US presidential election. In the months and years following that sale, people are looking…

Developers behind Instagram, Tiktok, and Whatsapp's pixelfed, loops, and SUP open source are currently collecting funds to promote further development of apps in Kickstarter. This trio is a part of the growing open -minded web, which is also known as a Fediverse equipped with the same ActivityPub protocol used in X alternative Mastodon. The latter, which was previously known as Twitter sold to ELON MUSK in October 2022, increased and used in the Egyptian statement of X, following the US presidential election, increased and used. Open source and distributed apps such as Mastodon and Bluesky (use new ones in the…

Apple released a new number on Friday and emphasized the adoption of iOS 18 users. The mobile operating system released in a public format in September 2024 is installed on 68 % of compatible devices. The number will jump to 78 % on the iPhone released in the past four years. For the remaining iPhone, 19 % run iOS 17, and 13 % use the previous version. Similarly, 19 % of the iPhone released in the past four years is currently running iOS 17. This figure drops to 5 % in the previous iOS build. This is understandable, considering the…

Welcome to Startups Weekly -Weekly something that you can't miss from the startup world. Do you reach the receiving box every Friday? Sign up from here. This week would have been a short week because it started on holidays in the United States. However, some of the founders were busy on the day of the inauguration ceremony, and for the next few days, they brought us more than their fair. The most interesting startup story of this week Image Credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg Via Getty This week, I remembered that not all sales were born in the same way, and…

In the days leading up to TikTok's ban in the US on Sunday, US users were flooded with renotes of the Chinese app. The app is listed in the US app store under the Chinese name Xiaohongshu and quickly became the No. 1 free app in the US, but after Trump suspended the ban, it was re-noted in the US. its use declined rapidly. By Monday, REDNOOTE had lost more than half of its daily active users in the US after reaching 32.5 million daily actives on the day of the ban. Rednote's daily active users in the U.S. fell…

Angell, a French smart electric bike motor -up, announced in an email to customers that the company has declared bankruptcy and is approaching the court to calculate the judiciary. “Angell is over,” said Marc Simoncini, a co -founder and CEO of the company on Instagram. (He is also a French judge in Shark Tank.) “Despite the incredible work of all employees, the hardware problem ends the adventure. I did. Originally established in 2019, Angell has started to create an electric bicycle with several smartly connected functions. The original motorcycle packed a small color touch screen in the center of the…

Kodiak Robotics has officially handed over two self-driving trucks to customer Atlas Energy Solutions, marking the startup's first commercial launch. Atlas, a proppant and oilfield logistics provider, received its first Kodiak-powered truck in December and immediately began operating it unmanned in an off-road environment in the remote Permian Basin of West Texas. Don Barnett, Kodiak's founder and CEO, said the company has already used self-driving trucks to deliver 100 packages without a human safety driver behind the wheel. . “As far as we know, this is the first time that a customer owns and operates a self-driving car rather than…

Meta's X Rivals thread said Friday that it is testing ads with some brands in the U.S. and Japan. Instagram head Adam Mosseri said the company will listen to feedback before expanding the experiment to other markets. “We know we're getting a lot of feedback on how we approach advertising, and we're making sure that we feel like posts in threads that we think are relevant and interesting,” Mosseri said. . “We will be monitoring this test closely before scaling it more broadly, with the goal of making advertising on threads as interesting a place as organic content,'' he said.…