Author: TechBrunch

Instagram is rolling out a new “Profile Card” feature that is essentially a digital business card for your profile. The official launch comes months after the Meta-owned social network was spotted testing the feature with select creators. The new double-sided profile card is designed to make it easier for users to share their Instagram accounts with others. You don't need to send your handle to anyone, just share your card. Instagram sees this feature as an easy way to connect with new people and make friends. One side is a shareable “card” that pulls information from your Instagram profile, including…

The New York Times sent a cease-and-desist letter to Jeff Bezos-backed Perplexity, asking it to cease accessing and using the content in its AI summaries and other output. The Wall Street Journal reviewed the document. The letter alleges that Perplexity “unjustly enriched” itself by exploiting the publisher's “unauthorized expressive, carefully written, researched, and edited journalism.” It is said to be in violation of copyright law. This is not the first time the newspaper has engaged with an AI company, suing OpenAI for using its content to train ChatGPT without consent. Other publishers have also accused Perplexity of unethical web scraping.…

Amplitude, a publicly traded company that makes digital analytics software, has acquired Command AI, an app user engagement startup formerly known as CommandBar. Most of San Francisco-based Command AI's 30-person team will join Amplitude. James Evans, Command AI's co-founder and CEO, declined to disclose the terms of the deal, but he was candid in saying that no acquisition was planned. “Our growth has been great and we have plenty of runway,” Evans told TechCrunch. “We weren't doing any shopping ourselves or anything like that, but when Amplitude reached out to us a while ago, this summer, we were very excited…

Inversion Space became the third company to receive a spacecraft reentry license from the Federal Aviation Administration, clearing the way for the startup to launch and return to orbit its Technology Pathfinder mission later this year. The three-year-old startup has ambitions to transform space into a new “Earth's transport layer” with ultra-fast, on-demand cargo delivery from orbit to anywhere on Earth. The Ray vehicle is the first piece of hardware that Inversion will send into space. The actual Ray capsule, mounted on the oven-sized bus, is only about twice the size of a Frisbee and much smaller than the company's…

Neuron7, a 5-year-old AI customer service startup, just closed an oversubscribed $44 million Series B round led by Keith Block and 1.5-year-old venture firm Smith Point Capital. Neuron7 is located in one of the most promising areas for AI technology: customer service. But unlike the ChatGPT customer-facing chatbot startup's plethora of services and services that do natural language search for manuals, Neuron7 is aimed at complex service and repair tasks. The company said its customers include ATM field repair company NCR Atleos, medical device manufacturer Medtronic, and printer and image processing company Lexmark. “If you are one of the largest…

After bringing generative AI to search in 2023, Google is powering its Shopping tab with the technology. The company announced Tuesday that it will use AI to help users buy products based on exactly what they are looking for. We've also launched a new scrollable feed of personalized shoppable products. When you search for products on Google, the results page now includes an AI summary of things to consider when shopping. For example, if you search for “men's winter jackets for Seattle,” you'll get a summary of what Google thinks you should know before buying a new jacket for that…

Early is a Tel Aviv-based startup that uses generative AI to generate unit tests to help programmers find potential bugs early in the development cycle. Founded in August, the company today announced that it has raised a $5 million seed round led by Zeev Ventures with participation from Dynamic Loop Capital. In its current form, Early supports JavaScript and TypeScript and is integrated with the Visual Studio Code IDE. From there, developers can quickly see how much of their code is covered by tests and automatically generate verified tests from within the IDE. The company says these tests include mocks…

Creating a compelling video isn't just about the visuals. Much of the appeal of great video content is in the audio, but finding (or sometimes creating) the right audio effects can be a time-consuming process. Adobe is showing off Project Super Sonic at its annual Max conference. This is an experimental prototype demo that shows how you can one day quickly generate background audio and audio effects using Text-to-Audio, object recognition, and even your own voice. video project. Being able to generate audio effects from text prompts is fun, but it might not be all that groundbreaking considering that companies…

This story has been updated throughout with updated details as the story unfolds. We will continue to do so as litigation and disputes are ongoing. There is a lot of controversy going on in the world of WordPress, one of the most popular technologies for creating and hosting websites. The central issue is a dispute between WordPress founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine, which hosts websites built on WordPress. WordPress technology is open source and free, and is used by a huge portion of the internet, about 40% of websites. Websites can host their own WordPress instance…

YouTube on Tuesday added new features to its mobile, web and TV apps, including fine-grained controls for playback speed, a redesigned mini-player, collaborative playlists and badges. Previously, users had a control to increase playback speed in 0.25x increments. In the latest release, YouTube now allows users to increase or decrease playback speed by 0.05x by tapping the “+” or “-” symbols in the new playback speed control menu. The company has also made it easy to create collaborative playlists. Playlist links and QR codes can now be shared with others, and users can add their own photos as thumbnails or…