Author: TechBrunch

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…

Ruben Harris and Timur Meyster, founders of upskilling platform Career Karma, today announced the launch of a company called OutRival. OutRival provides a service that allows businesses to build and host their own customer service agents to handle customer interactions. AI agent companies are all the rage right now, and AI is one of the few areas where venture capital is flooding in. As of September, the VC industry poured at least $64.1 billion into the AI ​​sector, with one-third of all VC funding going to AI startups this year, according to PitchBook data reported by the Wall Street Journal.…

GPUs and other chips used to train AI communicate with each other within a data center through an “interconnect.” However, these interconnections have limited bandwidth, which limits the performance of AI training. A 2022 study found that AI developers typically struggle to use more than 25% of their GPU's capacity. One solution could be new interconnects with much higher bandwidth, according to Vivek Raghunathan, CEO and co-founder of startup Xscape Photonics. The secret sauce, he says, is silicon photonics, silicon-based materials that manipulate light to transmit data. “Xscape has created a platform that connects disparate computing elements in a sustainable…

Port, a platform designed to centralize multiple development tools and workflows into one dashboard, has raised $35 million in a Series B round co-led by Accel and Bessemer Venture Partners. Yonatan Boguslavski and Port's current CEO Zohar Eini founded the company in 2022 after serving together in the Israel Defense Forces. Prior to joining Port, Einy was a Solutions Manager at Rookout, a debugging tools startup, and helped launch an AI monitoring company called Aporia. Einy has long held the opinion that developers rely too much on DevOps teams (the teams that oversee the planning, testing, and development of apps)…

SimpliSafe has announced the addition of Active Guard Outdoor Protection to its monthly subscription offering. The new tier adds a layer of 24/7 monitoring to your home security services. Outdoor Protection Pro is available for $50 per month. That price includes the Boston-based company's standard $32 indoor monitoring service. This new product will only be available through new hardware: Outdoor Security Camera Series 2. SimpliSafe says this limitation is due to its predecessor's inability to perform the “AI for the Familiar Face” feature. Cause false alarms in your own home. If the system does not recognize the person based on…

Harry Stebbings, the British podcaster who broke into the tech world with 20-minute interviews with venture capitalists and founders, used his fame to become a VC himself. Now, Stebbings has closed his third investment vehicle, his largest to date. 20VC, the company named after the podcast series, has closed a $400 million fund. As European technology companies continue to lag behind their U.S. counterparts at almost every stage of investment, 20VC's new fund will use Stebbings' media name and connections to attract more attention and help them move forward. Focus on supporting local startups. “I'm really tired of everyone making…

Gladia, a French startup that provides speech recognition application programming interfaces (APIs), has raised $16 million in a Series A funding round. Essentially, Gladia's API allows you to convert any audio file to text with a high level of accuracy and a short turnaround time. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google all offer speech-to-text APIs as part of their cloud hosting product suites, but they don't offer the same performance as newer models offered by specialized startups. There has been significant progress in this area over the past few years, especially after the release of Whisper by OpenAI. Gladia competes with other…

Music streaming company Spotify announced today that it is testing music videos for premium users in an additional 85 markets. The company conducted its first video experiment in limited markets in March. Spotify initially rolled out music videos in beta in 11 countries, including the UK, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Brazil, Colombia, Philippines, Indonesia, and Kenya. Egypt was added to the list earlier this year. The company did not say whether these 85 new markets include the United States. It's a big market for the streaming giant, but it was excluded from the first set of regions where music…

In a typical organization, finance is one of the most important functions. But teams often get stuck in manual workflows. According to research from HR software provider Paylocity, 38% of finance teams spend more than a quarter of their time on manual tasks such as reviewing invoices. Mathieu Hafemeister, a former fintech investor at Andreessen Horowitz, said he has seen many financial organizations struggle to scale due to manual tasks. “The current state of the finance industry is a myriad of point solutions cobbled together within the finance department,” Hafemeister told TechCrunch. “Excel remains the lowest common denominator, with limited…