Author: TechBrunch

Whatnot, a livestream marketplace platform for trading card collectors and sneakerheads, offers a bit of positive news at a time when the overall livestream shopping industry isn't gaining traction in the United States. The company announced Wednesday that its annual gross merchandise volume (GMV) in livestream sales exceeded $2 billion this year. This is a milestone following the recent launch of our new product 'Rewards Club'. It is a customizable loyalty program that allows sellers to create their own rewards that buyers can earn. , coupons, free shipping, and access to exclusive shows and products. Watnot believes the company's growth…

Whatnot, a livestream marketplace platform for trading card collectors and sneakerheads, announced Wednesday that it has surpassed $2 billion in annual gross merchandise value (GMV) this year. GMV's milestone comes on the heels of recent product launches. Rewards Club is a customizable loyalty program where merchants can create their own rewards and customers can earn, including coupons, free shipping, and access to exclusive shows and products. Whatnot's new growth metrics not only highlight the company's strong momentum, but also highlight the growth of its live-commerce business in the U.S., although it's still far behind China, where livestream shopping is a…

Character.AI is starting a new chapter after signing a $2.7 billion licensing deal with Google. The licensing deal includes CEO Noam Shazeer returning to the search giant. We hired Erin Teague, a former YouTube executive with global head of sports movies and product management, as chief product officer. Teague has worked at Google since 2016 and will join Character.AI next week. She also previously served as technical advisor to SVP for Search, Ads, Maps, Gemini, Assistant, Shopping and Payments. Recently, “Character.AI sets a new standard for how everyday users interact with AI, pioneering personalized and engaging AI experiences at scale,”…

During COVID-19, Wiley Webb and his wife embarked on a year-long journey to uncover the most pressing problems in our food system. He talked to people at over 70 farms and always heard they wanted more buyers. Major buyers told Webb they had wanted to find these farm suppliers but were unable to find them due to slow and opaque sourcing. Webb decided to build on the missing pieces. “Despite trillions of dollars in trade and all the sophistication, food buyers are having a hard time finding and contracting new suppliers,” Webb said. “The core issue that prevents the level…

This time last year, Alfonzo Terrell uncorked a bottle of fancy champagne to celebrate the one-year anniversary of being fired from Twitter. He had a lot to celebrate back then. His social media platform, Spill, just raised a $2 million seed expansion and has grown to around 200,000 users. As Spill approaches its second anniversary, Twitter's former global editorial director has something else to celebrate. That's why Emmy Award-winning actress Kerry Washington invested in his app. However, Washington is more than just a member of the cap table. She is active within the Spill community, hosting Tea Parties (the name…

If you've ever tried to use ChatGPT as a calculator, you've almost certainly noticed its computational problems. Chatbots aren't good at math. In this respect, it is not unique among AIs. Claude from Anthropic can't solve basic word problems. Gemini cannot understand quadratic equations. And meta llamas have trouble with simple addition. So why are these bots able to write monologues but still stumble on elementary-level math? Tokenization has something to do with it. Tokenization, the process of dividing data into chunks (for example, splitting the word “fantastic” into the syllables “fan,” “tas,” and “tic”), helps AI densely encode information.…

Lawmakers who support California's recently vetoed AI bill, SB 1047, are losing power. For months, Silicon Valley debated whether SB 1047 would have a chilling effect on California's AI boom or protect it from catastrophic damage caused by advanced AI systems. The answer has not been clear since California Governor Gavin Newsom decided this was the wrong approach and vetoed the bill on Sunday before it became law. Now, California Sen. Scott Wiener tells TechCrunch that some Silicon Valley institutions spread an unprecedented level of “misinformation” about SB 1047 in the months leading up to the veto. Ta. (People outside…

Two years ago, Xiaodi Hou was ousted as CEO of TuSimple, the self-driving trucking startup he co-founded, which subsequently ceased operations in the United States and was delisted from stock exchanges. In a strange turn of events, the company pivoted in the following direction. Chinese AI animation and games. Now, Hou is back at a Houston-based self-driving truck startup called Bot Auto. The startup recently made its public debut armed with $20 million in pre-Series A funding. In a sense, Hou is trying to reunite the AV band. Most of his 40-person team is made up of former TuSimple engineers…

Juno, the popular app that brought YouTube videos to Apple's Vision Pro, is shutting down, its developer announced Tuesday. YouTube had not released its own app for Vision Pro, so Juno allows users to watch videos in an immersive environment and use gestures to interact with the player to resize windows, scrub videos, and more. By making it executable, we filled an important hole in the app ecosystem. . Built by Christian Selig, an indie developer known for the now-shuttered Apollo app for Reddit, Juno was released shortly after Vision Pro arrived in February 2024. The app helped Selig familiarize…

The offices of plant-based protein startup Heura are tucked away down a narrow street a short distance from one of Barcelona’s main tourist draws. But the team of entrepreneurs and food scientists won’t be remixing their protein cocktails in close proximity to La Sagrada Família for much longer — they’re moving to new, larger digs in Poblenou, a district where industrial-scale office space is a lot easier to come by. As we’re shown around the “Heura House :)”, as the startup’s HQ is named (complete with beaming smilie), you can see why they want a bit more room to cook…