Author: TechBrunch
Tick tock! The countdown is on to secure your tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 at a deep discount. Register by September 27th at 11:59pm PST to save up to $600 per ticket type. Secure your seats before prices go up. This offer won't last long. Disrupt 2024 is your gateway to the heart of the startup ecosystem. From October 28-30 at Moscone West in San Francisco, 10,000 tech founders, innovators, and venture capital leaders will come together to network, learn, and share their expertise. With over 250 industry experts and 200+ sessions, this event is perfect for anyone serious about…
Meta Connect 2024 kicks off today at 10am PST with a keynote from CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The developer event will focus on Meta's XR (VR and AR) platform, the Metaverse, and Llama, the Facebook parent company's open source generative AI platform. New hardware like the Meta Quest 4, updates to Meta Ray-Bans, and a preview of the new “Orion” AR headset may be shown off in the California sun. There are a few ways you can stream the presentations live. The easiest way is to bookmark the Meta Connect site, which is free to sign up for. Meta will also…
Nostalgic '90s PC game Backyard Baseball is coming to Steam on October 10th, 27 years after its original release, for $10. Arcade-style baseball games have become cult favorites among sports fans who grew up with the game, many of whom are now in their 20s and 30s (including MLB All-Stars, like Bobby Witt Jr. and Trea Turner). Though they're aimed at kids, they have their own unique charm: Who would have guessed that a pizza box could serve as home plate, that wacky outfields are sometimes built around swimming pools, and that neighborhood kids defy the laws of physics when…
A common assumption is that companies like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic have bottomless pockets and hundreds of top researchers, which allows them to create state-of-the-art foundational models. But as one of them famously put it, they “have no moat.” And AI2 proved that today with the release of Molmo, a multimodal AI model that most closely rivals those companies, but that is small, free, and truly open source. To be clear, Molmo (a multimodal open language model) is a visual understanding engine, not a full-service chatbot like ChatGPT. It does not have an API, does not support enterprise integration, and…
The promise that blockchain would change the world has not materialized: the technology has primarily enabled people to speculate on a new asset class. A major hurdle to realizing blockchain's full potential, Web3 advocates argue, is that decentralized services are extremely difficult to build. Tomasz Tunguz, best known for his popular startup blog and successful SaaS investments at Redpoint Ventures, believes he's found a company that significantly lowers the bar for building blockchain apps. The company is Initia, which recently closed a $14 million Series A round, about 90% of which was funded by Tunguz's Theory Ventures, according to information…
Anyone who works at a computer for more than eight hours a day knows the amount of tool and “context switching” required to stay productive: “Where did I put that file?”, “How do I manage all my Bluetooth devices?”, “How quickly can I switch from my to-do list to GitHub to a web search?” Of course, this isn't rocket science, but Raycast aims to make that task easier by providing integrated and quick access to applications, files, commands, and workflows through a keyboard-based interface. Essentially, it's about bringing a little order to chaos with so-called “shortcuts to everything.” This could…
Supabase, an open-source developer platform and Postgres database service that started as an alternative to Google's Firebase, announced Wednesday that it has raised $80 million in a Series C funding round led by Peak XV and Craft Ventures. This brings Supabase's total funding to $196 million, including its Series B round (also $80 million) in 2022. Supabase co-founder and CEO Paul Copplestone didn't disclose the new valuation in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch ahead of Wednesday's announcement, but emphasized that it's an upround. He also said the company only recently began drawing down its Series B reserves. Like many database…
Digital transformation — upgrading companies' legacy apps and processes with new technology — has long been a hot, high-margin business, but the pandemic has caused the market to boom. Lockdowns and the widespread shift to working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic have led brands to turn to older technologies to modernize their organizations. According to Statista, global spending on digital transformation will reach $1.85 trillion in 2022, up more than 16% year-on-year. WhatFix is one digital transformation company benefiting greatly from this boom: The San Jose-based company, which provides a platform for demonstrating how to use third-party software,…
Reddit is rolling out machine learning-powered translation to more than 35 new regions across Europe, Asia and Latin America as it aims to open up the primarily English-language social network to more users. The service launches about five months after Reddit first introduced site-wide translations for French speakers, though the company has previously allowed users to translate individual posts into multiple languages. It also comes seven months after Reddit went public, and while the company says its user base and advertising revenue continue to grow, the most obvious way to attract more users is to make content available in more…
India's second-largest telecom operator, Bharti Airtel, on Wednesday vowed to curb the rise of spam calls and messages in the world's most populous country, announcing the rollout of an AI-powered spam-detection solution to all its customers. The Google-backed company also announced the launch of what it claims to be India's first network-based, AI-powered spam detection system. The feature will alert Airtel customers in real time to suspected spam calls and text messages and will be enabled automatically for all users at no extra cost. Airtel has about 387 million wireless subscribers in India. Indians have long been plagued by relentless…