Author: TechBrunch

“Social media should be built on protocols, not platforms,” ​​Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko said in an interview on TechCrunch's Equity podcast. “And people should be able to freely choose and move between different platforms.” Rochko is here arguing for a more decentralized approach to social media, one that gives users more control over their data and digital lives, including the kind of content they want to put up with. I am doing it. Recently, he spoke out about changes to Meta's controversial content moderation policy, including adjustments to the type of content Meta allows on its platform in the name…

Google announced Wednesday that Workspace customers can now take advantage of all AI features in Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Meet at no additional charge. However, this plan incurs a price increase of $2 per user per month. This change simplifies access to Workplace AI tools such as email summaries, automatic note-taking, and chat with Gemini bots. Previously, customers who wanted full AI capabilities had to pay an additional $20 per user per month for the Gemini for Workplace plan on top of the $12 for the Workspace Business Standard plan. The standard plan currently costs $14 per user per month.…

Colossal Biosciences, a company known for its mission to bring back the woolly mammoth and two other extinct species, is owned by TWG Global, the investment firm of Guggenheim Partners co-founders Mark and John Walter. raised a $200 million Series C at a valuation of $10.2 billion. Billionaire Thomas Tull. The funding comes two years after the company closed its previous round at a reported valuation of $1.5 billion. Why are investors pouring so much capital into a company that isn't yet profitable and whose flagship project – reviving extinct mammoths and Tasmanian tigers – is expected to be completed…

Some of the latest statistics show that employers are inundated with job applications. In the UK alone, employers running postgraduate training schemes will receive an average of 140 applications for each role in 2024, a 59% increase on 2023, according to the Student Employers Association. And despite some trepidation among a minority of recruiters, many companies are turning to AI to help, especially given that Gen Z now outnumbers Millennials in the population. We're looking at platforms. No doubt this contributed to the news. Maki, which has a conversational skills assessment-based AI agent for job interviews and candidate filtering, has…

Global fashion brands are struggling with billions of dollars worth of unsold inventory. In most cases, these brands avoid reselling in core markets such as the UK and US to prevent market cannibalization. Meanwhile, emerging markets such as Africa rely heavily on imported second-hand clothing, of which 30-40% is deemed unusable upon arrival, leading to environmental degradation from discarded textiles. This situation highlights a contradiction. Excess inventory of new and unsold goods in developed markets coexists with ecological damage caused by imports of used goods in emerging markets. But this dynamic also creates unique arbitrage opportunities for startups in the…

OpenAI has begun testing a feature that allows new users of ChatGPT to sign up with just a phone number, without requiring an email. The feature, discovered by software engineer Tibor Blaho, is in beta in the US and India and allows users to sign up for an account on ChatGPT, OpenAI's AI-powered chatbot platform, by entering their number. can be created. There are some limitations. Users who create an account using their own number cannot upgrade to OpenAI's paid plans, such as ChatGPT Plus or ChatGPT Pro, unless they verify their account via email. Multi-factor authentication is also not…

The U.S. school district that fell victim to the recent cyberattack on education technology giant Power Schools told TechCrunch that the hackers accessed “all” historical student and teacher data stored in its student information systems. PowerSchool, which uses school records software to support more than 50 million students across the United States, suffered a breach in December when its customer support portal was compromised with stolen credentials, leaving students and We now have access to a large amount of personal data belonging to teachers. in K-12 schools. It has not yet been publicly identified that this attack was the work…

For years, Vyas Sekhar has been calling his old friend from undergrad, Mackay Girish, to discuss potential startup ideas and seeking Girish's opinion. The two usually discussed the idea and ended the conversation there. When Sekhar called Girish in early 2022 about his idea for synthetic data, the conversation didn't end when he hung up. Sekar and his colleague Julia Fanti at Carnegie Mellon University were working on building synthetic data to solve the reproducibility crisis in academia: the inability to reproduce data. While Sekhar recognized the need for a solution in academia, Girish knew his customers at the time…

Microsoft is launching a pay-as-you-go plan for business customers that bundles some (but not all) of the company's existing AI-powered productivity features for Microsoft 365. The new plan, Copilot Chat (not to be confused with Microsoft's Copilot Business Chat or GitHub Copilot Chat), is powered by OpenAI's GPT-4o AI model and allows users to ask business-related questions and automate workflows. You can build and generate images. All of these features were part of Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft's expansive enterprise AI add-on for Microsoft 365. However, Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing is more stringent. License fees are $30 per user per month.…

Change Healthcare, the health tech company owned by United Health that lost sensitive health data of more than 100 million people in a ransomware attack last year, said Tuesday that it has not provided “substantive notice” to affected individuals about the massive data breach. announced that it had been completed. A February 2024 ransomware attack on Change Healthcare, one of the largest patient claims processing companies in the United States, caused a months-long outage and disrupted healthcare across the U.S. healthcare system. The data breach is known as the largest theft of medical data in U.S. history. Change Healthcare paid…