Author: TechBrunch
Earlier this year, Bridgit Mendler surprised fans by announcing that she would be heading up a new space data startup called Northwood Space. With Northwood, the former Disney star and singer is targeting an often overlooked but crucial part of space infrastructure: ground stations. Mendler will be at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Francisco from October 28-30 to share her insights on this area of space tech. Ground stations are the key communication points for satellites to communicate with Earth. These giant antennas transmit data from the spacecraft to operators, including information about the satellite's health and data collected in…
Linkinbio platform Linktree announced Thursday that it has acquired social media scheduling tool Plann for an undisclosed amount. While Sydney, Australia-based Plann will continue to operate as usual for now, Linktree plans to integrate its social scheduling tools into its platform in the coming months, meaning users will soon have access to features like social media planning and automated posting for platforms like TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. It's unclear whether Linktree plans to incorporate all of Plann's features, such as its AI-powered caption generator. Linktree did not disclose how much the new scheduling tool will cost users. Plann users…
AltStore PAL, an app that takes advantage of the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) to offer a third-party app store to EU users, is now available for free thanks to Epic Games. The app maker announced in a social media post on Wednesday that it was the latest recipient of a “MegaGrant” monetary award from Fortnite maker Epic Games, which will help cover future Apple core technology fees as well as making AltStore PAL available to users for free, with no subscription required. The alternative app store was created by Riley Testad, developer of the video game emulator Delta, and…
Code reviews are peer reviews of code that help developers improve their code quality, and they are time-consuming. According to one source, 50% of companies spend 2-5 hours per week on code reviews. Without enough staff, code reviews can become overwhelming and distract developers from other important work. Harjot Gill believes that code reviews can be largely automated with artificial intelligence. He is co-founder and CEO of CodeRabbit, which uses AI models to analyze code and provide feedback. Prior to founding CodeRabbit, Gill was senior director of technology at datacenter software company Nutanix, joining the company when it acquired his…
Twitter, formerly known as X, has announced that it is rolling out support for Passkey on Android. The release follows the social network's rollout of Passkey support to all iOS users in April. Passkey Login makes it harder for bad actors to remotely access your account, because they would also need physical access to your phone. Unlike standard logins, Passkey uses Face ID or Touch ID, a PIN, or a physical security authentication key to verify your login. Passkeys are a relatively new technology that eliminates the need to rely on username and password combinations, which can be prone to…
AI social media screening startup Ferretly has raised $2.5 million in seed funding to launch a new platform for vetting election officials. Founded in 2019, Ferretly uses AI to scan social media and publicly available online data to uncover potential risks and behaviors that may be missed through traditional background checks. The startup is the brainchild of Darrin Lipscomb, who previously founded software startups Pipestream and Avrio, which he sold to BMC Software and Hitachi, respectively. Lipscomb told TechCrunch that Ferretly is designed to help recruiters make sure the people they hire align with their company's values — just like…
Journalists, researchers and politicians have lamented Meta's shutdown of CrowdTangle, which they used to track the spread of misinformation on Facebook and Instagram. In place of CrowdTangle, Meta offers a content library, but its use is limited to people at “qualified academic institutions or non-profit organizations conducting scientific or public interest research.” Many researchers and academics, and most journalists, are barred from accessing the tool. Those who use meta content libraries say they offer less transparency and accessibility, fewer features, and poor user experience design. Many in the community have written open letters of protest to Meta, questioning why the…
Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, has resumed operations to users in India after being suspended for seven months by local authorities for operating “illegally” in the country. The exchange said on Thursday that it had registered as a reporting entity with the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), an Indian government agency tasked with monitoring financial transactions. Late last year, India blocked nearly 10 foreign crypto exchanges following the recommendation of the FIU. The FIU action came after a group of domestic crypto exchanges complained to the Ministry of Finance that they were losing trade to non-compliant overseas crypto exchanges. The…
Elon Musk's Grok released a new AI image generation feature on Tuesday night that, like AI chatbots, comes with few safeguards. This means you can, say, generate a fake image of Donald Trump smoking marijuana on Joe Rogan's show and upload it directly to the X platform. But it's not Elon Musk's AI company that's actually powering this madness. Rather, it's the startup Black Forest Labs that's behind the controversial feature. The collaboration between the two was revealed on Tuesday, when xAI announced it was partnering with Black Forest to use its FLUX.1 model to power Grok's image generator. Black…
Modern generative models make great demos, but will they really change the way movies and TV shows are made? Filmmaking and VFX experts say in the short term they won't, but in the long term they could literally change things beyond our imagination. At a panel at SIGGRAPH in Denver, Nikola Todorovic (Wonder Dynamics), Freddy Chavez Olmos (Boxel Studio), and Michael Black (Meshcapade, Max Planck Institute) discussed how generative AI and other systems can change (but not necessarily improve) the way media is created today. Their consensus was that while it's natural to question the short-term usefulness of these tools,…