Author: TechBrunch

Many students in the United States enroll in community colleges with the intention of transferring to a four-year university, but only 16% of those students earn a bachelor's degree within six years. But Campus, an online alternative to traditional community colleges, has an approach aimed at changing that. Many adjunct professors at the nation's top universities, including UCLA, Princeton University and New York University, earn salaries so low that a quarter of them qualify for some form of government aid. At the same time, education costs are rising. “We fell in love with the idea of ​​giving everyone access to…

Digital twin platform Matterport has agreed to be acquired by one of its customers, Costar, in a cash and stock deal of $5.50 per share, valuing the company at approximately $1.6 billion. Matterport's technology helps businesses create digital replicas of their physical spaces. KoStar's offer represents a whopping 212% premium over Matterport's last closing share price before the acquisition was announced on April 22nd. For Matterport, the stock has remained below $5 since August 2022 as it struggles to meet investor expectations for subscriber growth amid a downturn in the real estate market and broader macroeconomic slowdown. The deal appears…

Downsizing a startup can be bittersweet for founders. In Fundid's case, rising interest rates decimated the business finance startup. But venture capitalists and partners are also hurting it, says founder Stephanie Sample. TechCrunch profiled Sample in 2022 when it raised $3.25 million in seed funding backed by fintech investors Nevcaut Ventures, The Artemis Fund, and Builders and Backers. Prior to joining Fundid, Sample spent more than 10 years as the owner of more than 10 profitable franchise businesses in Montana. She owns 12 Taco Bell locations, and is the former owner of two Envy franchises, as well as three of…

Platform is a word that gets thrown around a lot in the technology industry, and it's often misused. But the basic definition of business school is: A platform is a company or business model that creates more value for its participants than it itself captures. Consider that some of the most successful companies in the technology industry help other companies make more money in total than they make themselves. Decades ago, Microsoft made a lot of money promoting her PC revolution. Just recently, Apple announced that developers using the App Store will generate $1.1 trillion in revenue in 2022. This…

Easel is a new startup founded by two former Snap employees at the intersection of generative AI and social trends. The company is working on an app that lets you create images of yourself and your friends doing cool things right from your favorite guy's iMessage conversations. There's a reason why the co-founders said they worked at Snap before founding Easel. Snap may never reach the scale of Instagram or TikTok, but it's certainly the most innovative social company since social apps started taking over smartphone home screens. Before Apple made augmented reality and virtual reality cool again, Snap paved…

After Karine Nissim and Héloïse Buune D'Agostino lost their husbands in a shocking and unexpected way, they faced all the challenges that surfaced during the grieving process, including the difficult tasks of organizing and arranging the funeral. I realized that there was no right place to face the challenges. You can also donate your belongings or look for support groups online. A seasoned entrepreneur himself, Nissim sold his startup DogVacay to Rover in 2017, and Bune D'Agostino co-founded Tentrr and Handwriting.io. The Widow founders decided to take matters into their own hands and build what they call “360 degrees of…

AWS, Amazon's cloud computing business, wants to be the go-to place for companies to host and fine-tune custom-generated AI models. Today, AWS announced the launch of Custom Model Import (preview), a new feature in Bedrock, AWS' suite of enterprise generative AI services. This allows organizations to import and access in-house generated AI models as fully managed APIs. . Once imported, company-specific models can benefit from the same infrastructure as other generative AI models in Bedrock's library (e.g. Meta's Llama 3, Anthropic's Claude 3). This includes tools to extend and fine-tune knowledge and implement safeguards to reduce bias. . “Some AWS…

James Jones' father was an engineer. He was a musician and preacher, performing in churches along the East Coast. Jones, an entertainment lawyer, often worries about managing the money her father collects from church performances, and artists and influencers often complain about the same thing. I realized that. “We also recognize that creators lack ownership over their creative assets, take out loans or mortgages, or generally create opportunities to build generational wealth for themselves and their families. They often complained about how painful it was,” Jones told TechCrunch. Jones said the pandemic has presented a new set of challenges for…

Dating apps aren't adhering to good privacy practices and are collecting more data than ever to lure Gen Z users, a new Mozilla study says. Researchers reviewed dating apps in 2021 from a privacy perspective. A recent report pointed out that dating apps are becoming more data-hungry and cumbersome. The organization examined 25 apps and labeled 22 of them “privacy-free,” or the lowest grade in Mozilla's terminology. Mozilla only gave a positive rating to Lex, which is owned and operated by Queer, while Harmony and Happn received fair ratings. Mozilla said 80% of apps have the potential to share or…

Firefly, Adobe's family of generative AI models, doesn't have a great reputation among creators. Firefly's image generation model, especially when compared to Midjourney, OpenAI's DALL-E 3, and other rivals, has been ridiculed as underwhelming and flawed, with a tendency to distort limbs and landscapes and miss the nuances of prompts. It has been. But Adobe is looking to turn things around this week with its third-generation model, Firefly Image 3, which will be released during the company's Max London conference. Now available in Photoshop (beta) and Adobe's Firefly web app, this model outperforms its predecessor (Image 2) and its predecessor…