Author: TechBrunch

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…

Health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group has admitted that a ransomware attack on its health tech subsidiary Change Healthcare earlier this year stole large amounts of Americans' personal medical data. UnitedHealth said in a statement Monday that the ransomware gang has exfiltrated files containing personal data and protected health information and “may be targeting a significant portion of the population of the United States.” The health insurance giant did not say how many Americans would be affected, but said reviewing the data “could take months” before it began notifying individuals that their information was stolen in the cyberattack. “It's expensive.” Change…

Throughout hip-hop's long history, jewelry has served as an important means for artists to convey their ideas and richness, or simply to captivate viewers. Diamonds in particular are an important motif, with Drake's $400,000 diamond-encrusted iPhone case being famous. But not everyone is a millionaire rapper, and most people can't afford to wear a broken watch that's filled with ice. Still, there is certainly a market for such jewelry at lower prices, and venture capitalists seem to be aware of it. A direct-to-consumer diamond jewelry startup called Pascal has raised nearly $10 million in VC funding to date, $2.5 million…

A vulnerability in the smart access control system used in thousands of rental homes in the United States could allow anyone to remotely control any lock in an affected home. However, Chirp Systems, the company that manufactures this system, has ignored requests to fix this flaw. U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA said last week that a phone app developed by Chirp, which residents use in place of keys to access their homes, was “unauthorized'' with hard-coded credentials that could be used to control any of Chirp's remote controls. A security advisory was issued stating that the data is being stored properly.…