Author: TechBrunch
Canadian private equity firm PartnerOne has acquired mobile app testing startup HeadSpin, whose founder was convicted of fraud earlier this year, for $28.2 million, according to documents seen by TechCrunch. The fire sale was reported by TechCrunch last week. According to the filing, HeadSpin had revenue of $21 million in 2023 and $5 million in Q1 2024. That means PartnerOne valued HeadSpin at about 1.4x revenue. The median M&A deal multiple for deals announced or closed in Q1 2024 was 1.6x, according to an analysis of PitchBook data. PartnerOne declined to comment on the purchase price or HeadSpin's revenue. In…
Meta has suspended its AI assistant after Brazil's National Data Protection Agency (ANPD) banned the company from using Brazilians' personal data to train AI models, a move that deals a blow to Facebook's efforts to build AI products in the Brazilian market, which has a population of more than 200 million. As cited in official documents, Brazilian authorities said the precautionary measure was due to “an imminent risk of serious harm and irreparable or irreparable damage to the fundamental rights of the guardians.” In addition, the ANPD stipulated that non-compliance would be subject to a fine of 50,000 reais per…
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth used by more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies. That growth has propelled OpenAI itself into becoming one of the most-hyped companies in recent memory. And its latest partnership with Apple for its upcoming generative AI offering, Apple Intelligence, has given the company another significant bump in the AI race. 2024 also saw the release of GPT-4o, OpenAI’s new flagship omni…
After months of speculation, Apple Intelligence took center stage in June at WWDC 2024. The platform was announced following a flurry of news about generative AI from companies like Google and Open AI, raising concerns that the notoriously tight-lipped tech giant had missed out on the latest tech boom. But contrary to such speculation, Apple has assembled a team to work on a typically Apple approach to artificial intelligence, and while the demo was flashy (Apple always loves a splash), Apple Intelligence is ultimately a very pragmatic approach to the field. Apple Intelligence (yes, that's AI for short) is not…
European Union President Ursula von der Leyen was confirmed in her role for another five years on Thursday after lawmakers overwhelmingly voted to re-elect her. The scale of her support (401 in favor, 284 against, 15 abstentions) is much stronger than her last election, but it may speak less to any passionate enthusiasm for her leadership and more to lawmakers' concerns about growing geopolitical uncertainty, with the war still ongoing in Ukraine and the US facing elections in November that could see Donald Trump return to the White House by 2025. But her ability to keep cool in times of…
Olivia DeLaMas is turning that mindset on its head. What if scrolling through social media didn't make you feel bad? What if social media, especially for women, actually made you feel more supported? “This is certainly not what mainstream social platforms were created for,” DeRamus told TechCrunch. But with his social platform Communia, DeRamus is venturing out something that may seem counterintuitive. Communia is both a social platform and a mental health tool, allowing users to post updates in a community feed or keep a private diary to track their feelings over time. But to be vulnerable, users need to…
TikTok has partnered with music distribution service DistroKit to speed up the creation of artist accounts for its members. The ByteDance-owned short-video platform introduced its Artist Account feature last year, allowing musicians to showcase new songs, their music catalogs and behind-the-scenes footage on the platform. Typically, when an artist applies for the tag, it takes up to 30 days for TikTok to process the paperwork. Currently, TikTok offers DistroKid members, who pay a yearly subscription fee of $22.99, the ability to sign up as an artist within a few hours. “It's now faster than ever for artists to create their…
What do MrBeast, John Oliver, and The Wall Street Journal have in common? Transcripts of their YouTube videos are collected and used to train AI used by companies like Anthropic, Nvidia, Apple, and Salesforce. An investigation by Wired and Proof News found that the dataset, called “YouTube Subtitles,” contains transcripts of over 173,000 YouTube videos from over 48,000 different channels. This AI scraping has become an issue across the tech industry: Jingna Zhang, artist and founder of the app Cara, has tried to protect artists by building social platforms that don't sell them out, and the University of Chicago is…
OpenAI on Thursday announced its latest miniature AI model, GPT-4o mini, which the company says is cheaper and faster than OpenAI's current state-of-the-art AI models. GPT-4o mini will be released to developers starting today, and to consumers through the ChatGPT web and mobile apps. Enterprise users will be able to access it starting next week. The company claims that GPT-4o mini outperforms industry-leading small AI models on reasoning tasks, including text and vision. As small AI models improve, they are gaining popularity among developers due to their speed and cost-effectiveness compared to larger models such as GPT-4 Omni and Claude…
A TechCrunch investigation found that the U.S. Postal Service shared its online customers' addresses with advertising and tech giants Meta, LinkedIn and Snap. USPS announced Wednesday that it had addressed the issue and stopped the practice, claiming it was “unaware” of the problem. TechCrunch discovered that the USPS shares its customers' information through hidden data-collection code (also known as tracking pixels) used throughout its websites. Technology and advertising companies create this kind of code to collect user information, like which pages users visit, every time a webpage containing the code is loaded in a customer's browser. In the case of…