Author: TechBrunch

Four years after acquiring Shine, a French fintech startup that offers bank accounts to freelancers and small businesses, Société Générale has announced plans to sell Shine to Ageras. In 2020, TechCrunch reported that Societe Generale had spent around €100 million to acquire Shine. It wasn't a huge deal, but it attracted a lot of attention at the time because it was more than just a technology and talent acquisition. Societe Generale isn't a name that pops up often in tech startup acquisition news. In short, the financial institution wanted to replicate BoursoBank’s success in online banking, but this time in…

With the Indian election process now over and a new government in place, Meta has lifted restrictions on election-related queries using the Meta AI chatbot, although Google continues to enforce restrictions as part of its global restrictions on these types of queries. The lifting of restrictions on Meta means that queries related to Indian election results, politician information, and details of public officials are now available. TechCrunch was able to get answers related to election results, politicians, and public officials from Meta AI. Meta has not made any statement on this. The company began blocking certain political queries when India's…

Ask health-focused venture capitalists to name a single top AI startup, and one name comes up time and time again: Pittsburgh-based Abridge, founded before OpenAI was a household name and before LLMs were a household term in Silicon Valley. In 2019, Shiv Rao, a practicing cardiologist, pitched a startup idea to Andy Weissman, general partner at Union Square Ventures, which Rao called a cross between SoundCloud and RapGenius for medicine. Weissman said he found it a bit funny to compare a startup AI-powered medical note-taking app to music hosting and song lyrics transcription, but the concept resonated with him. Rao…

When people think about the water they use, they tend to think of the water that comes out of the tap and the daily shower. But with roughly 70% of the water we use going to grow food, and that number rising to 90% in low-income countries, securing water for other uses can be tricky. But in many areas, farmers are encouraged to use only as much water as they think they'll need, sometimes overusing it to ensure a good crop. “Governments want to produce their own food; they don't want water to be expensive,” Kilimo co-founder and CEO Jairo…

The Federal Trade Commission said on Tuesday it had forwarded a complaint against TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, to the Department of Justice. The commission was investigating the company for potential violations of the Children's Online Privacy Act and whether TikTok violated laws banning “unfair and deceptive” business practices. “Because the investigation revealed reason to believe the named defendants have violated or are attempting to violate the law and because a prosecution is in the public interest, the Commission has resolved to refer the charges to the Department of Justice, following the procedures set forth in the FTC Act,”…

A new report says Apple's approach to leveraging ideas from the third-party developer community for new iOS and Mac features and apps could come with a big price. With the release of iOS 18 later this fall, Apple's changes could affect apps that currently bring in an estimated $393 million in revenue and have been downloaded about 58 million times in the past year, according to an analysis by app intelligence firm Appfigures. At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference every June, the iPhone maker previews upcoming releases of its software and operating system. These releases often include features that were previously…

Snap showed off an early version of a real-time, on-device image diffusion model that can generate vivid AR experiences at the Augmented World Expo on Tuesday, where the company also unveiled generative AI tools for AR creators. Snap co-founder and CTO Bobby Murphy said onstage that the model is small enough to run on a smartphone and fast enough to re-render frames in real time as dictated by text prompts. Murphy said the emergence of generative AI image diffusion models is exciting, but these models need to be significantly faster to be effective for augmented reality, which is why his…

Researchers have discovered a bug that could allow anyone to spoof a Microsoft corporate email account, making phishing attacks more likely to appear credible and fool their targets. As of this writing, the bug has not been fixed. To demonstrate the bug, the researcher sent TechCrunch an email that appears to have been sent from Microsoft's account security team. Last week, Vsevolod Kokorin, also known online as Slonser, wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that he had discovered an email spoofing bug and reported it to Microsoft, but Microsoft rejected his report because they couldn't reproduce the bug he discovered. Kokorin…

We all know the feeling of sending a funny TikTok video, hoping for a reaction from your friends only to get a laughing emoji in return, or worse, no reaction at all. Seen is looking to solve this problem with its new social app, which lets your friends record live videos of their reactions to the content you send them. The video messaging app, available for iOS devices, was co-founded by veteran entrepreneur Faheem Qazi and actress Karen Gillan, best known for her role as Nebula in “Guardians of the Galaxy.” Seen lets you send videos in private one-on-one iMessages…

Stop worrying: a new AI-powered search engine has arrived, and its developers believe it's better than many others out there. The platform, called Genspark, uses generative AI to create custom summaries in response to search queries: When you enter a search such as “What is the best formula for newborns?”, Genspark generates a Sparkpage, a one-page summary compiled from websites and content from around the web. It's an experience (obviously) similar to the Arc Search feature in the Arc Browser released earlier this year, and Google AI Overviews in Google Search. But Eric Jing, who co-founded the eponymous organization behind…