Author: TechBrunch

Lensrentals, the giant online rental service for photo, video, audio, and lighting equipment, has announced the acquisition of BorrowLenses, a major competitor in the photo and video equipment rental space, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. This is a competitive field in the goods market, and neither brand has a clear advantage over the other. Both companies declined to comment on the terms of the deal, but people familiar with the transaction indicated it was likely to be an all-cash acquisition. BorrowLenses has also been on an interesting journey. The company was acquired by Shutterfly about 10 years ago. Shutterfly was publicly…

Welcome to TechCrunch Crypto, formerly known as Chain Reaction. Get a roundup of TechCrunch's biggest and most important crypto articles delivered to your inbox every Thursday at 12pm PT. Subscribe here. Hello. Welcome to the TechCrunch Crypto Newsletter. First off, here's a shameless plug. Last week on Yahoo Finance, I participated in a roundtable discussion with Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein, CoinDesk Indices Managing Director Andy Baehr, and crypto-focused Matt Kohrs, host of The Matt Kohrs Show. We talked about Spot Bitcoin ETFs, digital asset regulation, and what the next era of cryptocurrencies will be. Look here. It's been an eventful…

Apple said it plans to make it easier for customers to switch to Android as a result of the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), which came into effect today. In addition to support for alternative app stores, new trading terms for EU app developers, a mobile browser selection screen, and more, the iPhone maker also announced it will be adding data portability products, including more “user-friendly” data movement features. from the iPhone to another of his non-Apple devices. The solution is not yet available, but Apple is working to have it ready by fall 2025, the company said. The announcement…

AI2 Incubator, which was spun out of the Allen Institute for AI in 2022, has secured $200 million in windfall computing funding that startups running its program can leverage to accelerate early development. “Our community of hundreds of AI practitioners is hungry for computing,” said Managing Director Jacob Colker. “Many of these startups don't have the resources to train their models beyond the generic API options that are out there, hampering their ability to put points on the scoreboard and show early traction. .” Companies participating in the AI2 Incubator portfolio or program could receive up to $1 million worth…

Threads, Instagram's Twitter-like app, is rolling out features that allow users to save drafts and take photos within the app. Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the feature today, saying it was designed to “make it easy to share ideas on the fly.” The official rollout comes a few weeks after Threads begins testing the feature with a select number of users. At the time, Mosseri said these were his two “most requested” features on the platform. These new features transform Threads into a competitor to X (formerly Twitter), which has had drafts and camera shortcuts for as long as we…

Sunnyvale-based Brevian wants to make it easy for business users to build custom AI agents. Currently, the company is focused on support teams and security analysts (areas where both use cases and training sets are clearly defined), but plans to expand into other areas over time. The company came out of stealth today and announced a $9 million seed funding round. Brevian, BREV/ΛN, was founded by Vinay Wagh (CEO) and Ram Swaminathan (CTO). The two came into this startup journey from very different directions. Mr. Wagh previously served as Product Director at Databricks and Head of Product at Bracket Computing.…

Uber Eats is adding live location sharing to help delivery drivers find customers in hard-to-find locations, including public spaces like campus courtyards, parks, and playgrounds. Starting today, this new feature is rolling out to all markets except Quebec. Uber Eats is available in over 11,000 cities on six continents. When a user places a “Meet Outside” or “Meet at the Door” order on Uber Eats, they are notified that their location is being shared with the delivery person, and if the delivery person is within 3 minutes and 100 customers have arrived. Notifications turn on when you are within meters.…

PayPal today announced that it is launching “Tap to Pay” in the U.S. for merchants with iPhones through the Venmo and Zettle apps. PayPal, which owns both Venmo and Zettle, said the feature allows businesses to accept contactless card and digital wallet payments directly on the iPhone without any additional cost or hardware. This release comes eight months after PayPal introduced this feature for merchants using his Android smartphone. With Tap to Pay, you can not only accept payments from cards and digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, but also add taxes, take tips, and write receipts without…

People worry that advances in AI will lead to job losses, but company CEOs rarely admit publicly that AI can help reduce headcount. His plagiarism detection company Turnitin, which CEO Chris Caren warned last year that his AI would allow the company to reduce its headcount by 20% within 18 months, announced today that Confirmed large-scale personnel reductions. TechCrunch has learned that Turnitin laid off about 15 people earlier this year as part of a broader organizational shakeup. While this is far from the 20% reduction that Caren expected (Turnitin has more than 900 employees, according to LinkedIn and Pitchbook…

This week, Anthropic, the AI startup backed by Google, Amazon and a who’s who of VCs and angel investors, released a family of models — Claude 3 — that it claims bests OpenAI’s GPT-4 on a range of benchmarks. There’s no reason to doubt Anthropic’s claims. But we at TechCrunch would argue that the results Anthropic cites — results from highly technical and academic benchmarks — are a poor corollary to the average user’s experience. That’s why we designed our own test — a list of questions on subjects that the average person might ask about, ranging from politics to…