Author: TechBrunch
The shortage of affordable housing is a growing issue around the world, even in emerging markets where demand is high, in part because traditional developers and real estate companies are focused on serving luxury housing seekers and want to avoid the huge operating costs associated with affordable housing, which can eat into their gross margins over time. Lhoopa appears. The Singapore-based startup combines technology with decentralized operations to partner with local experts such as brokers and builders to solve problems for people looking to buy housing, especially affordable homes. The six-year-old startup launched in the Philippine market, where there is…
Former President Donald Trump on Monday picked Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate as he seeks to reclaim the job he lost to President Joe Biden in 2020. Vance, best known for his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” worked for many years as a venture capitalist before leaving the industry after being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022. After graduating from Yale Law School in 2013, Vance moved to San Francisco and served as a principal at Mithril Capital, a fund co-founded by Peter Thiel and Ajay Loyan. Mithril launched two funds, $540 million and $850 million, in 2013…
At this year's Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple split its keynote into two parts: the regular OS updates and a look at the company's AI features. Apple separated the two sections because Apple Intelligence features will be available starting this fall, meaning they likely won't be included in the 18.0 release. Major iOS updates usually coincide with new iPhone releases in September. The Apple Intelligence feature is also not available in the currently available developer beta, and it may be a while before it's actually available, which is why the current iOS 18 beta release feels like the first half of…
Apple on Monday released a public beta of its next-generation software for iPhone, Mac, iPad, and Apple Watch, giving users the chance to try out iOS 18 and many of its new features and provide feedback to Apple, except for Apple Intelligence, which will be released in beta this fall. If you want to try out Apple's upcoming software upgrades, you can sign up for the Apple Beta Software Program on the company's website. Registering your device there will give you access to early versions of these features. iOS 18 includes several new customization options for the home screen. For…
Payments giant Stripe has long delayed its IPO, prompting lead investor Sequoia Capital to get creative with how it returns profits to its limited partners. Axios reported that the venture firm emailed LPs from funds it raised between 2009 and 2011 with an offer to buy up to $861 million in Stripe shares. Sequoia declined to comment, but the buyer will be another of Sequoia's new funds, according to the email sent by Axios to LPs. The move is notable for two reasons: First, it's evidence that LPs are increasingly seeking liquidity in this lackluster IPO market (2024 has seen…
Google's parent company Alphabet is in advanced talks to acquire Wiz for $23 billion, a person close to the company told TechCrunch. The deal talks were previously reported by The Wall Street Journal. According to sources, Wiz, a cybersecurity startup founded in 2020, was approached by Google's cloud chief Thomas Kurian a few weeks ago. Negotiations have progressed rapidly since then, and the two sides have tentatively agreed on an acquisition price. The person said there are many hurdles and details that need to be worked out in a deal of this magnitude, but declined to say what those hurdles…
As far as hardware startups go, few are as entertaining as Bird Buddy. Its simple innovation — attaching an internet-connected camera to a bird feeder — has spawned a strong customer base and a slew of copycats, with our own Sarah Perez being a well-known fan of the gadget. The Michigan-based company today announced “Name That Bird,” a new AI-powered feature that lets users name and track individual birds. While we can't speak to the effectiveness of the feature just yet, we can easily imagine it being one of the most requested features among users, one that strengthens the emotional…
YouTube Music is introducing two new ways to boost song discovery on the platform. YouTube on Monday announced it's experimenting with an AI-generated conversational radio feature and rolling out a new Shazam-like tool that lets users discover songs by singing, humming or playing snippets of a song. YouTube Music's new AI-generated conversational radio feature is rolling out to some premium users in the U.S. Those with access to the feature can create custom radio stations by describing the songs they want to hear, such as requesting “catchy pop choruses” or “upbeat pop anthems.” The launch of the experimental feature comes…
On today's episode of Equity, Rebecca Beran explores Google's reported talks to acquire cloud security company Wiz for around $23 billion. Wiz offers an “all-in-one approach to cloud security,” pulling data from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and more, and scanning it all for security risk factors. Google may see this as a good way to bolster its own cloud business, which grew 28% to $9.57 billion in the first quarter of this year. We also discussed a letter from OpenAI whistleblowers alleging that the AI company places unlawful restrictions on employees' communications with government regulators: They argue…
With the help of a robot, Google has found a new way to show what its Gemini AI model is capable of. This is a robot from Google's Everybody Robots division, which was shut down last year, but apparently the robots still exist, as Google fitted one of them with a yellow bow tie and used Gemini to teach the robot how to respond to commands and navigate around the DeepMind office space. To achieve this, Google uses visual language models, VLMs, trained not only on text but also on images and videos, to help answer questions and perform tasks…