Author: TechBrunch
Was Quibi ahead of its time? Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg ultimately blamed the coronavirus pandemic for the short-form video app's failure, but that's probably premature. It might have been. New app store data shows that the idea popularized by Quibi — cutting up original programming into short clips to provide quick entertainment — is now making a comeback. In the first quarter of 2024, 66 short-form drama apps, including ReelShort and DramaBox, generated his record $146 million in global consumer spending. This represents an increase of more than 8,000% from $1.8 million in Q1 2023, when there were just 21…
Britain's competition watchdog has warned of Big Tech's growing grip on the advanced AI market, with CEO Sarah Cardel expressing “real concern” about the state of development in the sector. . In its latest document on fundamental AI models published on Thursday, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has highlighted the interconnections and convergence between developers in cutting-edge technology fields that are responsible for the boom in generative AI tools. warned about the increasing number of The CMA paper notes the recurring presence of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple (also known as GAMMA) across the AI value chain: compute,…
Venture secondaries have exploded in recent years. While some companies are capitalizing on increased activity to position themselves among the most promising portfolio companies, AirTree Ventures is capitalizing on this momentum in a slightly different way. The Sydney-based venture, founded in 2014, has used company-led secondary sales to reduce its shareholding and gain liquidity from some of its most promising investments. The company's portfolio is made up of Australian unicorns including Canva with a final valuation of $40 billion, Immutable with $2.4 billion and LinkTree with $1.3 billion. AirTree co-founder and partner Craig Blair told TechCrunch that AirTree's goal, like…
The internet's giant platforms are slowly merging into larger clumps of sameness, and even the world's most high-profile companies can't escape this trend. TikTok's winning strategy of focusing on short-form, vertical videos has won it fans among other internet platforms, and now TikTok is taking a page out of its competitors' books and borrowing its popularity factors. It is reported that they are doing so. TikTok is working to launch a new app called TikTok Notes that will allow users to post images, aiming to take on Instagram, a service best known for its still photo-sharing feature. Of course, Instagram…
If you ask investors to name the biggest challenge for venture capital today, you'll likely get a near-unanimous answer: lack of liquidity. Due to the lack of IPOs, even though investments in startups and VC funds have risen in value, those bets have not generated much, if any, cash for backers. That's the drawback of private investment and public markets. Shares in private companies, such as startups, cannot be sold freely. Companies must authorize existing investors to sell their shares to authorized others, known as secondary sales. Cash-hungry venture investors, whether VCs themselves or limited partners, are increasingly looking to…
thread. Mastodon. blue sky. Substack notes. post. Nostra. I can spit it out. In the months since Elon Musk acquired the text-based social network formerly known as Twitter, there has been no shortage of competitors for X. Now you can add one more startup to that lineup. Lyrak is a new competitor to X that, like X, aims to differentiate itself by focusing on real-time news and monetization options for creators, but with Fediverse integration similar to Instagram's Threads. Masu. fediverse refers to an open source social network consisting of interconnected servers utilizing the social networking protocol ActivityPub. The most…
Flipboard, the social magazine app for the Web 2.0 era, is reinventing itself to take advantage of new commitments to the open social web, creating a social We are deepening our relationship with the network fediverse. , and eventually Instagram threads and the like appeared. The company announced Thursday that it is expanding fediverse integration to an additional 400 Flipboard creators and introducing fediverse notifications in the Flipboard app itself. The latter will allow Flipboard users to see new followers and other activity on the content they share on Fediverse directly in the Flipboard app. This follows last year's introduction…
Substack announced Thursday that it is introducing several new features for podcasters to its platform. Most notably, the company is rolling out an integration with Spotify that will allow Substack podcasters to sync and distribute all their free and paid episodes to Spotify's streaming service. Additionally, Substack introduces new custom audio transcripts and captions, along with improvements to clip sharing and mobile video. The release of this new feature comes as Substack announced that its podcasters collectively earn more than $100 million annually, a figure that has more than doubled in the past year. Ta. The number of active podcasters…
Humane today announced the launch of its first product, the Ai Pin. The Bay Area-based hardware startup has been around since 2017, a year after co-founders Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhry left Apple. Since then, the company has focused on building standalone AI devices with his $230 million deep pocket. Ai Pin is the first in what Humane hopes will be a series of devices aimed at leveraging the power and popularity of generative AI platforms such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. This system relies on a variety of LLM-based systems, utilizing what we believe to be the best…
Lerato Motolounge is a mother of two who works in a supermarket in Johannesburg, South Africa. After her cell phone was stolen, Ms. Mottlounge could not afford her new cell phone, so she had to go without one for nine months. Then in February 2024, she saw her billboard about PayJoy, a startup that provides loans to underserved populations in emerging markets. She was able to buy her first smartphone right away. Motloung is one of the millions of customers that San Francisco-based PayJoy has helped since its founding in 2015. (She was the company's 10 millionth customer.) The company's…