Author: TechBrunch
Apple will kick off its week-long Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 2024) event with its traditional keynote on June 10 at 10 a.m. ET/7 a.m. PT. The presentation will focus on the company's software products and the developers behind them, including the latest versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, visionOS and watchOS. You can watch the stream on Apple's event page , and there's also a stream on YouTube , though it tends to be a bit delayed. Over the past few years, critics have noted that the company has so far lagged behind companies like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI when…
Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference next week is sure to be a key moment in the iPhone maker's history, and while the Vision Pro debuted at last year's event, don't expect the hardware to be a highlight at WWDC 2024, which starts at 10 a.m. PST on Monday. WWDC is for developers, and much of the focus will be on iOS 18. The Cupertino tech giant will be showcasing its selection of integrating AI technologies into its devices and software, including its historic partnership with OpenAI. As the big event draws closer, various leaks have surfaced about what's in store for…
Welcome to Elon Musk’s X. The social network formerly known as Twitter where the rules are made up and the check marks don’t matter. Or do they? The Tesla and SpaceX CEO announced his bid to buy Twitter in April 2022, zealously driven to rid the platform of spam bots and protect free speech. Musk ultimately paid $44 billion for the website in October 2022, following attempts to kill the deal and a dramatic legal discovery process. Since Musk bought Twitter and took the company private, there has been a whirlwind of news around the microblogging platform, including but not…
TechCrunch has been keeping readers informed about Fearless Fund's legal battle to provide business grants to Black women, and today we're pleased to announce that Arian Simone, CEO and co-founder of Fearless Fund, will speak about the organization's fight for racial equality during a fireside chat on the Disrupt 2024 Builders Stage. The Fearless Fund was sued by the American Equal Rights Union in August last year, which claimed that the organization discriminated against non-black founders by providing grants to businesses run by black women. In June this year, an appeals court ruled that Fearless Fund's corporate grants were likely…
An important step has been achieved towards a more interoperable “Fediverse” – a broader network of decentralized social media apps like Mastodon, Bluesky and others. Now, users of decentralized apps like Mastodon powered by the ActivityPub protocol, or apps powered by Bluesky's AT protocol, can easily follow users on other networks, see their posts, like, reply and repost them. These same people will also be able to see other people's posts. The technology that makes this possible is Bridgy Fed, one of several efforts aimed at connecting the Fediverse with other networks like the web, Bluesky, and perhaps in the…
Stability AI, the startup behind the AI-powered art generator Stable Diffusion, has released an open AI model that generates sounds and songs that it says were trained exclusively on royalty-free recordings. The generative model, called “Stable Audio Open,” takes a text description (e.g., “processed studio-played rock beats, session drums on an acoustic kit”) and outputs recordings up to 47 seconds long. The model was trained using approximately 486,000 samples from the free music libraries FreeSound and Free Music Archive. Stability AI says the model can create drum beats, instrumental riffs, ambient sounds and “production elements” for videos, films and TV…
Instant delivery startups aren't the only ones struggling: Norway-based online supermarket delivery startup Oda has significantly scaled back its expansion ambitions and announced 150 job cuts to focus on just two markets: its home base and Sweden, home to online grocer Mathem, which it merged with last year. Oda, which raised hundreds of millions of dollars and was once valued as high as $900 million at the height of the SoftBank-led Vision Fund investment, has said it aims to be profitable in both countries within the next year. Oda's exit mirrors what's happening in the instant food delivery industry, where…
Newsletter platform Substack is introducing a feature that lets writers send videos to subscribers via Chat, the company's private community feature, the company announced on Wednesday. The rollout of video in Chat comes two months after the newsletter platform introduced video to Notes, an X/Twitter copycat feature that lets users share short-form content. Substack continues to add features that closely compete with social media platforms, and the addition of video to chat is no exception, giving newsletter creators a new way to communicate directly with their loyal followers and share exclusive news and previews with their community. The company launched…
Hello everyone and welcome to TechCrunch's first ever AI newsletter. I'm really excited to type these words. This has been a long time in the making, and I'm excited to finally share it with you all. With the launch of TC's AI newsletter, we will be discontinuing our semi-regular “This Week in AI” column, formerly known as Perceptron. However, all of our “This Week in AI” analyses, including spotlights on noteworthy new AI models, can still be found here. This week in AI, OpenAI is running into trouble again. A group of former OpenAI employees spoke to The New York…
Animating a 3D character from scratch is typically laborious and expensive, requiring the use of complex software and motion capture tools. Cartwheel wants to make it as easy as writing basic animations and generate basic movements with AI, allowing creators to focus on more expressive tasks. “When I started, there wasn't much new in animation,” says Jonathan Jarvis, co-founder and CEO of the startup and an animator himself. “There's a huge problem with having a blank screen, with tons of buttons and options. You can work for hours before finally seeing what the finished product looks like.” Cartwheel aims to…